Formula 1 approves addition of General Motors team starting in 2026

Formula 1 will have an 11th team in 2026 after all.

The series announced Monday that General Motors’ bid to add a team to the grid in two seasons had been approved. The FIA had previously approved the GM-backed effort, but F1 and its teams had not signed off.

The announcement comes after Michael Andretti stepped back from the Andretti Global effort to join F1. With Andretti’s role now minimized and TWG Global CEO Dan Towriss leading the push, negotiations broke through recently as it became clear over the course of the Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend that an 11th team would be joining the grid.

According to F1, the GM/Cadillac team will join in 2026 and it will use GM engines “at a later time.” That means the team will need to use engines from an existing engine supplier during its infancy.

The GM team will mean two of the 11 teams in F1 will be American-owned starting in 2026, along with Haas F1. F1 now has three races in the United States after adding races in Miami and Las Vegas in recent years after the exploding popularity of the Netflix “Drive to Survive” series.

Andretti, a longtime open-wheel racer who had a short stint in F1, had been pushing to field a team for years. However, he’d faced staunch resistance in F1 circles. Andretti’s entry had been approved by the FIA, F1’s governing body, in October of 2023, but was rejected by F1 in January. When that application was denied, F1 said that it didn’t believe the team would be competitive.

Andretti had said that he felt like the rejection was part of a grudge against him.

But things changed over the course of 2024 as Towriss took on a bigger role with the push to join the grid and a U.S. Justice Department investigation into the team’s rejection as part of a potential antitrust violation. The fate of that investigation is unclear, though it reasons that it could be dropped now that the bid has been approved.

The GM team’s entry into F1 will come as the series introduces new car regulations after 2025. Other new manufacturers are joining the series in 2026, like Ford and Audi. Ford will power the Red Bull cars for four-time champion Max Verstappen, while Audi is taking over the Sauber team.

Verstappen clinched that fourth straight title over the weekend in Las Vegas as he finished a spot ahead of McLaren’s Lando Norris. There are two races to go in the 2024 F1 season as the series visits Qatar and Abu Dhabi over the next two weeks.