Over the British Grand Prix weekend the 10 Formula 1 teams working away in the Silverstone pitlane were joined by a fictional 11th outfit as filming for the upcoming Brad Pitt movie continued.

The presence of a complete pit garage with two cars and a full hospitality unit in the paddock provided a little Hollywood taster of what F1 could look like should a genuine 11th team, also with a US flavour, finally be admitted.

As the world focused on the British GP just a few hundred metres away on the other side of the Dadford Road the Andretti Cadillac outfit’s design team continued to work flat out on the basis that the team will ultimately find a way onto the 2026 grid.

Andretti has operated a design base in an industrial unit at Silverstone since early last year, and in April it began a move into a much larger and brand-new facility close by.

It’s a smart but simple building – nothing like as flashy as the bespoke Aston Martin campus that is little more than a stone’s throw away – but nevertheless it’s quite a statement from an organisation that doesn’t yet have a place on the F1 grid. The main part is currently a huge empty space, but it’s gradually being fitted out to house various departments. The aerodynamicists were the first to be installed in new offices at the front of the building, followed by the vehicle performance group. They were joined in mid-August by the mechanical designers, who moved across from the original temporary facility.

The ambitious plans also involve a second and larger adjacent building. The intention is to run the F1 race team from Silverstone and bring in the Formula E outfit from nearby Banbury, as well as potentially adding F2, F3 and WEC projects.

The UK base is just one facet of the project, as a huge new Andretti HQ is currently being built in Fishers, a suburb of Indianapolis. It will serve both as the base for the Indy team and as the US home of the F1 project, and as such the manufacturing and construction of the car will be undertaken there.

In addition a dedicated team of engineers is working on projects such as power steering at GM’s huge motor sport base in Charlotte, where driver-in-loop simulator running is already being undertaken.

An aggressive recruitment programme stepped up in May. Previously hiring had been conducted by word of mouth and personal contacts, but latterly the team has been actively advertising. The roll call already includes some well-known names drawn from across the paddock [see overleaf], whose commitment has in turn convinced others to come.

As of July the headcount on the project, including those working at GM, stood at 173, with 38 more already hired and set to join in the coming weeks.

The staff are not just sitting around waiting for an entry to be confirmed. The team has already designed sample items like noses and roll hoops, which have been built and crash tested in order to hone systems and processes. A quarter chassis is under construction for side-impact testing, and the intention is to build a full prototype chassis, with suspension, by the end of the year.

Meanwhile the aero guys have been busy for many months in the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, used until recently by McLaren. Six people are based there permanently, with others commuting on a regular basis from the Silverstone base.

“Andretti’s intention to enter F1 has been clear for several years”

One anomaly is that under the rules current teams are not allowed to start aero R&D for 2026 until January 1, 2025, but Andretti is free of any such test restrictions, and can work flat out in Cologne and via CFD.

If the team does finally get the nod for 2026, and thus become subject to the aero-testing rules from January, it will have given itself a decent head start.

But despite the huge investment and the bullish approach of team owner Michael Andretti that elusive entry remains far from guaranteed. F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali and Liberty Media have made their opposition to Andretti’s presence abundantly clear, and their focus has been on keeping the 10 incumbent teams happy and financially healthy – which is no surprise given that the 2026-30 Concorde Agreement is currently under discussion.

To recap, it was in January 2023 that the FIA launched an “expressions of interest” process that opened up the grid to new teams for an entry in 2025-27.

Andretti’s intention to enter F1 had been clear for several years. He came close to buying Sauber before the deal fell through, and the Swiss outfit was snapped up by Audi. He decided instead to start from scratch, and quickly negotiated a Renault power unit supply.

Signed in the middle of the Covid pandemic when the future was uncertain, the current Concorde Agreement obliges a new team to pay a one-off $200m dilution fee to be split equally between the current teams. The figure was based on what they would collectively potentially lose with the F1 income pie now divided by 11.

Andretti was happy to pay what the incumbents now see as a bargain entry fee given that with F1 now booming teams are being valued at $1bn plus. However, Domenicali also made it clear that any newcomer had to bring added value to the sport, and by that he meant manufacturers.

Andretti called F1’s bluff by delivering US giant General Motors via its Cadillac brand. Initially touted only as sponsor and technical partner Cadillac raised the stakes by subsequently committing to making its own PU for 2028 onwards.

To most outsiders an Andretti Cadillac partnership looked like a dream ticket, especially given the sport’s ongoing expansion push in the USA. It certainly helped to tick the boxes with the FIA, and on October 2 the team’s entry was approved by the governing body, pending step two, which was F1’s commercial analysis of the team’s plans.

After nearly four months an answer finally came when, on January 31, F1 issued a terse statement outlining its reasons why Andretti should not be on the grid, at least in its initial guise as a Renault customer.

The door was ostensibly left open for a full works-backed Cadillac/GM project, with its associated prestige – something that couldn’t happen before 2028, given the PU design timeline. However it was a moot point as the entry granted earlier by the FIA was only valid for arrival in 2025, 2026 or 2027.

Subsequently things became a little messy. On May 1, team patriarch Mario Andretti was invited to an event in Washington, where possible competition law infractions were highlighted in a speech by congressman John James. Those were made concrete in a letter sent to Domenicali and Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei by the US Congress, via its Committee on the Judiciary. Maffei confirmed in August that a Department of Justice investigation is underway, while maintaining that F1 has complied with anti-trust regulations.

“It’s not like we’re rookies. We’ve put together a lot of experience”

Any such legal intervention was bound to ramp up tensions between the Andretti and F1/Liberty camps. Indeed the elder Andretti later revealed an uncomfortable encounter during the Miami GP weekend that saw Maffei claim that he would do “everything in his power” to stop the entry from ever happening.

If things couldn’t get any more complicated between the two parties, later in May Andretti announced that it had hired the F1 organisation’s long-time technical director Pat Symonds as executive engineering consultant, pending a lengthy gardening leave.

Symonds had been a key player at F1 since the start of the Liberty era, and as such he played an important role in shaping the 2026 regulations. He was also involved with F1’s analysis of the Andretti project, whose staff roster includes many people he knows from his days at Enstone or elsewhere. He clearly saw potential, notwithstanding the negative conclusion announced by his employer.

Meanwhile Michael Andretti is ploughing on, on the assumption that he will ultimately find a way onto the 2026 grid.

“It’s not like we’re a bunch of rookies here,” he says. “We’ve put together a lot of great experience, and each and every guy in the room knows exactly what they’re doing, and they’re capable of building a very competitive race car.

“There’s a lot of people sitting on the sidelines, with a lot of talent from other teams that are really watching and wanting to be a part of this. And I think once they see we do get the go-ahead, they’re going to come.

“I think what’s drawing them to this is it’s a clean sheet of paper. For an engineer, I think it’s a lot of fun, because you can have a lot of input on something that’s brand new, as opposed to being at a team that’s been doing it a certain way for years.”

Crucial to the project is the support of General Motors. The works engine is still four years away, but support on the chassis side is already having an impact.

“They have been a dream to work with,” says Andretti of GM. “They are so into this, all the way from top to the bottom. And the board is very much behind it. And I’ve never seen a company so into it, and so wanting to do it. I think with everything that’s going on now [with F1] they are even more motivated to show what they can do. Their place in Charlotte is as good as any F1 team has.”

Andretti technical director Nick Chester agrees that the backing of the US manufacturer plays an important role.

“It’s working really well,” says the former Enstone veteran. “The support from GM Motorsports is brilliant. They’re helping us in all areas, software simulation, aero, design. The small design team there is great – they are so enthusiastic about the project. They’re able to take on certain projects and run with them, all the way through to manufacture and test. That’s great, because we can carve off parts of the project, and then concentrate on others in Silverstone.”

Certainly staff numbers have been growing, but as ever gardening leave has held up some notable players.

“The biggest challenge really is recruiting,” says Chester. “It’s getting the best talent on board quickly. Ideally, I want to have a good chunk of the technical staff on board by the end of the year. We’ve had starters already from pretty much every team on the grid. And there’s a lot of interest.”

All of this hasn’t come cheap – the team won’t comment on what’s been spent thus far other than acknowledging that it’s “significant amounts”.

Andretti investor and partner Dan Towriss is one of the men who is trying to attract more funding.

“We’ve had a strong outreach to us of people that want to work with us in a sponsorship or partnership capacity,” says Towriss. “Obviously, F1 brings a lot of commercial excitement and opportunities. I also think that that’s part of the value that we bring to the series, the fact that there are all these corporations and brands that want to work with Andretti Cadillac.

“Certainly, building up the revenue sides is an important part of F1, as I think everybody knows, but there’s a strong financial commitment. Our success isn’t predicated on having a lead sponsor or anything like that. But at the same time, we’re very confident that the sponsors are going to come.”

While Andretti continues to invest and build up the Silvestone infrastructure, the clock is ticking towards 2026.

The entry process has run against a background of wider tensions between the FIA and F1 camps, although there was a plot twist when Mohammed Ben Sulayem – the man who sanctioned the Andretti entry – suggested in an interview that buying an existing team was perhaps the best way forwards after all.

Meanwhile Domenicali is negotiating the new Concorde Agreement with the current F1 teams, and quite how those discussions will ultimately impact a future 11th entry remains to be seen.

A further hurdle is Renault’s plan to stop making a 2026 power unit even for its own Alpine team, which means that Andretti will now have to find another partner to fill the void before Cadillac is ready in 2028.

How the story will play out remains anyone’s guess. For the sake of the sport we can only hope it doesn’t end up in court.