Another team on track?
The 2026 World Championship saw the return of an eleventh team in Formula 1 with the debut of Cadillac, but the addition of new cars on the starting grid may not stop in the coming seasons. This, at least, if the project conceived by Mexican billionaire Rafael Villagomez, owner of the Van Amersfoort team and recently joined by former Alpine and Aston Martin team principal Otmar Szafnauer as CEO and Managing Partner, comes to fruition.
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A clear intention
Villagomez is seriously determined to take the big step to bring the Dutch team into the Circus, doing so together with an expert like the Romanian manager, who throughout his career has held numerous roles in various F1 teams from the late ’90s to 2023: “The owner and I were considering the possibility of collaborating to create a Formula 1 team, a hypothesis that could still materialize if an interesting sales opportunity arises or if the possibility opens up to create a twelfth team”, he told GP Blog.
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The main difficulty
Having recently become the owner of the team, in which his son also competes in Formula 2, the squad is one of the most present in the feeder series landscape. In addition to the already mentioned F2, Van Amersfoort is also present in Formula 3, Formula Regional Europe and Middle-East, Formula 4, and Formula Winter Series. In fact, negotiations for a debut in F1 as the eleventh team had already opened, but Cadillac prevailed. The intention, therefore, is to enter as the twelfth team, but the FIA does not seem willing to welcome a new team, particularly due to the new Concorde Agreement valid until 2030 which limits the number of teams to eleven. Villagomez, however, believes in it, and the hypothetical ‘green light’ would coincide with the entry of a second Mexican-owned team in F1 after Rebaque, founded in the late ’70s by Hector Rebaque. Alternatively, Villagomez could start another project to enter another category such as IndyCar.
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