“It Was a Lot Worse Than I Thought”: Zak Brown Recalls McLaren’s Journey From P9 to Champions

McLaren’s rise to the top may have looked sudden but in reality, it took nine long years. Coincidentally, that is also the number of years Zak Brown has spent with the team as its CEO. The McLaren boss looked back at his journey of turning the side into a championship-winning one. While at it, he also recalled how he did it.

Brown was recently a part of the Autosport Business Exchange where F1 journalist Rebecca Clancy interviewed him. Clancy reminded the McLaren boss of the shambles the team was in when he inherited it.

The Woking-based outfit finished P6 in the standings with Brown in charge for the first year. It got from bad to worse for him as McLaren only managed a second-from-last finish a year later.

“It was a lot worse than I thought. I came in knowing that things weren’t in great shape. You could see [from] the brands on the car. You could see the results. But once I arrived, I realized it was really bad,” he told Clancy.

Another reason why Brown found the job challenging was its nature — running an F1 team. He had prior experience running an agency with a strong workforce of 1,200-1,300. The scale of it, therefore, did not intimidate him. He had always been an F1 fan, but running a team was a different ball game altogether.

That led him to take up the commercial side of the job first, something he admittedly was comfortable handling. Another reason he concentrated more on getting cash in was the realization that the team was in dire need of resources. The Californian tackled the problem head-on and got the team commercially on track in a short span of time.

How Brown dealt with ‘poison biscuits’

The next step was to get to know the people working in the team. That, however, did not turn out to be a pleasant experience. Brown found out how toxic the environment in the team was. Next, what he did was identify the culprits behind the toxicity and eliminate them.

“Changed the majority of the leadership team, but one at a time, once I got to know everyone. It took a while to turn it around. It was pretty toxic on the shop floor, as far as the politics, and as Andrea [Stella, team principal] calls it, poison biscuits. There were lots of poison biscuits being passed around,” he recalled.

Next, it was time to address performance issues. The team identified power units to be holding them back. In 2017, the papaya team got rid of Honda and started purchasing engines from Renault. As that did not work out either, McLaren switched to Mercedes engines and ultimately won the championship with them in 2024.

In Brown’s own words, “It was quite a daunting task to tackle, but we got there in the end. It hasn’t been straightforward.”