Cadillac might be a Ferrari customer on paper in 2026, but the team’s leadership is already working to make that label as temporary as possible.
CEO Dan Towriss has confirmed General Motors’ in-house power unit programme remains on course to put a Cadillac-branded engine on the Formula 1 grid in 2029 — and he insists the target is holding even as the sport’s longer-term engine direction continues to bubble away in the background.
“So the project is ahead of schedule, actually,” Towriss said, explaining that the plan is still to “bring the Cadillac PU online to compete in 2029”.
That matters because Cadillac’s first months in F1 have looked exactly like what a serious new entrant would want: not fireworks, but competence. A generally reliable start has been its quiet calling card, and for a brand-new operation that’s often the difference between being taken seriously and becoming paddock folklore. Right now, it’s 10th in the Constructors’ standings, ahead of Aston Martin — the only other team yet to score.
But the real story sits a little further down the road. Cadillac’s Ferrari deal is a necessary bridge, not an identity. This isn’t an expansion team content to live off someone else’s hardware indefinitely; the ambition is to become a full works effort once GM’s own engine is ready, with the performance, branding and political weight that status brings.
Towriss was pointed when asked how the Ferrari relationship evolves as GM builds its own programme. The message was essentially: clean separation, no blurred lines.
“In terms of IP, yeah, everybody’s got to bring their own IP, right,” he said. “So Ferrari has theirs, and with the GM Performance Power Units group… we’re developing our own IP.
“We’re developing our own engines and bringing our own work product to the grid in Formula 1. So those are going to be completely separate. We’re going to be a customer team of Ferrari, while we’re building our PUs, and that’s going to be GM work.”
That’s the key phrase: “completely separate”. In an era when customer relationships can become politically sensitive — and when power unit advantage can tilt the competitive order for years — Cadillac is planting a flag early. It wants to control its own destiny, and it wants the sport to understand that it’s not arriving in 2029 with a badge-engine or a lightly rebranded partner project.
The complication, of course, is timing. The current engine formula is set through the end of 2030, which means a 2029 arrival potentially gives GM only two seasons before another rules reset — assuming the goalposts don’t move sooner. That’s not a small issue when you’re talking about the kind of investment required to build a modern F1 power unit programme from the ground up.
Towriss didn’t pretend the discussion around future regulations is irrelevant. If anything, he acknowledged Cadillac is monitoring it closely. But he also made it clear that the business case, in his view, isn’t built around gaming the calendar — it’s built around getting a Cadillac engine on the grid as soon as possible.
“We’re really following the conversation on the regs, closely,” he said. “It’s possible that the regulations could change before 2031. It’s possible that they don’t change before 2031.
“Regardless of the funding, I think it’s important that we see a Cadillac power unit on the grid as soon as possible. That’s really the main focus, from my standpoint. If there are ways to speed it up, we will. But right now, the focus is still 2029.”
That “if there are ways to speed it up” line is doing some heavy lifting. Nobody commits to 2029 in public and then casually floats accelerating the timeline unless there’s genuine intent behind it — or at least a belief that the programme has margin. Either way, it underlines a mindset: Cadillac doesn’t want to spend the second half of the decade being defined by what’s bolted into the back of its car.
It also lands at an interesting moment for the wider engine debate. The current generation has its supporters and critics — some drivers have been vocal in their resistance, while Lewis Hamilton has said he’s enjoying the racing these engines are producing, with the heavier emphasis on battery harvest and deployment alongside lighter, lower-downforce cars.
For Cadillac, the politics of that conversation matter almost as much as the engineering. If 2031 becomes a genuine pivot point, you can argue a 2029 debut is either perfectly timed — a late entry with lessons learned from others — or awkwardly placed, arriving just as the sport begins to talk itself into another change. Towriss is effectively betting that the value of becoming a true works team outweighs the risk of a short initial shelf life.
And from Cadillac’s perspective, it’s not hard to see why. Being a customer is a starting position; being a manufacturer is leverage. It changes how you recruit, how you retain, how you negotiate, and how you’re perceived when the inevitable teething issues arrive. It also changes expectations — from the paddock, from fans, and from GM itself.
For now, the visible product is still the 2026 operation: Ferrari power at the back, steady accumulation of miles, and a baseline that looks solid enough to build on. But the longer game is already being written. Cadillac didn’t join Formula 1 to be a well-run customer team. It joined to put its own engine in its own car — and it’s telling everyone it plans to do it by 2029, whatever shape the next argument about regulations takes.
