Red Bull’s 2026 season launch event with Ford in Detroit on Thursday will kickstart a big year of American interest in Formula One.
The series’ United States expansion has boosted its fortunes in recent years, with new grands prix in Miami and Las Vegas capitalizing on the swell of American viewership. The 2026 season also marks the start of a deal with Apple as F1’s new U.S. TV broadcast partner.
But there is also an uptick in American competitive interest trackside. In 2026, Ford returns to F1 through its engine partnership with Red Bull and its junior team, Racing Bulls, and Cadillac debuts with its own team supported by General Motors.
“There definitely is a national pride element to Cadillac,” Dan Towriss, the CEO of Cadillac’s F1 team, told reporters at November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix. “F1 is innovation on the biggest stage imaginable, and the U.S. didn’t really have a seat at that table.”
There has been an American team, Haas, on the F1 grid since 2016. But the arrival of two of the three largest car makers in the U.S. is significant. GM is the largest automaker in the United States, reporting a 17% market share last September, putting it ahead of Toyota and Ford.
The Red Bull/Ford partnership and Cadillac’s entry are good news for F1, as it bids to further resonate with the American fanbase. Yet it will also add an extra competitive dimension to the rivalry between Ford and GM, which has endured for more than a century.
Cars produced by Ford and GM have raced against each other across numerous motorsport categories, most notably in NASCAR from the very start of stock car racing’s professional era, but also at famous sports car races such as the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Rolex 24 at Daytona, and the Bathurst 1000 Supercars race in Australia. But 2026 will be the first time that Ford and a GM brand have gone toe-to-toe in grand prix racing.
Ford’s history in F1 dates back to 1967, when it began supplying engines to the Lotus team. Graham Hill won the 1968 world title – the first using Ford power.
Graham Hill in his Ford-powered Lotus-Cosworth 49B at the 1968 Dutch Grand Prix
Ford’s tally of 176 race wins as an engine supplier puts it third in the F1 record books, only trailing Mercedes and Ferrari. But it has not been active on the grid since 2004, when it sold its Jaguar team to Red Bull.
The deal for Ford’s return in an engine partnership with Red Bull and Racing Bulls, announced in February 2023, brought things full circle.
Honda’s (soon reversed) decision to quit F1 and a failed deal with Porsche prompted Red Bull to sound out Ford about coming on board with its first engine-building program. The ambitious project gave Red Bull the chance to control its own destiny on the track, rather than be reliant on an engine supplier. This has been a problem for Red Bull for much of its own F1 history.
But building an all-new engine capable of competing with the experienced, established giants in Mercedes and Ferrari has been an enormous undertaking.
“We’re doing it together with Red Bull,” Mark Rushbrook, the global director of Ford Racing, told The Athletic in Las Vegas in an interview. “But it’s still a massive challenge. Just in terms of the technical challenge and the pace at which we need to move.”
Rushbrook explained that Ford has engineers stationed at Red Bull’s Milton Keynes factory full-time. “And then (there are) engineers that are there back and forth, not necessarily on a regular basis, but as they are needed for different projects as it comes,” he said.
“Then some of the work that we’ve done remotely from Dearborn (Ford’s Michigan HQ) as well. A lot of the parts are made in Dearborn and are being shipped over almost on a daily basis.”
Cadillac has also grappled with the scale of the challenge of preparing for F1.
It has set up a new team from scratch despite only getting the formal green light to join the grid in March 2025, after initially being rejected by the sport. Although it primarily operates out of Silverstone in the UK, its new F1 headquarters opens later this year in Fishers, Indiana. It also gets technical support from GM in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Warren, Michigan.
GM also plans to produce its own F1 engine from the 2029 season, at which point Cadillac will become a fully-fledged works team. This means producing all of its own car parts and the engine in-house. Until then, its engine will be supplied by Ferrari.
To Towriss, the scale of GM’s F1 involvement through Cadillac means it is not comparable to Ford’s partnership with Red Bull.
Cadillac F1 team principal Graeme Lowden (right) with CEO Dan Towriss (left) at the Italian GP in September (David Davies/PA Images via Getty Images)
“It’s not even close,” Towriss said. “One is a marketing deal with very minimal impact, while GM is an equity owner (in the Cadillac team). They’re deeply embedded from an engineering standpoint, and they were involved from day one. Those two deals couldn’t be more different.”
Rushbrook counters this. He said this was because Ford not only has direct input into the Red Bull engine program through its engineers, but also produces engine components.
“People will have their opinions,” he said. “But if they saw what was going on, if we were able to open the doors and show everything to them, I think they would be convinced very quickly.
“It’s not simply a marketing program. Of course, there is that element, but we’re in there with our sleeves pulled up.”
But Red Bull/Ford and Cadillac are unlikely to spend a lot of time competing with each other on the track this season.
Although the overhaul of the car design rulebook and the introduction of new engines could shake up the pecking order, the scale and success of Red Bull’s operation should initially put it well ahead of Cadillac, which is a start-up team with less than half the workforce size of the front-running teams. In October, Cadillac’s technical consultant Pat Symonds said there were 429 people on staff at the team, which compares to around 1,000 at the biggest operations.
Cadillac has, therefore, reasonably tempered expectations for what is likely to be a learning year spent at the back of the grid in 2026.
Isack Hadjar during testing at Abu Dhabi in December (Mark Thompson/Getty Images)
Yet both brands can battle for the attention of the American fanbase. Haas, despite being F1’s only American team for a decade, has not leaned heavily on that identity. Its F1 base is in the UK; much of its car is built in Italy, with an engine supplied by Ferrari; and it has expanded its partnership with the Japanese manufacturer Toyota through 2026.
Rushbrook said fan interest in Ford’s F1 return had been “strong since we announced it in February 2023, and I think it’s only getting stronger. Even as we walk around the (F1) paddock now, or even in the hotel or walking around the streets, people see Ford, and they’re cheering us on. They’ve very excited about us getting back on track.”
But without the constraints that, through much of F1 history, have come from being a partner to an existing F1 outfit, especially one as well-known as Red Bull, Cadillac can be more direct in becoming America’s F1 team. It will do so from the outset in 2026.
The livery for its first F1 car will be unveiled in an advert during the Super Bowl on Feb. 8, targeting the largest sports audience in the United States. Cadillac has also brought on several major American brands as sponsors for its debut season, including Tommy Hilfiger and Jim Beam.
“We know that Haas is here, but we really want to take that mantle as the American team and help grow that fanbase here, and be that next-generation Formula One team,” said Towriss.
Two American automotive heavyweights now being so entrenched in F1 is good news for the sport at large and its fanbase in the United States. That it could write the next chapter in the Ford-GM rivalry only adds to the intrigue.
