The Cadillac Formula 1 team is confident it will be able to resolve a dispute with film director Michael Bay after a $1.5 million civil lawsuit was filed over the team’s Super Bowl commercial.
According to reports by Rolling Stone and The Athletic, a 19-page lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles on Friday, alleging the Cadillac F1 team and its CEO Dan Towriss “have apparently stolen Bay’s ideas and work for the commercial, without paying for them.”
The lawsuit claims Towriss approached Bay, the director of Armageddon and Transformers, to work on the project in November, 2025. It seeks damages in excess of $1.5m, claiming Bay and his team were “working nearly nonstop” before “Towriss abruptly decided to ‘go in a different direction’ and use someone else to complete the project.”
The commercial aired in the final quarter of the Seattle Seahawks 29-13 victory over the New England Patriots and was used to reveal Cadillac’s livery for its debut season in F1.
Speaking during an online news conference the following day, Towriss said the creative ideas used in the finished commercial were discussed in advance of any contact with Bay.
“I think our reaction is we have a lot of respect for Michael,” Towriss said. “I think it’s disappointing that he chose to do that. Certainly, all of the creative was done well in advance of ever speaking with him.
“We were wanting to talk to him about a role as director, not taking creative ideas from him, and so I think the group, Translation, that we worked with did an excellent job developing all that.
“So we’re confident it’ll be resolved amicably but, you know, from our standpoint last night was a huge success and we’re very proud of the work that was done and that’s all I can say on it.”
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The commercial featured a speech given by John F. Kennedy in 1962 in which the former President committed the Unites States to landing a man on the moon before 1970.
Towriss said the main aim was to focus on the car while drawing parallels between the size of the challenge faced by Cadillac in entering F1 and those faced by NASA in the Apollo missions of the 1960s.
“So as we thought about the Super Bowl commercial, you know one of the things that came out very early on was the car needed to be the star of the show,” he added. “In a lot of Super Bowl ads you’ll see celebrity cameos and a lot of things, and it makes for a very interesting spot but this one was about the car, it was a livery reveal and not an F1 hype video or something else.
“So we wanted the car to be the star of the show, and I think with the JFK piece that was a very unifying moment and it captured a lot of the emotions that went into this team, of this kind of unbridled determination to win and to compete.”
