Formula 1’s announcement Monday that the Cadillac team’s entry had been accepted for the 2026 season means the F1 grid is set to expand from 20 to 22 drivers. The move opens up more F1 places for drivers on the junior single-seater ladder and strengthens the sport’s growing American footprint, as Feeder Series explains.

By Michael McClure

The now-successful Cadillac F1 proposal, the product of a partnership between Cadillac parent company and future power unit supplier General Motors and investor Dan Towriss’ TWG Global, puts to rest 10 months of turmoil after a previous version of the application under the Andretti Global brand was rejected.

From among the four bids lodged with the FIA to join the F1 grid in 2026, Andretti Global’s proposal was the only applicant to earn FIA approval, a decision made public in October 2023. Formula One Management then rejected the application in January 2024.

The denial spurred significant controversy and even an antitrust investigation by the United States Department of Justice into F1 owner Liberty Media. It subsequently surfaced that personal conflicts between F1 leadership and Michael Andretti, the then–CEO of Andretti Global and a former F1 and American open-wheel racer, may have contributed to the initial rejection.

Andretti, 62, stepped aside as the head of Andretti Global in October. Towriss, who replaced him, is the CEO of TWG Global, which helped push the Cadillac-branded entry across the finish line. Andretti’s father, 1978 F1 world champion Mario Andretti, will be on the board of the Cadillac entry in a non-executive directorial role.

Andretti Global had previously expressed interest in fielding F2 and F3 entries if its F1 bid were to be accepted. It is not known how this particular vision aligns with those of Towriss and his Cadillac entry.

No F1 team has a squad of its own in junior single-seaters, though all are involved in the discipline in some capacity. All 10 current teams sponsor a driver in the all-female F1 Academy support series, while eight have academies supporting drivers at various levels on the junior ladder.

Andretti has a development programme in the United States supporting Sebastian and Oliver Wheldon, the sons of the late Dan Wheldon, who won the 2005 IndyCar title with the team. Sebastian, 15, finished third in USF Juniors this year and will make his international debut with Prema Racing in the Formula Trophy UAE series in December. Oliver, 13, won the Skip Barber Race Series in September.

F1 is years away for either of the Wheldons, who race under the American flag while being of British-Canadian parentage. Still, Andretti and Towriss are understood to share a desire to bring an American flair to the sport, including through the F1 team’s line-up choices. No current F1 driver races under the American flag following Logan Sargeant’s departure from Williams in August.

Aston Martin junior Jak Crawford, fifth in the F2 standings with a win and four further podiums, is the best-placed American prospect on the F2 grid currently. Earlier this month, the 19-year-old signed to Andretti’s Formula E team as its reserve driver for the 2024–25 season after having appeared with the team at the FE rookie test in Berlin in May.

Crawford will return for a third F2 season, his second with DAMS, in 2025 in a bid to win the title. He spoke to Feeder Series about the trickle-down effects of the Cadillac entry at a media roundtable ahead of F2’s Qatar round this weekend.

“There’s only two more seats available, but that’s quite a lot for F1 to add two more seats, so that’s two more drivers that will be either moving up [or] it’s just two more seats that will be available for F2/F3 drivers,” he said.

“We’ve seen we’re going to have a lot of rookies in F1 next year from F2, but the previous year there was only Logan, really, who was a rookie last year, so hopefully we’ll see that it’s putting a lot more Formula 2 drivers up into Formula 1.”

While the absence of grid movement from 2023 to 2024 was unprecedented in F1, there has been a trend of more conservative driver choices in recent years as teams seek the financial and commercial stability that often comes with experienced drivers.

One specific point of contention among the junior single-seater world has been the lack of direct promotion opportunities for F2’s champions, who are not permitted to return to the category.

Two of F1’s 2023 rookies, 2021 champion Piastri and 2019 champion De Vries, waited one and three years respectively before making their full-time F1 bows. The series’ last two victors, 2022 champion Felipe Drugovich and 2023 champion Théo Pourchaire, have yet to find full-time F1 roles after winning the titles in their respective third seasons.

Drugovich has been a test and reserve driver for Aston Martin since 2023; Pourchaire has filled the same role at Sauber and will join Peugeot as a test and development driver for the World Endurance Championship in 2025.

Still, the entrance of a new team does not guarantee two more spots for F2 graduates. One driver who has been linked to the Cadillac project since its early days is 24-year-old American Colton Herta, who has raced for the Andretti IndyCar division since 2020. His father, Bryan Herta, is a strategist at the team.

Besides rookies who come from outside F2, drivers who miss out on the 2025 F1 season may also be on the market. The 2026 F1 season will feature a heavily revised set of aerodynamic and power unit regulations.

The last entirely new team added to the grid was Haas F1, who joined in 2016. The American outfit fielded Romain Grosjean, who debuted in 2009, and Esteban Gutiérrez, who debuted in 2013.

Haas did not run rookies for a full season until their sixth year in 2021, when they had all-rookie line-up of Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin, both members of the 2020 F2 grid.

F1’s North American expansion

GM’s entry also comes as part of a wave of corporate interest from F1 in North America as a whole and the United States in particular. The continent’s largest country by population was long considered an untapped market under the 40-year reign of Bernie Ecclestone, the largest stakeholder in the F1-controlling Formula One Group.

American media conglomerate Liberty Media purchased Formula One Group in January 2017 and quickly worked to expand F1’s footprint in the United States.

Over the last three years, F1 has added the Miami Grand Prix and the Las Vegas Grand Prix, which joined the calendar in 2022 and 2023 respectively. Those came in addition to the United States Grand Prix, which rejoined the calendar in 2012 after a four-year absence, and the Mexican Grand Prix, added in 2015 after a 22-year hiatus and now called the Mexico City Grand Prix.

F1 Academy, F1’s newest support championship, visited Miami this year as the second stop on its seven-round calendar. Next year, the F4-spec championship will add rounds in both Las Vegas and Montréal, home of the Canadian Grand Prix since 1978. Additionally, two of the five F1 Academy entries not supported by F1 teams are sponsored by American companies in Tommy Hilfiger and American Express.

No championship fully on the F1 package has ever had more than 28 per cent of its races in North America. The continent’s roughly 43 per cent share of the 2025 F1 Academy calendar sets a new record among F1 and its supporting series.

“When I saw the calendar, I was a little bit jealous that they had two races in the United States!” Crawford told Feeder Series. “All I could say is I wished we raced there. I believe back in 2021, we had the opportunity, or it was on the calendar, and we were less than a month away to racing in COTA in Formula 3. Unfortunately that didn’t pan out with the COVID situation during that time.”

Crawford said he felt that F3’s foiled American season finale – a support race for the 2021 United States Grand Prix, eventually rescheduled to the Russian Grand Prix weekend – could have “started something”. Instead, F2 and F3 have not made further overtures into racing in the United States and instead added their first rounds in Australia in 2023.

The F1 calendar also has a race in Mexico, the home country of Van Amersfoort Racing F2 driver Rafael Villagómez. But outside of entry-level competitions such as F4 NACAM, junior single-seater racing is all but nonexistent. Continental series FRegional Americas never visited Mexico.

The World Series Formula V8 3.5, once a rival to F2 predecessor GP2, visited Mexico City venue Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez in 2017 during the championship’s final season in support of WEC’s 6 Hours of Mexico.

“There is also Mexico, which would be really cool for F2, F3 to have a race back home,” Villagómez told Feeder Series when asked about a potential F2 expansion to North America. “To race at home is a big thing for most of the drivers.

“The calendar of the F1 Academy seems like it’s a little bit more spread out throughout the world. But that doesn’t change anything for us,” he added.

Mexico itself has enjoyed a growing presence in the junior ladder following Sergio Pérez’s ascension to an F1 seat in 2011. Pérez and Gutiérrez are the only two Mexicans to have raced in F1 since 1981.

In F3 this year, Trident’s Santiago Ramos and Van Amersfoort Racing’s Noel León represented Mexico, while Spanish F4 frontrunner Ernesto Rivera, a new Red Bull Junior Team signing, also hails from there. Several of them have spoken openly about the influence Pérez, now a six-time grand prix winner driving for Red Bull Racing, has had on their careers.

Header photo credit: Cadillac