Marcin Budkowski

Yeah, I think if you're looking at that incident, you know, looking at the fact that a similar thing happened to Perez and Montreux, you'd probably have to say build quality issue.

again at Cadillac and obviously that's what Marcin Budkowski has come in to fix as team principal to kind of change the the processes that they go through because obviously for getting the car together for 2026 it was basically throwing a car together for the start of the year performance was secondary it was just about getting a car on track and working but yeah all of

these reliability issues

are cropped

Well, in the last day or two, there has been a chink in the armour of Cadillac and their two drivers.

And Marcin Budkowski, the new guy there, has said basically yesterday, well, we're not so sure about Bottas carrying on because they want to put Colton Herter in there.

If they do that, it'll be a complete disaster.

Colton Herter couldn't even handle Formula 2, let alone Formula 1.

I think this was Hardenak.

And he was referring here to Marcin Budkowski's relationship with Ocon.

Now, Budkowski is the new team principal, took over from Graham Loudon at Cadillac.

And Bukowski used to work at Alpine when Ocon was there.

Now, if you remember, he's saying this is a good thing, that he knows Ocon and he's familiar with him, so he should bring him in.

Well, do you not remember how that ended? They didn't even...

So anyway, back to Hardenak.

Quote, Esteban Ocon might be one of Cadillac's options.

Well, yeah, exactly.

That's one of them, is that we found out as we got to the middle part of this year, this car cannot operate over a certain number of degrees in terms of temperature, and they've had real struggles with tire wear that became apparent when we got out of sort of the one-stop races and into some more two and three-stop races, and that isn't even counting some of the fires they've started themselves, i.e., they got rid of Graham Loudon [laughs] and introduced Marcin Budkowski into the role.

So it, it's not been, it's not been easy year for them.

I don't think we were expecting it to be.

He wants to understand every part of the business.

Now, I was having dinner, uh, two nights ago in, in the restaurant down here, and I saw Marcin Budkowski dining with Laurent Mekies, and they were having the buffet.

They weren't having a la carte.

What do you reckon that's about?

Yeah, I was thinking when you, when, when now you say it, like- Yeah, I mean, Marcin Budkowski is here for how long? A month, two months?

Yeah, yeah.

So I think he's still, you know, getting to know everybody, and it's always good to catch up with, with other team principals.