Formula 1 hasn’t even reached the starting grid for 2026, yet the gloves are already off between American automotive giants Ford and Cadillac.
The friction began when the GM affiliate, the grid's newest 11th team, lobbed a verbal grenade at Ford’s partnership with Red Bull – a move that Ford executives didn't just parry, but returned with a double-digit dose of ‘Blue Oval’ sass.
The transatlantic war of words is dripping with corporate pride, proving that while you can take the manufacturers out of Detroit, you can’t take the Detroit out of the manufacturers.
The opening salvo came from Dan Towriss, the CEO of Cadillac’s F1 operation. In a candid interview with The Athletic, Towriss attempted to draw a thick line between Cadillac’s full-team entry and Ford’s technical tie-up with the reigning world champions.
“It’s not even close,” Towriss claimed. “One is a marketing deal with very minimal impact, while GM is an equity owner (in the Cadillac team).
“They’re deeply embedded from an engineering standpoint, and they were involved from day one. Those two deals couldn’t be more different.”
Towriss’s implication was clear: Cadillac is a "real" team building a legacy from the ground up, while Ford is merely paying for a very expensive sticker on the side of Max Verstappen's car.
Ford Fires Back: ‘I Started to Laugh’
The response from the Ford family was swift and soaked in irony. Bill Ford, the executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, was reportedly amused rather than offended by the accusation that his company was taking the easy road.
“I started to laugh,” Ford told The Athletic, dismissing the Cadillac critique as “patently absurd.”
©RedBull
He then pivoted to point out a rather glaring detail in Cadillac’s 2026 plans: their reliance on Italian power.
“I would say, actually, the reverse is true,” Ford swiped back. “They’re running a Ferrari engine. They’re not running a Cadillac engine. I don’t know if they have any GM employees on the race team.”
The counter-punch hit home, highlighting that while Cadillac will eventually build its own engine in 2029, it will debut as a Ferrari customer – the very definition of a "supplied" effort.
More Than Just a Logo
Joining the fray, Will Ford, the general manager of Ford Racing, insisted that the Red Bull Ford Powertrains project is a gritty, sleeves-rolled-up engineering feat, not a Madison Avenue branding exercise.
“Nothing could be further from the truth, in terms of our partnership with Red Bull being a marketing effort,” he explained.
“We could have spent a lot of money to slap our logo on a car, or to put our name alongside a team. But we made a very deliberate decision to form Red Bull Ford Powertrains, as a true technical partnership and really complement the audacious effort that Red Bull decided to set down on in developing their own power unit.”
Ford CEO Jim Farley and Mark Rushbrook in Miami with Max Verstappen.
Will Ford emphasized that the collaboration is about merging Ford's massive R&D resources with Red Bull’s racing agility.
“And we found the areas where Ford can uniquely complement the skills and capabilities that Red Bull has, given the size and breadth and technical expertise within our organisation, with the intention of creating the best power unit in F1, just like we did in decades past,” he added.
Read also: How to watch Red Bull livery launches as Verstappen and Ricciardo reuniteFor now, the message from Ford is unmistakable: this isn’t a branding exercise, it’s a technological arms race – and they’re already tired of being told otherwise.
If this is the tone before a single lap of 2026 has been run, Formula 1’s newest rivalry might just be one of its fiercest yet.
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