As the Seahawks dominated the Patriots on the field in Super Bowl LX, Formula One’s newest team was busy making an introduction.
With an expected audience of over 130 million viewers serving as a backdrop, the Cadillac F1 team revealed its livery for its inaugural season with a Super Bowl ad. Running during the fourth quarter, the 30-second spot unveiled what fans can expect to see when the car takes to the track in less than a month at the F1 season opener in Melbourne.
That glimpse showed a car that was emblematic of Cadillac’s luxury brand. Featuring a split, black-and-white color scheme, Cadillac hoped to convey “a yin-and-yang balance expressed through stark black and white, where grit, determination, and performance meet aspiration, optimism and ambition,” the team said in a release.
Like much of the past 11 months since Cadillac received approval to join this year’s field as F1’s 11th team, the process of putting together such an ambitious livery reveal came at breakneck speed. So how did “America’s new team” pull this off?
“Everyone internally was asking the same question,” Cadillac’s chief marketing officer Ahmed Iqbal tells Sports Illustrated.
The Super Bowl is advertising’s biggest night of the year, so companies typically take four to five months to build out campaigns for 30 seconds of coveted airtime that, in 2026, cost $8 million-$10 million. Iqbal admits that Cadillac put its own spot together in less than 90 days. Yet that didn’t dissuade anyone inside team headquarters. Instead, it only emboldened Cadillac to do something different, which meant pairing the ad with an in-person activation right in the heart of New York City: Times Square.
“The ethos is we want to make sure this is a team for America and we want to make sure people feel like they have an opportunity to experience it and to see it,” Iqbal says. “So we picked a location where it’s really central, so it’s democratized in that way, but it’s still done in a very aspirational and exclusive way.”
The 60-second cut of the ad, helmed by creative agency Translation and directed by Sam Piling, shows the process of the first Cadillac F1 car coming together—from the announcement of the brand’s inclusion less than a year ago to the subsequent hustle of the various team members to get each piece of the puzzle into place. A voiceover of John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “We choose to go to the moon” speech plays over a swelling score from Academy Award nominated composer Max Richter, evoking the triumphs of the Apollo missions—historical American undertakings that have become a rallying cry for what Cadillac hopes to replicate by putting a car on the starting grid in Melbourne.
Striking a chord with a diverse viewing audience during the United States’ most-watched television event presented yet another challenge. Trying to convince American sports fans, while they were actively watching the biggest game of the country’s most popular sport, to invest their time in yet another offering and be taken seriously is a difficult balance to strike. It’s, in part, why Iqbal says Cadillac leaned into the themes—ambition and ingenuity—of the Apollo missions.
“The Apollo missions weren’t something that were political,” Iqbal says. “It was more about, we’re trying to go for a moonshot—which is what we [say within the team] now. We’re trying to do something, not first, but we’re trying to do it fast and we’re trying to do it the best.
“It’s one of those iconic American moments that I think got everyone together in this country to be like, ‘Yeah, this is worth doing, it’s worth going, it’s worth trying to innovate and do this crazy thing that many think is not possible.’ ”
But the advertising element of Cadillac’s moonshot wouldn’t be complete without landing the second act in Times Square. The result was a rectangular box planted firmly at the intersections of Broadway and W 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan, housing a replica of the team’s new car. The unassuming contraption stands out amid the flashing billboards of Times Square, as tourists in search of photos or New York City trinkets ambled up to the box with inquisitive looks.
The box, once again tagged with a pitch to “follow America’s new team,” featured frosted glass windows and a countdown clock that marked the seconds until 10:30 p.m. ET Sunday—shortly after the final whistle and the start of the Seahawks’ celebrations. Once the clock hit zero, the glass slowly began to defrost, revealing silhouettes of actors portraying Cadillac team members, making the final tweaks and updates to the car. Sounds of mechanical whirring were eventually joined again by JFK’s speech and Richter’s score, as the windows eventually cleared up entirely to reveal the black-and-white livery.
Generating a coherent message and a connection between the advertisement that would play on TV and the in-person experience was paramount, Translation executive creative director Mina Mikhael told SI. That way fans could experience one or the other, and not feel like they missed out on anything.
Had a chance to get a glimpse at @Cadillac_F1’s Times Square activation before Sunday night’s livery reveal: an awesome opportunity to see an F1 car up close. Story coming soon for @SInow: pic.twitter.com/bec5uHSQX9
— Zach Koons (@ZachKoons) February 9, 2026
Sunday felt like a culmination of what Cadillac had been building to since last March, and yet the biggest moments for the team’s inaugural season are still to come. The car will make its official debut at the Australian Grand Prix on Sunday, March 8—a date that’s circled for Iqbal and others as the team tries to “create a bridge” to Melbourne for fans that were already on board and those who may have jumped on the rocket ship during Super Bowl Sunday.
“The big part of getting people excited and building a fandom is storytelling. And in order to tell stories, you need to create moments and create some content,” Iqbal says. “So we make this reveal in this really extravagant way—then we have the opportunity to do more storytelling off the back of that.”
More F1 on Sports Illustrated
- Aston Martin Reveals New F1 Livery as Honda Era and Adrian Newey Chapter Begin
- Cadillac Reveals Their Very F1 First Livery During Super Bowl LX
- How Cadillac Built an F1 Debut Engineered for Everyone
- Update Revealed on Mercedes Engine Rule Controversy as Rivals Push for Change
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Cadillac Revealed an F1 Car by Using the Super Bowl As a Launchpad .
