Lewis Hamilton’s winter reset has another moving part: he’s split from long-time manager Marc Hynes on the eve of the 2026 season.
The timing isn’t accidental. Hynes is understood to be heading for a role with Cadillac’s new Formula 1 project, and with that looming, Hamilton has opted to sever the formal tie rather than drift into a situation where loyalties and priorities are inevitably tested.
For Hamilton, it’s also a familiar pattern. Hynes — a former British F3 champion — was previously chief executive of Hamilton’s Project 44 management company between 2015 and 2021, before the pair went their separate ways. When Hamilton completed his move to Ferrari at the start of last year, Hynes was brought back into the inner circle, in a broader attempt to tighten the operation around a driver embarking on the most scrutinised late-career switch in modern F1.
That reassembled support structure didn’t deliver the year anyone around Maranello had in mind. Hamilton’s 2025 season was, by the standards he’s set across two decades, brutally unproductive: no podiums at all, and a late-season slump that became impossible to dress up as “adaptation”. Four consecutive Q1 exits to finish the campaign was bad enough; being last on pure pace in qualifying in Las Vegas — the first Ferrari driver to do so since 2009 — underlined how far the project had drifted from the original promise.
In that context, Hamilton changing the people around him is less gossip than it is signal. Drivers don’t tend to overhaul their ecosystem when everything’s humming. They do it when the margins have become suffocating and the feeling is that too many small inefficiencies are piling up into one big problem.
Hynes’ Cadillac destination is part of the story, too. He already has links there through Zhou Guanyu, signed by Cadillac as its reserve driver for 2026. Hynes sits within Zhou’s management set-up alongside Graeme Lowdon — Cadillac’s team principal — which makes the transition feel more like a straight line than a surprise leap. For Hamilton, keeping his management aligned solely with his own interests is the cleanest call, particularly with the paddock about to absorb a new manufacturer-backed team with serious ambition.
And it’s not the only change happening around him.
Ferrari has already confirmed Hamilton will work with a new race engineer in 2026. Riccardo Adami, who was on the radio to Hamilton through 2025, has been reassigned internally to Ferrari’s junior academy and its TPC programme. The expectation is that Cedric Michel-Grosjean — most recently Oscar Piastri’s lead trackside performance engineer at McLaren in 2025 — will become Hamilton’s new voice on the pit wall. Michel-Grosjean’s LinkedIn profile lists him as currently on a career break after leaving McLaren at the end of last year.
None of this comes with the neat “fresh start” label teams love to sell in February, but it does fit the reality of where Hamilton is. He’s heading into a second season at Ferrari needing more than just speed; he needs clarity, comfort and rhythm. The margin for friction — a misunderstanding in feedback, a mismatched approach to sessions, a dynamic that doesn’t quite click — is smaller than it used to be because the performance cushion isn’t there.
Hamilton himself hinted at exactly that kind of internal audit when he spoke after the final race of last season in Abu Dhabi. Asked what needed to happen over the winter to go into 2026 with confidence, his answer wasn’t about a single lap time fix. It was about process — and about efficiency, both within Ferrari and in his own travelling, planning and off-track operation.
“I think we just need to analyse where we’ve been, what’s been good, areas that we can improve on,” he said. “I know where they all are. It’s sitting down with the team at the end of the year.
“I’ll look internally with my personal team away from the track and see what we can do make [things] more efficient with timing and travelling and all these different things and I’ll do the same with the team.”
That reads differently now. In Abu Dhabi it sounded like a veteran’s end-of-year housekeeping. In February, with Hynes moving on and Ferrari reshuffling the key conduit between driver and pit wall, it looks more like a deliberate stripping-back of anything Hamilton feels is slowing the machine down.
The temptation is to frame these moves as crisis management. The more accurate read is that Hamilton, at 41, is doing what the very best drivers do when the margins tighten: controlling what he can control. Ferrari will bring whatever it brings to the track in 2026, and the sport’s new era will judge it quickly. But before any of that, Hamilton is making sure that when the lights go out, the operation around him is leaner, sharper — and his.
