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Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as Formula One’s most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has involved a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the US, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a knowing grin when considering the experience.

“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”

A Unique Task

Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the parent company, GM, into F1.

“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”

With every day that passes thoughts are sharper on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.

“One must presume that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.

“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”

Racing Talent and Team Building Push

In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”

To that end hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.

NASA Blueprint

“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the program at a different facilities.

“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that leader talks to a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The success of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta