Prime Tire Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s F1 newsletter. Sign up here to receive Prime Tire directly in your inbox twice a week during the season and weekly in the offseason.Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today I’m live from Spa, enjoying the sights, sounds and smells of the 2026 Belgian Grand Prix.(It’s mainly cars blasting through the Ardennes forest and wafts of pommes frites from stands around the paddock and fan zones. Never gets old!)I’m Alex, and Luke Smith will be along later.Cadillac’s Colors: Why the U.S. team keeps changing its liveryI like to be honest with you, dear PT reader. It’s why I was keen to go through my worst predictions of the 2025 season (something I’ll be revisiting this year, too).So, here’s a confession: I simply failed to notice that Cadillac has not been running its asymmetric livery on its MAC-26 cars ever since the Barcelona-Catalunya GP that Lewis Hamilton won for Ferrari at the start of June.A few excuses:
Backmarker F1 teams get less TV airtime.
And when Cadillac was on screen during the Austria weekend, when its current color scheme made its debut, the brakes on the MAC-26 regularly catching fire demanded my attention instead.
Then, at Silverstone over Fourth of July weekend, the Cadillacs were delightfully adorned in a red, white and blue arrangement to honor the 250th anniversary of the United States.
