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McLaren’s renaissance man

2 weeks ago

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Writer:

Dan Prosser | Ti co-founder

Date:

24 January 2025

Zak Brown greets us like a whip – quick, smart, no wasted energy. It’s brief handshakes all round, a polite smile, then a few quick strides to his chair and the lapel mic that’s waiting for him. He’s running late and we have a hard cut-off, so we’re no less keen to get started than he.

That’s how it is when you’re the CEO of the reigning Formula 1 World Champions. Days in the office (although describing Norman Foster’s McLaren Technology Centre as an office is like calling Blenheim Palace a detached house; the MTC is still breathtaking after 20 years) are rare and therefore precious, particularly with pre-season testing just six weeks away. Every minute of every one is diarised, accounted for, critical.

The theatre, deep within the bowels of the MTC, is the perfect place to hit record and quiz Brown on how he orchestrated McLaren’s extraordinary turnaround from one of the slowest teams on the F1 grid at the start of 2023 to World Champions less than two years later; his drivers, and whether they can shift up a gear in 2025 and finally challenge the formidable Max Verstappen in the drivers’ championship; the new regulations that are due a year from now, plus much more besides. For episode 250 of The Intercooler podcast, which will go live on all the usual podcast platforms and our YouTube channel on 10 February, Andrew Frankel and I did just that.

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