Cadillac fired Graeme Lowdon on a Wednesday morning, told him that same day, and called it a planned transition. Only in Formula 1 can you get blindsided before breakfast and have it repackaged as corporate strategy by lunchtime.
The Man Who Built the Car Gets Shown the Door
To be fair to Cadillac, nobody is pretending Lowdon was a long-term fixture. CEO Dan Towriss admitted openly that replacing him was always part of the plan. What he could not quite explain was why it happened at this precise moment, midway through the team’s debut season, with Lowdon learning his fate the very morning the announcement went public. Not a mutual decision, Towriss confirmed. Quite the understatement.
Lowdon deserves genuine credit. He built this team from nothing over nearly four years, recruiting staff, constructing infrastructure, and getting two cars onto the grid in Australia. That is no small achievement. The reward? A phone call on a Wednesday morning during the summer break.
Enter Budkowski, the CV on Legs
Marcin Budkowski is, on paper, an excellent hire. The 49-year-old Pole has worked at Prost, Ferrari, McLaren, the FIA, and Alpine. He helped introduce the halo in 2018, rose to Head of Aerodynamics at McLaren, and led a team of over 700 people at Alpine. He was also available immediately, having spent recent years as a TV pundit in Poland, which presumably made the gardening leave conversation mercifully brief.
“My focus will be on aligning our people, tools and information flow so the right decisions are made quickly, and the performance of the car improves every time we go racing.” – Marcin Budkowski
All very polished. The FIA’s own regulatory complexity means Budkowski’s technical breadth is a genuine asset, particularly with a recurring overheating brake issue that the team has so far failed to cure despite bringing fixes to multiple events.
AI, GM and the Americanisation of a British Operation
The more interesting subplot here is Towriss’s vision for Cadillac’s future. He wants to tap into General Motors’ AI capabilities, pull expertise from American industries like aerospace, and grow the team’s presence in Indiana rather than simply centralising everything in Silverstone. It is an ambitious, genuinely different model from every other team on the grid.
Whether Budkowski, a man steeped in the traditional European F1 model, is the right person to lead that reinvention is a fair question. Towriss seems convinced. The pressure to plan for 2027 is real, and a new team principal can still shape that car. A later change could not.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Cadillac have zero points. Sergio Perez came agonisingly close in Monaco before a penalty dropped him out of the top ten. The season resumes at Zandvoort, with 12 races remaining. Budkowski has been in the job less than a week and has not yet had a proper factory tour.
In F1, being the person who does the hard, unglamorous work of building something from scratch offers no protection whatsoever. Lowdon learned that the hard way. Budkowski would do well to remember it too.
