Cadillac Employs Nasa Playbook to Assemble Squad from Nothing for Melbourne Grand Prix.

A little more than one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the team from scratch has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.

The Race Against Time to Australia

At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.

The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.

“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”

An Unprecedented Task

Nick Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.

“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”

With each passing day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.

“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.

“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”

Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort

In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the mood of determined optimism.

“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”

To that end staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to hit the target of 600 members quickly. Alongside their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the new engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Nick 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 know how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”

So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the mission at a variety of locations.

“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their supervisor, that leader consults a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and faster.”

The Future

The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta