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A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the go-ahead as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the organization from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.

The Race Against Time to Melbourne

At the last event of the season to be hosted in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.

“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”

A One-of-a-Kind Challenge

Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors, into F1.

“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change organizational mindset.”

With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.

“One must presume that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”

Racing Talent and Hiring Effort

In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the mood of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now at more than 400 and planned to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.

Space Mission Blueprint

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.

“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager talks to a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta