Cadillac explain decision to poach key Lewis Hamilton F1 ally

Cadillac boss Graeme Lowdon has explained the team's thinking behind poaching Lewis Hamilton's manager to join its management structure. 

Last month, it was announced that Marc Hynes would become Cadillac's chief racing officer after amicably splitting with Hamilton ahead of the 2026 season.

The two had become friends during their junior careers, in which Hynes won the 1999 British F3 title, beating Jenson Button to the crown, with the 2009 F1 champion finishing third overall. 

Hynes was drafted back into Hamilton's inner circle for his move to Ferrari in 2025, after enjoying a previous spell between 2015 and 2021, including serving as the CEO of 'Project 44', Hamilton's management company.

Hynes has existing links to Cadillac, with the team's reserve driver Zhou Guanyu also in his management stable, as is team principal Lowdon. 

Explaining the decision to hire Hynes in the senior role, Lowdon explained how he would provide a racer's link between the team as it gels, and should be regarded as a final piece "in the jigsaw" of the management structure, which also includes Dan Towriss as CEO and Mario Andretti as an ambassador.

"Anyone who knows Marc knows that he is extremely competitive in every aspect, and that's quite important, especially in a new team when we have a very experienced engineering group and technical group, but who haven't even had 12 months working together," Lowdon told media, including RacingNews365.

"That group needs to operate at the very highest level, but also from the racing side, you need to close the feedback loop. 

"You can't really have engineering delivering solutions into a racing environment unless the loop comes back, and whilst we've got incredibly experienced drivers, it is not really the driver's role to take on every single aspect of that.

"Ever since we've been able to run a car, one of our key areas of progress has been closing all these loops, whether it is in feedback on the wind-tunnel, on the driver-in-the-loop simulator, or CFD or indeed, processes and procedures in the garage.

"That is key, and obviously, technical and engineering going around in a loop together with the chief racing officer feeding back into that, so you can kind of see it as a customer-supplier relationship to some extent.

"Otherwise, you have a team that's marking its own homework, and that is not the way to progress.

"We said very early on that we want this to be the team which everybody wants to join, that everyone is proud to be in, and that people want to stay in. 

"One of the things which we are pushing really hard in terms of core values is this absolute open honesty in how we operate, because it is very difficult to progress unless you have that.

"We haven't got time to mess about, and we've got some pretty impressive competition that we need to be trying to push, so [signing Hynes] is just part of that overall structure, and it is one of the last pieces of the jigsaw of the overall thing that you see coming together."