Cadillac Is Building an F1 Engine in North Carolina. That Sentence Used to Be Science Fiction.

There is a 204,000-square-foot building going up in Concord, North Carolina, about fifteen minutes from Charlotte Motor Speedway, where somewhere between 300 and 350 engineers will spend the next three years building a Formula 1 power unit from scratch. The budget sits around $140 million when you combine the construction costs and start-up fees. The entity behind it is called GM Performance Power Units LLC, led by Russ O’Blenes, a longtime GM engine designer who has spent decades building things that go fast for General Motors. The target date for the first competitive lap: 2029.

An American car company building a Formula 1 engine on American soil. I keep reading that sentence and it still sounds like something from an alternate timeline.

The Gap Between Then and Now

The last time an American-built car won a Formula 1 Grand Prix, the year was 1967. Dan Gurney, driving an Eagle-Weslake he had designed and constructed through his All American Racers team based in Santa Ana, California, won the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps. The car was gorgeous. One of the most beautiful open-wheel machines ever built, if you believe the historians, and you should. The engine was a 3.0-liter V12 co-developed with Harry Weslake’s engineering firm in England. Gurney won, sprayed champagne from the podium (possibly the first driver to ever do this, though that claim is debated), and then ran out of money.

That’s the pattern. American ambition enters Formula 1 with big plans and insufficient resources, produces a few flashes of brilliance, then withdraws. Lance Reventlow brought his Scarab team to the 1960 season and lasted two races. Gurney’s Eagles competed from 1966 to 1968 before financial reality ended the project. Haas has been on the grid since 2016 but runs Ferrari engines and designs its car with Dallara in Italy. The chassis is assembled in the UK. The American identity is real but the engineering supply chain is European.

Cadillac and GM are attempting something that hasn’t worked in nearly six decades. They’re going to try it anyway.

The Bridge Years

For 2026, 2027, and 2028, the Cadillac F1 team will race with Ferrari power units and gearboxes. Standard procedure for a new entrant. You borrow an engine from someone who already builds one, you learn how to operate an F1 team without simultaneously learning how to build the most complex hybrid powertrain in motorsport, and you develop your own engine in parallel.

The team itself is led by Graeme Lowdon, the former CEO of Virgin Racing and Marussia in F1, who knows exactly what it takes to start a team from zero. He’s done it before. The operational headquarters sit in a new facility in Fishers, Indiana, with additional sites in Concord (the engine factory), Warren, Michigan (GM’s technical center), and Silverstone in Northamptonshire, England. Four facilities across two countries. The Fishers campus alone represents a $200 million investment.

The drivers for the inaugural season are Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas. Combined, they bring 527 Grand Prix starts and 16 wins to a team that has zero. Perez, 35, was cut loose by Red Bull after a rough 2024. Bottas, who spent five seasons as Lewis Hamilton’s teammate at Mercedes from 2017 to 2021, had been serving as the Silver Arrows’ reserve driver. Neither man will confuse anyone for a future world champion at this stage of their careers. That’s the point. Cadillac doesn’t need a Max Verstappen right now. They need two professionals who know what a properly functioning F1 car feels like and can translate that knowledge into feedback the engineering team can use. Sensor data only tells you so much. A driver who has raced at the front of the field can tell you what’s missing from the seat of his firesuit.

Preseason Proof of Life

The MAC-26 hit the track for the first time at Silverstone for a shakedown, then ran a four-day private test in Barcelona behind closed doors. At the official preseason test in Bahrain, both drivers completed race simulations. Bottas posted a best of 1:35.290. Perez ran 1:35.369. The team accumulated over 1,700 kilometers with no catastrophic failures and only minor technical issues. For a team that didn’t exist eighteen months ago, that’s a result.

Context matters here. Every new F1 team in the modern era has shown up to its first test fighting reliability problems. Haas couldn’t keep its car running in 2016 preseason. The 2010 new entrants (HRT, Virgin, Lotus Racing) were multiple seconds off the pace. Cadillac turning laps consistently, running full race distances, and keeping both cars operational simultaneously puts them ahead of every modern precedent for a debut team.

Whether that translates to points in the actual championship is a different question. The gap between “reliable in testing” and “competitive on Sunday” is wide enough to park a freight train in. But the foundation is there.

The Engine Is the Whole Story

The livery reveal during Super Bowl LX was the spectacle. The JFK moon speech ad, the split black-and-white color scheme, the Times Square activation, the 130-plus million viewers. All of that was marketing. Well-executed marketing. But the thing that determines whether this Cadillac project becomes a permanent fixture in Formula 1 or another cautionary tale about American overreach in European motorsport is the engine in Concord, North Carolina.

The 2026 F1 power unit regulations mandate a 1.6-liter V6 turbo-hybrid with a dramatically increased electrical component. The new rules triple the electrical power output compared to the previous generation. Building one requires expertise in internal combustion engineering, battery technology, energy recovery systems, and power electronics. GM has all of those capabilities scattered across its automotive and motorsport programs. Consolidating them into a competitive F1 power unit by 2029 is the engineering challenge. The project is reportedly ahead of schedule, which is encouraging but also the kind of thing every manufacturer says until dyno testing begins in earnest.

Here’s why I’m paying attention: the 2026 regulations represent a reset for every team and every engine manufacturer. New aerodynamic rules. New power unit specifications. Active aerodynamics. The playing field is as level as it will ever be in a sport that rewards incumbency. If there was ever a window for a new American manufacturer to enter Formula 1 and build something competitive within its first engine cycle, this is it.

GM paid a $450 million expansion fee to get the 11th slot on the grid. Total pre-race investment sits around $1 billion. The 2026 cost cap is $215 million per season. These are real numbers backed by a corporation that posted $171 billion in revenue last year. This isn’t a vanity project running on venture capital and optimism. The money is there. The facilities are being built. The people are being hired.

What It Means If It Works

The last time an American constructor won a Grand Prix, Vietnam was on the evening news and the Beatles were still together. Fifty-eight years of absence from the winner’s circle. Every failed American attempt in between has reinforced the narrative that F1 is a European sport and Americans should stick to oval racing.

Three American races now sit on the F1 calendar. Austin since 2012. Miami. The Las Vegas Strip Circuit. The U.S. audience for Formula 1 has exploded since Liberty Media acquired the sport in 2017 and Netflix’s Drive to Survive turned casual viewers into obsessives. The audience is there. The races are there. What’s been missing is the manufacturer.

If GM puts a competitive engine on the grid in 2029, it rewrites the story of American involvement in Formula 1. Not the audience story, which is already written. The engineering story. The one that matters in a sport where the car is the star and the technology is the currency.

A Cadillac-powered car built in Indiana, running an engine assembled in North Carolina, racing against Ferrari and Mercedes and Red Bull Powertrains. Dan Gurney would have appreciated the ambition. He also would have known that ambition alone doesn’t keep the engine running at 15,000 RPM for two hours on a Sunday afternoon.

The factory in Concord will determine which version of this story we tell in five years.