How it began

Cadillac is the championship’s first new team since 2016, when Haas joined the grid. The entry was submitted by TWG Motorsports, the motorsport arm of the investment group TWG Global, and General Motors, which owns the Cadillac brand. On 25 November 2024 the championship announced an agreement in principle with General Motors, and on 7 March 2025 the FIA and Formula 1 gave the team final approval to join for the 2026 season as the eleventh team.

The project was preceded by an Andretti bid, rejected after a commercial assessment in January 2024; the championship’s statement of 25 November 2024 referred directly to that decision, and the new bid came from General Motors. By the time of approval, according to Formula 1, more than 200 people were working for the team on aerodynamics, chassis, software and simulation.

The team

The team has four sites: Fishers in Indiana, Charlotte in North Carolina, Warren in Michigan and Silverstone in England; the race base is at Silverstone. The CEO is Dan Towriss, who also heads TWG Motorsports. The technical side is led by Nick Chester, formerly Renault’s technical director.

Power units and gearboxes come from Ferrari, under a deal announced on 11 December 2024. The team’s own engine is being prepared by GM Performance Power Units, a company set up by TWG Motorsports and General Motors: on 23 April 2025 the FIA approved it as a power unit supplier from the 2029 season, and until then the team races with Ferrari engines.

Building the team

On 5 December 2024 Graeme Lowdon was appointed as the team’s first team principal; in 2010 he had been president and sporting director of Virgin Racing, and then of Marussia and Manor Marussia until 2015. The drivers were announced on 26 August 2025: Valtteri Bottas, who had raced for Williams, Mercedes, Alfa Romeo and Sauber, and Sergio Pérez, who had driven for Sauber, McLaren, Force India, Racing Point and Red Bull. Both are Grand Prix winners.

On 3 September 2025 Colton Herta from IndyCar became test driver, and on 5 January 2026 Zhou Guanyu, who raced for Alfa Romeo and Sauber from 2022 to 2024, became reserve driver. The car first took to the track on 26 January 2026 at the Barcelona test, with Bottas the first to drive it. The livery was revealed in February 2026 during a Super Bowl ad break, and pre-season testing in Bahrain took place on 11–13 and 18–20 February.

2026 season

The debut race was the Australian Grand Prix on 8 March 2026: Pérez finished sixteenth and Bottas retired. A week later, in China on 15 March 2026, Bottas came home thirteenth from nineteenth on the grid — the best result of the first half of the season. In Monaco on 7 June 2026 Pérez crossed the line tenth, but a post-race penalty dropped him to fifteenth, and the team missed out on its first points.

The first half of the season was marked by overheating and brake fires. At the Austrian Grand Prix on 28 June 2026 the team brought updated sidepods and floor, but both cars retired; in Hungary on 26 July 2026 it was a double retirement again. On 12 June 2026, at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, Herta drove the first of the four Friday practice sessions planned for him this season.

On 12 August 2026 Marcin Budkowski, formerly Alpine’s executive director, took over as team principal from Lowdon; his first Grand Prix in the new role was the round at Zandvoort on 23 August 2026. At the Italian Grand Prix on 6 September 2026 Bottas started sixteenth — higher than seventeenth for the first time that season. Cadillac arrived together with the new regulations — power units that take about half of their output from the electrical side, and active aerodynamics — and became the eleventh team in the same year that Sauber turned into the Audi works team.