New Cadillac team principal Marcin Budkowski confirmed he’d held negotiations with “more than half” of the Formula 1 grid as he explained why he opted for the debutant outfit.
On Wednesday Cadillac made a shock announcement that Graeme Lowdon had been replaced by Budkowski as team principal during the summer shutdown of its rookie F1 campaign.
The American squad sits bottom of the championship and without a point after 11 rounds, but Lowdon’s dismissal was still a surprise considering Cadillac was expected to be slowest.
CEO Dan Towriss nevertheless opted for change and went for Budkowski, who has held various roles in the world championship since joining Prost as an aerodynamicist in 2001.
The 49-year-old Pole left Prost in 2002 for a five-year stint at Ferrari before joining McLaren, where he left to become technical and sporting coordinator for governing body the FIA in 2014.
In 2020 Budkowski then left the FIA to join the Renault squad as an executive director, while in 2021 he shared the team principal duties in a dual set-up alongside Davide Brivio.
Budkowski left the Enstone squad in 2022 and has since been a television pundit, before returning to an F1 team four years later after negotiations with various squads.
“I've had discussions in the past years with more than half of the teams on the grid - some of them more advanced and some less advanced,” confirmed Budkowski.
“But for me, it was important, if I come back to this kind of leadership role, to be in a project that I believe in and there's a few aspects to that.
“This project is very ambitious, it's backed by TWG Group which is extremely involved in motorsport, General Motors is one of the biggest car companies in the world with a lot of ambition, with funding which wasn't always the case in my previous ventures.
“Also, one thing that really, really made me very confident in joining is that all the people that I talk to, all the people who effectively will be on the board of the team and in the top leadership of the team, are motorsport people.
“They're all people who live motorsport, who understand motorsport, who've been very exposed to motorsport and I think that's very, very refreshing for me, because the conversation is completely different from the get-go.
“There's the ambition, there's the desire to build a strong team and eventually a competitive team, a team that will be able to fight at the front.
“But there's a real understanding of how challenging it is, of the timelines of the road ahead and I think since we started talking with Dan, I think our visions are very, very similar and the ways we see things developing.
“I don't feel there will be a lot of pressure on me and I'm sure there will be expectations and that's logical and normal in this kind of role, but these expectations are not unreasonable and are not completely removed from the reality of Formula 1.
“Everybody understands the size of the challenge ahead, but there is the commitment to tackle it and I'm joining this with the same mindset.
“To be honest, that part for me was beyond all the foundations we talked about and the backing and etc, it's the attitude and the vision and actually being sat and talking to people who live and breathe motorsport and who fundamentally understand motorsport.”
