Cadillac’s first Formula 1 car has finally been given an identity of its own, and it’s not a string of letters pulled from a sponsor deck. The team will take its maiden season to the grid with the MAC-26 — the “Mario Andretti Cadillac 26” in full — a deliberate nod to the 1978 world champion who now sits on the board of the sport’s newest outfit.
The name matters because this project has spent so long fighting to be taken seriously. Cadillac has done the hard yards to get onto the grid, and in the process it’s learned a familiar F1 lesson: nothing is symbolic unless it’s backed by substance. A chassis name won’t make the car quicker, but it does tell you how the team wants to be seen — rooted in American racing heritage, unashamedly political about its place in the paddock, and intent on framing its arrival as something bigger than simply filling a slot.
Cadillac F1 CEO Dan Towriss had been hinting for weeks that the car would be christened with “a special name”. He’s now made the intention explicit: to tie the debut machine to Andretti’s story and to the broader pitch that an American works-branded team belongs on the world stage.
“Naming our first chassis MAC-26 reflects the spirit Mario carried into Formula 1 and the belief that an American team belongs on this stage,” Towriss said. “His story embodies the American dream and inspires how we approach building this team every day.”
That’s the public-facing message, and it lands neatly at a time when the team can finally shift the conversation away from boardroom wrangling and towards performance. Pre-season testing is done, Cadillac has mileage in the bank, and the basics of trackside execution — the unglamorous things that trip up new entrants — have been put under real pressure for the first time. The car had been running without a published name until now, but the more important point is that it’s been running at all, and consistently enough for the team to call the Bahrain test a success.
Andretti, never one to mince words, treated it less like a marketing exercise and more like a personal capstone. “Racing has been the joy of my life,” he said. “It is the ultimate compliment that the Cadillac Formula 1 Team sees those years as meaningful and worthy of recording with this honour.
“I cherish the opportunity that it gives me to have a lasting bond with F1 and am genuinely appreciative of everyone who continues to acknowledge my part in racing history.”
There’s a neat symmetry to it. Andretti’s 1978 title with Lotus remains one of the sport’s enduring reference points — the American who didn’t just visit F1, but conquered it. Cadillac’s decision to stamp his initials onto the first chassis is a reminder that this team wants to be an American story told in F1’s language, rather than an F1 story awkwardly dressed in Stars and Stripes.
Of course, F1 has never cared much for sentiment once the lights go out, which is why Cadillac’s other big statement is the driver line-up. If you’re building credibility quickly, you don’t do it by rolling the dice on rookies while you’re still finding your operational feet. You do it with mileage, feedback, and a pair of drivers who’ve lived through title fights and understand exactly how messy a bad Sunday can get.
Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez are about as “known quantity” as you can buy in this sport. Between them they bring 16 grand prix wins — 10 for Bottas, six for Perez — and, more tellingly, a stack of seasons spent inside championship-winning organisations. Bottas was there for Mercedes’ Constructors’ run from 2017 to 2021; Perez has the Red Bull experience from the title-winning campaigns of 2022 and 2023. Cadillac will lean hard on that institutional memory, because nothing accelerates a new team’s learning curve like two drivers who can separate a genuine car problem from a setup dead end in the space of a handful of laps.
The wider context is equally important. Cadillac will begin life with Ferrari power “in the coming years”, while General Motors continues work on its own power unit programme. That makes 2026 an exercise in building a team while also laying track for a longer-term identity — the sort of balancing act that can swallow years if you get the sequencing wrong.
So the MAC-26 name is doing a lot of jobs at once. It’s a tribute, yes, but it’s also a stake in the ground: a reminder that this entry wasn’t assembled to make up numbers, and that Cadillac sees the first car as a foundation stone rather than a placeholder.
We’ll get the first proper measure of it in Melbourne, where the MAC-26 will finally stop being a testing curiosity and become a race car with consequences. The season opener runs from 6-8 March, and Cadillac’s debut won’t be judged on the romance of its badgework. It’ll be judged on whether it looks like it belongs — on track, on the pitwall, and in the relentless rhythm of a grand prix weekend.
