It took Zak Brown a decade, a culture overhaul and a lesson from Novak Djokovic to turn the McLaren Mastercard F1 Team back into world champions.
The team lining up at Monaco this weekend for its 1000th Formula 1 race is double world champions – Lando Norris took the drivers’ title in 2025 and the constructors’ championship has been secured for the past two years.
When Brown arrived in 2016, McLaren was struggling on track and fractured off it. The team that would go on to win everything was, by its own Chief Executive Officer’s assessment, a place where blame had become the default language.
“When I started at McLaren, there was a lot of blame,” Brown told Sector’s The Business of Formula 1 podcast.
“It was like: ‘well, my rear wing’s good, but the people on the front wing…’ – but it’s one race car.
“So you might feel good that you think you’ve nailed your part of the race car, but don’t we all want to work together?”
The cultural shift Brown set about building was not primarily about signing the best engineers or the fastest drivers, it was about making every part of the organisation understand its stake in the outcome.
“When we win on Sunday, whether you’re physically working on the race car, or you’re in the HR department, or the finance department, everyone knows they contributed,” he said.
“If we didn’t have these great fans here, we wouldn’t have Formula One or McLaren. These great fans come from our marketing team and our communications team. It’s all about trust, transparency, teamwork, appreciation for how much we need each other.”
That culture is easy to maintain when things are going well. Brown is more interested in what it looks like under pressure – and the 2026 season has already provided a test.
McLaren’s difficult start to the year, following back-to-back championship wins, is precisely the kind of moment he has spent a decade preparing the organisation for.
“We’re not championship favourites for the first time in a couple years,” he said.
“So that’s when the team has to kind of rally, come together. When things don’t go well, things go quiet, a little bit of blame game – and it’s like, let’s just get it out on the table. We’ve never said we’re perfect. Let’s talk about issues.”
“I’m a big fan of tackling issues, not people, because usually the issues are not just one person. If a pit stop goes wrong, we’re all on TV, want to blame the right rear jack. But did the driver stop in the right spot? Was there a failure with the gun? Was it the person putting the tyre on?
The composure that principle requires is something Brown is candid about working on in himself as much as anyone else.
He is, by his own account, not a naturally calm individual. The contrast with Team Principal Andrea Stella, who is seen as methodical, measured, rarely rattled, is one he describes with obvious affection.
“It’s not easy for me, because I’m naturally an emotional person,” he said.
“Being on the pit wall next to Andrea, I laugh all the time. He’s very cool, calm, and collected. And I want to freak out. I look at him, and he’s like, ‘don’t do it!'”
Once McLaren found its competitive edge, Brown made a deliberate decision not to change what had got them there.
The temptation to evolve, to do things differently when success arrives, is one he has actively resisted.
“People, when we got in the lead two years ago, it was like, so what are you going to do different?” he said.
“It was like, why would I do anything different? What got us here? I believe in consistency, marginal gains, incremental gains, constantly reviewing.
“Mistakes are okay. Don’t make the same mistake twice, because you learn from mistakes. But if you make the same mistake twice, you clearly didn’t learn.”
It was a conversation with Novak Djokovic that gave Brown the mental framework he has found most useful for managing his own reactions under pressure.
Novak Djokovic is a good friend of ours, and he’s mentally very strong…he said it used to drive him crazy when people told him how to feel or not feel, because I can’t control how I feel.
Zak Brown
The 24-time Grand Slam winner is a friend of Brown and has offered the American some of his wisdom down the years.
“Novak Djokovic is a good friend of ours, and he’s mentally very strong,” Brown said.
“We talked to him, and he said it used to drive him crazy when people told him how to feel or not feel, because I can’t control how I feel.
“What I can control is how I react to how I feel. And then he has triggers that he uses to recognise when he does feel a certain way how he wants to react to get out of it.”
“A lot of the stuff that I say is a bit of preaching to myself to remind myself. I’m trying to improve as the team CEO, and I’d like to think I’m a little better today than I was yesterday.”
With both world championships on display in Woking and the team’s 1000th race coming up in Monaco, Brown already has his next ambition in sight.
“What’s my dream? Racing with two drivers for a long time that are great guys, that are both World Champions. We’ve ticked all those boxes, except Oscar needs to go win a World Championship. Then rinse and repeat.”
Listen to the full interview with Zak Brown as part of the latest episode of The Business of Formula 1
