A one-sided, mutual firing? Plus: Your midseason team grades revealed

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Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today I was thinking about a classic Formula 1 question: What is Red Bull going to do with its driver lineup?

It comes around summer every year, and this year is no different. Except today, my thoughts are on Red Bull’s junior team, Racing Bulls.

And right before I was ready to submit this newsletter, the shocking news came that Cadillac fired its team principal after just 11 races. So we’ll start there.

I’m Alex, and with the F1 summer break still in full swing, it’s once again just me in your inbox.

Cadillac Change: Lowdon axed as team principal

The email subject “Cadillac Formula 1®®®® Team appoints Marcin Budkowski as new Team Principal” rather changed the course of my afternoon.

Mainly because the claim that Graeme Lowdon was suddenly replaced by Budkowski after “a planned leadership transition as the organization evolves from its initial build phase into the next stage of racing performance” just made me so annoyed.

Lowdon was fired. And Budkowski — who rather tipped his hand when he said he was yet to visit the Cadillac base at Silverstone in the United Kingdom — was suddenly named his replacement. Hardly an orderly, long-planned transition.

Dan Towriss, Cadillac team CEO (and CEO of the motorsport division of majority team owner TWG Global) later told reporters that “Graeme and I always talked about that there would be a transition at some point.”

But he also said “this decision was mine” and “it wasn’t a mutual decision” with Lowdon, who has yet to comment publicly on the matter.

No wonder Towriss “wouldn’t put a timetable” on the length of the “planned leadership transition” when asked about it in the media roundtable Teams call with Budkowski, which followed Towriss informing Lowdon of his exit only this morning.

This all made me think of Christian Horner (don’t worry, I have a point). Not about Horner’s own sudden axing as Red Bull team boss in July 2025, but how, when he first arrived at that team, his own appointment was so sudden a half-drunk coffee from his predecessor remained on his new office desk.

So often, sporting decisions are fast and brutal. I think it would have been better for Cadillac to have been clearer on that from the off. At least Towriss didn’t completely brush off questions about it.

But questions are going to keep coming. Especially as Towriss confirmed the team has “issues” with communications and a silo culture at the team’s Silverstone base. That’s in addition to its place in the back of the F1 pack and its cars regularly catching fire.

And, above Cadillac, TWG’s founder Mark Walter is in the headlines after selling the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission investigating insurance companies Walter owns.

F1’s newest team just got even more newsworthy.

Grades: Your midseason team report card results

Now, let’s go back to last week’s PT, where I presented Luke Smith and Madeline Coleman’s midseason team report cards feature for the 2026 campaign. Afterward, I asked you to assign your own grade for each team.

First up, an apology: PT readers only had six A-F grade options, unlike those with pluses and minuses available to Luke and Madeline.

So, while this is something of an apples and oranges comparison, we can nevertheless see where the two sets of grades differed. And here, two teams stood out.

Both writers and readers assigned A’s to Racing Bulls and Mercedes, B’s to Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull, C’s to Haas, Audi and Cadillac, and an F for the awful Aston Martin effort so far in 2026. But the grades for Alpine and Williams didn’t match up.

In both cases, PT readers gave these squads lower grades than Luke and Madeline. You all graded Alpine a C, rather than B+, and Williams an E, instead of D.

Considering just how badly off the pace Alpine was in 2025, when it switched off development to prepare for its new era with Mercedes power from 2026, a rise from 10th to sixth in the constructors’ standings is worthy of a B, for me.

But Williams, which also turned off 2025 car development very early and made a big deal out of how the huge change in car design rules offered it a chance to rejoin the big teams for the first time in a generation, E feels right.

Sure, Williams overachieved with Carlos Sainz’s two podiums in 2025, and its finishing position as best-of-the-rest behind the top four squads raised expectations for a team building back toward its historic best.

But it has been a very underwhelming start to the new era; there’s just no escaping it for Williams team boss James Vowles and co., while drivers Sainz and Alex Albon are frustrated at the failure to kick on from 2025.

Thanks to everyone who voted on our midseason team report card grades. Now click here to have your say on midseason driver rankings, and we’ll go through the results — you guessed it — in PT next week.

Driver Debacle: Lawson’s last chance at Red Bull?

On Monday, Luke and Madeline revealed their combined top-10 driver rankings for the season to date.

No prizes for predicting Kimi Antonelli in the top spot; it really couldn’t go to anyone else considering this is just his second season in F1. (Again, please head here to have your say on midseason driver rankings!)

But, to let you in on our inner workings for features such as these, when Luke asked me to help rule on Lando Norris and Max Verstappen for the second and third places (I advised putting Norris ahead due to his clear step as a world champion and because Isack Hadjar has beaten Verstappen on merit at times this year), I found myself surprised by one of his and Madeline’s selections.

Namely, Racing Bulls driver Liam Lawson at No. 10. 

There’s no denying Lawson is having the strongest season of his F1 career to date, with impressive points finishes in Monaco and at Silverstone. But his rookie teammate Arvid Lindblad is pushing him hard — particularly in qualifying.

Lindblad being so close to Lawson exposes the New Zealander to risk. Long-held F1 logic suggests a driver will get better with age, so Lindblad already being so close to Lawson’s level after just 11 races suggests Lindblad has a higher performance ceiling overall.

Now, Antonelli unexpectedly blowing Russell away this year exposes a problem with that long-held F1 logic. But this is how F1 teams think about drivers. Red Bull, as the only organization on the grid with two teams, thinks about four (and more, as we’ll see) all at the same time.

Assuming Verstappen stays put for 2027, as appears most likely right now, that creates a bottleneck across the Red Bull and Racing Bulls seats. This isn’t a huge problem for the senior squad, as it’s so happy with Hadjar’s performances since he replaced Yuki Tsunoda.

But a lack of upward options for the Racing Bulls pair is an issue — because another Red Bull junior is currently a favorite to win the 2026 Formula 2 crown. Luke interviewed Bulgarian racer Nikola Tsolov just before the summer break and was impressed by his attitude, as well as his six wins this F2 season.

If Tsolov wins the F2 title, he can’t go back to the feeder category in 2027, per its rules. And if Red Bull opts to promote him to F1 next year — Racing Bulls team principal Alan Permane confirmed he’s “next in line” and “to say he’s on the radar would be a little bit of an understatement” when speaking to reporters at Spa last month — this leaves Lawson exposed.

Lindblad being so good so quickly means he would surely be kept on in any case. Plus, Lawson already had a shot alongside Verstappen and blew it (tough as it was with Red Bull’s early 2025 car handling issues).

No Red Bull driver has ever gone back to its top team after a demotion.

Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies may be less ruthless than the old Horner/Helmut Marko combo on driver decisions, but that remains to be seen (and also assumes the top managers at the senior team are still making driver decisions for both teams).

But there is a lesson from Red Bull’s history that I think Mekies should heed: 2017 Pierre Gasly.

Having won the 2026 GP2 title under immense financial strain, he was initially sent to race in Japan’s Super Formula series — a top line single-seater category where the cars rival F1 speeds.

Gasly came close to winning it as a rookie, before he was finally elevated to F1 with a third of the season to go in 2017. Red Bull following a similar path would not only give it — and Lawson — some breathing room, but if Verstappen does walk for 2018, it increases its options of filling its slots with its own drivers.

The decisions Red Bull makes on its seats will be one of the key themes to watch when the summer break ends.

Outside the Points

The official F1 website has this delightful selection of images taken during the season so far from photographer Alex O’Conor.

Mercedes is considering handing Antonelli new engine components he (and teammate George Russell) is almost certain to need at his home race at Monza, Italy, next month due to reliability issues faced earlier in the year.

Luke explained how track limits abuse has been the only real flaw during Antonelli’s season so far.

And Madeline outlined the complex car development race playing out at most races, which is even more important to the story of each event as team form has been changing significantly around the new parts they are putting in their cars — common in the early seasons of any new F1 era.

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