Wow, Formula 1 Really Hated Michael Andretti

On Monday, F1 and General Motors announced that they had agreed that GM would join the F1 grid as a brand new team, a surprising turn of events given that a nearly identical pitch involving GM and the Andretti Global racing organization was rejected back in January of this year. It’s the kind of opaque political maneuvering that makes F1 so irresistible to me, and as I was researching the topic for Shift+F1 prior to recording, I ended up writing out why I think things turned out this way… and why I think F1 might end up regretting making General Motors so central to this expansion.

After stonewalling Andretti Global's attempts to enter Formula 1 racing for over two years, the sport is now welcoming General Motors into the sport as the 11th team on the grid for 2026. In light of the fact that this is substantively be the same Andretti bid that F1’s leadership rejected before, it’s worth wondering whether the value of the GM and Cadillac badges was the decisive factor for F1 leadership, or if it was removing the liability of the Andretti connection.

The argument from F1’s chieftains has always been that, if the sport was going to grant a highly-coveted new spot on its grid to a new team, the team needed to come in as a serious contender and bring real value to the sport. They wanted a high-quality “works” team, one that has the technical and manufacturing wherewithal to produce an entire Formula 1 machine from end-to-end, especially the complicated and ruinously expensive power units. The fact that Andretti’s bid was bolstered by a promise to partner with GM wasn’t sufficient for the opposition that had gathered to Andretti’s efforts. The Andretti F1 car would be sourcing its engine from another supplier (at least at the outset), like most of the current F1 grid, and there was wariness about how seriously GM was in its intentions to take an active role in its partnership with Andretti.

Behind that reasoning was a blatant distaste toward Andretti Autosport, and particularly toward the Andrettis themselves. Mario Andretti might be a living legend who won races with just about every kind of machinery he ever touched, but he is not quite as beloved figure in F1 as he in the United States… and his son Michael’s reputation in the sport was marred by his grim stint at McLaren prior to being replaced by Mika Hakkinen. Yet it was the way he came across as owner and executive at his motorsports company that truly turned the sport against him.

Something about the way Michael Andretti lobbied to secure support for his team’s bid was off-putting to the leadership of the F1 grid. In many ways, the response to Andretti was anachronistic, like the Andrettis were nouveau riche Americans of the 19th century, hunting for a place in European society. 

Except it might not be quite as easy to reduce it to a simple matter of bluff, assertive Americans repelling the reserved Europeans they set out to charm. Zak Brown has led McLaren for a decade, Otmar Szafnauer was a well-regarded team principle (though I have always suspected his stock was likewise diminished by his very midwestern lack of pretension, which seems like it was not what board room “alpha” wannabes like Lawrence Stroll and Laurent Rossi wanted from a direct report). Rather than coming across as respectful or considerate, Andretti's attempts to persuade other team owners to welcome his efforts to join the F1 grid, he seems to have struck his peers as presumptuous and manipulative.

More important than Andretti’s initial unctuousness was the way the organization was also desperately bargain-hunting. Andretti was willing to pay an anti-dilution fee of $200M to the other teams on the F1 grid to make up for the fact a ten way revenue split would become an eleven way split, but the fee was seen as too small in light of the current value of a spot on the F1 grid (the fact that owner Liberty Media’s takes half the sport’s revenue off the top and teams would end up losing money if the sport’s health and popularity draws more entrants is another topic for another day). 

Andretti may also have erred critically by soliciting, or maybe just having the misfortune receive, the blessing of the FIA and its increasingly unpopular chairman Mohamed Ben Sulayem. After a misfiring charm offensive, it would not be surprising if F1’s leadership was thoroughly alienated by Andretti’s efforts with the FIA and then with the press to paint the other F1 teams as acting out of pure greed and bad faith, a charge which attracted warnings of an anti-trust investigation from Congress.