SimplyAbuDhabi XLVIII

McLaren Racing’s Zak Brown: ‘Everyone said we were finished’. B y T h e I n t e r v i e w P e o p l e L ess than a second. Faster than the blink of an eye. That’s the difference between everything and nothing in Formula One. Zak Brown, the boss of McLaren Racing, knew that if the pit stop by his driver Lando Norris was 0.7 seconds faster than that of Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz, he would win the final Grand Prix of last season in Abu Dhabi. Victory would earn McLaren its first F1 constructors’ title in a quarter of a century. Most people would run away from that kind of high-octane stress, but Brown cannot get enough. “I’m fascinated by the speed, technology, and precision of modern racing,” he says. McLaren nailed the pit stop and took the title. “It was the greatest moment of my career”. Brown grew up racing before moving into F1 sponsorship and taking over McLaren in 2018, masterminding one of the most thrilling revivals in any sport, as the Woking-based team have already won the Constructors’ Champion title and for the first time in nearly 20 years, McLaren took the drivers’ championship with Lando Norris emerging victorious and Oscar Piastri placing third. “We’ve gone from being the worst team to the best team in the shortest period of time”, he explains his new book called, inevitably, Seven Tenths of a Second. Most sports folks come across as pained by the quest to win, rather than thrilled. Not Brown. “I love my job!” he insists. While Brown may be known to be hard on competitors, he is even harder on himself. “I’m a workaholic. I’m motivated by fear of defeat”. He works hard and fast. “The competition is insane, so we’re running all the time. The weak and lazy don’t survive”. Brown’s love of F1 spans five decades. It was the summer of 1981 when his parents took the then nine-year-old to the Long Beach Grand Prix. “I was instantly intoxicated by the sound, the speed,” he recalls. He moved to Britain, the home of motorsport, aged 18. He raced and won karting championships and went on to compete in Formula 3 in the 1990s and British GT in 2012-13. But he was forced to concede he was not good enough to make it in F1. What was the problem? “I’m a sore loser. I’d yell at myself in my helmet if I was losing and you can’t perform in sport like that. You have to channel your emotions into something positive. Novak Djokovic does it best”. It did not take him long to find “a new high-adrenaline interest: deal-making – the sport of business”. He started cutting sponsorship deals in F1 for and in 1995 he founded JMI (Just Marketing International), which grew to become the world’s biggest motorsport marketing company. Brown moved on to McLaren Racing as executive director, and in 2018 became the chief executive. It was a dream for a man “who was always a McLaren guy because [Ayrton] Senna was my favourite driver”. But it was a daunting challenge. The team, founded by New Zealander Bruce McLaren in 1963, had fallen to ninth in the constructors’ title race in 2017 and failed to win a single F1 race between 2012 and 2021. Strategy was “all over the place”, with five CEOs in the six previous years. “Nobody knew which way to row. Sponsorship and morale were at rock bottom. We were losing £125m a year. Everyone said we were finished,” Brown recalls. When Covid hit, McLaren teetered on the brink of collapse. “We were weeks away from not making payroll”. Painful cuts, a stop-gap loan from the Bank of Bahrain, new investment from a private equity outfit, and a £170m sale and leaseback of the firm’s Norman Foster designed headquarters, saved the firm. McLaren and Brown’s fortunes began to change in 2023 when Brown promoted Andrea Stella, the acclaimed former race engineer for Michael Schumacher, to team principal. Stella reconfigured the 2023 season car, a move that was proven right in the 2024 season. Now McLaren Racing is profitable again and Brown has increased sponsorship revenue tenfold. The firm, he declares, “has never been stronger. So there is no ‘let’s take our foot off the throttle’. Foot down!” F1 shows few signs of cooling down either. The sport’s fanbase has never been bigger. It is attracting new teams – Cadillac joins next year – and new sponsors, including mighty luxury goods giant Louis Vuitton. Can the boom continue? “Yes. Because F1 is so entertaining. Sport is entertainment and if you ever forget that, you’re in trouble”, Brown says. Simply Abu Dhabi | 161