Cadillac Tear Up Their Own Timeline by Removing Founding Boss Lowdon

Graeme Lowdon spent three years turning an idea into a Formula 1 entry, doing much of the groundwork before Cadillac even had an official place on the grid. He compared the task to putting a man on the moon. Eleven races into the team's debut season, with Cadillac yet to score a point, he has been removed as team principal and replaced by former Alpine boss Marcin Budkowski. The team's chief executive says this has nothing to do with the brakes that keep overheating or the results that haven't come. That claim is the most interesting part of the story.

A Founder Out Before the Project He Built Even Landed

Lowdon, 61, was a senior figure at the Manor/Marussia team that raced from 2009 to 2016 before taking on the job of building Cadillac from scratch. The team's route to the grid was a protracted one, and much of that groundwork fell to Lowdon before Cadillac had an official F1 entry at all. He was informed of his removal on Wednesday morning, according to Cadillac chief executive Dan Towriss.

What makes the timing notable is not the sacking itself; team principals change hands across the sport most seasons. It is that Lowdon is leaving before the version of Cadillac he spent three years assembling has produced a single points finish. A team he compared to a moon landing is now being handed to someone else to fly.

Towriss Insists This Isn't About the Brakes

Cadillac have been troubled by reliability problems in 2026, particularly overheating brakes, and the team has failed to score in the first 11 races with an experienced line-up of Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas, both former race winners. It would be the obvious explanation for a sudden change at the top. Towriss rejected it directly.

He said the decision to remove Lowdon was his, based on "the future direction of the team," and separated it explicitly from results. "I wouldn't say that it's, you know, the performance or the teething issues over the last few weeks," Towriss said. He and Lowdon had discussed a future transition, he added, but "the time for that change came sooner than was expected."

Whether a winless season and repeated technical failures were entirely absent from that calculation is a fair question to hold in reserve. Towriss framed the move as forward-looking rather than corrective, describing "a very narrow window of opportunity" to build something new rather than improve something that already exists. It is a distinction that matters to how the change is read: not a rescue mission, on his account, but a deliberate pivot in what kind of organisation Cadillac wants to become.

Budkowski's CV Fits a Different Kind of Ambition

Budkowski, 49, arrives with a résumé built almost entirely inside the sport's technical and regulatory machinery. He spent time at Renault's F1 team from 2017-22 through its Renault and Alpine guises, most recently as executive director, and ran the FIA's technical department from 2014-17. Earlier in his career he worked for McLaren, Ferrari and Prost.

The twelve-year gap between the two men's ages is a small but telling detail: Lowdon built Cadillac as an entrepreneurial founder navigating the sport's entry process from the outside; Budkowski joins as an F1 insider who has spent close to a decade inside the paddock's technical and governance structures. At Cadillac he rejoins former colleagues including chief technical officer Nick Chester, also formerly of Renault, which suggests the appointment is as much about assembling a familiar technical network as it is about replacing one executive with another.

Towriss described Budkowski as bringing "exceptional F1 experience, technical expertise and strategic leadership" intended to help the team "develop the winning mindset, tools and processes required for long-term success." Budkowski's own statement leaned on similar language, describing a phase defined by "maximising car development within the cost cap" and building "an elite organisation with a winning mindset."

The Logistics Puzzle Doesn't Change

Whoever runs Cadillac inherits an operation still spread across three countries. The team currently works out of seven buildings on an industrial park opposite Silverstone in the UK, alongside General Motors' technical centre in Michigan and a motorsport headquarters in North Carolina. A new base in Fishers, Indiana, is set to become the team's headquarters in due course, though Cadillac says it will retain a UK operation.

That structure was part of what Lowdon had to reconcile while getting the team onto the grid in the first place. Budkowski's statement about "aligning our people, tools and information flow so the right decisions are made quickly" reads as a direct response to exactly that kind of complexity, even if it wasn't named as the trigger for the change.

Cadillac entered Formula 1 acknowledging it would take time to become competitive, and eleven scoreless races into a debut season is not, on its own, an unusual place for a new team to sit. What is unusual is changing the person who built the team before that competitive window has even closed. Towriss says the decision reflects where Cadillac wants to go rather than where it currently stands. The team's results over the rest of the season will be the only real test of whether that distinction holds.

Research: This article uses the archived evidence supplied for this story. Story inspiration: BBC Sport's original report.