An Australian engineer who helped set up the early years of one of Formula One's most recent new teams has warned it could take five years for Cadillac to even join the midfield.
Cadillac will officially become the first brand-new team to enter Formula One in more than a decade on Sunday, with their first grand prix in Melbourne.
Armed with two former championship contenders in Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez, they arrive with arguably the best driver pairing of any new team this century.
Life is traditionally not easy for entirely new outfits.
While Brawn GP won a championship in 2009, they were simply new owners taking over a team already in existence in Honda.
Haas are the most recent team to arrive on the grid in 2016, taking points in their first race before finishing the constructors' championship eighth.
Lotus, HRT and Virgin came before them in 2010, with the trio all going pointless in their first season and ceasing to exist within seven years.
"It's a huge challenge," Macquarie University lecturer Sammy Diasinos, who was an engineer at Lotus from the 2011 season, told AAP.
"All the other teams have years of processes and data when it comes to designing a new car.
"They do not have that in any formal documentation. They only have what's in the mind of the people that they've employed."
Diasinos, who also had success at Williams and Toyota, spent two years with the Lotus outfit that changed their name to Caterham in 2012.
Through five years in the sport Lotus/Caterham did not score a point, while HRT also went pointless and Virgin and their successors scored three.
But Diasinos does believe it will be slightly easier for Cadillac, with lower-ranked teams now granted more wind-tunnel time and larger cost caps.
"Alpine, for example, have been talking about having a four-or-five-year plan to get from being a midfield team to front-running team," Diasinos said.
"That sort of time frame is a realistic expectation to even get from the back of the field to the midfield.
"I don't expect they'll be fighting near the front initially, but over time hopefully they do make their way forward because for these teams to survive, they have to."
Diasinos believes the other thing playing into Cadillac's favour the fact they could test and simulate races last year and that all teams are dealing with a regulations overhaul in 2026.
Perez and Bottas were both more than three seconds off the pace in qualifying on Saturday, the slowest of all who completed a flying lap, in 18th and 19th.
"On a project like this it's very easy to see Melbourne as the end objective, and it's not," team principal Graeme Lowdon said on Friday.
"It's the start of a very, very, very long journey."
