A truly American team will arrive in F1 in a year, but not under the Andretti banner which had to cede its project to General Motors for a colossal budget to join the big circus.
This is obviously the big news of the week with the announcement, the day after the Las Vegas Grand Prix, of the arrival of the GM group with the prestigious Cadillac brand in Formula 1.
The agreement was reached between the different parties after Liberty Media boss Greg Maffei and project initiator Michael Andretti were sidelined to resolve personal tensions.
Rampant inflation
Formula 1, the FIA and the ten current teams have therefore agreed to welcome an eleventh team, but the financial conditions have skyrocketed compared to the anti-dilution fund provided for in the Concorde Agreements which were set at 200 million dollars.
From 2026, the new version of these agreements has set the bar at the dizzying height of 450 million dollars, an amount that GM and its partner TWG (Towriss Walter Global, the buyers of Andretti Global) will distribute at the rate of 50-50. This tidy sum will make it possible to compensate for the future distribution of revenue between eleven teams instead of ten.
A cake set to grow
The distribution key specifies that FOM (Formula One Management) distributes 63% of revenues to the teams, which will therefore receive $28.3 million each as compensation. Several managers indicated that this was insufficient, but the projections made on the future of the discipline's economic model are rather optimistic.
“The pie will certainly have grown even bigger after 2026 so that each team loses nothing, just like the FOM, estimate the financial analysts consulted. The arrival of GM constitutes a big boost assured in the USA and this is the reason why the teams quickly accepted the deal by changing strategy to welcome an eleventh competitor.”
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