Formula 1 rejects Andretti Global's bid to join in '25 or '26, leaves door open for future

Formula 1 management has swiftly and unmistakably rejected Andretti Global's bid to become an expansion franchise in the pinnacle of motorsport in the 2025 or 2026 seasons. It comes nearly four months after the FIA -- F1's governing body -- gave Andretti its seal of approval that made the global motorsport franchise the sole finalist in the FIA's Expression of Interest process the body opened last spring.

In its three-page report released Wednesday morning, F1 did leave the door open on Andretti's future hopes to enter the sport that its namesakes Mario and Michael Andretti raced in decades ago. The sport's officials proposed that General Motors' plan to supply engines in F1 in 2028 -- plans the company announced in November to help bolster Andretti's F1 bid after initially attaching themselves to Michael Andretti's project as a minor manufacturing partner in January of last year -- could sway them.

But the sport's owners pulled no punches in its decision that Andretti's proposal, as it currently stands, would fail to reach F1's competitive standards while providing little value to the sport and its current stakeholders, while at the same time serving as a burden to those currently invested in the sport.

"Our assessment process has established that the presence of an 11th team would not, on its own, provide value to the Championship," F1's statement read. "The most significant way in which a new entrant would bring value is by being competitive. We do not believe that the Applicant would be a competitive participant.

"While the Andretti name carries some recognition for F1 fans, our research indicates that F1 would bring value to the Andretti brand rather than the other way around. ... We do not believe that the applicant has shown that it would add value to the Championship. We conclude that the Applicant's application to participate in the Championship should not be successful."

Five hours after F1 published its report, Andretti Global and GM, through its Cadillac Racing arm released a joint statement saying the pair "strongly disagreed" with the sporting body's assessment.

"Andretti and Cadillac are two successful global motorsports organizations committed to placing a genuine American works team in F1, competing alongside the world's best," the pair's statement read. "We are proud of the significant progress we have already made on developing a highly competitive car and power unit with an experienced team behind it, and our work continues at pace."

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F1 questions Andretti's grasp on 'challenge involved'

Among its criteria F1 says it honed in on during its month's long review of Andretti Global's project, the sport said it considered the prospective team's "likely competitiveness ... and it's impact on value"; Andretti's engine plans, before and after GM's planned entrance into the sport; benefits the new team might bring towards fan growth and engagement; the "operational impact" of a new team; the impact that approving Andretti's bid would have on F1's future revenue; and Andretti Global's own future "financial sustainability."

Notably, F1 also stated it consulted with "key stakeholders to understand their view of the value that the Applicant would bring," but denied any "consultation" with current F1 teams.

F1 reached out to Andretti Global representatives on Oct. 10, eight days after the FIA announced its own approval of Andretti's bid, to lay out the assessment process and provide a questionnaire for the team to fill-out. Andretti returned responses two weeks later. According to F1's Wednesday statement, the sport's representatives reached out to Andretti on Dec. 12 as an invitation to hold a formal in-person meeting for the team to go over its full application.

"But the Applicant did not take us up on this offer," the statement read.

One of F1's biggest concerns was the timing. Joining the grid for the start of the 2025 campaign, the officials wrote, would leave Andretti Global having to build cars under two different regulations in back-to-back years. F1's present technical regulations expire after 2025, set to be followed by a new list of rules for the 2026 season.

"The fact that the Applicant proposes to do so gives us reason to question their understanding of the scope of the challenge involved," the F1 statement said.

Joining in 2026, of course, wouldn't have this issue, and had Andretti been approved this week, they would've had more than two years to work towards building that new car to the future regulations. Andretti Global noted this week in a story by The Athletic that they've already hired 120 people -- most to their growing technical team -- to solely focus on the F1 project while working out of a factory at Silverstone in the U.K. The team's technical director, Nick Chester, has spent more than two decades in the sport, and he leads a team that includes an aerodynamics chief that worked for Williams and Renault, as well as a chief designer with nearly four decades of F1 experience.

Chester told The Athletic that Andretti Global had hired away folks directly from three-time defending champion Red Bull, as well as Ferrari Mercedes and McLaren, among others. So far, the team had already build a 2023 model car at 60% scale that has run in Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany, and it had eyed building a full-size Andretti Global chassis later this year to use for homologation testing.

As its part in supporting Andretti's progressed towards a hopeful bid to join the grid, GM had already dedicated 50 engineers toward designing wind tunnel models, manufacturing parts and developing the car's roll hoop design and hydraulic systems at its Charlotte, N.C. base, according to The Athletic.

"I can't imagine anyone would want to try and stop us and deprive racing fans the opportunity to see a genuine American works team going head-to-head with the legendary names currently competing in F1," Michael Andretti told The Athletic, taking an obvious shot at Gene Haas' "American" team that has never run an American driver, does most of it's work via a U.K. base and runs a Ferrari engine.

"As (FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem) has said a number of times, the benefit we will bring to the sport and the championship are so obvious."

Clearly not obvious enough to those with the final say.

In learning the news, Mario Andretti, Michael's father and the last American F1 race-winner and champion, wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter): "I'm devastated. I won't say anything else because I can't find any other words besides devastated."

IndyStar reached out to Andretti Global representatives, seeking comment from the younger Andretti, before the team posted its own statement. The team owner is yet to respond to the news himself.

In response to a potential 2026 debut for Andretti Global, F1 officials noted that the sport "represents a unique technical challenge to constructors of a nature that the Applicant has not faced in any other formula or discipline in which it has previously competed." F1 officials feared, according to the statement, that running with a competitor's engine for an already finite time as Andretti waited for GM's launch, a circumstance that could make its temporary power unit provider "reticent to extend its collaboration with the Applicant beyond the minimum required while the Applicant pursues its ambitions of collaborating with GM.

"A compulsory (power unit) supplier would see (this) as a risk to its intellectual property and know-how."

Holes in F1's argument against Andretti approval

The statement, though, ignores the fact that Red Bull has already stated its plans to bolt to Ford in 2026, abandoning its Honda-supported project, while Aston Martin and Sauber have already stated their plans to shift from Mercedes and Ferrari, respectively, to Honda and Audi power. In all three of those situations, those teams will work the next two years with engine partners that will quickly become competitors once the checkered flag falls on the 2025 season.

F1 also seemingly held Andretti to an entirely different standard than many of its current participants in stating that any new entrant to the series should be able to prove its worth and its benefit to the championship "by being competitive, in particular by competing for podiums and race wins."

Last year, Red Bull won 21 of the 22 races. In the seven season in which the current 10 F1 teams have competed together, Haas and Sauber have achieved zero podiums, while Williams has recorded just two over the same span. Alpha Tauri, essentially running as Red Bull's B team in recent years, has recorded just four podiums since the start of 2017, including one win.

Also, despite approving up to 12 two-car teams in its Concorde Agreement that binds the 10 current teams, the FIA and F1 management together, F1 noted in its statement that the admission of Andretti Global to the grid "would place an operational burden on race promoters, would subject some of them to significant costs and would reduce the technical, operational and commercial spaces of the other competitors."

Andretti's hope for the future

GM initially joined forces with Andretti, offering up its Cadillac brand, just over 12 months ago, but both sides were noncommittal on what that manufacturer partnership would involve. In the days after the pair's initial announcement, F1 team principals quietly bashed the project, calling it nothing more than a "badging exercise" rather than the true arrival of a major American manufacturer. At the time, Andretti said it already had an engine partner (Alpine) in the early years, and that GM would explore potential engine program options down the road.

It was only in mid-November on the eve of the Las Vegas Grand Prix -- more than a month after F1 officials began taking a hard look at Andretti Global's bid -- that GM formalized its commitment to launching an F1 engine program for 2028.

Had that news been offered up at the start, or had GM been able to ramp up as quick as fellow power unit newcomers Ford and Audi and join the grid for the new technical regulations in 2026, F1 implied in its Wednesday statement that its decision might've been different. Even then, though, it argued against the likely success of such a project.

"A novice constructor in partnership with a new entrant (power unit) supplier would also have a significant challenge to overcome," F1 reasoned. "Most of the attempts to establish a new constructor in the last several decades have not been successful.

"Coming to the sport as a new (power unit) manufacturer is also a huge challenge, with which major automotive manufacturers have struggled in the past, and one which can take a manufacturer a number of years of significant investment in order to become competitive. GM have the resource and credibility to be more than capable of attempting this challenge, but success is not assured."

Even as the team said its work to join the F1 grid "continues at pace", it's presently unclear where Andretti's F1 ambitions go from here. In closing its Wednesday statement, the sport's officials hinted at the prospect that an Andretti Global project with more years to ramp up, coming into the sport at a time not involving large-scale technical changes and with a new manufacturer at the outset could be seen as more appealing. At that time too, though, F1 and its teams are expected to agree upon a far higher entrance fee for prospective new entrants -- a jump from $200 million to $600 million or more. Whether Andretti will still hold interest four years down the road, and whether the sport and its teams will come up with new roadblocks for Michael Andretti and company to scale, remains to be seen.

For what it's worth, GM has said its F1 interest is 'Andretti or bust.'

"We would look differently on an application for the entry of a team into the 2028 Championship with a GM power unit, either as a GM works team or as a GM customer team designing all allowable components in-house," F1 wrote. "In this case, there would be additional factors to consider in respect of the value that the Applicant would bring to the Championship, in particular in respect of bringing a prestigious new OEM to the sport as a (power unit) supplier."

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Formula 1 rejects Andretti Global's bid; lacks competitiveness, value