Cadillac calls it a planned transition, and Dan Towriss says the decision was his alone.
Cadillac announced Marcin Budkowski as its Formula 1 team principal on August 12, the release stating that "his appointment follows a planned leadership transition as the organization evolves from its initial build phase into the next stage of racing performance." Within hours, chief executive Dan Towriss gave The Race a different description: "It was my decision; it wasn't a mutual decision." Graeme Lowdon, the outgoing team principal, had been informed that morning.
Eleven rounds into its debut season, Cadillac has yet to score a point. Its best finish remains Valtteri Bottas's 13th place in China, per RACER, and Bottas and Sergio Perez sit 21st and 22nd in the drivers' standings. Formula1.com's analysis of the change counts "12 Grands Prix still to go" for the new man to work with.
One car problem carries most of the operational weight in that analysis: the MAC-26 has "suffered a chronic problem with overheating brakes, which they have failed to cure despite bringing fixes to events," per Formula1.com, which reports that "following weeks of discussions, Towriss and the General Motors leadership team decided that change was needed." A recurring, unfixed reliability limitation is the kind of failure a board can point to; it converts a general sense of underperformance into a specific engineering deadline missed repeatedly in public.
Budkowski, a 49-year-old Polish and French engineer, arrives with senior roles at Prost, Ferrari, McLaren, the FIA and Renault/Alpine on his record, including leading more than 700 people as Alpine's executive director. The Race notes he is best known for the controversial 2017 move from an FIA technical role straight to Renault, and that he left Alpine during one of its leadership overhauls, spending the years since as a television analyst in Poland. He started work on August 12 and assumes the role publicly at Zandvoort.
Lowdon was appointed team principal at the end of 2024, having previously run the Manor operation, and the release thanks him for helping "establish a strong foundation in our build-up phase." The vocabulary assigns him neatly to the completed chapter: build phase over, performance phase beginning, the man who ran the build going out with it.
A planned transition does not normally inform its outgoing principal on the morning of the announcement. Both descriptions came from the same company on the same day, one through the press office and one from the chief executive on the record. Teams control their release language; they control interview answers less well.
Budkowski's first race weekend in charge runs at Zandvoort, August 21 to 23.