Cadillac F1: The Honest Report on America’s New Team

Formula 1 expanded to eleven teams in 2026 for the first time in a decade, and the eleventh is American. That much of the original version of this page was right. Almost everything else about it has either changed or was wrong when it was written — including the team’s name.

Twelve of twenty-two rounds are done. Cadillac F1 sits last in the constructors’ championship on zero points, has retired nine cars in eleven races, lost a points finish in Monaco to a penalty, and sacked its team principal in August. It has also built a five-hundred-person Formula 1 team from nothing in about a year. Both of those things are true, and the second one is the reason the first one was always going to happen.

Quick Answer: How Is Cadillac F1 Doing?

Cadillac F1 entered Formula 1 in 2026 as the sport’s eleventh team, with Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas driving and Ferrari supplying power units and gearboxes. After twelve of twenty-two rounds it is eleventh of eleven constructors with zero points — the only team yet to score. Its best result is Valtteri Bottas’s thirteenth place in China; Sergio Perez crossed the line tenth at Monaco but a penalty dropped him to fifteenth. Team principal Graeme Lowdon was replaced by Marcin Budkowski in August 2026. The team is owned by TWG Global, not Andretti, and General Motors’ own power unit does not arrive until 2029.

Why Cadillac F1 Is Not Called Andretti

This is the part most coverage skips, and it explains everything else.

The bid started in January 2023 as Andretti Global with General Motors backing. The FIA approved it in October 2023 through its own expression-of-interest process. Then, on 31 January 2024, Formula One Management rejected it — not the governing body, the commercial rights holder. The stated reasons were blunt: that the applicant “would not be a competitive participant,” that relying on a customer power unit rather than a works engine would damage the championship’s standing, and that F1 “would bring value to the Andretti brand rather than the other way around.”

FOM did leave a door open, saying it would look differently at an application built around a General Motors power unit. Everything that followed was the restructuring required to walk through it. Michael Andretti ceded control of Andretti Global in September 2024. In November 2024, TWG Global — the holding company run by Mark Walter — took ownership, and GM and F1 announced an agreement in principle with the team rebranded Cadillac. Final approval came on 7 March 2025, with the Concorde Agreement signed and a $450 million anti-dilution fee paid, double the $200 million written into the 2021 agreement.

So the entry that races today is TWG Cadillac Formula 1 Team LLC, competing as Cadillac F1. Dan Towriss, CEO of TWG Motorsports, runs it. Michael Andretti is an advisor with no ownership or executive role. Mario Andretti sits on the board — and the 2026 car is designated the MAC-26, for Mario Andretti Cadillac. General Motors is a brand and technical partner rather than an equity owner of the race team.

The Cadillac F1 Season So Far

The 2026 calendar was cut from twenty-four rounds to twenty-two when Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were cancelled in March, the FIA citing the safety of personnel. Twelve have now run, the most recent at Zandvoort on 23 August.

Look at the gap between tenth and fourth rather than the gap between eleventh and tenth. Aston Martin, a fully established team with a new factory and a wind tunnel, has three points. Williams has eleven. The bottom of this grid is compressed and slow, and Cadillac F1 is at the end of it rather than adrift from it.

The debut, Australia, 8 March

Both cars were out in Q1, eighteenth and nineteenth. Bottas retired on lap sixteen with a steering wheel problem and then a terminal fuel system failure. Perez finished sixteenth, three laps down — the first classified finish in the team’s history. Graeme Lowdon’s summary afterwards was “really satisfied that we got one car home.” Bottas put it better: “We made history as a team today.”

The point that got away, Monaco, 7 June

Perez crossed the line tenth. He had already served a drive-through for lining up in the wrong grid box at the start; doing the same thing again at the restart brought a ten-second penalty and dropped him to fifteenth. The stewards reasoned that at Monaco “two places on the grid is a very significant advantage.” Fernando Alonso inherited tenth and Aston Martin’s first point of the year. It remains the closest Cadillac F1 has come.

The double retirement, Austria, 28 June

Both cars retired in the opening laps with overheating brakes. Bottas’s caught fire and was sprayed with extinguisher foam; Perez reported smoke in the cockpit. Formula 1’s own half-term report links it to a new sidepod and floor package the team had just introduced — a reminder that on a first-year car, an upgrade is also an experiment.

The pattern underneath all of it

Nine retirements across the first eleven rounds — four for Perez, five for Bottas — and Bottas added a sixth at Zandvoort. Neither driver has reached Q2 all season; the best grid slot is eighteenth. The best race result is Bottas’s thirteenth in China, achieved from twentieth on the grid, which tells you the race pace is better than the qualifying pace. Perez after Zandvoort: “The pace was very strong, especially once we were out of traffic.”

The Cadillac F1 Team Principal Change

On 12 August 2026, with the team eleventh and pointless, Cadillac F1 replaced Graeme Lowdon with Marcin Budkowski — formerly the FIA’s head of single-seater technical matters and executive director at Alpine. He took over from the Dutch Grand Prix. Dan Towriss made the decision himself and told Lowdon that morning.

Towriss on the timing: “I think that the time for that change came sooner than was expected.” Budkowski on what he intends to do first: “My first priority is going to be to listen and observe in the factory.” And, more usefully, on expectations: “There’s no more magic wand in F1 — that’s long gone.”

Reasonable people disagree about this one. Lowdon assembled the team, hired the staff and got two cars to the grid on time, which is not nothing — several attempts at this in F1 history never made a race at all. Replacing him twelve races into year one is either decisive or impatient depending on where you sit.

2029 Is the Year That Actually Matters

Cadillac F1 runs Ferrari power units and gearboxes, announced in December 2024 as a multi-year agreement. Ferrari never named an end date; the widely reported understanding is 2026 through 2028.

The FIA approved GM Performance Power Units LLC as a registered power unit manufacturer on 23 April 2025, effective from the 2029 season — not 2030, and not 2028, which was the original registration made in November 2023. That date is the entire point of the project. A customer team buying engines is a participant; a manufacturer building its own is a constructor, and the difference is the reason Formula One Management rejected the first application.

The Cadillac F1 engine programme is running at GM’s Charlotte Technical Center in North Carolina alongside a European facility next to Silverstone, with a purpose-built engine plant at Concord, North Carolina targeted for occupancy in the first quarter of 2027. Judge this programme in 2029. The 2026 season is the apprenticeship.

Where Cadillac F1 Actually Is

Cadillac F1 is, for now, a mostly British operation. That is not a criticism — it is how you field a car in eighteen months.

Note the correction to the earlier version of this page: the US headquarters is in Fishers, Indiana, a suburb north-east of Indianapolis, not Indianapolis itself. General Motors’ own releases have used both, which is probably how the error spread.

Headcount has moved just as fast. The March 2025 figure of “over 300” was accurate at the time and is now well out of date: the team hired around 520 people by the end of 2025 from 143,265 applications for 595 advertised roles, and the working number through 2026 is roughly 500 to 600 across all sites. The aerodynamics department alone went from six engineers to more than a hundred in three years.

The Cadillac F1 American Driver Question

The obvious criticism of an American team is that it has no American driver. Cadillac F1 knows, and the plan is Colton Herta — but the plan is in trouble.

Herta signed as test driver in September 2025 and moved to Formula 2 with Hitech for 2026, announced that October. He called it “my last shot at reaching F1.” The reason is arithmetic: an FIA superlicence needs forty points over three seasons and Herta had thirty-four going into 2026. IndyCar awards forty only to its champion. Formula 2 awards forty to each of its top three, and enough further down that an eighth-place championship finish would take him to exactly forty.

At the summer break he is sixteenth in Formula 2 on twenty-six points, roughly thirty-nine behind the eighth place he needs, with no podium. His best result was fifth in the Barcelona sprint after a last-lap lock-up cost him a maiden podium from third on the grid. He is eight points clear of his own team-mate. With four rounds left, the gamble is not working, and the press has started saying so.

The team’s other non-race drivers are Zhou Guanyu as reserve, Pietro Fittipaldi in development, and Simon Pagenaud and Charlie Eastwood on the simulator.

The Rules Cadillac F1 Arrived Into

Timing matters here. 2026 brought the largest technical reset in more than a decade, which cuts both ways for a new team: everyone started from a blank sheet, but the established teams have the tools and the history to fill it faster.

The hybrid element is where General Motors’ road-car work is supposed to pay off eventually — the same electrified-axle thinking that sits behind the Corvette ZR1X and the E-Ray. That transfer is a 2029 argument, not a 2026 one.

Why an Eleventh Team Matters

• The grid had been shrinking. F1 has spent a decade losing teams, not gaining them. Twenty-two cars is the most since 2016, and the $450 million entry fee is the mechanism the existing teams negotiated to make it worth their while.
• It is a second American manufacturer commitment, not just a team. Haas is American-owned but buys Ferrari power units and has never planned to build its own. GM has registered to build engines. That is a materially different level of commitment.
• It gives the US market a home team. Three American races, a Netflix-driven audience, and until this year no team with an American name on it. Whether that converts is a commercial question, not a sporting one.
• The American driver is still missing. An American team fielding a Mexican and a Finn is a stopgap, and everyone involved describes it that way. The Herta plan is the intended fix.

The Honest Cadillac F1 Verdict

Zero points after twelve races looks like failure and mostly is not. A brand-new constructor arriving in the middle of the biggest regulation change in a decade, with a customer power unit, a factory still being built and a workforce hired inside twelve months, was never going to trouble the midfield in year one. The teams above it have been doing this for decades.

What is fair to criticise is reliability. Nine retirements in eleven races is not a pace problem, it is an execution problem, and it is the thing a new team can actually fix. It is presumably why the team principal changed in August rather than in December.

Our family has been in the car business for more than a century, and the thing we would say to anyone judging this after one summer is that Formula 1 punishes impatience more reliably than it punishes anything else. Mercedes took years to win after coming back. Red Bull bought a team and spent five seasons getting good. The question worth asking about Cadillac F1 is not whether it scored in 2026. It is whether the engine is competitive in 2029.

If the racing has you thinking about the road cars, browse our inventory or list your car with us. Our guide to electric supercars versus combustion covers the same hybrid physics from the road side, and our sister publication Exotic Car News follows the season week to week.

Cadillac F1 FAQ