Cadillac’s first proper swing at Formula 1 isn’t coming via a quiet studio reveal or a polite press conference in a half-empty hospitality unit. It’s landing in the middle of America’s loudest, most expensive broadcast real estate: a Super Bowl ad slot.
On Sunday night, with Seahawks versus Patriots deciding the NFL title, Cadillac will use a fourth-quarter commercial break to unveil the team’s inaugural 2026 F1 car — livery, identity and all. The plan, as reported in the US, is a 30-second spot timed for when the game is supposed to be at its most tense. In other words, Cadillac isn’t dabbling here. It’s paying to be impossible to ignore.
That’s the point. Formula 1 teams don’t normally launch cars to the casual viewer; they launch them to fans who already know the difference between a pushrod and a pullrod. Cadillac’s approach flips the funnel. The message isn’t “here’s our chassis”; it’s “we exist, and we’re coming for your attention”.
Plenty about this project has been visible at the edges in recent weeks. Cadillac has already been out running private shakedowns, including a Barcelona appearance, and the driver line-up has been photographed in team gear: Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas in black with white accents, leaning hard into the sort of sleek, lifestyle branding that American manufacturers understand instinctively. Yet the actual thing that matters to most F1 obsessives — the livery, the name, the look of this new entry when it finally joins the established grid — has remained under wraps.
That ends tonight.
The ad is expected to show the car’s paintwork before pivoting straight into a distribution play: a prominent “watch on Apple TV”, with Apple positioned as the home for F1 broadcasts in the United States. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, framed it as a neat collision of “sports, innovation and culture”, with Cadillac’s arrival presented as a marker of where the championship’s momentum is headed.
You can call it marketing gloss — because it is — but it’s also revealing. Cadillac isn’t just trying to launch a team; it’s trying to create a habit. If you’re spending Super Bowl money to introduce your F1 car, you’re not targeting the existing core audience. You’re targeting the people who might watch one race because the ad got them curious, then stick around because the broadcast is right there on a device they already use.
Cassidy Towriss, Cadillac F1’s brand advisor, has been blunt about the intent. The “ultimate goal”, she’s said, is building a fan base, and the Super Bowl is the fastest way to do that “in multiple different ways”. That’s as close as you’ll get to an admission that this is a brand campaign first and a race-car reveal second.
There’s a cultural confidence to it, too. F1 has spent a decade working to crack the US properly, and it’s done a lot of the heavy lifting — multiple races, a bigger media footprint, a schedule that’s now familiar enough to sit alongside NFL Sundays and NBA nights. Cadillac’s move is less “please notice us” and more “we belong on this stage”. It’s American industry walking into F1 with its shoulders square.
The reveal also underlines just how different the 2026 landscape is shaping up to feel. Cadillac is entering at the start of a new technical era, and while the team’s on-track pecking order won’t be set by a 30-second clip, perception matters early. A strong visual identity, an unmistakable colour scheme, and a launch that makes mainstream sports fans stop scrolling — those things can buy patience when the lap times inevitably lag behind the front-runners at the start.
For fans outside the US, there’s a catch: even if you can watch the Super Bowl, you might not see the commercial.
In the UK, the game is being shown free-to-air on Channel 5 and also on Sky Sports. South Africa has it on ESPN via DStv. Australia’s Seven Network is carrying it, while Italy has DAZN and Mediaset. But broadcasters frequently strip out US ad breaks for local coverage, so international viewers shouldn’t assume they’ll get Cadillac’s spot live just because they’ve got the game on.
Cadillac has covered that base, too. If football isn’t your thing — or if your broadcast goes to a studio pundit the moment America cuts to commercials — there’s a parallel reveal running in Times Square. A frosted exhibit has been installed in New York, designed to “thaw” as the countdown ticks down, gradually exposing the livery.
It’s theatre, obviously, but it’s theatre with purpose: Cadillac is trying to make its entrance into F1 feel like a mainstream event rather than a niche motorsport detail.
And in a sport that’s increasingly comfortable living at the intersection of engineering and entertainment, that’s probably the most 2026 thing about this launch. Cadillac isn’t waiting to earn attention on merit in Melbourne or Bahrain. It’s buying the spotlight first — then daring itself to justify it once the lights go out.
