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Just over twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the green light as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Establishing the squad from the ground up has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Melbourne

At the last event of the season to be staged in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.

“You can have a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”

A Unique Task

Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to transform cultural approach.”

With each day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.

“One must presume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement subsequently.”

Pilot Selection and Hiring Push

In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.

“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and intended to reach the goal of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the organization are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred.

Space Mission Inspiration

“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have adopted, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling various components of the project at a multiple sites.

“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and faster.”

The Future

The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta