Cadillac and Audi - the same ambition but two very different projects

There are two new Formula 1 teams in 2026, representing two of the world's biggest car companies. They have the same ambition, but they are two very different projects.

Audi has taken over the Sauber team to form the basis for its works assault on F1, marking parent company the Volkswagen Group's first foray into the highest level of the sport.

US giant General Motors (GM) is also trying out F1 for the first time. It has joined forces with US sports conglomerate TWG to form a new team named after its luxury Cadillac brand.

Both were tempted in by the engine rules introduced this year, believing the increased effect of the hybrid part of the engine was an important marketing point for their road-car portfolios.

Both want to become world champions. Both realise they have some way to go before achieving that aim.

Audi has set themselves a target of being in a position to compete for that in five years' time. Cadillac have been less precise, but team principal Graeme Lowdon has made it clear they have "limitless ambitions".

Let's take a look at where the two projects are at.

Audi team principal Jonathan Wheatley, who joined from his former position of sporting director at Red Bull last March, said at the team's launch this year: "We're not here to mess around. It's an ambitious project. We're humble. We know where we're starting from and we know where we want to go.

"We want to make Audi the most successful F1 team in history. There are milestones on that journey and we are starting it today."

No pressure, then.

Audi won the Le Mans 24 Hours 13 times in 18 years from 1999 to 2016. And in rallying they were famous for introducing four-wheel drive with the iconic Quattro in the early 1980s.

They might not have taken part in F1 before, but they did compete in its forerunner, the European grand prix championship, in the 1930s.

In a battle with arch-rivals Mercedes, Auto Union won the title with the great Bernd Rosemeyer in 1936, won five races against Mercedes' seven in 1937, while the legendary Tazio Nuvolari won races for them in 1938 and 1939 before the Second World War brought racing to a halt.

Audi's entry this year rekindles that old rivalry with Mercedes, and battle lines have already been drawn in a pre-season row over the rules governing the engines' compression ratio. Audi are said to have been prime among those pushing for a rule change because of a fear Mercedes had found a way of exploiting a loophole to their advantage.

Rivals on track with Mercedes, though, Audi are unlikely to be for a while.

While Mercedes start the season as championship favourites, Audi have a lot of work to do to transform Sauber into a winning proposition.

Following the announcement of Audi's entry in August 2022, the first steps of the programme did not augur well. Audi did not invest anywhere near enough money anywhere near soon enough.

Sauber made no progress through 2023 and into the following year. With the clock ticking on its entry in 2026, Audi axed chief executive officer Andreas Seidl, who had left his previous role as team principal of McLaren to join them, in mid-2024.

He was replaced with a dual management team of former Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto, who was tasked with running the factories - Hinwil in Switzerland for Sauber, and Neuberg in Germany for the engine programme - and Wheatley, in charge at the track.

Even then, the management changes were not finished. Binotto had initially joined as chief operating and technical officer. Less than a year later, he was made head of the Audi F1 project, and chief executive officer Adam Baker left the company.

The appointment of Binotto and Wheatley had a relatively quick impact, as Sauber finally began to move forward in 2025.

Having been marooned at the back, Sauber became more respectable performers, and their veteran German driver Nico Hulkenberg even finally scored a podium after 16 years of trying in last year's British Grand Prix.

This year, the driver line-up of Hulkenberg and Brazilian Gabriel Bortoleto, who is heading into his second season, continues, and the new Audi engine makes its debut.

So far the team have made a promising start.

They ran their car early in January, the first team to do so built to this year's new rules, and put a first aerodynamic upgrade on it in the final pre-season test in Bahrain last week.

Pace-wise, the belief is that Audi are in the midfield mix with Haas, Alpine and Racing Bulls, and ahead of Williams. A solid effort so far, although Hulkenberg is not getting carried away.

"It's just speculation right now still," the German said last week. "We really don't know until Melbourne and even a few races in, because I feel at the moment it can be quite track dependent on how your package feels on different circuits.

"So we'll have to wait and see until everybody really pulls their pants down in qualifying and we'll find out. Early days. I hope we're competitive somewhere in the midfield right now.

"But, yeah, the team's been working hard over the winter, pushing all the areas, doing the power-unit side for the first time. It's been busy and a challenge, and I think we're OK. But there's still a lot of work and a lot of room for improvement on that side and a lot to come."

If Audi was faced with a huge task in taking over a team that had suffered years of underinvestment and trying to make it competitive, while also setting up an F1 engine division, Cadillac's task was just as hard, but in a different way.

They had to set up a team from scratch, while battling political headwinds for at least three years.

Their journey started with the US-based Andretti team, which competes in a number of series, including IndyCar and Formula E, pondering an entry in the early years of this decade. But things got messy.

Michael Andretti, who ran the team, rubbed a lot of people in F1 up the wrong way with what was perceived as his abrasiveness and presumption, and there were questions marks within F1 as to how serious GM's involvement was. Initially, the team had a deal to use Renault engines, and it appeared Cadillac was little more than a sponsorship deal.

Andretti put forward its case for an entry through an official FIA process, but despite being accepted by the governing body in October 2023, they were rejected by F1 in January 2024, on the basis that they did not bring extra value to the sport.

But Andretti parent group TWG refused to accept defeat. They reconfigured their bid. Michael Andretti was removed from the project, although father Mario, the 1978 F1 world champion, remains as an ambassador, and Cadillac's involvement was made more prominent, including taking on the name of the team.

GM pledged to build its own engine - currently scheduled to appear in 2029 - and as it became clearer that Renault might pull out of F1, as it now has, a Ferrari customer deal was inked.

A US department of justice investigation into F1's rejection of Andretti further greased the wheels, and the entry was finally confirmed in March last year.

While all this was going on, Lowdon, formerly a senior figure at the Virgin/Manor/Marussia team that raced from 2009-16, was charged with setting up a new company from scratch. They had to commit to that long before the entry was confirmed, or they would simply have run out of time.

Chief technical officer Nick Chester, technical director of Renault F1 from 2013-20 and subsequently the title-winning Mercedes Formula E team, was the second person to sign after Lowdon. He started in March 2023, and set to work on building up a 600-strong team at the same time as beginning to design a car.

Now, Cadillac are occupying six buildings on the business park opposite the main entrance of Silverstone, and have two other bases, the GM technical centre in Warren, Michigan, and the GM Motorsport headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, where drivers Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez have been working on the simulator.

A new TWG headquarters in Fishers, Indiana, is due to be finished late this year, and will eventually become the F1 team's manufacturing centre, but the UK base at Silverstone will remain, albeit slimmed down to fewer buildings.

"You do need really good communications," says Lowdon, "and we've got a massive necessity for peer-to-peer interaction. So we need engineers talking to engineers. We need an engineer here (at Silverstone) talking to an engineer in Charlotte and another one in Warren, Michigan, or eventually in Fishers.

"So we've looked to have a very, very flat management structure. It's highly modelled on the Apollo project. It's very similar. OK, we're not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes."

Lowdon and Cadillac F1 chief executive officer Dan Towriss, who has the same position at TWG, have been keen to emphasise the size of the task at hand, and their own sense of realism.

"We started with big dreams," Towriss says. "We ran into a lot of obstacles and it was just a cacophony of voices that were telling us no. Not just no, but never.

"We've come at this incredibly complex, competitive time and we're jumping in from a standing start.

"We didn't buy an existing team. We didn't import a bunch of stuff. We started with nothing. So that's a pretty daunting challenge from that standpoint, which is why you heard a lot of people say it's going to be really hard.

"We know it's going to be really hard, but that's where that grit, that fight, that persistence comes."

Cadillac have made no bones about the fact that they expect to finish last this year.

"Can you imagine if you've owned a Formula 1 team for 10 years and then another team rocks up and beats you?" Lowdon says. "You would be apoplectic. You would be so annoyed. And so you have to assume that any new team coming in is going to be last, you know, otherwise, you know, what's gone wrong somewhere else?"

They do indeed appear to be at the back. But Lowdon's words have been prescient. Aston Martin are in such dire straits that there is a significant question mark about which of the two will be slowest in Melbourne.

The difference is, if it's Aston Martin, that is a desperate blow. If it's Cadillac, well, it's kind of part of the plan.

"We're up against teams who have been doing this for a very, very long time," Lowdon says. "We're working through the programme. We've had no major issues, just small issues that I think every team in the paddock will have had before.

"We've got a lot of experienced people in the team. But the experience of working together as kind of like a Formula 1 team is less than 12 months.

"But I would say, to sum it up, extremely happy with the team. Very, very happy with the platform that we're building. And we can't wait for Melbourne."