Cadillac's Formula 1 entry will not run its own power unit until 2029, but the program is already proving that its long-game promise was more than marketing. The American brand's in-house F1 engine is running on dynos at the team's GM Performance Power Units site in Concord, North Carolina — and it is running ahead of schedule.
The confirmation came from Dan Towriss, CEO of TWG Motorsports, the entity that fronts Cadillac's F1 entry. "The project's ahead of schedule, actually. As of right now, we're slated to bring the Cadillac PU online and to compete in 2029," Towriss said.
That timeline matters. Cadillac entered F1 in 2026 using customer Ferrari power units, a deal that runs through to the end of 2028. The team's commercial pitch — that it is the first all-American manufacturer to enter F1 since the mid-1980s — only stands up if Cadillac eventually runs an American engine, and the political case for the entry, made by GM and the FIA against significant resistance from existing manufacturers, hinged on that promise.
The engine itself is being shaped inside a brand-new facility opened in 2025 in Concord, the heart of NASCAR country and now home to GM's most ambitious motorsport project of the modern era. The division was set up specifically to design, build and run the in-house power-unit family, with the FIA having approved General Motors as a 2029 F1 engine supplier in 2024. Russ O'Blenes, a 30-year GM veteran, leads the technical effort on the ground.
Cadillac's racing operation is already feeling the heat of life on the grid. The team's Miami Grand Prix — its first F1 home race — saw both cars finish, but team principal Graeme Lowdon admitted the result fell short of expectations, with Sergio Perez's race compromised by tire-management issues that the team blamed on its rookie operating window rather than the customer Ferrari V6 hybrid hardware itself.
The North Carolina engine project will not solve those issues for now, but it is the strategic anchor that keeps the wider Cadillac project credible to GM's board. Building a Formula 1 engine from a clean sheet is one of the most complex industrial undertakings in motorsport: every PU on the 2026 grid is the result of multi-year development cycles drawing on tens of millions of euros and sometimes hundreds of engineers. To do it in parallel with running a brand-new race team, while still using a competitor's hardware on Sundays, is unprecedented in the modern hybrid era.
Towriss's message — that the work is on time, possibly early — is also a marker for the rest of the paddock. F1 is preparing to shift again at the end of the decade, with FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem this week openly declaring his preference for a return to V8-led power for 2030. If those rules shake out alongside Cadillac's first in-house PU, the Concord shop could find itself first to a new generation of Formula 1 engineering rather than last to the old one.
For Sergio Perez, who returned to the grid this season as the public face of the program, the calendar reads as a runway rather than a deadline. Cadillac's customer Ferrari engine has to deliver enough competitive results between now and 2029 to justify the marketing spend; once the in-house unit arrives, the program switches from import to export, and the Concord shop becomes a strategic asset that Liberty Media's American expansion has long advertised but never actually owned.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/cadillac-f1-engine-running-concord-north-carolina-towriss-ahead-of-schedule). Visit for full coverage.*