Almost no Formula One team is new. The eleven outfits on the 2026 grid contain the remains of a haulage firm from Essex, a Hong Kong businessman's rescue, a bankrupt Indian airline fortune and a nine-time champion sold for a nominal dollar. This chart traces each constructor through every rename, sale, merger and collapse — one block per identity, the colour recalling the car of that era. Tap any block for what actually changed hands.
Renamed — same companySold or taken overMerged with another teamNew legal entity — collapse, rescue or breakawayWound up for good
Threads that cross rows
March → Tyrrell, 1970. Ken Tyrrell bought March 701s for Jackie Stewart while his own car was built; Stewart won at Jarama in one. The works March team's own wins came later, and only twice.
Shadow → Arrows, 1977. Most of Shadow's design and management staff walked out to found Arrows, which was then successfully sued for copying the Shadow DN9 and had to build a replacement car in 53 days.
Hesketh → Williams, 1976. Walter Wolf bought Hesketh's assets and 60% of Frank Williams' team in the same move; Frank left a year later and started a new company from scratch.
Wolf → Fittipaldi, 1980. Walter Wolf Racing was folded into the Fittipaldi brothers' team, taking Harvey Postlethwaite's designs with it.
Ensign → Theodore, 1983. Teddy Yip absorbed Mo Nunn's team into the outfit he had already built out of Shadow.
Scuderia Italia → Minardi, 1994. The BMS Dallara team merged into Minardi — so a strand of it still races today as Racing Bulls.
Penske → ATS, 1977. Günter Schmid bought Roger Penske's PC4s and went racing under his own wheel brand.
Arrows → Super Aguri, 2006. Honda supplied Aguri Suzuki's new team with tooling derived from the 2002 Arrows A23, four seasons out of date on its debut.
Team Lotus → Caterham, 2011. Tony Fernandes bought the dormant Team Lotus name from David Hunt while Group Lotus licensed "Lotus" to the Enstone team — two unrelated Lotuses on one grid, and a High Court case.
How to read it
A block is an identity, not a livery: it starts when the entity or its name changed and ends when it changed again. Where a team's look drifted inside one identity — McLaren from Marlboro red to silver to papaya — the block shades across it. Where the change was corporate, the join is hard.
Title sponsors are not lineage. Alfa Romeo's name on a Sauber from 2018, and Lotus's on the Enstone car from 2011, were badges rented for money; neither team descends from the marque it carried. Works entries by Alfa Romeo, Mercedes, Honda, Renault and Matra appear as separate rows from the modern teams that use those names.
Seasons contested, not calendar years of ownership: deals agreed over the winter are shown at the following season, and where a name outlived its owner — BMW Sauber in 2010, Benetton in 2000–01 — the block follows the name on the entry list and the text explains the gap. Championship and win counts run to the end of 2025 unless a 2026 result is named.