- Cadillac Sacks Graeme Lowdon as F1 Newcomer Shifts From Building Team to Chasing Performance
Cadillac has dismissed founding Formula One team principal Graeme Lowdon midway through its debut season and appointed former Alpine executive Marcin Budkowski, marking a decisive shift from the complex task of getting America’s newest F1 team onto the grid towards the harder challenge of making it competitive.
The General Motors-backed team said Budkowski’s appointment was part of a planned transition as Cadillac moves from its initial construction phase into a period focused more heavily on racing performance. Lowdon, who had led the project since 2024, was informed of the decision on Wednesday morning.
Cadillac chief executive Dan Towriss made clear that the departure was not mutual.
“It was my decision, it wasn’t a mutual decision,” he said, explaining that discussions over the next stage of the team’s leadership had begun several months earlier.
Lowdon achieved the first and arguably most difficult objective of the Cadillac project: building an entirely new Formula One organisation, recruiting staff and putting two cars on the grid as the championship’s 11th team.
But halfway through its first campaign, expectations are beginning to change.
Cadillac remains the only constructor without a point after 11 rounds, despite showing flashes of pace and at times competing more closely with established teams than many expected from a completely new operation. Reliability, however, has increasingly emerged as a constraint.
That creates a very different management challenge from simply reaching the starting grid.
Budkowski arrives with extensive technical and organisational experience across Formula One. The 49-year-old Polish-French engineer has worked at Ferrari and McLaren, held senior technical roles at governing body the FIA and later became executive director of Renault, subsequently Alpine.
Cadillac’s technical director Nick Chester previously worked alongside him at Alpine, potentially easing the transition into an organisation now attempting to convert its considerable resources into competitive development.
Towriss said Budkowski brings the experience and leadership required to develop the “winning mindset, tools and processes” necessary for Cadillac’s longer-term ambitions.
Building an F1 team is principally an organisational challenge. Winning with one is an engineering, operational and development challenge conducted against rivals who possess decades of accumulated knowledge.
Cadillac entered Formula One knowing that its first season would involve a steep learning curve.
Initially, reliability was one of the more encouraging elements. After the opening three races, Sergio Perez had reached the chequered flag in every Grand Prix, while the team was beginning to reduce the performance gap to established competitors.
But as the season progressed, reliability difficulties became more visible. Perez suffered a front-suspension failure in Canada which Lowdon subsequently described as preventable. In Austria, both Cadillac cars retired within the opening laps with brake problems, producing the team’s first double retirement of the season.
Perez said after Austria that Cadillac needed to investigate deeply, while Valtteri Bottas described reliability as the team’s “number one” priority after suffering his third consecutive retirement
Those failures highlight why Cadillac’s next phase cannot simply be about finding more outright speed.
Every race completed produces data about tyre behaviour, aerodynamic performance, energy management, cooling and mechanical systems. Persistent retirements therefore impose a double penalty: points are lost immediately and development information is lost for the future.
The team brought an extensive upgrade package to Austria and showed signs of moving closer to the midfield before reliability problems disrupted the weekend. At Silverstone, both cars were able to qualify ahead of the Aston Martins, providing another indication that the underlying car was gradually becoming more competitive.
His first job may therefore be less about reinventing Cadillac and more about converting visible performance gains into repeatable race weekends.
For Sergio Perez, the leadership change adds another dimension to a season that represented his return to Formula One after losing his Red Bull seat at the end of 2024.
Perez joined Cadillac alongside Valtteri Bottas specifically because the newcomer wanted experienced drivers capable of helping construct a team rather than simply driving the car.
The Mexican said when his comeback was announced that he had returned because the Cadillac project restored his enthusiasm for Formula One and allowed him to end his career on his own terms.
Perez has experience of race-winning machinery and championship-contending teams, while Bottas spent years inside Mercedes during one of the most dominant periods in Formula One history. Their feedback gives Cadillac reference points for what a mature front-running organisation should feel like operationally.
The new team principal must determine where Cadillac’s current weaknesses are structural, where procedures need tightening and how aggressively resources should be directed towards the present car versus longer-term development.
For Perez specifically, performances during the remainder of the season could also influence how Cadillac views its driver structure as the team develops.
But there is no evidence from the leadership announcement itself that his immediate position is threatened. The current reset is principally about management and competitive execution rather than a confirmed driver change.
Indeed, the combination of two experienced race winners may become even more valuable during Budkowski’s early months.
Cadillac’s challenge is unique because it is simultaneously learning how to race and how to develop.
Established teams already possess procedures for pit stops, race strategy, upgrades, manufacturing and reliability analysis built over many seasons. Cadillac has had to create much of that organisational memory in real time.
Lowdon’s achievement was taking the project from concept to competition.
He said he had held discussions with more than half the teams on the Formula One grid in recent years before choosing Cadillac and had spoken with senior General Motors leadership before accepting the role.
“It was important if I come back to this kind of leadership role to be in a project that I believe in,” Budkowski said.
Cadillac does not need to become a front-running team immediately for the leadership change to be judged successful.
The more realistic early benchmarks are simpler: finish races consistently, narrow the gap to the midfield, eliminate preventable failures and convert opportunities into the team’s first championship points.
The Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort on August 23 will be Cadillac’s first race after the summer break and the beginning of Budkowski’s tenure.
The leadership change therefore represents a natural but ruthless evolution of the project. Lowdon built the organisation that made Cadillac a Formula One team. Budkowski has been hired because merely being a Formula One team is no longer enough.
