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Just over a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entry for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has required a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.

The Countdown to Australia

At the last event of the championship to be held in the US, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will never be adequate time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when considering the experience.

“You can have a short period thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, GM, into F1.

“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to alter cultural approach.”

With every day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.

“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.

“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Push

In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the mood of combative optimism.

“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”

To realize that ambition recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at in excess of 400 and intended to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.

NASA Blueprint

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on various components of the program in a different facilities.

“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for everything is far more efficient and faster.”

What Lies Ahead

The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta