Cadillac has made the first major leadership change of its Formula 1 story, appointing Marcin Budkowski as team principal after the sudden dismissal of Graeme Lowdon midway through the American team’s debut season.
The change was announced on August 12, 2026, during Formula 1’s summer break and just 11 races into Cadillac’s first campaign. Although the team described the move as a “planned leadership transition”, chief executive Dan Towriss subsequently confirmed that the decision to remove Lowdon was his and that Lowdon had only been informed on the morning of the announcement.
It makes Budkowski’s arrival far more than an ordinary management reshuffle. Cadillac is still building the structures of a new Formula 1 operation while simultaneously trying to compete against ten established rivals. Now the man responsible for leading that project at the beginning of its competitive life has been replaced before its first season has even reached its halfway-to-two-thirds stage.
Budkowski’s first Grand Prix as team principal will be at Zandvoort, with the 2026 Dutch Grand Prix taking place from August 21 to August 23 following F1’s four-week summer break.
For Cadillac, the appointment represents a shift from getting onto the grid to figuring out how to move up it.
Graeme Lowdon’s Cadillac tenure ends abruptly
Lowdon had been appointed team principal of the Cadillac project in December 2024 and played an important role in transforming the proposed American entry into a functioning Formula 1 team.
That meant overseeing preparations for Cadillac’s arrival on the grid and helping establish an operation capable of tackling one of motorsport’s most technically and logistically demanding championships.
Cadillac also assembled one of the most experienced driver combinations available for its inaugural campaign, recruiting Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas.
But its first 11 Grands Prix have demonstrated just how difficult starting an F1 team from scratch remains.
Cadillac entered the summer break as the only constructor yet to score a point in 2026. A failure to score in itself is hardly extraordinary for a newcomer, but reliability has emerged as a more troubling feature of its opening campaign.
Perez and Bottas have recorded nine Grand Prix retirements between them across those first 11 rounds. More significantly, the situation has deteriorated rather than stabilised as the season has progressed: Cadillac managed to bring both cars to the chequered flag in only one of the seven races immediately preceding the summer break.
There have been highly visible technical problems too, including Perez suffering a brake fire in Monaco and Bottas encountering a fire caused by heat, alongside other stoppages during the season.
That context makes the timing of Cadillac’s management change particularly significant.
Was Lowdon’s departure really planned?
Cadillac’s initial description of a “planned leadership transition” suggested an orderly handover. Towriss’s subsequent explanation painted a more complicated picture.
The Cadillac chief executive confirmed that removing Lowdon had been his decision rather than the result of a mutual agreement.
According to Towriss, the process of considering Cadillac’s next leadership phase had begun several months earlier. The team had been examining what it required for the next stage of its development and assessing the capabilities of potential candidates.
Those discussions eventually led to Budkowski.
Lowdon, however, was not informed until the morning Cadillac announced the change.
Towriss argued that secrecy was necessary because conducting a visible recruitment process while Lowdon remained in charge could have destabilised the organisation. In Formula 1, where personnel movements are scrutinised intensely and even a factory visit can generate speculation, Cadillac chose to keep its deliberations private until it was ready to act.
That helps explain why the change appeared so sudden externally, but it also establishes an important distinction for the historical record: Cadillac may have planned its succession process internally, but Lowdon’s own departure was not a long-announced or mutually negotiated handover.
Towriss nevertheless credited Lowdon with helping establish the team’s foundations and thanked him for his contribution to building Cadillac from the ground up.
Why Marcin Budkowski?
If Cadillac wanted an experienced Formula 1 operator with an unusually broad understanding of how the championship works, Budkowski is a logical choice.
The 49-year-old Polish-French engineer has worked across several different areas of Formula 1 rather than following a career entirely within one team.
His CV includes spells with Prost, Ferrari and McLaren, as well as the FIA. He later joined Renault and remained with the organisation through its transition into Alpine, spending four years there before leaving his role as Alpine executive director in 2022.
That background gives Budkowski experience of F1 from both sides of the regulatory divide: inside teams attempting to produce competitive cars and within the governing structure responsible for overseeing the championship.
Now comes a very different challenge.
Cadillac does not simply need someone to manage an established Formula 1 organisation. It needs to develop one.
Budkowski has identified car development, organisational alignment and operational execution as priorities. He has also specifically highlighted the challenge of maximising development within Formula 1’s cost cap.
That point is especially relevant to the modern championship. A new team cannot simply spend without restriction until it catches its rivals. Performance has to be created while operating within financial regulations, making efficient processes, accurate decision-making and the allocation of resources increasingly important.
Budkowski’s task is therefore as much organisational as technical.
Cadillac’s first 11 races show the scale of the job
It would be misleading to judge Cadillac’s entire F1 project solely by its lack of points.
Formula 1 history is full of new constructors discovering that merely qualifying and finishing consistently can be a substantial achievement during their formative period. Modern F1 has arguably made the challenge even greater because today’s teams arrive in an environment of immense technical sophistication and mature organisations built over decades.
Cadillac’s nine combined race retirements, however, illustrate why the team cannot afford to treat 2026 purely as an extended learning exercise.
Reliability is fundamental. A car that does not finish cannot score opportunistic points, gather the maximum possible race data or give its drivers consistent experience from which development decisions can be made.
That creates a vicious circle for a newcomer. The team needs mileage to learn, but technical failures can deprive it of exactly the mileage required to understand and improve the car.
Budkowski’s comments upon taking the position reflect that reality. He wants Cadillac’s people, tools and information flows aligned so decisions can be made quickly and the car improves each time it races.
In modern Formula 1, that process can be every bit as important as finding one dramatic technical breakthrough.
From joining F1 to becoming competitive
Cadillac’s leadership change can also be viewed as a marker in the evolution of the project itself.
Lowdon was the team principal who helped get Cadillac to Formula 1. Budkowski is being asked to help make Cadillac competitive once it is there.
Those are related but not necessarily identical jobs.
Towriss has stressed that Cadillac’s ambition was never simply to participate. The stated objective is to create a next-generation organisation capable of eventually fighting at the front, and he believes Budkowski’s technical knowledge, strategic leadership and Formula 1 experience can help establish the processes required to reach that level.
The language is ambitious for a team that, as of August 12, remains without a championship point.
Yet Cadillac’s current position and its long-term target are not necessarily contradictory. No credible new F1 operation expects to move immediately from its first start to victories. The real question is whether its early weaknesses become permanent characteristics or problems that are systematically eliminated.
That is the test Budkowski inherits.
A very modern Formula 1 team-principal change
For followers of F1 history, there is something distinctly modern about Cadillac’s decision.
Team principals were once often synonymous with the organisations they led: founders, owners or dominant personalities whose tenures could define entire eras. Today’s Formula 1 team principal increasingly sits at the centre of a vast corporate, technical and sporting organisation in which information management, cost-cap efficiency, recruitment and operational processes matter alongside traditional racing instinct.
Budkowski’s appointment fits that model.
His engineering background and experience across teams and the FIA make him representative of a generation of senior F1 figures whose expertise crosses technical, regulatory and managerial boundaries.
His immediate challenge is not to transform Cadillac overnight. It is to turn a new entrant into a functioning, reliable and progressively faster Formula 1 competitor.
The first measurement will be straightforward: can Cadillac start getting both cars to the finish consistently?
From there come points, development and eventually the much bigger ambitions outlined by Towriss.
Zandvoort begins Cadillac’s second chapter
The Dutch Grand Prix will consequently carry unusual significance for a team only 11 races into its history.
When Perez and Bottas take to the track at Zandvoort, Cadillac will effectively begin the second phase of its Formula 1 project.
Lowdon’s contribution belongs to the foundation story: building the operation, preparing its entry and taking Cadillac onto the grid in 2026. Budkowski inherits what comes next — converting that foundation into performance.
Cadillac remains pointless, has suffered nine race retirements between its two drivers and has struggled increasingly with reliability. None of those problems has a quick managerial solution.
But changing team principal during the summer break makes Cadillac’s expectations unmistakable.
Simply reaching Formula 1 was the first achievement. Staying at the back is not the plan.
For Budkowski, the opportunity is considerable. He takes charge of one of the championship’s youngest organisations, backed by one of America’s most famous automotive names and carrying ambitions considerably greater than its current championship position.
For Cadillac, meanwhile, the decision will eventually be judged not by how abruptly Lowdon departed, nor by the terminology used to describe the transition, but by what happens next.
The first chapter was about getting Cadillac onto the Formula 1 grid.
Budkowski’s chapter is about moving it forward.
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