Racing
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McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown says the team’s return to the top of Formula 1 was driven above all by a change in “people and culture,” after he arrived in late 2016 to what he described as a dark, unhappy environment.
Speaking to media including RacingNews365, Brown said the contrast with the current McLaren is stark. The team has since won the 2024 and 2025 constructors’ championships, and Lando Norris ended McLaren’s 17-year wait for a drivers’ title last year, but Brown said the biggest shift was not technical talent. It was the atmosphere around the team.
“I think about my first day joining,” Brown said. “It was a dark environment, and that was literally the paint on the race car, being black and dark grey, to the walls. You could feel it was a cold environment. It wasn't a happy environment. The partners weren't happy, our drivers weren't happy, and the majority of our race team wasn't happy, [and there were] a lot of conspiracy theories running around.”
Brown said McLaren already had the talent it needed. The task was to unlock it by changing the way the team worked and felt internally.
“I think we're a much more vibrant team,” he said. “There was a huge amount of talent in here. It was just about unlocking it, providing motivation, excitement, and bringing some fun back. We race cars for a living. It's more fun winning than losing, but at the end of the day, it's a pretty fun job.”
He pointed to a broader leadership effort behind that shift, with team principal Andrea Stella the most visible public figure, while also crediting McLaren’s head of people, chief financial officer, commercial department and communications staff for helping build the environment he wanted.
For Brown, the clearest sign of progress is that McLaren no longer operates with the divisions he found when he joined. He said the team has moved on from an “us and them, upstairs, downstairs, racing team, commercial department” mentality to one where departments beyond the garage see themselves as directly involved in performance.
He used weight-saving work as an example. If the team has to modify the car’s vinyl as part of that process, Brown said the commercial department now gets excited because it feels it is contributing to making the car faster. In the same way, when McLaren wins on Sunday, the finance department understands it had a role in that result.
Brown said that sense of alignment now runs across about 1,400 people, with the predominant amount involved in Formula 1 even if not all of them are directly on the program. “When you can get 1400 people rowing in the same direction and everyone understanding how important their role is to our on-track success, it creates an awesome environment,” he said.
He stopped short of claiming politics have disappeared entirely, but argued McLaren has reduced them to a minimum, a change he sees as central to sustaining the team’s championship-winning level.