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A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as F1's newest entrant for 2026. Building the organization from nothing has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when considering the ride.

“You can have a brief moment looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.

“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the chance to transform team culture.”

With each day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.

“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the squad had a statement to make as well.

“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement subsequently.”

Racing Talent and Team Building Push

In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.

“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”

To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.

NASA Model

“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission across a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta