Budkowski Named New Cadillac F1 Team Principal
On 12 August 2026, during the quiet of Formula 1’s summer shutdown, the Cadillac Formula 1 Team confirmed a major change at the top of its organization. Marcin Budkowski has been appointed as the new Team Principal, effective immediately. He will lead the American outfit into the second half of its first ever World Championship campaign, with his first official weekend in the new role set to be the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort from 21 to 23 August.
The announcement came jointly from the team’s two operational hubs in Fishers, Indiana and Silverstone, England. Cadillac was careful to position the decision not as a reaction to a difficult start, but as a planned evolution. In the team’s language, the project is moving out of its initial build phase, where the priority was simply getting onto the grid, and into a second phase focused on extracting performance, tightening operations and laying the groundwork for long-term competitiveness.
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It is a significant moment for the newest team in the sport. Cadillac, backed by General Motors and majority owner TWG Motorsports, is Formula 1’s eleventh team and the first completely new constructor to arrive since Haas in 2016. Leading that transition from start-up to racing team will now be Budkowski.
A Founding Chapter Closes
To understand the appointment, it is necessary to acknowledge the work of Graeme Lowdon. The British executive was named as Cadillac’s founding Team Principal in December 2024, when the project was still transitioning from its original Andretti Global roots into a full GM-backed entry.
Lowdon’s background made him a logical choice for a build-from-zero job. He had previously been CEO of Virgin Racing and later Marussia, navigating the challenges of a small, independent team entering the sport in 2010. At Cadillac, his task was enormous.
From late 2024 through 2025, he oversaw the creation of a new headquarters in Fishers, the expansion of the Silverstone race operations, the signing of a technical partnership with Ferrari for power units and gearboxes until GM’s own power unit arrives in 2029, and the recruitment of more than 500 people from over 140,000 applications.
Lowdon also led the process that resulted in Cadillac signing Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas, two drivers with a combined 16 Grand Prix victories and vast experience of developing cars in top teams. He put in place the facilities, the processes, the commercial partnerships and the regulatory compliance needed to pass the FIA’s entry scrutiny and make the grid in Melbourne for the 2026 Australian Grand Prix.
Cadillac’s statement thanked him for that foundational work. The team made clear that the infrastructure he assembled, including the Fishers manufacturing site, the Warren, Michigan engineering center, the Concord, North Carolina power unit base, and the Silverstone race team, will remain the backbone of the project.
Why Budkowski, Why Now
The choice of Budkowski signals a shift in emphasis from building to optimizing.
Dan Towriss, CEO of both the Cadillac Formula 1 Team and TWG Motorsports, said the goal from day one had never been just to participate. The ambition, he reiterated, is to build a next-generation organization capable of fighting at the front. In that context, Budkowski was described as bringing the blend of technical depth, regulatory understanding and strategic leadership required for the next stage.
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Towriss pointed to the need to develop a winning mindset, along with the tools and processes that allow a modern cost-cap team to make fast, accurate decisions.
That cost-cap element is crucial. Under current regulations, teams cannot simply spend their way out of problems. Every wind-tunnel run, every manufacturing batch, every upgrade has to be justified and tracked. For a new team learning how to operate efficiently within those limits while also building its own internal systems, experience in managing large engineering organizations is invaluable.
An Engineer With a Complete View of the Paddock
Marcin Budkowski is one of the few figures in modern Formula 1 who has seen the sport from all three sides: championship-winning factory, governing body, and ambitious midfield constructor.
Born in Warsaw on 23 April 1977, Budkowski was raised and educated in France. He graduated from the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in 1999 before pursuing specialized studies in aeronautics and aerodynamics at ISAE-SUPAERO in Toulouse and Imperial College London.
That academic path, combining elite French engineering training with British aerodynamic specialization, gave him a direct route into Formula 1 at the height of its V10 era.
His first job was in 2001 as an aerodynamicist at Prost Grand Prix, the team owned by four-time World Champion Alain Prost. The team was in terminal financial difficulty and collapsed at the end of that season, but the experience opened a door. Recommended by technical director Henri Durand, he was hired by Ferrari in 2002.
He would spend the next five years in Maranello during one of the most dominant periods in the team’s history. Initially working in computational fluid dynamics, he later moved into wind-tunnel operations and aerodynamic project leadership. It was the era of Michael Schumacher, Jean Todt,
Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne, when Ferrari won Drivers’ and Constructors’ titles year after year. Budkowski was embedded in the methodology that made that dominance possible: relentless iteration, meticulous correlation between CFD, wind tunnel and track, and a culture where detail decided championships.
In 2007, seeking a new challenge, he joined McLaren in Woking. Over seven seasons, he worked both at the McLaren Technology Centre and trackside, contributing to the aerodynamic programs that carried Lewis Hamilton to his first World Championship in 2008. By 2012 he had been promoted to Head of Aerodynamics, managing a large department responsible for defining and delivering performance to the car.
He left in early 2014, having led teams through multiple regulation cycles.
His next move was unusual and highly informative. He crossed to the other side of the fence, joining the FIA as Formula 1 Technical and Sporting Coordinator, later becoming Head of the Formula One Technical Department. Working under Charlie Whiting and alongside the FIA’s safety and technical teams, he was involved in shaping and policing the regulations.
Most notably, he played a key part in the development and introduction of the halo cockpit protection system, which became mandatory in 2018 and has since been credited with saving multiple lives. The FIA role gave him an intimate, practical understanding of how rules are written, interpreted and enforced, and how the sporting governance process works during a race weekend.
In 2018 he returned to a team environment when Renault recruited him as Executive Director. The hire was controversial enough at the time that rival teams wrote to the FIA and Formula One Management to query his immediate move, but Renault positioned him as central to its rebuilding plan.
At Enstone, he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the chassis operation, overseeing engineering, production, HR and budget. The organization employed more than 700 people, and Budkowski had to align technical ambition with financial reality.
During his tenure the team rebranded to Alpine, and in January 2021 he was made a director of Alpine Racing. He effectively shared Team Principal duties with Davide Brivio under CEO Laurent Rossi during the 2021 season.
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That year brought a high point: Esteban Ocon won the Hungarian Grand Prix at the Hungaroring, the team’s first victory as Alpine and its first under any name since 2013. Alpine finished fifth in the Constructors’ Championship. Budkowski left in early 2022 when the team opted for a different leadership structure.
Since then he has remained visible and current. He worked as a technical consultant on various projects and became a respected analyst for Viaplay’s Polish F1 coverage, a role that kept him closely connected to the sport’s technical and strategic conversations. Crucially, he has been free of long-term contractual gardening leave, making an immediate appointment possible during the summer break.
The Context of Cadillac’s Debut Season
Cadillac’s first season has illustrated why starting a Formula 1 team from scratch remains one of the hardest tasks in elite sport.
Despite securing two proven race winners in Perez and Bottas, and adding Zhou Guanyu and Colton Herta as reserve and test drivers along with a roster of simulator drivers, results have been hard to come by. Through the first eleven races of 2026, up to and including the Hungarian Grand Prix, Cadillac remained at the bottom of the Constructors’ Championship as the only team yet to score a point.
The raw results only tell part of the story. The team has shown flashes of midfield pace in qualifying trim, particularly on circuits where aerodynamic efficiency is less critical. However, reliability has been a consistent weakness.
Multiple retirements have been linked to brake system overheating and energy management issues, problems typical of a new package where the integration between chassis, cooling, brake ducts and the customer Ferrari power unit is still being understood.
For comparison, Haas scored points in its second race in 2016, but other new entrants in the 2010 era went seasons without scoring. Cadillac’s leadership has consistently said it is playing a longer game, targeting competitiveness when its own power unit program, run by GM Performance Power Units LLC under Russ O’Blenes in Concord, comes online in 2029. Until then, the team is leasing Ferrari power units and gearboxes while learning to operate as a full constructor.
The 2026 regulations themselves have added complexity. The new generation of cars, with greater electrical power and active aerodynamics, has demanded entirely new tools and simulation approaches from every team. For a new entrant, building those tools while simultaneously racing is a double workload.
It is within this reality that the leadership transition was planned. Talks between Towriss, GM leadership and key stakeholders had reportedly been underway for several weeks before the August announcement. Choosing the summer break gives Budkowski a two-week window to embed himself at Silverstone and Fishers, meet department heads, review the development pipeline and travel to Zandvoort without the immediate pressure of a race weekend.
What Budkowski Says He Will Prioritize
In his first comments as Team Principal, Budkowski did not promise short-term miracles. His language was deliberately operational.
He described Cadillac as having an extraordinary foundation and ambition, but said the defining challenge of this phase is maximizing car development within the cost cap and turning every function toward competition.
He spoke about building an elite organization with a winning mindset, one that is driven, relentless when faced with setbacks, obsessed with detail and process, and able to execute with precision on Sunday.
His stated focus is on alignment: aligning people, tools and information flow so that the right decisions are made quickly and car performance improves every time the team goes racing. For anyone who has followed his career, that emphasis is familiar.
At Ferrari and McLaren he learned how top teams correlate data, at the FIA he learned how clarity of process prevents mistakes under pressure, and at Renault and Alpine he learned how to manage a large, budget-constrained organization through structural change.
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In practical terms, that is likely to mean three things. First, tightening the feedback loop between the track and the factory, ensuring that issues identified on Friday translate into effective solutions rather than experimental parts.
Second, ruthless prioritization under the cost cap, choosing development items that offer the best lap time per dollar and per wind-tunnel hour.
Third, cultural discipline, reducing operational errors in pit stops, strategy calls and reliability procedures that have cost the team chances to fight for points.
He will work with an already experienced technical leadership group. Chief Technical Officer Nick Chester, former chief race engineer Xavi Marcos from Ferrari, operations officer Rob White, and other Enstone alumni form a core that knows how to design, build and race Formula 1 cars. Budkowski’s job is not to redesign the car himself, but to integrate those groups and make the organization faster at learning.
A Significant Mid-Season Move for F1
Mid-season Team Principal changes are rare for established teams and even rarer for new ones. New constructors usually try to maintain stability through their first year to allow systems to mature. Cadillac’s decision to make a change now suggests a belief that the foundation is solid enough to absorb new leadership, and that waiting until the winter would waste valuable months of organizational development.
For Formula 1 more broadly, the appointment adds another heavyweight engineering leader to the Team Principal ranks, which have increasingly shifted from pure business managers to technical leaders who can bridge the gap between the factory and the boardroom.
Budkowski’s polyglot background, he is fluent in Polish, French, English and Italian, and his long-standing relationships across the FIA, power unit manufacturers and technical departments should also help Cadillac as it navigates its transition to a full works team. From 2029, it will need to negotiate technical regulations as both a chassis and power unit manufacturer, a position that requires credibility on both sides of the garage.
What Happens Next
Budkowski assumes his duties immediately. His schedule in the coming days includes time at Silverstone to meet the race team and engineering groups, and remote sessions with the Indiana-based design and manufacturing teams. He will then travel to Zandvoort, a tight, high-downforce circuit that will provide a stern first test of any process changes.
The Dutch Grand Prix will not be judged on points alone for Cadillac. The more telling metrics will be operational: clean practice sessions, consistent correlation between simulator and track, reliable execution and a clear development direction for the remaining flyaway races.
The full impact of a Team Principal change at this stage of a team’s life is never visible in one weekend. It plays out over twelve to eighteen months, in hiring decisions, in how the team allocates its aerodynamic testing restrictions, in how it approaches the 2027 car while still trying to score with the current one.
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What is clear is that Cadillac has completed a deliberate handover. It has retained the institutional knowledge and personnel base built under Graeme Lowdon, and it has placed in charge an engineer whose career has traced almost every facet of modern Formula 1: winning at Ferrari and McLaren, governing at the FIA, rebuilding at Renault and Alpine, and explaining the sport to a new audience on television.
The task now is to turn that breadth of experience into lap time. For a team that has always said its ambition is not to make up the numbers but to eventually fight at the front, the next phase begins at Zandvoort.
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