Zak Brown interview: On McLaren's rise, keeping the team on top and papaya rules

In 2016 McLaren was at a low competitive and commercial ebb, locked in a toxic cycle of mutual recrimination with its engine partner, Honda, and struggling to attract high-value sponsors – and retain existing ones.

Behind-the-scenes boardroom intrigue would soon result in the ousting of Ron Dennis, whose drive and punctilious attention to detail had defined the team since the 1980s. Chief executive Jost Capito, a recent high-profile recruit from Volkswagen Motorsport, barely had time to warm his seat before he was out, too.

Zak Brown, a former racer, was Formula 1’s pre-eminent sponsor-wrangler: his company Just Marketing International, which he later sold to Sebastian Coe’s CSM, was responsible for landing some of the biggest deals in motor racing – from Martini’s return to F1 as Williams title sponsor to the likes of Diageo and GlaxoSmithKline.

On his watch McLaren has restructured and rebranded, re-adopting classic elements of its history including the papaya orange livery from the late-1960s and early-1970s, expanding its reach into IndyCar and sportscar racing – and returned to the winners’ circle in F1.

It’s now nine years since you joined McLaren – but how did that move come about? You were quite a left-field candidate – people were talking about you as being the next Bernie Ecclestone rather than running a team…

So I was headed to Formula One [Management, the commercial rights holder]. That was kind of my dream, if you like, because I’d been on the commercial side of the sport for 20 years, but I’ve always been a racer. But I think the F1 opportunity made a lot of sense and was kind of exactly my skill set.

At the same time, Ron Dennis was trying to recruit me to join McLaren. I was good friends with Ron, had done a lot of business with McLaren. But with all due respect to Ron, I’ve been my own boss for kind of my whole life.

And so the idea of being number two, even though that would have been the case at F1, but with a bit of a path to having the opportunity – no promises – to be the big boss… It was clear Chase [Carey] was brought in [to FOM] for a certain period of time, whereas with Ron, it was kind of like… maybe, maybe when I’m done – but by the way, I don’t think I’m done anytime soon. So at the end of the day, I was gravitating towards F1.

Big-name hires aside, Brown’s focus has been on unlocking the potential of staff already on the books

Photo by: Clive Rose / Formula 1 via Getty Images

But then I got a phone call one day from [McLaren shareholders] Shaikh Mohammed and Mansour Ojjeh. They kind of said, ‘We’re going to make some changes. We know you’ve been talking to us. We’d love to come have you run the show.’

I was like, ah, now that gets me – that’s a different opportunity. Because I was always a McLaren fan, always my favourite team, loved it, did all different sorts of racing. I was very close with McLaren because of my business. And I’m a racer at the end of the day.

So I felt like McLaren could give me the personal enjoyment of not only being a deal maker and a brand builder, which is kind of what the F1 commercial role is, but what the F1 commercial role didn’t have that McLaren had is when the lights went out, I’m in the race.

And coming back to being a racer, being drawn to the competitive side of, not running the show, but being in the show was very compelling to me. So that’s ultimately how it all came about.

"It helped that I’m a racer, because a lot of the times you see people come in that don’t have a racing background, and they’re the ones that usually say or do something to show they don’t know the sport. And I think that gave me a lot of credibility on the shop floor" Zak Brown

Whenever anyone joins a business in a senior role, it’s a regime change. You do your due diligence and you work out what you want to do differently. So what was that process like? How much of a change of mindset did it require from you as well?

Quite a bit. I was used to having 1300-1400 people, leading a group that size – because when I sold to CSM and they put me in as group CEO, it was about 1400 people. So the size I was comfortable with, very comfortable with the commercial side of the business, but not with the technical side of the business.

And I’ve seen so many people over the years open their mouth and show their ignorance. I wanted to make sure I never said or did anything that made people think, ‘This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about’. So it took me a little bit of time.

I pretty quickly identified I needed a lot of leadership change. And there’s no one here today on my leadership team that was on the leadership team when I joined. There are two people I promoted, but they weren’t on the leadership team at the time. And that wasn’t my design in the sense of I’m coming in, I’m going to change everything.

McLaren’s Senna era inspires Brown, although Dennis had to step aside when new broom swept in

Photo by: Rainer Schlegelmilch / Getty Images

It’s quite the opposite. I want to come in and I want to understand everything. But then I quickly came to the conclusion I needed to change my leadership team. And not just people, but structure.

That was the first thing I did because I felt like I needed more people rowing in the same direction, more leadership, because that’s really what the team lacked. You had boardroom tussles going on. Ron running it, [Martin] Whitmarsh is running it, Ron running it, Eric [Boullier] running it, [Jost] Capito running it for two weeks.

Forget about those individual people. Some of them very good, some of them not. But no business is going to be able to build momentum and provide direction when you have, I don’t care who they are, five different bosses in five years, six years. I knew I needed to bring stability, but I also needed to rebuild trust.

There was a lot of paranoia on the factory floor. It wasn’t very transparent. Fans were grumpy, sponsorship was at a record low, terrible on-track results. And as I say, other than that, everything was great. What was great was our brand.

And I knew out of the people, so many had been here for so long, that there was greatness in there, but it hadn’t been unlocked. So my approach was: let me bring the leadership to the table, let me get the economics going and get some belief behind our direction. Hence changing to the papaya, which was what our fans wanted. I started bringing in sponsors that would allow us to invest in wind tunnels, etc. And then it just started to build a lot of momentum.

Did it help that you were a fan of the team beforehand? Is there a particular era in the team’s history that kind of appeals to you, inspires you?

For me, it would be the [Ayrton] Senna era, closely followed by the [Mika] Hakkinen era. Because even though I was deep into racing by the Hakkinen era, I wasn’t in F1.

I love the history of McLaren. And I think it helped that I’m a racer, because a lot of the times you see people come in that don’t have a racing background, and they’re the ones that usually say or do something to show they don’t know the sport. And I think that gave me a lot of credibility on the shop floor, that while some people maybe said, ‘What does he know about running an F1 team?’, there wasn’t a, ‘What does this guy know about F1?’.

In 2016 McLaren was at a low point competitively and commercially as Honda partnership turned sour

Photo by: Manuel Goria / Motorsport Images

You’ve made a conscious decision to broaden the scope of McLaren’s racing programmes with IndyCar, the WEC programme. Is there an element of crossover and cooperation between those entities, as there was in the 1970s?

We’re in the business of racing. That was one of the things that was exciting – Shaikh Mohammed and Mansour said, ‘Hey, you can expand this into other forms of racing once you get F1 back on track’.

IndyCar gave us more North America, which is a huge part of our fanbase and one of, if not the most important market for most of our sponsors. So we wanted to have a competitive difference to our competitors in F1. And I’ll give you some examples.

The World Endurance Championship is about getting closer to our automotive business. But when you put the three together… Arrow Electronics, our title sponsor in IndyCar, joined our F1 team. BAT [British American Tobacco], when they joined us, we were up against another F1 team, but we were able to say, ‘We’ve got a bigger North American presence because 46% of the business is North America’. So the sponsor crossed over.

"Different racing platforms, different entry points for sponsors. So the fans love it. The sponsors love it. Our employees love it" Zak Brown

Then you get into talent, driver crossover. Pato O’Ward, our IndyCar driver, doing FP1s. So there’s some driver crossover. Personnel, you can’t share resources because IndyCar and F1 are maximum effort. What you do have is people who have been on the F1 team a long time and don’t want to travel to 24 races anymore, or always wanted to live in America. So we have had personnel move between the three series.

It gives us a storyline inside McLaren of these growth opportunities: north, south, east, west. Different racing platforms, different entry points for sponsors. So the fans love it. The sponsors love it. Our employees love it.

And it provides incremental opportunities for all of them. When you put that all together, that’s why we have the racing portfolio we have.

There was no let-up in self-criticism and the drive for improvement in the debrief following the Spanish GP 1-2

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

One of the other interesting aspects of McLaren’s recent success is that you’ve got there without doing too much shopping. You’ve hired in people such as Rob Marshall, but mostly it’s been promotion from within.

I think the magic we’ve created is unlocking the performance of the team that was clearly already sitting here. We brought in some other people because you want to have other perspectives. But I think at its core, we unlock the potential and the performance that was already sitting here.

So what are the main improvements left with the team and the drivers? Because you’ve already won the constructors’ championship two years in a row. As we speak, it’s highly likely one of your drivers will win the drivers’ title. So what are those next opportunities? How hard are you looking for them?

We’re looking very hard for them. Sometimes they slap you across the face but mostly they’re really small, incremental opportunities. The minute you think you’ve perfected anything, you’re going backwards.

You come out with this new component – you can make it lighter or more durable. So we have a mindset of we’re chasing perfection. We know we’re never going to catch it, but that’s not stopping us from chasing it. And we know that milliseconds count in this sport. So we’re of the mindset of there’s room for improvement everywhere. We’re satisfied, but we’re never complacent.

Andrea [Stella] would probably remember this from his time at Ferrari: Rob Smedley said that in 2004, when Ferrari had by far the fastest car on the grid, Jean Todt would make them hang their heads in shame if they did anything other than finish 1-2 at every race.

I don’t believe in shaming people. We’re a resilient group, but you learn.

We finished first and second in Spain this year and if you’d been sitting in our internal debrief you’d have thought we DNF’d – because we led with, ‘Here are the 10 things we did wrong that we could have done better’. And it’s all very positive intent, but that’s the mindset of the team. Of course, we celebrate and that’s an important reward, but you quickly move on and you get down to the next race.

Employing two top-line drivers at liberty to race each other isn’t an easy option, but Brown wouldn’t have it any other way

Photo by: Bryn Lennon / Formula 1 via Getty Images

Obviously you’ve got two top-line drivers, which is a choice, and you’ve allowed them to race each other – which is also a choice and a difficult one. The easy choice when you run an F1 team is to have a number one driver and a compliant number two. So what was the thinking behind setting out this ‘let them race’ policy, and what have been the moments where you thought, ‘Actually this is a bit harder to manage than we expected’?

The ‘papaya rules’ kind of took on a life of their own, I think, because we said it over the radio once. It’s just common sense. Don’t run your team-mate off the track, certainly not with all four wheels. We don’t want our cars touching.

It’s a lot more simple than people think it is. We’re racers. We’ve always let our drivers race. Senna-Prost, Lauda-Prost… Yes, it can end in tears, but we’re determined for it not to end in tears. And so, while we have a million different suggestions on how we should run our racing team, we’re sticking to our values.

We’re going to stay true to our racing principles, if you’d like, which is we’re racers and we’re going to race each other hard, and we’re going to make it to the end.

And our two drivers are going to shake hands and hopefully, hopefully we finish first and second. That’s what we’re pushing for and get in a situation where we let them decide who’s first and who’s second. And we’re just being transparent, fair, honest, but we’re not perfect.

"We can put our head on the pillow saying, ‘We raced, we gave both drivers an opportunity. And if someone beats us, they beat us’" Zak Brown

So it does add stress. First of all, it makes it a lot easier to win the constructors’ championship if you finish first and second. And if you have two number one drivers, you’ve got two chances of winning the drivers’ championship, not just one.

I’m excited about these next races, not worried. And we know the consequences are, it could be like 2007, where we took points off each other, but we can put our head on the pillow saying, ‘We raced, we gave both drivers an opportunity. And if someone beats us, they beat us.’

What we don’t want to do is lose by beating ourselves. My aim is to keep both of these drivers with us for the long term – if one of them wins the championship, the other one won’t, but I want them to know that they decided it for themselves out on track. And whatever happens, they come back next year ready to go again, knowing they’ll get a fair crack of the whip.

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IndyCar is integral to McLaren broadening the scope of its racing activities, tapping into the US market and fanbase

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