Cadillac’s first proper winter as an F1 team has quickly taken on a familiar shape: a new badge on the garage, a busy driver roster, and a senior hire designed to stop all those moving parts from drifting out of sync.
Marc Hynes has been confirmed as Cadillac’s chief racing officer ahead of the 2026 season, a role the team says will sit right on the fault line between performance and organisation. His remit is broad by design — align the drivers and engineers, streamline how the sporting and technical groups work together, and generally make sure the operation doesn’t lose time to its own growing pains.
If Hynes’ name rings a bell beyond the junior single-seater crowd, it’s because of who he’s been alongside in recent years. The former British F3 champion ran Lewis Hamilton’s affairs between 2015 and 2021 as chief executive of the seven-time world champion’s Project 44 management company, and the two reconnected ahead of the 2025 season when Hamilton moved from Mercedes to Ferrari.
That reunion didn’t come wrapped in results. Hamilton endured a bruising 2025 campaign — the worst of his career — finishing the year without a single podium for the first time since his rookie season in 2007. And last week it emerged Hamilton and Hynes had split again ahead of 2026, with Hynes closing in on a fresh F1 role. Cadillac has now made it official.
There’s an obvious temptation to frame this purely through the Hamilton lens, but Cadillac’s pitch is less about star association and more about building a functioning race weekend machine from day one. The team’s statement said Hynes will “work to ensure peak performance throughout the team’s racing operations” by keeping the groups pulling in the same direction — the kind of job title that, in practice, becomes a referee when time is tight and tensions are high.
Hynes will also take ownership of Cadillac’s driver programme, which is sizeable for a newcomer and loaded with experience: Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez are the race drivers, Zhou Guanyu is the reserve, and Colton Herta is listed as the test driver.
“Building a new team in Formula 1 is a rare challenge, and I’m excited to help shape the culture, processes, and performance standards from the very beginning,” Hynes said. “We have a strong and diverse driver line-up, and my focus will be on creating the clarity, alignment, and discipline needed to allow everyone – drivers and engineers alike – to perform at their very best.”
Team principal Graeme Lowdon, who has been around enough start-ups to understand where they tend to wobble, was candid about why Cadillac wanted someone like Hynes in that seat.
“Marc brings an exceptional combination of racing experience, strategic understanding, and people management to the team,” Lowdon said. “His ability to connect drivers, engineers, and leadership will be critical as we establish ourselves on the grid.”
There’s plenty of connective tissue here that makes the appointment feel more like a continuation than a sudden leap. Hynes already had an existing relationship with Cadillac via Zhou, whom he manages. Zhou joined Cadillac as reserve driver last month after holding a similar role at Ferrari. Lowdon, too, is involved in Zhou’s management setup — not unheard of in modern F1, but it does underline how tight the circle is around this project.
Hynes and Lowdon also go back a long way. They worked together at Marussia — then racing under the Virgin Racing name — where Hynes was a driver coach in 2010. In a paddock that runs on trust as much as it does on lap time, that kind of shared history matters, particularly when you’re trying to set standards quickly rather than discover them the hard way.
Cadillac’s timing is no accident. The team held a filming day in Bahrain on Monday, just ahead of the start of the second pre-season test for 2026. That’s the moment the theory ends — when systems, procedures and decision-making start getting stress-tested under real deadlines, with real parts and real people.
And that’s where a “chief racing officer” either proves to be a vital layer of structure or an awkward extra tier. Cadillac is clearly betting on the former. With Perez and Bottas bringing different kinds of experience, Zhou in the background, and Herta in the wider programme, the challenge isn’t just picking the right direction — it’s stopping the operation from splintering into four different ones once the season hits.
For Hynes, it’s a pivot away from the high-profile intimacy of managing a global superstar and into something more industrial: building a culture, enforcing process, and making sure a new outfit doesn’t spend its debut year learning lessons everyone else learned a decade ago.
Cadillac’s debut season is coming fast. The hard part now isn’t assembling names; it’s turning them into a team.
