Zak Brown relays confidence shown by McLaren shareholders for them to make a turnaround in recent F1 seasons despite competition where he sees no minnows anymore.
It hasn’t been the smoothest start to the hybrid era for McLaren where it initially struggled with Honda. They made a decent comeback with Renault, but switch to Mercedes didn’t bring benefits – not because of the power unit, but more on the chassis side of things.
It took them some years to get things sorted and finally in 2023, things started to look better under revised regulations. They struck gold in 2024 and took the constructors’ trophy away from Red Bull at ease, while they beat Ferrari in the final race of the season to seal it.
They took it again in 2025 and also won the drivers’ trophy in a fine display. A lot of fingers were raised at Brown for his leadership, irrespective of the team around him. But his push to put Andrea Stella incharge and get a sound technical team around him, eventually paid the way for recent success.
“I mean, it’s been an amazing quest, to go from where we were, not only on track, but off track,” said Brown to media. “I think the commitment that we’ve had from our shareholders, specifically Mumtalacat, has been unbelievable from day one. All they want us to do is win, have a great brand and take care of our people. I think because we take care of our people, that’s why we’ve had the results that we have.
“We’ve got unbelievable sponsors, total support from our shareholders, our Chairman, and that enables Andrea and I and our leadership team to put our head down and get on with the job as far as the rulebook. That’s the exciting part of Formula 1, we’ve got to do it all over again. We changed a lot of our car in 2025, so even though the rules didn’t significantly change, our technical team didn’t sit still.
“And just like our technical team, our leadership team, our CFO, our head of HR, our commercial team, our head of comms, chief of staff, they all have to do an amazing job because the complexity of a Formula 1 team to be able to put the technical team and the racing team in a position to win, there’s a lot of stuff that has to go on behind the scenes to even give them the tools, the resources, and us, the people.
“So, it’s a great accomplishment last year, because we definitely earned it the hard way,” summed up Brown, who highlighted that they have to get back to the drawing board due to the new regulations in F1 2026. It will be a hard journey as per the American, as he feels Cost Cap means that there are no traditional minnows in the sport, that even a 10th placed team can do well on their day.
“Now we’ve got to do it all over again and it’ll be tough because as I say, the worst team in Formula 1 is really good,” continued Brown. “So not only the competition of the drivers, the competition of the teams, there’s no more small teams anymore, there’s now those minnow teams that we all grew up with, everyone’s running at the cost cap. The sport’s unbelievably healthy.”
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