Villagomez and Szafnauer: a project to enter F1 as the twelfth team

Another team on track? The 2026 world championship saw the return of an eleventh team to Formula 1 with the debut of Cadillac, but the addition of new cars to the starting grid may not stop for the next few seasons. This, at least, if the project conceived by the Mexican billionaire Rafael Villagomez, owner of the Van Amersfoort team and in which the former Alpine and Aston Martin team principal Otmar Szafnauer recently stepped into the role of CEO and Managing Partner, materializes. A clear desire Villagomez is serious about taking the big step to bring the Dutch company into the Circus, doing so together with an expert like the Romanian manager, who during his career has played numerous roles in various F1 teams from the end of the 90s to 2023: “The owner and I were evaluating the possibility of collaborating on the creation of a Formula 1 team, a hypothesis that could still materialize if an interesting sales opportunity arises or if the possibility of creating a twelfth team would open up,” he told GP Blog. The main difficulty Having recently become owner of the team, in which his son also competes in Formula 2, the team is one of the most present in the panorama of preparatory categories. 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 reality, negotiations for a debut in F1 as the eleventh team had already opened, but it was Cadillac that prevailed. The intention, therefore, is to enter as the twelfth team, but the FIA ​​does not seem willing to welcome a new team, in particular due to the new Concorde Agreement valid until 2030 and 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 into F1 after Rebaque, founded in the second half of the 1970s by Hector Rebaque. Alternatively, Villagomez could start another project to enter another category such as IndyCar.