MOTORSPORT – WHEN Zak Brown first joined McLaren, he went for a walk along the famous Boulevard at McLaren Technology Centre (MTC) in Woking, England, where he spent time taking in each of the cars on display.
Every one had its own unique story, of which Brown already knew every detail. In the nine years since, this current iteration of Bahrain-owned McLaren Racing has been quietly penning its own.
Recently, it’s been getting louder.
“It looked easy when you’re 16, 17 years old and watching it on TV,” Brown told mclaren.com in an exclusive interview, casting his mind back to that period.
His perception has shifted significantly with experience, and as of the weekend prior to last, that experience has included winning back-to-back Formula One constructors’ world championships with McLaren. “Now, I appreciate what a monster achievement it is,” Brown added. “It’s an absolutely amazing accomplishment by the whole team at McLaren.”
Brown joined McLaren Racing in November of 2016 as an executive director before becoming CEO in April of 2018. His first day was just over a year after one of the worst championship finishes in the team’s history. Now, he’s overseen a remarkable turnaround.
Speaking from Singapore, shortly after delivering the team’s 10th constructors’ championship, Brown said the historic win is “Everything I could have dreamt of and hoped for – it’s everything that we’ve all worked very hard to achieve.”
As a boyhood McLaren fan, Brown understands what this success means more than most. “It’s amazing,” he reiterated.
Referring to Brown as a sports fan does his interest in sports a disservice. The California native grew up on a steady diet of baseball, ice hockey, and motorsports, and has since taken up golf, following the transformative realisation that it isn’t “an old guy’s game”.
His love of speed was sparked in childhood, when his parents had taken him to the 1981 Long Beach Grand Prix. “I remember watching Alan Jones’s win like it was yesterday and still have the race programme,” Brown posted on Instagram a few years ago, ahead of driving Jones’s FW07B around the circuit in the F1 Historic Challenge.
That early fascination evolved into an obsession, as he attended Nascar and IMSA GT races at the Riverside International Raceway circuit in California, while continuing to follow F1 on television. In the same way he supports the St Louis Cardinals in MLB and cheers on the LA Kings in NHL, McLaren is his team in motor racing. The first time he remembers watching the team, he recalled, was in the 1988 season, when Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost were battling it out for the title as teammates.
“They were always winning races and winning championships,” Brown said. “Back then, I was an aspiring racing driver, and my desire was to race for McLaren. I didn’t really have management in my mind – not in a million years did I think I would be in the fortunate position that I am, leading such an amazing racing team.”
Brown competed full-time across America and Europe for a decade and still climbs into the cockpit of a race car at every opportunity, but his focus is now firmly on putting McLaren Racing in the best position possible to deliver silverware.
Maximising human performance has become the cornerstone of his strategy, and the results are hard to argue with. Upon arrival, Brown said the task at the top of his in-tray was to “start learning and meeting people”. Quickly, it became clear that there was untapped potential within the team – it just needed unlocking. Through fostering relationships and by better understanding the talent available to him, Brown and his senior leadership team have found a way to piece that puzzle together, along with some carefully selected, crucial new additions.
But so many of the people Brown will see when he walks around the MTC now are the same as those he’d have seen on that first day there.
“That’s what has driven our success – primarily, the people who gave us our race car at the beginning of 2023 are the same people who have delivered back-to-back Championships,” he said.
Several records have already been broken or matched this season, with McLaren charging to an unassailable lead of 650 points in the constructors’ championship – 325 ahead of second place, winning 12 of the 18 grands prix. It is the joint-earliest constructors’ title victory in F1 history, having been secured with six of the 24 grands prix still to run.
In 2025 alone, McLaren set a new record for the team’s most podiums in a single season and recorded their highest number of one-two finishes since 1998, including four in a row for the first time since that year. McLaren also notched an historic 50th one-two and the team’s 200th grand prix win, while claiming famous victories in Monaco and at the team’s two home grands prix in Great Britain and Bahrain.
“That demonstrates what it’s possible to get out of people, when the environment is right and you have great leadership, teamwork, and an awesome culture,” Brown said. “F1 has never been more competitive – even the worst team in F1 is a great racing team. The competition is so fierce. The level of dominance we’ve displayed through the majority of the season is what you hope for, but it’s impossible to go into a season and expect that.
“To win back-to-back championships is a testament to the hard work that every single person at McLaren has done at the factory and at the race track. That includes our team principal Andrea Stella, the senior leadership team, and, of course, we couldn’t have done it without our two awesome racing drivers, Lando (Norris) and Oscar (Piastri).”
The last McLaren team to win consecutive constructors’ championships was the one Brown first began watching in the late 1980s. Winning four constructors’ and drivers’ titles on the bounce between 1988 and 1991, it is doubtlessly the team’s most successful era. While this current McLaren team hasn’t reached those levels just yet, they are tracking along the right course, and have already earned their own distinctive chapter in McLaren’s history books.
“It’s hard to rank it because McLaren’s had unbelievable success over the years,” Brown said when asked for his opinion on where this era of McLaren sits amongst its successful predecessors. “
There have been a lot of eras of dominance in McLaren’s history, and it’s hard to compare ’24 and ’25 with ‘88, ’89, ’90, and ’91, when the team were winning everything.
“What I think is the fascinating part of this story is where we came from in such a short period of time – from effectively being one of the slowest cars at the beginning of ’23 to turning that around and producing a championship-winning car just 12 months later is unheard of,” Brown highlighted. “I think that’s what makes this story unique and special – how quickly we went from being at the back of the grid to the front.”
As F1 has progressed, so have the teams at the back of the grid, while the cost cap – introduced in 2021 to boost competitiveness and make the sport more financially sustainable – has helped level the playing field. Building long-term, lasting success in F1 has never been more challenging, especially in a sport where the regulations are regularly refreshed to shake up the grid.
“Do we want to create a McLaren dynasty and leave a legacy? Of course we do,” Brown stressed. “But it’s like Andrea says: ‘You don’t race trying to create a legacy, you show up every weekend, focused on what you need to do that weekend, and then, the results and the history books take care of themselves.
“Next year, with the new regulations, is going to be even tougher. This year, we had the benefit of working within regulations that we knew. But we’re now entering a new era, with one of the biggest regulation changes in the history of F1 – that comes with a lot of risk and a lot of opportunity.”
The aim, naturally, is to carry on winning, and next in McLaren’s sights is this year’s F1 drivers’ championship. As it stands, Piastri and Norris occupy the top two positions in the standings, with Max Verstappen in third.
“While we’d like it to solely come down to our two guys, Max is still very much in the game,” Brown said. “I think what has been key is that the team have remained so focused but also very humble. So, we’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing.
“Our strategy isn’t going to change because we’ve won the constructors’ – we’re going to approach the remaining race weekends in the same way we’ve approached every one before it.”
Whatever the end result, the target for 2026 will be the same as it was going into 2025: to fight for both championships.
“That’s what we’re here to do: win races and win championships. And we couldn’t be hungrier.”
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