How McLaren went from “chaos” to F1 champions

When McLaren CEO Zak Brown first joined the Formula 1 team back in 2016, he admitted some surprise about what he found – and not in a good way.

From the excitement about joining his favourite squad, the reality check of the ‘chaos’ he walked into was not an easy one to deal with.

As he sits down exclusively with Autosport to reflect on his journey from that low point to get to where McLaren has become constructors’ champion, he admitted that the first impression was “a lot worse than I thought it was”.

At the time, the struggles McLaren was facing with Honda were pretty clear to see – but the mistake that many made was thinking that its engine was its only deficit. For Brown, problems were everywhere.

“I think we now know that wasn’t even probably the biggest part of the issue,” added Brown, who saw problems with management, structure and sponsorship.

“You had a revolving door in leadership and chaos at the board level, which has been well documented. You had no adult supervision on the racing team and people. You’ve got leaders, but people need good leadership.

“On-track sponsorship was at a record low and everything on the factory floor was a conspiracy theory. There was a lot of negativity. We were way behind on development. I think there was almost an arrogance of ‘we are so good’ that we took our eye off of wind tunnels and CFDs.

“So that’s kind of what I walked into.”

Making change

A nose cone in front of the McLaren garage. Jenson Button and Fernando Alonso wait in their McLaren MP4-31 Honda cars

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Having spent the first part of his career as a sponsorship guru, Brown knew how to run a big business, but his switch to McLaren was the first time he had stepped into a management role with a racing team of such a scale.

And being what he would even admit was a little bit wet behind the ears on that front meant he had to bat away any lack of self-confidence when it came to proving to the staff that he was in this for the long haul.

“I’d been around racing,” he said, “but actually standing up and talking to a racing team, when they’re all staring at you, you could feel the: How long is this guy going to be around?

“Everyone else had been around a year or two, and you could kind of feel that. So you had to portray confidence.”

Brown says that the priority from day one was sorting out the senior figures, because if that was not right then everything else was doomed.

“The first thing I did was change the leadership team, kind of one by one,” he said. “I didn’t come in with that in mind, but I quickly identified this place needs new leadership.

“Some people I hired I had worked with at JMI [the sponsorship agency founded by Brown]. Some people were brand new. And only one was an internal promotion, which was Laura [Bowden], now our CFO, because to have a great racing team, everything needs to fire on all cylinders, right?

“If you’re going to have great commercial success, it’s got to have a huge fan base. You have got to have a great comms team to engage with the fans. You’ve got to sell sponsors to be able to hire the best people, to do a new wind tunnel.

“It’s not just have a great aerodynamic department. You’ve got to have that. But then there’s everything that feeds into that.”

While changes were taking place behind the scenes to give the Woking factory the management structure it needed, revolution was coming on track too.

The Renault wake-up call

Stoffel Vandoorne, McLaren MCL33

Photo by: Manuel Goria / Motorsport Images

At the end of 2017, Brown moved to end the Honda partnership and switch the squad to customer Renault engines for the 2018 season, in a change that actually proved to be an awakening moment for a team that had led itself to believe its chassis was as good as anybody else’s out there.

Brown added: “That was a great wake up call, because I think everyone thought we were just bolting a new engine in and here we are. But it was actually, ‘we’ve changed that, it’s a little better, but we’ve still got some big issues’ So I think that was healthy.”

What followed then were those challenging Covid 2020/2021 campaigns where off track Brown battled to shore up the finances that had left it risking collapse without the support of its shareholders.

“We were definitely on the brink,” said Brown. “We were paying all our bills, but we were months away, and not several months, from [shutting]. We knew we could make it through the year, but we were in a situation that if we didn’t have a cash injection, we would have been at risk.”

On track there was the unprecedented situation caused by the unique 2020/2021 campaigns of frozen car development where Brown felt the new team of Andreas Seidl and James Key had the good fortune to inherit a competitive package, and duly get the credit for the previous regime’s efforts.

“Everyone kind of thought with the new people that had come in, Seidl, James Key ‘like, wow, look at what they’ve done in ‘21’ and it was actually the team before,” said Brown. “So really the first time their collective work was seen was ’22.”

A difficult start to that year, allied to problems Daniel Ricciardo faced, triggered concern for Brown. But the eureka moment for him that things were not where they needed to be came at that year’s French Grand Prix when a much hyped upgrade package failed to deliver.

Brown said: “It didn’t work, and the response from the leadership, that was not what I expected. I thought we’re in trouble now. So I had some pretty serious conversations.”

Over the summer break, Brown dealt with the Ricciardo issue as the team and driver reached a deal to end their partnership at the end of the year.

Brown also decided, after Seidl had come to him saying he had signed a contract to  join Audi, to agree to an early exit so he could make the internal change he wanted: putting current team boss Andrea Stella in charge.

“I could have gone [to Seidl], ‘no, hang out your contract’,” said Brown. “But it was like, no, actually, congratulations, you can join tomorrow.

“I’d actually wanted Andrea Stella to run the team before I made that decision, but he had originally turned it down [over the 2019/2020 winter]. He felt he wasn’t ready, and that’s the type of guy Andrea is. He’s not ego-driven.”

Brown recalls his second more successful attempt to convince Stella to join once it became clear that Seidl would be moving on.

“I went: ‘Andrea, I really need you’,” added Brown. “He tells a funny story. I was calling, he was having an espresso, and he was like, I need another espresso! He didn’t accept it on the first call. He was like, ‘let me think about this, it is a big ask.’ But ultimately, I got him over the line.”

The Stella impact

Zak Brown, CEO, McLaren Racing, Andrea Stella, Team Principal, McLaren F1 Team, congratulate each other

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Brown tasked Stella with doing a root and branches review of the racing team to help shape it in a way that he felt would work best. And, while the Italian had not been willing to shake the tree in his previous capacity as an engineer, now he was in a different role.

“I asked him to look at everything,” said Brown. “He’d obviously been paying attention, and he’s a guy who stays in his lane of authority. But now I was like: ‘I want you to have total authority.’

“We knew the start of ’23 was going to be a mess. We made some changes. James Key and Tony Salter, left, and it empowered people like Pete Prodromou, who had been a bit sidelined.

“We just put the right guys back in charge, because we didn’t really make many new hires. We just restructured it. We then told the media: ‘We’re going to have a terrible start to ’23.’ And we were spot on!

“Then there was the hard part. We were getting blasted by everyone, but our partners were hanging in there, because we’d been on a nice journey, and the shareholders were totally hanging in there.

“They all wanted to know, what are you doing? You need to fix this! But I never felt that they weren’t going to give me the opportunity.”

That beginning of 2023 offered a disconnect between the results the team was delivering on track and the rapid rate of progress with upgrades that were taking place at the factory.

Brown said: “We started to see a rate development. Then we had this weird dynamic of getting killed on the race track and publicly slaughtered, with a quiet confidence back at the factory.

“I think what was good was we knew we were going to be bad in ‘23 and we called our shot. So it wasn’t like we were scratching our head. We knew we weren’t going to be good.

“At this point, we had got plenty of sponsorship and there was a lot of belief in Andrea’s leadership, and that leadership team were firing on all cylinders, right? Across finance, HR, comms, commercial. We were very united, and it made us stronger.”

The final steps

Lando Norris, McLaren F1 Team, 1st position, Zak Brown, CEO, McLaren Racing, and the McLaren team celebrate in Parc Ferme

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Confirmation of the upwards trajectory came at the 2023 Austrian Grand Prix, when a planned big upgrade did the job.

“Andrea kind of called his shot at Austria, which was out of character for him,” added Brown. “He was like, ‘oh, that’s going to be a big one.’

“We rolled it out on Lando’s car. It was strong, but then afterwards we knew Lando was always good there, so was it him or was it the car? But then at Silverstone it was ‘wow’.”

From that moment on, McLaren has built on its form. Developments have worked and the progress has been steady so that when that Miami upgrade arrived in May this year, it catapulted the squad to the front.

Brown thinks McLaren is now back to the kind of team that he originally fell in love in.

“I think we’re on our A-game now,” he said. “We’ve got the best sponsor portfolio on the grid. I think we have record revenues. We are profitable, which is a sign of the success we’ve had on track.

“But we go racing for trophies, not for economics. I think we’re back to the McLaren I knew, which was, ‘oh did you see what McLaren did on track or off track.’ And I put it all down to people at the end of the day.

“We’ve all got great wind tunnels. We’ve all got great CFD. But it’s the people that make the difference.”

And the key focus for Brown now, as his squad celebrates that first F1 constructors’ title since 1998, is ensuring it doesn’t drop the ball now.

“If you look at some of the other teams out there, that have got great technology, great drivers, and kind of slid backwards, I think it’s because the culture’s not where it needs to be,” he said.

“My primary goal now is to bottle up what we have right now, add to it where I can, but not let anyone eat, as Andrea calls them, the poison biscuits – which is the politics internally, or the politics that people try and lob in.

“It’s easy to happen when we have a bad weekend or a weekend we could have done better, but the way Andrea is able to pick the team up and go ‘don’t go there’ it is amazing. It’s don’t start blaming each other. We’re a team. It’s just kept us really solid.”