When Zak Brown joined McLaren back in 2016, the team’s future looked bleak.
The famous car racing company hadn’t won a Constructors Championship, the sport’s highest title for Formula 1 teams, since 1998. Individual company drivers also hadn’t won an individual title since 2008. So when Brown took on the CEO role, he had one goal: get back to winning.
That didn’t happen overnight; Brown says it took him the better part of a decade to put together the right team. But by the 2023 F1 season, though, things started to turn around. The team finished fourth in the Constructors’ Championship, thanks to midseason car upgrades. But no one, not even Brown himself, expected McLaren to have the season it did in 2024.
“I thought we had a shot,” says Brown. “I was hopeful of some race wins and podiums, but clearly we exceeded all expectations.” Drivers Lando Norris, who has been with the team since 2019, and up-and-comer Oscar Piastri, who joined in 2023, together racked up six race wins and 21 podium finishes by the end of the season, gaining McLaren the coveted Constructors’ Championship for the first time in more than twenty years.
Brown tells Fortune he credits McLaren’s comeback to a combination of key management decisions, hiring the right leaders, creating a “no-blame” workplace culture, and figuring out how to retain staff in an industry that thrives on poaching.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Congrats on the last season. What made the difference?
The cost cap (the maximum amount of money a team can spend in a season), helped level the playing field, and then the team stepped up to be better than everyone else last year. We’re very much focused on performance, as you would imagine, no politics, no distractions, no dilution of efforts. Trust, collaboration, teamwork, and all the fancy words that everyone uses but so often don’t happen.
It’s no different than why we see sports teams sometimes with all the big, famous names that don’t deliver, and then you see some sports teams with a few less famous names that deliver, and that’s because of the culture, the environment, and they’ve executed well together. And I think that’s what happened at McLaren.
I’ve heard that poaching between F1 teams is a major part of the industry. How have you gone about retaining employees?
I see some top teams who have lost their entire pit wall due to people not being satisfied in their roles for whatever reason, and that’s not a good place to be.
It’s a very competitive sport, not just on the track, but off the track, for sponsors, for employees, for drivers, for technology. But I’m a believer that you don’t want to retain people just because you’ve got a contract with them. You want to retain people because they want to be here. I much prefer making McLaren an environment where people want to work. We look after their well-being. We look after their families. This is an environment where people want to be at McLaren, not that they have to be at McLaren.
Rob Marshall, our chief designer, was at our competitor Red Bull for 17 years, and it wasn’t easy bringing him over, it was an opportunity every team was looking at. I have no doubt in my mind, sitting here right now, that a lot of the talent here at McLaren are on other racing teams’ wish lists, and so it’s our job, the leader’s job, to make sure that everyone that we want to have here is happy being here. So when they get those phone calls, they don’t return [them].
You instill a “no blame” culture at McLaren, what does that mean?
We win and lose together, we back each other up, and we don’t blame each other. Mistakes happen, and we learn from them. Normally, when mistakes happen, they compound issues, and it’s easy to look at the last person who made a decision or touched the car and place blame there.
Nine years ago, when I joined McLaren, it was in a lot worse shape than I thought it was.
We had a new engine partner in Honda, and I think the general belief at the time was that the performance issues we had were all their fault. Then, when we changed power units, and things didn’t go as we thought they would, we had to take ownership of that. There was an arrogance, a denial that once we swapped the power unit we were going to be back to McLaren and when that didn’t happen, it was pretty sobering and I realized there were lots of issues with leadership that we needed to improve. So, one by one, we changed the leadership team. We changed the team principal, the technical director, and more.
At the start of 2023, we had the worst car on the grid. So what made the difference? The leadership, guidance, and motivation. The leadership team unlocked what was sitting here, which was a championship-caliber group of people who weren’t operating in the right way. We had the horsepower, but we were spinning our wheels, and what his team was able to do was put the traction down.
How do you keep people around when the team isn’t winning?
I’d love to pay everybody more but we can’t do that, we would breach the cost gap. So we found other ways to encourage people to stay. We put in a brand new state of the art gym. We’ve upgraded our food. We try to take direct flights that might cost us a few more bucks than layovers on long flights, because we recognize the wear and tear of travel that comes with the job. We do family days and have activities where employees and their families come to the race track.
We care for people and their families because this is a hard job. It’s 24/7 for those living on the road. And the races take place on weekends, so most people aren’t home Saturday or Sunday nights. So it’s about looking after the well-being of our people, their families, food, diet, travel, benefits, and making it a fun and exciting environment. It’s about providing growth and happiness and looking after the people who work extremely hard.
