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I’ve seldom been more relieved than when the Formula One racing series recently rejected Andretti Global racing and General Motors’ bid to join the series with a team bearing the Cadillac badge in 2025.
Not that I hold any ill will for Andretti. I wish them nothing but success.
Nor do I dislike F1 racing. I’ve followed it since the spectacle of F1 races in downtown Detroit when I was fresh out of college. Heck, when I was a kid, F1 legend Jackie Stewart was literally a comic-book hero in Ireland — Spider-Man in a tartan cap.
But the last thing General Motors needs is an expensive distraction from the technical and management challenges at the core of its business. Its Cadillac brand needs to successfully launch the raft of electric vehicles it promises — three new ones this year alone! — before it ventures into an arena that has proven costly and unproductive for brands from BMW, Lamborghini, Stellantis-member Peugeot, Porsche to Toyota.
F1 is a side gig that devours box cars full of cash and engineers’ careers. GM and Cadillac need to keep the main thing … the main thing.
Why using someone else’s engines was a bad idea
The initial proposal, as reported, based on buying engines from Renault and sticking them in cars bearing Cadillac badging, was an embarrassment. Those engines currently power cars run by Alpine, an asterisk of a sports car brand that won as many F1 races as I did last year. A later proposal offered to develop Cadillac powertrains that the cars could use in a couple of years.
Directing corporate cash and engineering resources there as Cadillac struggles to launch its vital new electric vehicles would be folly, particularly since GM had at the time stopped work on the hybrid technology F1 requires.
The 2024 F1 season begins March 2 in Bahrain.
GM plans to revive the use of plug-in hybrids in its vehicles. Perhaps Cadillac will make sense in Formula One someday, but as an engine supplier to an established competitor, not a stand-alone startup team.
That’s the route Ford took last year when it announced that six-time F1 champion Red Bull — currently home to the world’s hottest driver, Max Verstappen — will use Ford engines starting in 2026.
The deal was a coup that stunned the racing world. It will put Ford engineering in the spotlight — and under the microscope.
Ford supplied F1 engines for decades, winning championships with everyone from Jackie Stewart to Michael Schumacher before exiting due to costs in 2004. Its engineers are working with Red Bull on the engines and hybrid systems, including high-power electronics and turbochargers.
The synergies are clear: Ford’s working with F1’s best team, associating itself with a proven world champion.
The proposed GM sortie into F1 didn’t have any of that going for it.
It’s about more than money
Still, some say GM would gain “prestige” participating in F1.
Prestige like hanging out at the bottom of the grid, battling teams with names like Visa Cash App RB for a single point? F1 is full of teams that barely hang on, contributing no victories, or even stirring losses, to the automakers associated with them.
Toyota, with more money than Croesus and more engineers than MIT, ran an F1 team from 2002 to 2009, reportedly spending hundreds of millions of dollars. It never won a race, much less a championship.
Brands like BMW, Porsche and Lexus show you can build an esteemed, profitable global brand without dabbling in F1. Cadillac competes successfully with them and other global leaders in sports car racing every week. That’s enough. Now, and for the foreseeable future.
F1 bosses dropped broad hints — practically holding their palms out for the cash — that they might reconsider GM’s bid if it comes in with the full force and budget that manufacturers like Mercedes and Ferrari devote to the program — and waits until 2028, when the entry fee for a new team may have tripled or more from the $200 million Andretti was prepared to pay this year.
Maybe by then Cadillac will be an unquestioned global leader in luxury, technology and design. Maybe GM will have mastered the production and sales of EVs and self-driving vehicles.
Then again, maybe by then GM will have demonstrated it doesn’t need F1 to make and sell some of the world’s most advanced and desirable cars. It never did before.
Contact Mark Phelan: 313-222-6731 or mmphelan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @mark_phelan. Read more on autos and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.
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