Formula 1 is rich enough to afford more teams than it can fit on the grid, according to a former team boss.
The championship has permitted an 11th team, Cadillac, to join the field this year. Formula One Management initially rejected its application amid concerns over the loss of income existing teams would suffer if they had to share their prize money with an additional team. This was eventually resolved by requiring the new entrant to pay an ‘anti-dilution’ fee.
However the sport’s growth in recent years means its teams now earn significantly more from prize money and sponsors. Claire Williams, who was deputy team principal at her father’s eponymous squad from 2013 to 2020, believes “there’s enough in the pot” now for F1 to accommodate several more teams.
“I remember [being] sat around the table in Strategy Group and when another team wanted to come in and it was like, well, the pot’s quite small as it is right now,” she told Business of Sport. “The numbers are going to elude me, but we could each lose 10, 15 million with this team coming in and that’s not really particularly fair.
“[But] a team now is going to have 10 to 15 million down the back of its sofa. It’s not going to worry about it.
“There is enough money in the pot of Formula 1 to be able to accommodate an 11th team. There’s probably enough money in the pot of Formula 1 to accommodate 15 teams in the sport, but all the TPs [team principals] will then reject it because they don’t want to have to share.”
F1 hasn’t filled all 26 grid spaces since 1995 and the last race which attracted more than the maximum number of starters was the year before that.
Cadillac, under its original name Andretti, was one of several applications which responded to the FIA’s request for new entrants. However Williams does not believe FOM and the existing teams would allow others to join.
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“They don’t want to share out – and quite right, they’ve invested however much they’ve invested. A new team shouldn’t be automatically deserving of the same amount of that prize fund pot that existing teams get. It’s got to be a ratcheted system. But Formula 1 won’t, the other TPs [and] the sport won’t allow that many teams.”
The FIA approved the new team’s original application in October 2023. FOM rejected it three months later, then reversed its position in November 2024. It finally made Cadillac’s arrival official in March 2025.
“For that 11th team to come in, that would have taken an enormous amount of negotiation and conversations,” Williams observed. “It’s not just a given. I don’t think… Formula 1 is smart enough to make sure that it protects itself against over-egging the pudding, I think, so to speak.”
Teams enjoy far better economic circumstances today than they did when Liberty Media first replaced CVC Capital Partners as the sport’s rightsholders in 2017, said Williams.
“It kind of started going wrong in the financial crisis of ’08 and then it never really picked up. It picked up a bit, but then there was this real lull in that kind of 2016 through to 2019, 2020 even, where there was just nothing around.
“I kid you not, title sponsorships were being done for eight, nine million at the end my era. You can’t run a team where you’re getting a title sponsor for eight or nine million. And then you’ve got teams fighting over that money. It was ridiculous.”
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She believes the value of title sponsorships are now as much as 10 times higher. “In my day, if you look at my budget, it was 120 million, minimum, really. You can sell as many sponsors you want to make 120, but in an ideal world we were targeting 20, 30 million then for a title [sponsor].
“Now, they’re selling titles for 80, 90 million. So it’s all based on supply, isn’t it, what brands are coming in. If you’ve got, like now, these wonderful brands coming into sport and climbing over themselves to sponsor, then the teams dictate the rate card, whereas that was not the case in my day, it was really the sponsors dictating the rate card.”
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