"Something needed to change" - What Cadillac F1 needs from its Marcin Budkowski era

With Cadillac F1 Team pulling the trigger on a surprising mid-season team boss change, incoming chief Marcin Budkowski is tasked with rectifying the new team's flaws and speeding up its rate of progress.

Under founding team principal Graeme Lowdon, Cadillac did an admirable job assembling a start-up F1 team under difficult circumstances, only officially receiving approval to join the grid less than one year before the 2026 season opener.

The TWG Motorsports-owned F1 team, helmed by CEO Dan Towriss, grew into a 400-strong operation across Silverstone and existing GM facilities in North Carolina, while still building a new US headquarters near Indianapolis.

Cadillac met every deadline on its way to becoming F1's 11th team, but a subsequent lack of progress and recurring problems with the team's production quality and car build started causing frustration among its drivers Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez, with the latter suggesting in Belgium he expected the team to be further ahead than it was. That was before the team's solution to recurring brake problems went up in smoke again in Hungary.

Cadillac's teething issues were to be expected from a brand-new team, but apparently that impatience was also shared with the team's ownership. During the summer break CEO Towriss decided to make a drastic change by replacing Lowdon with Budkowski, the 49-year-old Polish engineer with an extensive pedigree working for the likes of Ferrari, McLaren, Renault and the FIA over the past 25 years.

Valtteri Bottas, Cadillac Racing

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

There had already been a widespread belief within Cadillac that parts of the operation needed restructuring and refinement, but making a change at the very top by swapping Lowdon for Budkowski came out of the blue. The former Manor man was only informed on the morning of the announcement of his replacement. But Cadillac is understood to be appreciative of Lowdon's cooperation following the shock decision, and there is a clear acknowledgment the team would never have made it onto the grid without him.

But while Bottas agreed "something had to change" within the squad, he wasn't expecting Lowdon to be the one paying the price. The Finn admitted to having mixed feelings over the move as he was still digesting the sacking of the man who brought him into the Cadillac fold.

"I think a big change like this in the middle of the season is always initially surprising," Bottas said in the Zandvoort paddock. "But then Dan explained to me all the reasons why this change and I respect that.

"I think something needed to change. Some of the issues we've had were just dragging along. But I didn't quite expect such a big change. I was maybe expecting more stuff happening at the factory. Obviously, it's a real shame that it is Graeme who got out because, first of all, he's a friend of mine. But I also think he's done a great job setting up the team, so my hat off for that. But at the same time, I'm also welcoming Martin. For sure one reason for the change was to have a technical person in this position. He's got all my support."

Sergio Perez, Cadillac

Photo by: Eric Le Galliot

Perez joined Bottas in paying tribute to Lowdon, but said he was keen for Budkowski to hit the ground running. "I think Graeme has done a tremendous part in bringing Cadillac to where it is now, together with GM and Dan. He's part of the history of the team and I wish him well on whatever comes next.

"I think it's really exciting when you have a new leader and see his new perspective. I haven't been spending much time with him, but I think it was time to change and I think it shows that, although it's only our first year, Cadillac is really willing to move forward with this team as quickly as possible. And we hope that with the new leadership that can come soon."

Changing team bosses six months into the squad's existence suggests there's no lack of decisiveness on Towriss' part to be pulling whichever trigger needed to drive Cadillac's progress forward. But given the complexity of the current ruleset and the cramped timelines involved in defining the 2027 car project, Budkowski isn't granted a particularly long time to get his feet under the desk either. His arrival also coincided with another major transition, as Cadillac moved into its new Silverstone facility on his first day in the job.

"The factory is amazing. It's a new facility that just came online actually on Monday, the first day that I started. So it was nice because I wasn't the only one who couldn't find his desk on day one," Budkowski quipped. "It's definitely a step up from what the team had been operating until then, which was a provisional structure on the Silverstone circuit enclosure."

Budkowski acknowledged it would take him several more weeks to get the "full picture" of how the team operates. However, while appreciating the "cracking job" his predecessor had done to get Cadillac on the grid in respectable fashion, he had already identified some key structural weaknesses that he wanted to address.

"I'm starting to see some of the things that we're going to need to hit hard and prioritise in the next few weeks," he said. "In the time they had available, they had to take some shortcuts, and some of them were biting us a little bit. These guys have gone to war, and the decisions you make in wartime are different to the decisions you make in peacetime.

"If they had three years instead of one to do it, in some areas they would have done it better. But it's not a criticism, because what they've done in the time they had, I don't think there's a lot of people who could have done that."

Budkowski was confident Cadillac could make a significant course correction for 2027, though he was still hopeful some of the short-term changes could improve the squad's fortunes this year as Aston Martin's recent progress has pushed Cadillac down to the last row of the starting grid.

Building Cadillac’s technical "DNA"

Colton Herta, Cadillac Racing

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

The brake cooling issue is one, very publicly visible, short-term priority. "Yes, there are reliability issues that maybe are not at the level you expect from a Formula 1 team, but there's a huge complexity in some areas and the brake area is one of them," Budkowski pointed out.

"There have been some mistakes made in terms of design and materials that will be addressed. It's an unlucky chain of events, because there's not a single source of failure. There's a cascade of different things. It's one of these situations when you fix one thing and something else goes wrong and you learn as you do it.

"One thing that struck me is there's a lot of young, very bright people in the office. Super talented, super motivated, but they don't have the experience and the strength in depth that a lot of teams have," Budkowski explained. "Teams build collective knowledge, sometimes we refer to it as the DNA of the car, and it's the history of a group of people building cars for years.

"There's none of that in this group, so this car has been really the prototype. This group of people now have experience of having done a car together, and that will certainly help for next year. So there's a lot of lessons learned. Some of them we can still address a little bit for this year, and most of them we'll have to wait for next year's car."

With major changes having to wait until 2027, Bottas is hopeful the team can at least target some of the lower hanging fruit by ironing out its most painful deficiencies. "We still have quite a bit of lap time on the table when it comes to quality, when it comes to precision on the setup, quality and precision on the parts, such as diffusers, wings, bodywork," he said. "If we can gain more consistency there, we're talking quite a bit of lap time.

"We need to make the car quality great, so it looks like an F1 car that is run by a top F1 team. My view now is whatever we're going to do, we don't want to sacrifice any of 2027 performance, because that needs to be a bigger jump with a new car."