Racing
© Eterna
Zak Brown says he was on course to join Formula 1 under Liberty Media in 2016 before McLaren offered him a bigger role, a decision that he now frames as the turning point that led him into the team’s revival.
Speaking on The Race Business podcast, the McLaren Racing CEO said he believed he was “actually going to go there” to Formula 1’s commercial rights holder after Liberty Media’s takeover. Brown said Liberty and then-F1 CEO Chase Carey wanted to recruit him, and that existing business ties made the move look likely.
“Chase Carey was brought in in 2016, who did a wonderful job,” Brown said. He added that he also knew Eric Shanks and Derek Chang, describing it as “a very small world,” before concluding: “I actually thought I was going to go there. And then the McLaren opportunity presented itself.”
That McLaren opportunity was not the one first put to him. Brown said his initial discussions came through Ron Dennis, but the position on offer “wasn’t as exciting as the Formula 1 opportunity.” The situation changed after Dennis left the company, when Brown said he was “presented with something that was more exciting than the Formula 1 opportunity.”
The difference, in Brown’s view, was the racing side. Formula 1 itself was “an unbelievable opportunity,” he said, but McLaren offered something Liberty could not. “When the lights go out, I want to go racing,” Brown said, drawing the line between running the business of F1 and being inside a team competing on track.
That choice mattered because of what Brown found when he arrived at McLaren. He joined McLaren Technology Group in 2016 as executive director and became McLaren Racing CEO in 2018, taking charge of a team he described as being in deep trouble. “It was a mess,” Brown said. “The team was disgruntled. A lot of politics. Fans weren’t happy. We didn’t have many sponsors. What sponsors we had weren’t happy.” He said McLaren had “record-low sponsorship” and was coming off “our worst season in the history of McLaren.”
Brown said he believed the team still had “a great brand that needed to be rejuvenated,” and made that the starting point of the rebuild. He said McLaren “went back to the papaya” and tried to become “a more exclusive brand, a more energetic, colourful, friendly, warm,” instead of what he called a “Darth Vader” image that was “black and grey and cold and not very welcoming.”
From there, Brown said, the commercial reset became the base for the racing recovery. He said he focused on rebuilding trust inside the team and “attacked the commercial side” because that was where he knew he could make a difference. “If we could get the commercial built up, we could hire the best drivers, we could get new windtunnels, things of that nature,” Brown said.
McLaren’s subsequent return to championship-winning form means Brown’s account now reads as a significant Formula 1 what-if. The executive who thought he was heading to Liberty instead chose a team role because he wanted to race, and that decision became central to pulling McLaren out of one of the lowest points in its history.