The all-new Cadillac Formula 1 team has taken inspiration from NASA's Apollo missions in order to hit its deadlines ahead of its grand prix debut next year.
Cadillac is set to join the grid as F1's 11th team in 2026 and, as of Tuesday, has 250 days to prepare for its first official practice session at the Australian Grand Prix.
The team only received confirmation of its place in F1 115 days ago, and now faces a race against time to design and manufacture its cars from its bases in Silverstone and the United States.
It has already built a proof-of-concept chassis that has undergone unofficial crash testing in the U.K. (including a 50-tonne front-impact test), as well as testing an ever-evolving 60-percent scale model in Toyota's Cologne-based wind tunnel.
During a tour of Cadillac's Silverstone base last week, team principal Graeme Lowdon told journalists that his outfit has employed roughly 400 of the 600 staff it plans to have in place in time for its F1 debut.
In order to have two cars ready in such a short period of time, Cadillac has tried to minimise hierarchy within its workforce by adopting a management structure based on Apollo's Mission Control.
"It's highly modelled on the Apollo project," Lowdon said. "It's very similar. OK, we're not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.
"If you look at the task in hand, we've got immovable deadlines. We've got a massive necessity for peer-to-peer interaction.
"So we need engineers talking to engineers. We need an engineer here [in Silverstone] talking to an engineer in Charlotte [North Carolina] and another one in Warren, Michigan, or eventually in Fishers [Indiana, where Cadillac U.S. racing headquarters is being constructed]. And so we've looked to have a very, very flat management structure.
"We've leaned heavily on the management structures that were used for the Apollo project. It's super interesting and I don't know if other teams have used that before.
"You always look around to get inspiration from how other people have tackled things. And I just thought that there was some good learnings from that.
"Is it the equivalent of putting a man on the moon? I don't know about that. But what strikes me is it's quite a difficult task."
Lowdon, who served as CEO at former F1 team Manor when it raced in the sport under the Virgin and Marussia names, claims there are advantages to the Apollo-style structure over a normal team setup.
"So race teams are often described in military terms where, even if you see a garage tour, someone will say, this is organised in a kind of pyramid, and you have one person at the top," he explained. "And the typical military structure is command and control. So you issue commands, people do things.
"When it's a multi-site team like this, that becomes a massive challenge. And what you can't have is an engineer here [in Silverstone] having to go up and down a particular hierarchy and then hop across, in our instance, not just to a different geographic location, but a different country altogether, and then go up and down.
"So instead, it's a kind of a different structure where it's mission control instead of command and control. So you have this really flat structure. Engineers are able to talk directly to each other. And the thing that's heavily imparted on them is the mission itself. Everyone knows what the mission is. They know what needs to be done.
"So far it works. You know, the proof of the pudding is going to be in whether the car's quick."
Cadillac plans to increase its staff numbers in the United States when its new factory in Fishers, Indiana opens next year.
Lowdon is confident his team will be able to lure top level engineers both in the U.S.A. and in Europe by virtue of its backing from Cadillac's parent company GM and the unique prospect of being a start-up F1 team.
"I think we offer a number of things," he said. "You know, the fact that we are backed by GM is super important because they have the scale as well.
"But if we look at the kind of team element, we've got a lot of experienced people here. And the thing that we can offer them is certainly this flat structure. I'm an engineer myself, and I know if you've got a task, you want to talk peer-to-peer and solve it. And so it's up to us to offer that.
"But also we can offer a lot of responsibility. You know, when that car turns a wheel for the first time, everyone in here will be able to point at it and say, I did that. None of it's a legacy. There's no carryover. That's hugely, hugely appealing."