Autobayng News Team
The 2026 Formula 1 season is expected to usher in one of the greatest shake-ups the sport has ever seen.
Not only could the major change to the technical regulations reset the sport’s competitive order, the on-track competition is likely to be entirely different as energy management plays a greater role in the racing.
But there is another significant new element coming to F1 this year: the eagerly-anticipated arrival of a brand new team.
In Cadillac, F1 will have an 11th team in the paddock for the first time in a decade. And that will have some notable impacts on how the sport operates – on and off the track. Here are the most significant ways that the sport will change with an additional team taking part.
Existing teams get richer
Although the ten currently competing F1 teams have been near universal in their reluctance to have to welcome a new enterprise among their ranks, they are all set to get a small financial boost as a sweetener.
Ever since FIA president Mohammed ben Sulayem first announced his intentions to open up F1 to new potential teams, the existing ten competitors have argued that they would all collectively suffer from having to split the sport’s prize money and commercial rights revenue 11 ways instead of 10. To address this, FOM introduced an ‘anti-dilution’ fee for any new participants who joined the grid.
For the privilege of getting to join the grid for 2026, Cadillac reportedly had to pay an increased fee of $450 million (£334 million) – meaning each of the current ten teams will receive around £33 million each to make it easier for them to swallow having more competition on the grid from next season.
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22 cars on the grid
Assuming everything with Cadillac’s Formula 1 effort remains on track and is successful, the Australian Grand Prix will be the first round of the world championship to feature 22 entries since the 2016 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Although there has not been a 22-car grid for 10 years, it was the standard for several seasons in the late nineties into the noughties. For three seasons between 2010 and 2012, 24 cars was the norm. On one occasion at Valencia in 2011, all 24 cars were classified finishers in the race, with Narain Karthikeyan becoming the only driver in F1 history to finish a grand prix in 24th.
The most obvious difference arising from the addition of two cars is there will naturally be increased competition for points, making those occasions when a lower-ranked team grabs a point or two by sneaking inside the top ten all the more critical. There will also be more potential for traffic problems in practice and qualifying, especially around shorter circuits like the Red Bull Ring or Monaco.
Speaking of qualifying, more cars means that the procedure for qualifying sessions will have to change slightly to accommodate them. Two extra cars means that one more car will have to be eliminated from the first two phases of qualifying, making 16th place the final safe position in Q1 with drivers in positions 17th-22nd knocked out.
11 garages and paddock buildings
Another team on the grid means that the pit lane will now be even busier, with an 11th garage active at each circuit. Not only does this make the pit lane even busier during races, at the start of sessions or after red flags, it will also mean there will be more hospitality units in the paddock – with less room to fit the existing ones in.
Anyone who has had the privilege of being in a paddock during a grand prix weekend might wince at the idea of there being even more hospitality units taking up the minimal space that already exists – especially at circuits like Zandvoort where space is at a premium. But it’s not as if the current teams aren’t used to fitting 11 teams into the paddock already, given that each of the current 10 raced alongside Manor in 2016.
There is also more recent experience to draw from. At several rounds in 2023 and 2024 the teams co-existed in the paddock alongside the APX GP ‘team’ set up for filming purposes for the official F1 movie. At circuits like Silverstone, APX GP even had their own hospitality suite in the paddock to act as a base for film crews. It suggests that teams should be able to manage another party joining the paddock just fine.
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Prize money distribution
One of the most contentious aspects of opening up the sport to another team is in how the prize money will be distributed among the 11.
Currently, teams receive a share of half of FOM’s commercial revenue for a season. That money is distributed in multiple ways, but most prominently in the form of prize money, where teams receive a cut of that fund based on their finishing position in the constructors’ championship. Naturally, the champions receive the largest cut, and the team in tenth place the least.
Back when F1 last had 11 teams, the scale of distribution was more biased towards successful teams than it is now under the stewardship of Liberty Media. Although top performing teams earn impressive sums through their success, teams who finish towards the bottom of the standings get a greater proportion of the prize pot than they did a decade ago – something that has clearly impacted how competitive modern Formula 1 is.
The inevitable effect of having more teams to distribute the prize fund between is that each team will receive a lower share than they otherwise would have. But that is where the anti-dilution fee is intended to make up in some way for that loss.
Aerodynamic testing restrictions (ATR)
As well as bringing in the cost cap – which Cadillac’s new team has to abide by for this year prior to their entry next season – arguably a more consequential new element introduced to F1 under Liberty Media has been the aerodynamic testing restrictions (ATR).
Working on a similar concept to the draft system in most major North American sports series, where the least-successful teams receive better opportunities to improve their squads in the future than their successful rivals, the ATR sliding scale limits the volume of wind tunnel and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) testing that each team can do. The idea is to limit the positive feedback loop effect of success in the sport making future success easier by restricting the amount of research and development work a team can do and give more opportunities to their rivals to catch up.
Although it would be natural to assume the current scaling would change as a result of Cadillac joining, this is not the case. Since the ATR was first introduced into the sport for the 2022 season, the team at the top of the standings receives just 70% of the testing time that the team in seventh place enjoys – seventh being the base level. When Cadillac make it 11 teams, they will receive 15 percent more testing time than the team in seventh, which is the same level as whoever finishes last in this year’s championship. Both the tenth and 11th placed teams will receive 115% of the best ATR limit going into the future.
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