Students interested in joining these teams will work together with the faculty to devise a clear plan, including what to do if one student were to drop out, become ill, etc. This will last 2-6 weeks and may or may not be related to your eventual research project. It will culminate in a written report. Getting your Ph.D. degree is then mostly a matter of doing the same thing on a larger scale. The worst case scenario is that you are still a member of a great department, and will receive the traditional levels of support it offers.
Faculty can re-apply immediately if a team project fails on the first try.
You can even get your own money and do what you wish, write the paper all by yourself, and travel to a meeting to present it. But all that comes on top of the team project. In traditional graduate programs, students take a qualifying exam in year 2 or 3. The faculty determines whether the student is a suitable candidate for the Ph.D. degree at this point. Most students pass this exam.