Inside Cadillac’s brake issues, shock leadership change and why Graeme Lowdon had to go

The second phase of Cadillac’s arrival in Formula 1 has begun, with Graeme Lowdon’s tenure ending in abrupt fashion. With Marcin Budkowski now in charge, what changes are already evident at the American squad?

Over the summer break, Cadillac announced that Marcin Budkowski would return to Formula 1 as its new team boss, as Graeme Lowdon was replaced in his role with immediate effect just before the Dutch Grand Prix.

Why Graeme Lowdon left Cadillac as Marcin Budkowski took charge

The change in leadership at Cadillac came as a surprise, at least from an external perspective, given the competence with which the team had hit the ground running since debuting at the Australian Grand Prix.

Almost immediately, as Lowdon himself acknowledged in his last media appearance before the summer shutdown, the team was being held up for comparison against the establishment, underlining just how well this new squad had started life in F1, particularly in the context of just how wide of the mark the experienced Aston Martin team started the year.

There were undeniable issues in the first half of the season, with the most pressing one being that of reliability – the ongoing overheating and braking problems, which reoccurred with a small fire on Valtteri Bottas’ car in Hungary, seemed like basic and fundamental matters that should have been overcome over half a season, while suspension problems were also annoyingly recurrent.

It’s in this technical malaise that Lowdon appears to have fallen down, with sources indicating over the Dutch Grand Prix weekend that Lowdon was simply too business-orientated, rather than being across all areas of the technical, to root out these issues.

It’s worth remembering that, while Lowdon’s background is as an engineer, his most recent F1 experience, at Manor Marussia, was as a CEO, overseeing the business as a whole. But, with Dan Towriss occupying this role at Cadillac, there was no escape route to move Lowdon into this role and, instead, Towriss made the decision to simply remove someone who had become surplus to requirements and, in his place, put in someone with more recent technical know-how.

Lowdon isn’t the only departure from Cadillac, with head of communications Lucy Genon also being released from her role concurrently, an increasingly common occurrence in a communications department when there is regime change. In another change, and entirely separate from the decision to remove Lowdon, Towriss’ own PA, Fiona Hewitson, was also let go just before the summer break, for undisclosed reasons.

It was put to this writer over the Zandvoort weekend that Lowdon’s role, by rights, should have come with a logical succession after the season-opener in Australia, given the completion of the remit to oversee the build-up and arrival of the team on the grid – a task that Lowdon, in a display of prescience, would acknowledge as his own, quite narrow, skillset when he spoke to media including PlanetF1.com at the Monaco Grand Prix.

Any chance Lowdon had at expanding this skillset of his dwindled rapidly with every technical failure. Despite the complexity of modern-day F1, the cars are largely reliable, and the inability of the MAC-26 to regularly reach the chequered flag was hurting the team’s ability to log the mileage needed to unlock more understanding, more speed.

Despite Lowdon’s popularity, and his near-universal likeability amongst his colleagues, it became increasingly clear to Cadillac that it was felt he was not the right person to lead the team into the second phase: moving up the grid.

Added to this feeling was Lowdon’s apparent reluctance to lean on the expertise available by way of being part of a larger OEM, ie. General Motors. Lowdon is said to have attempted to resist any help, or offers to help bolster the team’s technical knowledge, from GM – an attitude that is said to have frustrated Towriss.

With Cadillac moving into a new Silverstone facility in the week before Zandvoort, the timing was right to make the move. It’s impossible not to feel sorry for Lowdon through the process, and while there is a genuine sense of disappointment that a rather inelegant axing had to be made, sources have tacitly indicated that someone more technical is a better choice for the next phase.

Indeed, it’s understood that Budkowski had full and frank meetings with both drivers ahead of Zandvoort, in order to answer any and all questions regarding the car and the development path for the MAC-26; the first time, it’s said, both drivers have had such a meeting with the team principal.

What has Marcin Budkowski spotted at Cadillac?

Step forward Marcin Budkowski, who ticks the boxes of being a recent technical figurehead, thanks to being a technical director at Enstone, while boasting executive leadership skills from his time heading up Renault/Alpine, as well as having the knowledge of how best to use the resources and capabilities of a large OEM. Previous roles included being head of aerodynamics at McLaren, and working for the FIA as a technical advisor before heading up the department.

Alongside Cadillac’s move of facility, Budkowski himself moved to the UK last week, coinciding with three days at the factory to meet staff, view the facilities, and get a feel for what Cadillac, under Lowdon, had done well, and where there is room to improve to help chief technical officer Nick Chester and chief designer John McQuilliam – a colleague of Lowdon’s from Manor Marussia – deliver at their best.

“A good first impression when I walked in of the work environment, which is definitely a step up from where the team has been operating until then, which was a provisional structure on the Silverstone circuit enclosure,” he said of the new factory.

Particularly impressed by Cadillac’s new engineering floor, a circular design in which the staff gather around a podium upon which perches a Cadillac F1 car model, Budkowski said he’d made the most of the time available to him at the factory as he didn’t leave for Zandvoort until the last possible flight on Wednesday night.

“The last two days were getting into it, but it’s going to take me a few more days or weeks to get the full picture,” he said.

“But 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, and then it’s going to be a matter of time for me to get a full hang of the organisation and see what works, and what can be improved.”

Cognisant of the fact that he is stepping into a team where Lowdon had quickly built up loyalty, Budkowski took the time to point to the “immense admiration and respect” that he has for what his predecessor managed to pull together in such a short period of time once it became clear that Cadillac could, and would, make it to the grid in 2026.

But the decision-making to achieve this task created its own headaches, as he addressed.

“I’m impressed, having seen where the people were working before and knowing how tight the deadlines were to build a team from scratch, to design, build, homologate a car in time for testing, and go testing; these guys have done a cracking job,” he said.

“Equally, in the time they had available, they had to take some shortcuts, and these shortcuts, some of these shortcuts are fighting us a little bit because… these guys have gone to war, and the decisions you make in wartime are different to the decisions you make in peacetime.

“I think if they had three years instead of one to do it, they would have done it a little bit differently. 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 are a lot of people who could have done that. So it’s a great foundation. It’s a great starting point.

“There are things that are actually very, very good. There are things that need attention, and also there’s potentially some reprioritisation to be done in terms of what’s important.

“There are some opportunities to improve things, reliability, of course. There are some little performance weeks here and there that can be brought. I think there’s a lot as well on the car quality and the execution on the track to focus on.

“I think that focus is going to naturally move to next year because this year’s car’s been done in a rush, and there’s a lot of learning that’s been done. There’s still a lot of learning to be done, but there’s a lot of learning already this year that will be applied to next year’s car.

“I have immense respect and admiration for what’s been achieved so far by Graeme for building this team from the ground up, recruiting these people and actually showing up and racing with a level of competitiveness I think is reasonable for a new team.”

Addressing the brake issues that have plagued Cadillac, Budkowski explained that Lowdon faced a “cascading” sequence of events in trying to overcome the problems.

“There are reliability issues that maybe are not the level you expect from an F1 team, but there’s a huge complexity in some areas. Brake areas are one of them,” he said.

“There have been some mistakes made in terms of design and materials, etc. They will be addressed. It’s an unlucky chain of events in a way because the brake failures are not a single source of failure.

“There’s a cascade of different things that it’s one of these situations that, when you fix one thing, something else goes wrong, and you learn as you do it.

“It’s painful because, at this stage, we’re really in the learning phase. We need the mileage; we need the laps to get as much learning as possible, as much data as possible.

“Again, a lot of teams rely on data from years of racing. We’re starting from an empty database, and we need to fix the relevant issues just to get more data and more learning. So that’s one of the obvious big priorities. But if they were simple, they would have been solved.

“Every team has teething issues with a completely new car, a new set of regulations, and a new power unit. We have significantly more than other teams, because we’re a new team and learning everything.”

Budkowski hinted that the team will look to its youth to start building for the future, alongside the team looking for eminent names from elsewhere on the grid – PlanetF1.com understands that names such as Paul Monaghan and Craig Skinner are in advanced negotiations to join the squad.

“A lot of the people at the factory have designed cars, and some of them have designed quite a few cars. But one thing that struck me when I went around the office in the morning is there’s a lot of young people there, very bright, young graduates, young engineers, young designers, super bright, super talented, super motivated.

“But they don’t have the experience and the strength and depth that a lot of teams have. Teams build collective kind of knowledge; there’s the individual experience and knowledge, and also there’s a collective, sometimes we refer to it as the DNA of a car – it’s the history of a group of people building cars for years.

“Some cars have better traction etc. It’s kind of embedded in the collective experience. There’s none of that in this group.

“So this car is even more of a prototype, and this group of people have now experienced 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.”

What of Cadillac’s United States’ ‘centre of gravity’ shift?

Cadillac’s new facility near Silverstone allows the new team to carry out key manufacturing and logistics planning, and is a more permanent solution to the aforementioned structure Budkowski spoke about.

Alongside that, Cadillac is also making use of General Motors facilities in the United States, where GM has a technical centre in Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as renting out Toyota’s wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany.

But the current status quo is not the long-term ambition. In the United States, Cadillac has been building a brand-new state-of-the-art facility in Fishers, Indianapolis, while the General Motors F1 power unit department is being built up in the Charlotte area, beside the parent company’s facility.

It’s all part of the American squad’s scaling up of its F1 push, which will see the transition of some of that effort to the United States. During the summer break, it was suggested elsewhere that Cadillac would start forcing some current staff, including marketing, to move to the US if they are to remain employed – a claim that is understood to be inaccurate.

Budkowski will be able to define where he sees the strengths and weaknesses of the operation, and make the changes he believes are needed in order to ensure the team’s competitiveness, including how best to make use of the facilities owned or operated by Cadillac.

However, there’s no denying that Cadillac is building up US operations. Last winter, Cadillac’s executive engineering consultant, Pat Symonds, said a switch to American engineering and manufacturing will happen “relatively soon”, as he outlined how the team intends to shift its “centre of gravity” to the new Fishers facility.

Cadillac is developing operations in America, which, when online, will see Graeme Lowdon’s team have a more visible presence in the United States, alongside retaining operations in Silverstone.

“What we will leave in Silverstone… the idea is the concept design will remain in the UK for a fair while. What we have termed our rapid response manufacturing, so things like front wings and floors that you’re changing race to race, we’ll probably leave that in the UK.

“Manufacturing, we will move to America reasonably soon, always keeping a capability in the UK, and then, over a period of time, we’ll start transitioning other parts.

“So I guess our next big decision is the wind tunnel, and to me, it only makes sense to build the wind tunnel in America.

“Now, at the moment, we’re using a wind tunnel in Germany. So, to me, the difference between going to Germany and going to America for wind tunnel testing is not actually a big deal.

“If you’re running a remote wind tunnel, you have to have a mission control, just like we do for races. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s in Germany or whether it’s in America, and actually, the manufacturing will be in America.

“So in some ways, it’s easier. Electricity, these things use a lot of electricity, and electricity is about a third of the price in the USA than it is in the UK. And that goes under the cost cap!”

Given the changes at Cadillac, it might now be more accurate to say that the stance of making a full switch to a US centre of gravity is no longer accurate, and that the US and UK facilities will work in tandem.

After all, where a move to the United States would count against Cadillac is that the veterans of F1, the established skillset, are primarily Europe-based, with the UK’s ‘Motorsport Valley’ well-known for having seven teams located within a relatively small patch of the country, making it easier to attract existing talent. Included in the seven is the American squad, Haas, which has its primary base in Banbury as well as a facility in Kannapolis in North Carolina.

It’s something that even Ferrari and Racing Bulls, in Italy, and Audi, in Switzerland/Germany, have to factor into their recruitment strategies, given their locations in Europe mean personal life upheaval for when someone from one of the seven UK teams does decide to move.

Speaking before his departure, Lowdon commented on this topic when asked by PlanetF1.com about the ease with which this shift in Cadillac’s centre of gravity can be made.

In his opinion, talent recruitment isn’t an issue: “I think it actually gives us wider access to talent, and you’re quite right… the centre of gravity shifts.

“But there’s a centre of gravity for individual elements of the team; aero design still has focus at Silverstone with the wind tunnel in Cologne.

“Other areas will very firmly be established in Indianapolis, and what we’re trying to do is actually turn this to an advantage in that it gives us a bigger catchment area to try and attract talent, and it’s not a case of moving things from Silverstone to Indianapolis.

“It’s a case of building things up in Indianapolis, and, at the moment, we have a trusted network of very good suppliers, but we’re working with some of those to build capability into Indianapolis over time as well.

“So it’s not the simplest thing in the world to do, because, if it was, everyone would be doing it, and clearly they’re not.”

Of course, modern-day technologies have made the world a smaller place, and remote working has also significantly streamlined how departments spread across the world communicate in real time: a significant factor that differentiates what Cadillac is trying to do from historic American constructors.

America has yet to achieve any significant success in F1. Aside from the Indianapolis 500, which featured on the F1 calendar through the 1950s despite a widespread lack of participation from the usual championship entrants, just two American-licensed constructors have ever won a grand prix.

The 1976 Austrian Grand Prix was won by John Watson in a Penske, while the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix was won by Dan Gurney’s Anglo American Racers.

While Penske’s win was under an American flag, the cars were built in Dorset in the UK, meaning Gurney’s Eagle is the only American-built F1 car to have ever won a race.

Put to him that F1’s traditionally Euro-centric nature elevates the challenge of Cadillac’s plans further, Lowdon had replied, “Hopefully, we’ll change that. It’s a country that stuck a man on the moon, so I think they know what they’re doing! So we’ll get around it.

“We’re still building. We are building the plane while flying in it or the ship while we’re sailing in it. We are still doing that. We’re still building factories,” he said.

“Next to my desk are some steel-toe cap boots and a hard hat, and we go and look at construction sites – the very, very big one in Indianapolis and then smaller ones in Silverstone, and obviously the PU companies building the factory down in Charlotte as well.

“[Fishers] is still in construction at the moment, and there’s going to be more announcements soon about when various things will come online there.”

Revealing the construction, a huge project, is well underway, Lowdon explained that the new sim is going into the factory at present, and, in 2027, some of the first opportunities of the new facility will start to come online.

“It’ll be phased – it’s 450,000 square feet. It’s not small,” he said.

“It’s very well advanced, the whole construction there, but it’s a huge project, and there’s a lot happening and coming online at Silverstone as well.”

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