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Just over a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the green light as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.

The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and has a knowing grin when considering the ride.

“There might be five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive 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.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into F1.

“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to alter team culture.”

With each passing day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.

“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal commented recently and while Nick Chester shared this view he believed the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push

In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to over 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of building an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the power unit, set for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.

NASA Blueprint

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”

So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.

“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager talks to a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this flexible strategy will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta