Is Nike Getting Back Into Formula 1?
F1 fans were sent into a frenzy after seeing Cadillac F1 drivers decked out in Nike Dunks. But it may not be what it looks like after all.
Hi everyone, welcome back to SportsVerse, my twice-weekly newsletter that tells stories you can’t find anywhere else about the intersection of sports, fashion, business, and culture. This is the third and final time you’ll be hearing from me this week, I promise.
The Formula 1 side of the internet began losing its mind yesterday during F1 pre-season testing in Barcelona. It wasn’t because of some new car technology, not because of driver drama, not because of any big crashes. It was because of a pair of Nike sneakers (or several pairs).
Pictures emerged this week of the American Cadillac F1 team, a new entrant to the grid in the 2026 season, with its drivers (Sergio Perez, Valteri Bottas and reserve driver Zhou Guanyou) and members of team staff wearing all-Nike footwear. The drivers themselves were wearing the once-ubiquitous Nike Panda Dunks, while other team members sported different silhouettes bearing the famous Swoosh.
Naturally, people raced to the conclusion that this was a not-so-subtle teaser or prelude to an announcement of a formal all-American partnership between Nike and Cadillac.
Some less initiated in the world of F1 may wonder why this is a big deal or point of interest at all. After all, Nike sponsors teams and athletes in countless sports, including those far less popular than F1. The fact is that Nike has steered well clear of Formula 1 since the 1990s, and even though brands of all kinds (including rival sportswear labels) have begun aligning themselves with the sport owing to its recent wave of mainstream approval, the Swoosh has so far not been tempted to return.
I spoke to several sources, both at Nike and in the F1 world, who expressed the same sentiment: they were unaware of any deal between the two parties, and were just as surprised as anyone else to see the Cadillac team wearing Nike sneakers.
Whether something formal will materialise between Cadillac and Nike is unclear at this point, but the bottom line is that these things do not happen by accident.
Let’s face the facts:
All three drivers and all support staff in the photos are wearing brand new Nike footwear.
F1 is maybe the most logo- and sponsor-conscious sport of them all. There is no way a team would, just by chance, be photographed so prominently wearing footwear of a brand they are not affiliated with in some way. Especially, as Sachin Jha points out, at a team launch event.
It’s not as if Bottas, Perez and the Cadillac support staff took a group trip to Footlocker before the Barcelona event and synced up on which kicks they would buy for the day. This was coordinated.
The conclusion:
Something is happening here, you can’t tell me otherwise.
Teams are increasingly looking to different brands to sign as their sneaker partners, in comparison to years gone by, when Puma seemingly had a stronghold on the grid. Meanwhile, major sportswear brands are increasingly aware that Formula 1 is a highly coveted arena in which they can’t afford not to market products, especially if their competitors are flooding in. McLaren is several years deep into a footwear partnership with K-Swiss, for example, while Mercedes has worked with Adidas since the beginning of the 2025 season.
I spoke to someone who suggested it could be a play by Cadillac to attract the attention of Nike (or another sportswear brand) to come calling with a sponsorship proposal. But if that was the case, I wonder why Cadillac didn’t just send Nike an email asking for a quick chat.
Tommy Hilfiger is Cadillac’s apparel partner, but this likely still leaves scope for the brand to work with a separate partner for footwear (for example, when Tommy Hilfiger was Mercedes F1’s apparel partner, the team still wore Puma footwear). This could leave a tidy opening for Nike or another brand to slot in.
It’s been a while since Nike was involved in Formula 1. Given Nike’s focus on its five key sports categories as part of the turnaround strategy laid out by CEO Elliott Hill (which does not feature motorsports), it seems unlikely the brand would be willing to dump so much cash on a partnership with Cadillac F1 that certainly wouldn’t come cheap, and would fall well outside the brand’s target categories.
As fun as it would be, it seems hard to imagine at this stage. Especially as an F1 partnership would be a pure marketing play (as opposed to one designed to generate sales and/or profit). And the latter is what Nike is focused on above all right now.
But there is precedent: Nike’s last partnership in the sport yielded one of the nicher retro sneaker grails in history. In the 90s, it sought replicate its Air Jordan success in the world of motorsports. The Air Zoom Schu, a high-top lifestyle sneaker that only went on sale in Europe and Asia, was an adaptation of the red and black suede racing shoes supplied by Nike to none other than seven-time F1 champion Michael Schumacher from 1996 through the turn of the century. The silhouette is pretty hard to come by these days.
We will have to stay tuned to see if anything ultimately materialises as far as a Cadillac and Nike partnership goes, but for now, it seems like a bit of innocent pre-season flirting. And who can begrudge anyone that?
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
See you next week and absolutely no sooner,
DYM
The irony is that the lack of a formal deal might be the point. Nike doesn’t need F1 for performance credibility, but F1 increasingly needs Nike for cultural relevance, especially in the US.
If Nike wasn't thinking about it before, they sure are now