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A little more than one year previously at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the season finale of the championship to be held in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit 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 task, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.

The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the journey.

“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”

An Unprecedented Challenge

The CTO had success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Building an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter team culture.”

With every day that passes thoughts are sharper on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being handled.

“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.

“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement from there on.”

Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push

In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.

“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”

To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to reach the target of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to build the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.

Apollo Model

“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”

So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling distinct elements of the project in a multiple sites.

“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager communicates with a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and faster.”

Upcoming Challenges

The success of this agile approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta