Michael Bay Is Suing Cadillac F1 For Their Super Bowl Livery Reveal Advert

We’re less than a month away from the 2026 F1 season, and the winter break has been... eventful, what with all the dating announcements, disruptions and legal drama. Following Williams cancelling test week in one of the biggest disruptions in recent years and Lewis Hamilton and Kim Kardashian making their relationship public at the Super Bowl, Cadillac is now in trouble over their Super Bowl advert for their first ever Formula 1 livery. 

Cadillac, set to join Formula 1 this year as the 11th team on the grid, revealed their split livery with a mystery activation box on Times Square and a Super Bowl commercial spot.  After the advert aired, Transformers director Michael Bay filed a $1.5-million lawsuit against the CEO of Cadillac Dan Towriss, claiming that his team had “stolen Bay’s ideas and work for the commercial, without paying for them.”

According to Bay’s claims, Cadillac had reached out to Bay in November 2025 to direct an advert that would introduce Cadillac as the “American” team on the grid. Towriss and Bay discussed ideas, like the JFK voiceover in the background, and the desert backdrop for the commercial. However, on December 6, roughly a week after Bay had started working on the ad, the Cadillac team informed him that they were looking to take a different direction with the commercial and have someone else work on it. 

Meanwhile, the Cadillac F1 wing paints a different story. “Michael Bay is a cinematic genius and we talked with him about directing our Super Bowl ad. But after two meetings, it became clear he couldn’t meet our timeline, and there ultimately wasn’t a path forward,” a spokesperson for Cadillac F1 said in a statement. The spokesperson claims that the concept for the ad was something the Cadillac team had already come up with before contacting Bay, and they were only “exploring him as a director”. Bay claims that he had already been hired as a director on set. In fact, he has worked with General Motors, Cadillac’s parent company, for twenty-five years now.

Bay has sued Cadillac on four counts: breach of verbal contract, breach of implied-in-fact contract, goods and services rendered and fraud, while the $1.5 million figure he is demanding is to match the directing and producing fees owed to him, along with the expenses he and his team have already absorbed, along with additional punitive damages for violating the contract.