The mid-season replacement of a team principal is one of the most disruptive moves a Formula 1 organization can make. For an established operation it signals internal crisis. For a team eleven races into its existence, it signals something else entirely: a deliberate shift in what the job requires.
Cadillac arrived in 2026 as Formula 1’s eleventh team, the first new entrant in a decade, backed by General Motors and built from the ground up by TWG Motorsports. On August 12, a week before the sport returned from its summer break at Zandvoort, the team announced that founding principal Graeme Lowdon had been removed and replaced with immediate effect by Marcin Budkowski. Against that backdrop of organizational change, Valtteri Bottas has provided the one element new teams crave most: clarity on continuity. The Finnish driver confirmed on Dutch Grand Prix weekend that his contract is a multi-year agreement that runs until at least the end of 2027, and that the leadership change does not alter his standing.
It is a small but important stabilization point in a project that is still learning how to finish races.
From Blueprint to Grid: What Lowdon Was Hired to Do
To understand why Cadillac made the change now, it helps to understand what Lowdon was hired to do in the first place.
Lowdon is not a conventional race-team principal in the mold of a long-time engineer or strategist. His strength has always been zero-to-one construction. At Marussia, and later in various advisory and business roles, he built the commercial, legal, and operational scaffolding that allows a Formula 1 team to exist at all. At Cadillac, that meant hiring more than 300 people across three sites, commissioning factory capability, passing the FIA’s entry audits, building a car, building spare parts, building a pit crew, and building the logistical chain to get to Melbourne on time.
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Every deadline was met. The team made the grid. In the context of new-team history, where projects often collapse before they turn a wheel, that is not a trivial achievement.
CEO Dan Towriss, who runs TWG Motorsports and ultimately controls the Cadillac F1 program, has been explicit that the plan was always for Lowdon to eventually hand the baton to someone else. The founding phase and the racing performance phase require different skill sets. One is about assembling resources and creating processes. The other is about extracting milliseconds from those processes under the cost cap while simultaneously steering a major regulation change.
Towriss said the decision was his alone and that the timing arrived sooner than expected. He framed it not as a reaction to the last few results, but as a function of a narrow window of opportunity. With the 2027 technical regulations already in active development and General Motors working toward its own power unit program for the future, ownership did not want to build a team in the image of the current paddock and then try to retrofit it. They wanted leadership aligned to where the sport is going, including the increasing role of simulation, AI-driven development tools, and regulatory negotiation.
It is a rationale that explains why the news landed without prior speculation. Lowdon was informed on the morning of the announcement.
Who Marcin Budkowski Is and Why Cadillac Chose Him
Marcin Budkowski is 49, Polish-French, and has spent more than two decades on both sides of Formula 1’s technical divide.
He started as an aerodynamicist at Prost, then Ferrari and McLaren in the early 2000s. He later became head of the FIA’s Formula 1 technical department, a role that gave him an encyclopedic understanding of how regulations are written, interpreted, and policed. From there he moved to Renault as executive technical director and ultimately served as the de facto team principal of Alpine during its transition from Renault. That breadth matters for Cadillac.
Cadillac does not need another team-builder right now. It needs a technical leader who can diagnose why parts fail, why correlation is off, and why development parts cannot be raced. Budkowski has lived through that loop at a works team, at customer teams, and at the regulator itself. He also understands the political dimension of the sport. As he noted after his appointment, the fight in modern Formula 1 is ruthless, not because teams are hostile but because every team is highly professional and the cost cap prevents you from buying your way out of mistakes.
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His immediate mandate is unglamorous and urgent. Towriss and Budkowski have both used the same language: reliability must be fixed very, very urgently.
The Reliability Ledger That Forced the Conversation
Through the first eleven races of 2026, Cadillac sits eleventh in the constructors’ championship with zero points. The official tally shows zero, though the story is slightly more painful than that. At Monaco, Sergio Perez finished tenth on the road, which would have been the team’s first point, only to lose it to a post-race penalty that dropped him to eleventh. Since then, the team has recorded just one two-car finish in the seven races leading up to the summer break.
The statistics behind that are revealing. Cadillac has nine retirements so far, the second-highest total on the grid behind Aston Martin. The recurring theme has been brake systems. Overheating, brake fires in practice at Barcelona and at the end of FP2 in Monaco for Perez, failures in final practice, and race retirements have all traced back to the same core area: cooling and integration of the new-for-2026 brake-by-wire and energy recovery architecture on a car that is overweight and under-cooled relative to its initial targets.
In the old Formula 1, a new team could brute-force its way through such problems with testing and parts. Under the cost cap and restricted testing regulations, every retirement is doubly expensive. You lose the result, and you lose the mileage. Mileage is data, and data is the only way to understand whether your wind tunnel, your CFD, and your simulator agree with each other. Budkowski’s point after taking the job was blunt: there is no point bringing upgrades to the track if you cannot race them long enough to learn from them.
This is the context in which ownership decided to accelerate a planned transition. Towriss downplayed the idea that recent teething issues triggered the move, but the reliability record explains why a technical principal is now seen as the right profile. The team has identified that meaningful lap time remains in better build quality, better assembly precision, and better operational execution rather than in headline aerodynamic concepts.
Bottas, The Contract, and The End of Speculation
Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez were announced as Cadillac’s debut drivers after both spent 2025 away from full-time racing. Bottas served as Mercedes reserve after losing his Sauber seat at the end of 2024. Perez left Red Bull at the same time. Both signed what the team described as multi-year agreements. In Formula 1 contract parlance, that language has a specific meaning: deals that run until at least the end of 2027, with options beyond that structured around performance and team triggers.
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For months, however, that clarity was muddied by speculation. Cadillac maintains an American reserve driver program, with Colton Herta racing in Formula 2 this season to accumulate Super Licence points. At various points in the first half of the year, reports linked Herta to a race seat as early as 2027. Earlier in the season, Lowdon publicly dismissed those rumors as unfounded. More recently, links to other junior drivers, including Ferrari-backed Rafael Camara, who won the F3 title and is third in his rookie F2 season, have added noise.
Bottas moved to shut that noise down directly.
Speaking to Finnish outlet Ilta-Sanomat at Zandvoort, he said plainly: I have a ticket here for next season and I will focus solely on continuing here. In a separate appearance he reiterated that his 2027 seat is secured and that he is not concerned about an early exit. Discussions about anything beyond 2027, he said, are for later.
The team has mirrored that stance. Towriss said he is very confident Perez will remain with Cadillac into 2027 despite persistent links to Williams in the event Carlos Sainz moves. He described both drivers as assets, specifically praising Perez for driving very well and pushing hard behind the scenes. The message from the top is consistent: there are no changes planned for 2027, even if, as Towriss added with typical F1 caveat, things can always change.
For Bottas, now 37 between Zandvoort and Monza, the question of age has inevitably been raised. His answer has been equally direct. He said he is in good physical shape, that his reaction times are the same as when he started, and that experience adds value each year rather than subtracting from it. At no point, he said, has it felt like anything has gotten worse.
The Human Reaction: Surprise, Loyalty, and Realism
Bottas’s public statements about Lowdon’s departure have been notable for their balance.
He did not pretend it was expected. Of course it was a surprise in the middle of the season, he said. He described Lowdon as a friend and credited him with the enormous work of getting Cadillac from concept to starting grid.
At the same time, he acknowledged what every driver in the garage could see. When a brake system repeatedly fails, when two-car finishes become rare, when upgrades cannot be validated because the car does not finish, something needs to change. His phrasing for the ownership style was pointed: I would think that such a change is a certain American way. When you see that something needs to be changed, then it is done quickly.
He stopped short of endorsing the specific personnel choice. When asked directly whether removing Lowdon was the right call, his answer was pragmatic rather than political: Time will tell how the new guy performs his task. It is a response that reflects a decade of experience in top teams, including five seasons as a championship contender at Mercedes where he learned how quickly technical leadership can define a season.
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That equilibrium — personal loyalty combined with professional realism — is precisely why Cadillac wanted him in the first place. A new team does not just need speed. It needs drivers who can give consistent, actionable feedback without catastrophizing, who can separate the emotional impact of a sacking from the engineering task of making the next race better.
Where Cadillac Actually Stands on Performance
Bottas has been unusually candid about the car’s true pace, which helps set realistic expectations for what a principal change can and cannot achieve in 2026.
Asked what Cadillac could achieve if reliability disappeared overnight, he answered: We wouldn’t be able to get into the points yet, because the gap to the others exists. In normal races, we could currently place somewhere around 18-20th place. That’s where we are.
That assessment aligns with external analysis. Cadillac has been holding back a struggling Aston Martin for much of the season, but fell to the back again after Aston Martin introduced a large upgrade package in Hungary. The midfield in 2026 is exceptionally compressed, led at the moment by Mercedes, with Andrea Kimi Antonelli leading the drivers’ championship. For a new team with a customer Ferrari power unit in its first year and a car that is still overweight, points were always going to require attrition, strategy variance, or weather.
The goal for the remainder of this year, therefore, is not a dramatic leap up the standings. It is operational maturity. Finish with both cars. Validate the correlation tools. Give the aero and vehicle dynamics groups clean data sets from Friday to Sunday. Use the remaining races as a rolling test program for 2027.
Why 2027 Is the Real Prize
Formula 1’s regulation cycles create a paradox for new teams. The year you enter is never the year you can win. The year after a major rule change is where you can reset expectations.
The 2027 technical regulations, which evolve from the major 2026 reset that introduced increased electrical power and sustainable fuels, will lock in key architectural decisions in the coming months. For Cadillac, that window is existential. The team is simultaneously learning how to operate as a Formula 1 team and designing the car that will define whether it remains a backmarker or can fight in the lower midfield on merit.
This is where Budkowski’s FIA background becomes strategically valuable. The regulatory process in Formula 1 is collaborative in name and competitive in practice. Teams lobby for interpretations that suit their concept while trying to close loopholes that suit others. Having led the technical department that policed those debates, Budkowski knows how to steer regulation discussions in a way that favors a team that is still building its own engine program for the future under General Motors.
Driver continuity plays into that as well. In a regulation transition, teams benefit from having the same drivers in the simulator and on track, building a shared language around car behavior. Perez and Bottas have more than 500 Grand Prix starts and 16 wins between them. That combined database of how a good car should feel, how a tire should be managed, how to set up a car for both qualifying and race, is an asset that cannot be replicated by a rookie, even a highly touted American rookie.
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Towriss has said Cadillac is not here to participate but to become a winning organization in the future. That future is not 2026. It is the end of the decade. Securing Bottas and Perez through at least 2027 is a way to ensure the development curve is not interrupted by another variable.
An American Way of Managing
The cultural footnote in this story deserves attention because it explains why the move felt abrupt to the European paddock.
In most European-run teams, a founding principal would be given the full debut season, with a transition announced in October and executed in December to avoid destabilizing an already stretched group. The American sports ownership model, particularly one rooted in TWG and GM, operates differently. Decisions are centralized, data-driven, and executed quickly once ownership concludes that the rate of progress does not match ambition. There is less emphasis on paddock optics and more on organizational velocity.
That approach can be jarring. It can also be effective if the replacement brings immediate process improvement. The risk, of course, is that it undermines morale in a team that has worked flat-out to reach the grid. Cadillac is trying to mitigate that by framing the change as a planned evolution rather than a punitive sacking, and by keeping its driver lineup stable as a counterweight.
Whether that framing holds will be determined by results, not press releases.
Stability as a Performance Tool
In the end, Bottas’s contract confirmation does more than end speculation about Herta or Camara. It provides the team with a form of stability that is itself a performance tool.
A driver who knows he will be in the car next year drives differently. He is more willing to sacrifice a practice session to run experimental parts. He is more willing to give unfiltered feedback about fundamental car flaws because he knows he will benefit from the fix. He is more willing to invest in relationships with engineers who will still be his engineers in six months.
For Cadillac, which has spent the first half of the season learning how expensive it is to not finish, that mindset is essential. The team does not need to find half a second in downforce next week. It needs to finish in Zandvoort, Monza, Baku, and beyond, to accumulate the laps that allow it to understand where that half second actually is.
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Bottas, with his ticket for 2027 confirmed, can now focus on that job without the distraction of market rumors. He has made clear he respects the ownership decision even if he was surprised by its timing, and that he will judge Budkowski by what changes on track rather than by what is said off it.
Cadillac’s challenge is now to show that the second phase of its project accelerates learning rather than interrupting it. If Budkowski can resolve the brake cooling issues, improve build quality, and bring the factory and trackside operations into tighter correlation, the team will enter the winter with a credible platform for 2027. If not, the debate about leadership will continue, regardless of who holds the title.
For the moment, at least one variable is settled. Valtteri Bottas will be in a Cadillac in 2027. In a season defined by instability, that continuity is the foundation the team needs to build on.
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