Cadillac F1 Team Principal: Budkowski Replaces Lowdon

Marcin Budkowski is Cadillac F1 Team Principal, appointed today as the American squad closes its build phase and turns toward performance for the first time in its debut season. He replaces Graeme Lowdon, credited with building the team from the ground up. Budkowski arrives with more than two decades in Formula 1, spanning Prost, Ferrari, McLaren, the FIA and Renault/Alpine, where he served as executive director and board member through the team’s move into the Alpine era. His first race in charge comes at Zandvoort next weekend, as Cadillac returns from the summer break with half a season of data behind it and a new mandate in front of it.

Key Points – Cadillac F1 Team Principal

• Marcin Budkowski appointed Cadillac F1 Team Principal, replacing Graeme Lowdon
• Appointment marks the team’s shift from build phase into its next stage of competitive development
• Budkowski brings more than two decades of F1 experience across Prost, Ferrari, McLaren, the FIA and Renault/Alpine
• Served as executive director and board member during Alpine’s formation from the former Renault team
• First race in charge is the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, August 21 to 23
• Towriss frames the appointment around building “the winning mindset, tools and processes required for long-term success”

The Change at the Top

Cadillac confirmed the appointment on Wednesday, framing it as a planned leadership transition rather than a reaction to results. The team is roughly halfway through its debut Formula 1 season and returns from the summer break next weekend at Zandvoort. Graeme Lowdon, who led the organisation through its build phase, steps aside. Lowdon previously headed the now-defunct Manor F1 outfit before becoming a key figure in the Cadillac project from its earliest stages. Dan Towriss, CEO of Cadillac F1, thanked Lowdon for the foundation built from the ground up.

Towriss was equally direct on Lowdon’s exit, thanking him for his commitment through the organisation’s start-up phase and wishing him well.

Budkowski’s Background

Budkowski’s F1 career spans two decades of engineering, regulatory and executive roles. He started out in 2001 as an aerodynamicist for Prost, then joined Ferrari in 2002 during a period that produced multiple championships. McLaren came next in 2007, where he worked across aerodynamic roles at the factory and trackside before being made head of aerodynamics in 2012. He left McLaren in 2014 for the FIA, first as Formula 1’s technical and sporting coordinator, then taking charge of the governing body’s F1 technical department from 2017. That same year he moved to Renault as executive technical director, staying on through the team’s transition into Alpine and becoming a director of the Alpine F1 Team in January 2021. He left the role in January 2022. Viaplay brought him in the following year as a technical analyst for its Polish Formula 1 broadcast, work he continued through to this appointment. Cadillac’s release adds that he has also been advising teams, drivers and organisations across the wider motorsport industry. He is 49, Polish and French, and speaks multiple languages. The Race reports his 2017 move from the FIA into Renault drew concern from some of Renault’s rivals at the time.

The Mandate

Budkowski was clear about the job in front of him. Maximise car development within the cost cap. Get every function of the organisation pulling the same way. The build phase is someone else’s story now.

Budkowski called it a privilege to lead the team’s on-track efforts, starting at Zandvoort next weekend.

Sites, Drivers and the Build Phase

Lowdon’s Cadillac remit ran well beyond the garage. Inside INdiana Business reported the team’s $200 million, 400,000 square foot headquarters in Fishers, Indiana is under construction and expected to employ around 300 people once complete, serving as both corporate HQ and a manufacturing base for the car. Axios reported a second facility, an $85 million power unit plant in Concord, North Carolina, in the Charlotte metro area, approved with local tax incentives and expected to create up to 350 jobs, with construction targeted to finish in early 2027. Motorsport.com reported that with Fishers still being finished, Cadillac ran the bulk of its 2026 season operation out of its existing Silverstone base, with Lowdon telling the Beyond the Grid podcast last September that the US headquarters would become the team’s main base “over time” once Fishers is ready.

Lowdon also led the driver market work that put Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez in the car for Cadillac’s debut season, and steered the team through the FIA and Formula One Management approval process that confirmed its place on the 2026 grid. On Cadillac’s own account, that build-phase work is largely done.

Zandvoort and What’s Next

Budkowski steps in with Cadillac yet to score a point in its debut season. The MAC-26 has run at or above expectation for a chunk of the year, at times ahead of Aston Martin’s 2026 car, but with rivals bringing development steps that are only going to eclipse Cadillac’s own plans for the car, the rest of the campaign is likely to be more of a back-of-the-grid battle, with next year’s car already the bigger focus internally. Cadillac returns from the summer break at the Dutch Grand Prix, August 21 to 23, with half a debut season of learnings behind it. The team has framed the second half of the year as a sharpened phase of its competitive journey, and Budkowski’s first race in charge lands right at that reset point on the calendar.

Coffee Corner Take

Cadillac didn’t need a Team Principal to survive its first season. Lowdon got them that far, and before that he got Manor further than most people expected too. Lowdon’s job was building the thing: sites, drivers, approvals. That’s largely done. This appointment is about the season after this one, and the one after that.

The timing says as much as the appointment itself. This lands during the mandatory summer shutdown, before the paddock reconvenes at Zandvoort, with no real paddock chatter pointing to it. The Christian Horner links that did the rounds last year were never on the cards. That was lazy reporting more than anything else, the kind of story that attaches his name to any high-profile opening just to keep him in the press. Towriss shut it down flat at the time, backing Lowdon 100 percent. Nothing since then suggested a change was coming. That Cadillac has made the call anyway, mid-shutdown, barely halfway through the debut season, says something about the organisation. There’s a practical advantage in it too. Budkowski hasn’t been contracted to a rival team since leaving Alpine, working as a broadcast analyst instead, so there’s no gardening leave or notice period to run down. He can walk straight into the Zandvoort garage next weekend. This isn’t a team waiting for bad results to force its hand in public. The conversation about whether Lowdon’s build-phase skill set matched what comes next had clearly already happened behind closed doors, and Cadillac was ready to make the uncomfortable call the moment it landed on an answer rather than sit on it until the next natural break in the calendar.

There has been loose chatter for a while about Cadillac eventually pulling more of the operation back to the US. Nothing official beyond what Lowdon himself said on record last year, that the US site becomes the main headquarters “over time” once Fishers is finished. Today’s change doesn’t confirm anything beyond that. But a technical, cost-cap focused operator arriving just as that site nears completion is not nothing either.

Budkowski’s CV tells it’s own story. Prost, Ferrari, McLaren, the FIA, Alpine. It’s a resume built inside cost cap discussions, inside regulatory rooms, inside the boardrooms that decide where a team’s development budget goes. The 2017 Renault move that reportedly unsettled some rivals says something too: he has never been afraid of being the appointment nobody quite saw coming. Cadillac has just hired the kind of operator you bring in once the garage is built and the question becomes how fast the car gets faster.

That boardroom seat, held through the team’s rebrand from Renault to Alpine, is arguably the more relevant credential right now. So is the FIA spell before it, running the governing body’s own F1 technical department. That is where an operator learns how a Formula 1 team gets elevated: governance and budget discipline count for as much as car parts. Bringing in someone who has already sat on that side of the table is as clear a signal as Cadillac could send about what this appointment is for, pushing the team into its next phase rather than keeping it ticking over.

Towriss’s own words back it up. His line about the goal never being “simply to participate” but to “build a next-generation team capable of competing at the very front” is the whole story in one sentence. Lowdon’s background was commercial and operational. CEO of two F1 teams. A driver manager. The man who built Cadillac from a proposal into a functioning grid entry. Budkowski’s background is engineering, start to finish. An aerodynamicist by training who spent two decades inside the technical departments at Ferrari, McLaren and the FIA. Competing at the front needs that kind of background running the operation. Cadillac reached the ceiling of what Lowdon’s skill set could deliver and went looking for someone who speaks the language of the car itself.

His own language gives away the priority. Aligning people, tools and information flow so decisions get made quickly. That’s a technical director’s language wearing a Team Principal’s title. But the timing matters. If Cadillac really is about to spend the back half of the season further off the pace while development attention turns to 2027, Budkowski isn’t walking into a fight for this year’s points. He’s walking into a fight for the shape of next year’s car, with the rest of 2026 as the runway to get the organisation ready for it.

Lowdon built something from nothing in a paddock that does not make room for new teams. That part of the story is done now, and it deserved the thank you it got. What happens next, and how much of it is really about 2026 at all, belongs to Budkowski but one thing is for sure Cadillac once again have shown they mean business.