Formula One’s newest team liken their effort to the Apollo moon landings and join the grid with the aim of becoming a championship-winning forceWhen the new Formula One season begins on Sunday in the usual fever of excitement and anticipation, consider amid the maelstrom the Cadillac team.Before the lights go out in Melbourne, F1’s newest entrant will have a deserved chance to take a breath and savour for but a moment, their remarkable achievement of simply having made it to the grid.The US team backed by General Motors has been built, aside from those involved in the pre-planning, from scratch in what will be a year and a day since its entry was formally approved.As their team principal, Graeme Lowdon, explained, that process had begun in an empty room with a screwdriver and an A4 sheet of paper.While Audi are also new entrants, they have taken over the extant Sauber team; Cadillac are the first new constructor to enter as a startup since Haas joined a decade ago.

Drivers Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez will be the veterans at the sharp end and Bottas, a 10-time race winner who competed alongside Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes when the team were the benchmark in F1, is well placed to appreciate what Cadillac have pulled off.“Everyone has worked their ass off the last months,” he says.“For us to do our shakedown in January in Silverstone that was for me a miracle.When you put that in perspective, what an achievement for a team from a standing start.“It’s difficult to explain how many hundreds of people you need.

How many thousands of pieces you need to first design and then manufacture.There are so many things in the car that can go wrong.It’s just so much work from everyone to get here.It’s really important to try to put that across, because people just hear: ‘Oh, it’s a new team’ and assume that was a relatively simple thing.”Since they were given the provisional go ahead at the Las Vegas GP in 2024, the team, who will use Ferrari engines until 2029 when General Motors will produce the first of their own power units, have been building at a ferocious rate on every level.

The personnel numbers are up to 600, with recruitment reaching a rate of one a day during the drive.Alongside their facilities in the UK at Silverstone they are in the process of completing a new headquarters in Fishers in Indianapolis and are building the new facility for engine manufacture at the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina.Everyone involved with the project has stressed the level of commitment from GM and every indication is that the manufacturer has long-term ambition and is making every commitment to their aim of becoming a world championship-winning force, rather than making up the numbers.To that end they have pursued talent.Jon Tomlinson from Williams has been brought in as head of aerodynamics.

Nick Chester, formerly of Renault, is the technical director and the team manager is the hugely experienced Peter Crolla, brought in from Haas.Notably they also recruited Pat Symonds of Benetton, Renault and Williams who had also most recently been the chief technical officer at F1 and had observed the early Cadillac applications for a place on the grid.Symonds is their executive engineering consultant and has worked extensively in F1 at almost every level since 1979.He liked what he saw at Cadillac from the off.“There’s some real front-of-the-grid stuff happening here,” he said.

“We have a really good foundation, I’m absolutely certain of that,We have some really good people,”He, like Bottas, feels that the scale of the task he joined in January 2025 was perhaps not quite appreciated,“We had to go in a year from 125 people to 550 people,How many companies grow at that rate?” he said.

“But it’s still a huge task and it’s made bigger because there’s nothing to carry over.In F1, every year you design a new car, but you’re not going to change the brake pedal, you’re not going to change the steering column, things like this.You have plenty of bits that you don’t need to redesign.“We had to design every single component on the car from scratch, and that’s a very difficult task.”Lowdon has compared their effort to that of the Apollo moon landings in having a fixed timescale and in bringing disparate parts of a project together to form a coherent whole.

At their various facilities prominently placed clocks have been counting down, second by second, to this first race.An insistent, ticking focus, were any more motivation needed.Vroom in the USAScarabTwo ambitious Americans, Lance Reventlow and Bruce Kessler, took a look at what the Europeans were doing at Ferrari, Maserati, Aston Martin and Jaguar and decided the could build a better car.Victories came at the 1958 LA Times Grand Prix at Riverside Raceway and their front-engined racers would go on to enter 93 races, with 39 wins and 32 podium finishes until 1963.In F1 they competed in just one full season – 1960 – racing in six of the 10 grands prix, finishing 10th with Chuck Daigh at the US Grand Prix, won by Stirling Moss in a Lotus-Climax.

Eagle Dan Gurney and the Le Mans winner Carroll Shelby founded All American Racers in 1964 and competed in various classes before taking a crack at F1 with patriotically named Eagle.The stars and stripes team were based in Rye, East Sussex and ran with British‑built Weslake engines.They raced in 25 grands prix, entering a total of 34 cars.At the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix, Gurney achieved the first “all-American” victory in a grand prix since Jimmy Murphy’s triumph with Duesenberg at the 1921 French Grand Prix.An American team has yet to repeat that double feat.

Penske The last American team to win a race – the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix, with the Northern Irishman John Watson (below) at the wheel.Penske are better known as Indycar racers, but their PC1 cars made their debut in 1974.They scored no points that year and the following season was marred by the death of their driver Mark Donohue.HaasA fully fledged American team returned to F1 in 2016, buying up the failed Marussia.Banbury-based, they are still blazing the trail with Esteban Ocon and Oliver Bearman at the wheel.

Still no wins, though, with a lone pole claimed in Brazil in 2022.CadillacThe General Motors behemoth is eager to tap into the Race to Survive/Gen Z market, so is launching a team with its premier marque on the car next year.On the eve of zero hour then, the team are at very least ready for lift off.They did well in having the car built to take part in full in the first pre-season testing session (a feat notably not managed by Williams or Aston Martin) as was observed with respect across the paddock.“You’re not only here but you look like a proper professional team,” was the reaction, said Symonds.

“That’s very gratifying.That came from very senior people in other teams and it came from world championship drivers.”However Cadillac are under no illusions as to where they really are.At best perhaps 10th quickest, in front only of the currently troubled Aston Martin, the team know how much there is still to do.The first goal is to reach the flag, do it again and again and again.

Then to target points, which if they manage it this season will be rightly celebrated like a victory.GM are not expecting miracles but everyone in the team is adamant they have to show progress.Simply being there is not enough and would be considered unacceptable given their ambition.“If we start, for example, at the back, that’s OK but we’ve got to get out of there,” said Bottas, bluntly.“We’ve got to keep progressing and moving forward.

If we start from the back and we end up at the back, that’s not progress.If we see improvements throughout the year, with the team, with the car, that’s the main thing.”Expectations are being managed but with that comes the harsh reality of maintaining morale across a 24-race season while bringing up the rear of the field.Maintaining a sense of momentum even if it is barely discernible might yet be as much of challenge as any thus far.As things stand then, there is grand optimism for this bold experiment that will finally reach fruition at Albert Park and while there will be no fairytale victory for Cadillac, they have at very least set their sights on telling a compelling story and reaching the top.

“There’s been no compromise made on quality, everything is the best you can get,” noted Bottas.“That gives me the confidence that the team is really all in going for this.We still have a long way to go to be something like Mercedes, but the foundation is being built so that this could become something like Mercedes.”