Graeme Lowdon spent four years assembling a Formula 1 team that did not know, until the eleventh hour, whether it would be allowed to race at all. He got Cadillac through the door for the biggest regulations reset in a generation, with Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas in the cars and Ferrari power in the back. Eleven grands prix later, he was out of a job. The Cadillac F1 team principal is now Marcin Budkowski, and the speed of that handover has become the first genuine controversy of the American squad’s debut season.
Cadillac chief executive Dan Towriss confirmed the change last week, and his framing of it was revealing. He had always envisaged a point at which Lowdon would be replaced, he said — but that point had arrived “sooner than expected”. The obvious question, put to BBC Sport’s F1 correspondent Andrew Benson by a reader ahead of this weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix, is why an owner would restructure his leadership mid-season rather than let a debut campaign run its course and judge it whole.
What Towriss saw in Cadillac’s first 11 races
Towriss and Lowdon had worked side by side on the project for four years, in conditions few start-ups would recognise. Cadillac did not hold an official entry until March 2025 — a year out from their first race — and Towriss has publicly credited Lowdon with building a team from nothing while not knowing when, or even whether, it would be racing.
As Benson writes for BBC Sport, the split looks like a mismatch of expectations rather than a question of effort. Lowdon was consistently careful about what a brand-new operation could achieve in its opening seasons. Towriss, watching the first 11 races as a competitor rather than an applicant, plainly wanted more — and installed the highly experienced Budkowski in Lowdon’s place.
The numbers behind the Cadillac F1 team principal decision
They flatter nobody. Setting aside Aston Martin’s disastrous opening 10 races, Cadillac have been an average of 1.2 seconds off the next slowest team — and that team is Williams, themselves 0.4secs adrift of Haas and enduring a miserable season of their own. Cadillac remain the only team on the grid yet to score a point.
Nor is it purely a matter of lap time. Reliability has been a repeating problem, most conspicuously overheating brakes. Our coverage of the Austrian Grand Prix upgrade that left Perez and Bottas on the back row caught the pattern early: a package arrives, the deficit does not move.
The immediate outlook is bleaker still. Aston Martin have now introduced their major upgrade, which removes the one team Cadillac could occasionally beat and leaves them facing the rest of 2026 well adrift of the field.
What Budkowski inherits at Zandvoort
Budkowski arrives with an unusually forensic understanding of how F1 teams are built and policed. He ran the FIA’s single-seater technical department before moving to Enstone, where he became executive director of the Renault and later Alpine operation. He is, in other words, an appointment aimed at process and structure — not at a quick fix this weekend.
Just as well, because no quick fix exists. Formula 1 resumes at Zandvoort from 21-23 August with 12 rounds left and Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli 50 points clear at the head of the drivers’ championship, a title fight that will absorb most of the attention Cadillac might otherwise attract. Whatever Budkowski changes now will show up in 2027, not in the Netherlands.
All of which leaves Lowdon’s four years looking oddly under-credited. Getting an eleventh team onto a Formula 1 grid, in a new rules era, from a standing start and without a guaranteed entry, is a feat almost nobody in the modern paddock has managed. Making it competitive inside 11 races was a different job — and not the one he was hired to survive.
