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A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for 2026. Establishing the organization from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.

The Countdown to Australia

At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the US, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.

The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.

“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Opportunity

The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry backed by the owner, GM, into F1.

“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to transform team culture.”

With each passing day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.

“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.

“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on progression subsequently.”

Pilot Selection and Hiring Push

In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of fighting spirit.

“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”

To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at more than 400 and scheduled to attain the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester alluded.

Apollo Model

“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”

So they have embraced, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project at a variety of locations.

“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a leader at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower staff to take charge. Avoiding management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”

Upcoming Challenges

The efficacy of this agile methodology will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta