Zak Brown has highlighted the dramatic turnaround at McLaren during his nearly decade-long tenure at the F1 team.
Brown joined McLaren in late 2016, initially as executive director for the McLaren Technology Group, before being appointed as CEO of McLaren Racing 18 months later.
Under his leadership, McLaren has returned to the top of F1, winning back-to-back constructors’ championships, whilst last year, Lando Norris ended the team’s 17-year wait to again clinch a drivers’ title.
Behind the scenes, Brown has also ensured the Racing operation is financially healthy, with its success helping to attract a plethora of sponsors.
Notably, however, he claims the biggest change on his watch has been the “people and culture by a country mile”
“I think about my first day joining,” said Brown, speaking to the media, including RacingNews365. “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.
“I think we’re a much more vibrant team. 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.
“So [it was about] getting everyone in a teamwork environment and the culture that all of the people in the leadership team, and obviously, Andrea [Stella] is the one who is most visible to all of you, but my head of people, our CFO, the commercial department, comms, they’ve all done a wonderful job in their respective departments.
“When I joined, there was an us and them, upstairs, downstairs, racing team, commercial department. Now it’s exciting to see when we do something like a weight-saving exercise, and you start having to kind of modify the vinyl on your race car, as small as that may seem, the commercial department gets excited about feeling like they’re contributing to the solution to make the race car faster.
“So when we win on Sunday, the finance department knows they had a big role in that, etcetera. So when you can get 1400 people, not all of those are on Formula 1, but the predominant amount, rowing in the same direction and all understanding how important their role is to our on-track success, it creates an awesome environment.
“I wouldn’t want to be as naive as to say we have no politics here, but I’d say we have very little.”
