McLaren’s renaissance man

Brown doesn’t have a long list of championship titles and race victories to his name, but he was quick enough to earn a meagre living that way for several years, competing to a very high standard in Formula Ford, British F3 and Indy Lights. Penniless, he sometimes slept on friends’ floors – a rite of passage for many aspiring racing drivers.

It wasn’t lightning raw speed that kept Brown’s aspirations alive all those years, but his business acumen. While contemporaries like Jan Magnussen were painting their masterpieces in slick rubber on track, Brown was teaching himself about sponsorship. Soon enough the penny dropped and the pounds quickly followed: he realised he was better at raising money than racing cars, and that it was far easier to raise it for the fastest, most highly rated young drivers out there. It was a realisation that would eventually make him a rich man and very highly regarded in motor racing’s C-suite.

Through Just Marketing International, the motorsport sponsorship agency he founded in 1995, Brown introduced blue chip companies like electronics giant LG and investment banking firm UBS to Formula 1; Bernie Ecclestone, grateful and impressed, sang his praises. Brown co-founded United Autosports in 2010 with racer and former mentor Richard Dean. The Wakefield squad is now one of the UK’s top independent race teams, winner of the LMP2 class at Le Mans on two occasions and the FIA World Endurance Championship in the same category.

With a track record like that, it’s surprising it took until 2016 for one of F1’s top teams to come knocking. He became executive director of McLaren Technology Group in November 2016 and CEO of McLaren Racing less than 18 months later.

When the call came, there was only ever going to be one answer. ‘McLaren has always been my favourite team ever since Ayrton Senna joined in 1988,’ Brown tells us. ‘This is the team I want to be at. I love the history. While I’m focused on today and tomorrow, I definitely think about the past, and that comes with a lot of pressure. It’s an unbelievable brand and racing team, it’s got to have the best drivers in the world… The responsibility of leading a racing team like McLaren is immense, but I love it.’

From a competitive standpoint, McLaren was in terrible trouble when Brown arrived. Its 30-point haul in 2017 was enough for only ninth in the constructors’ championship – second from last, a repeat of the team’s abysmal performance in 2015. And the decline had been rapid. In 2010, 2011 and 2012 McLaren had finished second, second and third in the standings, winning numerous races in all three seasons. The engineers, designers, mechanics – the entire staff at Woking – knew how to win, expected to win, but something had gone badly awry.

Brown wielded his axe. For 2019, his first full season as CEO, McLaren fielded its first all-new driver line-up since Fernando Alonso joined the team in 2007 to partner a promising young rookie named Hamilton. Many thought and said aloud that Carlos Sainz and Lando Norris, the latter in his debut year, formed McLaren’s weakest driver pairing in a generation – not a single F1 podium between them.

Yet the progress was there for all to see – fourth in the constructors’ standings in 2019, third in 2020. Surely ditching the unloved Renault power unit in favour of the prized Mercedes for 2021 would see that upward trajectory continue. But no. Despite several podiums that year including an opportunistic win for Daniel Ricciardo at Monza, McLaren had slipped back to fourth by season’s end. And Brown was beginning to smell trouble.

‘In 2022, our storyline was the challenges we were having with Daniel,’ he says, referencing Ricciardo’s poor and somewhat out of character performances compared to teammate Norris, who was emerging as one of F1’s fastest drivers. By the end of the 2022 season, Norris had racked up more than three times the number of points; Ricciardo was done for. By the summer break, Brown had decided to part ways with the popular Australian, replacing him with rookie Oscar Piastri.

Not that a simple driver swap would be enough to arrest the slide. ‘I knew trouble was coming,’ says Brown. As the media busied itself with speculation surrounding Ricciardo’s struggles, Brown had bigger concerns: ‘I felt our car was kind of average in 2022 but that’s not what got all the media attention. We had a big development for the French GP in July that didn’t work. These things happen. What I didn’t like was the response from some of the leadership to what was a failed development.’

Not finger pointing, Brown says, but a sort of lackadaisical, unperturbed attitude to what was, for him, a very concerning turn of events. Complacency simply wouldn’t do. ‘It’s like, no, this is a problem. Don’t forget,’ he continues, ‘this was the same team that was working on the 2023 car.’

Brown would have to wield his axe again, now more than ever before. He released team principal Andreas Seidl at the end of the 2022 season and made changes across the leadership team. Senior engineer Andrea Stella was promoted to team principal.

‘But at that point the 2023 car is kind of baked in the oven. When I promoted Andrea, he quickly came back and said, “We’re in trouble.” We announced at the launch of the 2023 car that it was going to be a bad start to the season, but I didn’t think it was going to be that bad.’

How bad? Team leader Norris finished 17th in the opening two races; he was the slowest qualifier at round two in Saudi Arabia. ‘Andrea quickly got on restructuring, empowering the right people, putting people in the right places, giving them the right guidance. And so what happened was we were going racing, getting killed on track, but we knew from our development that [we were making progress].

‘So it was like, how do you hold on to your sponsors and your fans and employee morale when publicly, you’re getting pummelled, but yet, back at the factory, you’re getting pretty excited about what’s going on in the wind tunnel? So the good news was that we weren’t surprised by [our start] to 2023 and I had made the people changes to fix that; but then it takes six months to [produce an upgrade package]. And then we went Austria.’

When the desperately needed upgrades did finally arrive in July that year, there were only enough parts for one car. Norris drove those upgrades to a promising fourth in Austria, comfortably the team’s best result of the season so far. Next time out at Silverstone, he qualified on the front row with his teammate immediately behind him. Norris finished second in the race, Piastri fourth. ‘All of a sudden it was like, wow, we’ve fixed this car. And from that moment onwards, everything we’ve put on the car has worked.’

Norris and Piastri scored nine podiums between them before the end of the season, but it wasn’t until 2024 that McLaren got back to winning ways. And it was all down to another deeply effective upgrade package. It may have taken a fortuitous safety car to bring Norris back into contention at the Miami Grand Prix, but Lando fans, McLaren supporters, neutrals and, frankly, anyone who enjoys seeing at least some competition in Formula 1 will long remember watching him simply drive away from Max Verstappen in the closing stages, dropping the car and driver pairing that had dominated the season so far to secure his first win in Formula 1, and only McLaren’s second in 12 years.

The race for the constructors’ title was on. McLaren’s deficit to Red Bull – 99 points before the Miami GP – came down one piece at a time, like a wall being dismantled brick by brick. It took until the 17th round of the championship at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix for McLaren to wrestle the lead from Red Bull, but from there it didn’t look back. The Woking squad stayed out in front until the chequered flag flew at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in December, the final race of the year. It had been 26 years since the team’s last constructors’ title and 16 since it last won the drivers’, but McLaren was on top once more.

And scoring 14 more points than second-placed Ferrari, champions with room to breathe? Not even close – Brown describes that race as ‘the worst two hours of my life’. Piastri was turned around at the first corner by an overly ambitious Verstappen lunge, leaving Norris at the front of the field with no wingman, being hunted down by the Ferraris. It was a simple enough calculation – if Carlos Sainz or Charles Leclerc overtook Norris to win the race, the constructors’ title would go to Maranello not Woking.

‘We were seven tenths of a second away from losing the World Championship,’ reckons Brown. Had Norris’ pit stop taken 2.7 seconds rather than the two dead it did take, he’d have been passed by Sainz and, most likely, not able to get in front again. Seven tenths of a second to end an agonising 16-year wait – you see why Zak Brown so hated those two hours.

Talk turns to drivers. In Norris and Piastri, Brown has in his stable two of F1’s brightest young talents, but there remains a sizeable question mark over Piastri’s capacity to compete with Norris over a full season, and Norris’ ability to defeat the likes of Verstappen in the ruthless cut and thrust of a title fight. He rarely got the better of Verstappen on track last season, and despite a significant car advantage for much of the year, he didn’t assert himself as the man to beat often enough.

Regardless, both drivers have the unflinching support of their boss. ‘I think both of them are going to challenge for the championship this season,’ he says. And if that turns out to be true, Zak Brown must call on every scrap of experience he has as a driver, all of his tact as a manager, his wits as a politician, his shrewdness as a businessman and his fortitude as a competitor to keep his ambitious young drivers in check, and to ward off the destabilising efforts of his rivals. He made McLaren Racing a hunter once more, but winning that championship has, in turn, made his team the hunted.

Brown’s quick to recognise Andrea Stella’s contribution, and he puts McLaren’s success down to the senior management changes he made at the end of 2022. ‘Let’s say we’ve got 1000 people on the Formula 1 team,’ he says. ‘I changed three people. So 997 people who gave us the car at the beginning of 2023 are the same that just won us the World Championship.

‘So it was the leadership, the camaraderie, the trust, the transparency, the culture, and you can’t buy that. What you need is the right people working together. And then our sport may be a little bit unique – we all spend time trying to destabilise the competition. It’s very political in that sense. And so I think when you look at Red Bull, which is an unbelievable team with hugely talented people, they’ve lost some really good people [including Adrian Newey]. They had their challenges at the beginning of the year off track. And I think Max Verstappen is an unbelievable driver. They’ve got a great wind tunnel. They’ve got a great racing car. What went wrong there is, I think, the environment was destabilised.’

Now Zak Brown must prove that the 2024 constructors’ title wasn’t a one-off – that his contribution to the long and illustrious history of the McLaren Formula 1 team will be more than a single championship nicked in the narrow gap between one team’s rapid decline and the ascendency of another.