Cadillac vs. the world: How GM got its place in F1 for 2026

The Americans are coming. General Motors is going Formula 1 racing, the series announcing on Monday that it has agreed a deal in principle that will see the automaker from Detroit join the grid beginning in 2026.

It marks a seminal moment in American racing. By the time GM’s Cadillac becomes F1’s 11th team, it will be 50 years since the last U.S.-based outfits competed in the series.

There is a long way to go before that, though, and a lot can change in little more than 12 months. In fact, it was only this year that F1 had rejected GM’s initial efforts to join the sport — then fronted by Andretti Global.

So what’s changed to get Cadillac into the paddock? And what does its looming debut mean for American racing? ESPN dissects General Motors’ arrival in F1 with views from both inside the paddock and the epicenter of U.S. racing.

How GM turned F1’s ‘no’ into a ‘yes’

General Motors joining the grid in 2026 represents a huge and unexpected U-turn from Formula 1 over the elusive 11th grid slot, so what changed?

The wording of Monday’s announcement — and specifically, what wasn’t mentioned — was key. Originally packaged as an Andretti bid supported by GM, the Andretti name was not present in F1’s Cadillac press release and has effectively been sidelined in favour of GM taking the reins completely. Much of that is down to events that have taken place behind the scenes.

Holding company TWG Global taking control of Andretti Global in September saw Michael Andretti, who had angered F1 and its teams with his repeated public criticisms, shuffled away from a leadership role and out of the orbit of the F1 bid. That started a chain reaction of events that made the bid much more favourable to F1, with TWG able to convince GM to take the reins of the project. GM is now going all-in with its Cadillac brand, rather than simply being a technical partner of a new entrant, committing to eventually building, running and supplying its own engines. That satisfied one of the key criteria F1 had been looking for in an 11th team.

The reasoning behind January’s decision to block Andretti-GM for 2026 centred around value and competitiveness. F1 doubted Andretti joining in either 2025 and 2026, with what was ostensibly a technical partnership with GM, provided enough value to existing stakeholders to convince them to give up a slice of the sport’s booming revenues to another entrant. With a new team likely to struggle in the short term, the Andretti name was not seen as a big-enough draw to offset the expected growing pains.

Significant financial backing from General Motors and the introduction of a brand as strong as Cadillac is as much as the sport could ask for. It’s a similar case with Audi, who is in the process of taking over the Sauber team for 2026: the German manufacturer has committed completely to the project, including supplying its own engines. Even if Cadillac is slow to become competitive — which is the paddock consensus about Audi’s chances, too — having that name in the sport is a positive for all involved, especially when it comes with that kind of financial commitment to the project.

By the end of the decade, Cadillac will have full works status. In the short term, it will rely on a customer engine deal with an existing manufacturer, the identity of whom remains to be seen, but Formula 1 obviously feels confident the team that has been assembled so far can compete at an acceptable level by 2026.

It will join the hub of F1 teams that work out of the UK, primarily from a factory near the Silverstone circuit, although it’s also using Toyota’s state-of-the-art wind tunnel facility in Cologne, Germany, while GM’s racing arm also has three facilities in the U.S. it may be able to lean on. Expect a slew of hires in the coming months; Andretti-Cadillac had already brought in Pat Symonds as executive engineering consultant and former Renault man Rob White as chief operating officer.

As for Andretti, much of that team’s work and legacy will remain. Mario Andretti, America’s last F1 champion and the father of company boss Michael, will join the Cadillac team as a director, as a nod to what the family has done to get another American team on the grid. Andretti Global deserves credit for the work done behind the scenes to bring GM to the table in the first place.

There has been no news of drivers yet, but both Andretti and GM previously indicated a willingness to start racing with at least one American behind the wheel. Although big-name drivers might be hard to come by for Cadillac’s first season, the presence of an 11th team in 2026 will present a completely left-field option for a lot of experienced drivers who might otherwise have found themselves on the outs. — Nate Saunders

Cadillac vs. the world

F1 is the last corner of the big league motorsports world that General Motors had yet to explore.

There was a Chevrolet on the grid for the first Indianapolis 500 in 1911, literally. Arthur Chevrolet started 11th and finished 36th driving a machine built by another brand, but one that would eventually become part of the General Motors portfolio: Buick. Later that same year, in September 1911, Arthur and his two brothers teamed up with former Buick employees to start what would become GM’s anchor-as-chevron, the Chevrolet Motor Car Company.

Since then, GM-powered machines have won 18 Indy 500s, five under the now-shuttered Oldsmobile brand and 13 powered by Chevy, including seven out of the past twelve. The General Motors history in NASCAR is unmatched, with 1,199 Cup Series wins shared between Chevy, Buick and the discontinued Olds and Pontiac banners. Chevrolet has also won 43 NASCAR manufacturer’s titles, two and a half times its closest rival in Ford. In NHRA drag racing, Chevy alone owns 28 Manufacturers Cups.

Stateside, no one does auto racing like General Motors, but the corporation — which ranked as Earth’s fifth-largest auto manufacturer in 2023 with nearly $170 billion in revenue — has never gained much traction with the international motorsports crowd. Chevy Corvettes made their modern day sports car debut in 1999 and have since added 127 wins, including nine class victories at Le Mans. Cadillac has also gotten in on the action, ending a decades-long absence at Le Mans in 2000 and spending the end of the last decade piling up wins and titles from the 24 Hours of Daytona to an alphabet soup of sports car sanctioning bodies and divisions.

But F1, this is different. The timeline for Cadillac F1’s debut will be moving with more speed than any race car they have ever built. F1’s 11th team on the grid will go racing in 2026, initially with help from the outside, but with the goal becoming a works team that builds its own chassis and engines by the end of the decade. By comparison, American-based Haas F1 has an office in North Carolina’s NASCAR country but preps its cars in England and uses engines from Ferrari. When GM’s archrival Ford begins its partnership with current F1 kings Red Bull, also in 2026, it will be as an engine partner but with no ownership in the team.

When GM rolls off the grid for the 2026 season opener, the scramble it has made to get there will be matched only by the level of expectation from a United States Formula 1 fanbase that has spent the past five years growing from niche to mainstream.

“I believe that is the greatest challenge now, what people expect you to do immediately,” explained 1963 Indy 500 winner Parnelli Jones in 2019. “The good news is that so many more people in the United States care about Formula 1 now. The bad news is that because of that, in their eyes, there’s no ramping-up time. They want results now.”

Jones, who died earlier this year, was a leader of one of the small handful of American-based race teams who have dared go where Cadillac goes now. In 1975, Vel’s Parnelli Jones Racing with Viceroy Cigarettes sponsorship and Mario Andretti behind the wheel made its F1 debut and nearly won the Spanish Grand Prix, but was ultimately undone when tire supplier Firestone backed out on the eve of the ’76 season.

The 1970s were also the decade of Shadow Racing Cars, an American sports car team that moved to F1 and scored more points than any other U.S.-centred effort, but also lost two drivers to tragic accidents. A similar story was written by Team Penske, who lost Mark Donohue to a fatal crash in 1975, its second season, and won a race in ’76 with John Watson, but pulled the plug at the end of that season. Penske’s PC4, the Austrian GP victor, remains the last American-built car to win a grand prix.

But the ultimate measuring stick for any true American F1 effort remains the Anglo American Racers of Dan Gurney. The Eagles that flew around grand prix circuits from 1966 to 1968, particularly the Eagle T1G that won the ’67 Belgian GP with Gurney at the wheel, are still considered some of the most beautiful machines to ever roll through a Formula 1 paddock. However, even Gurney was financially forced to pack up his Eagles and go back the States at end of his best F1 season.

“Any racer worth his salt wants to be challenged,” says Mario Andretti, the only American citizen to win the F1 world champion. “There is no greater challenge than Formula 1 racing. Except perhaps getting there in the first place.” — Ryan McGee