Zak Brown has described the McLaren Mastercard F1 Team’s partner portfolio as “a world championship of brands” and believes the ecosystem that creates is as important as anything happening on track.
Brown initially joined McLaren Racing as Executive Director in 2016 as the team sat ninth in the constructors’ championship – its worst finish in the team’s history.
The car carried few sponsors, the culture was broken, and the commercial operation was in disarray.
He arrived as a specialist, a former racing driver who had spent the previous two decades building the world’s largest motorsport marketing agency, and his first priority on arriving at Woking was not the car. It was the money to build one.
In 2018 he was appointed Chief Executive Officer and, a decade on from Brown first arriving in Woking, the transformation is difficult to argue with.
The reigning constructors’ champions now carry globally recognised partners across a portfolio that extends across Formula 1, IndyCar and a World Endurance Championship programme.
“I mean, Google, Dell, MasterCard, Cisco, OKX – it is a world championship of brands on our car,” Brown told Sector’s The Business of Formula 1 podcast.
“I’m just as proud of our shirt and what our race car looks like as the race car itself…then the ecosystem that creates for them to all do business together.”
The arrival of MasterCard as naming partner this season slightly reframed McLaren’s approach – but Brown was adamant that a brand sharing the team’s title would have to be the right fit.
I’m just as proud of our shirt and what our race car looks like as the race car itself.
Zak Brown
“I’d said from day one of joining that we don’t need a title or a naming partner,” Brown said.
“We of course like one, but we don’t need one and if we were going to do that, it had to be a likeminded brand, a long-term commitment, a mega brand, a global brand, a non-controversial brand.
“You’ll have them in your back pocket or as we go away from plastic, you’ll at least have it on your phone. It is a brand that can help us with our fans and it’s a long-term agreement.
“They’re great people, they know sports inside out and they’re a big player in sports. They have billions of customers, they can help us build our fan base and they’re connected to people on a daily basis. So they kind of ticked all the boxes in a big way.”
That insistence on the right fit rather than the biggest cheque reflects a broader philosophy Brown has applied consistently across the portfolio.
He told Sector that the commercial approach has not changed despite the team’s transformation from backmarker to champion – and that consistency is deliberate.
“People, when we got in the lead two years ago, it was like, ‘so what are you going to do different’?” Brown said.
“It was like, why would I do anything different to what got us here? Now that we’re here, I don’t want to start changing what we’re doing.”
The partner network also funds something Brown considers central to McLaren’s long-term commercial health – reaching the fans who will never attend a race.
With only one percent of the global fanbase ever getting to a circuit, activations like the Trafalgar Square event before last season’s British Grand Prix and the McLaren Racing Live: Miami event are key to that.
“Our general view is one percent of fans get to the race track,” explained Brown.
“So we’ve to go out and introduce our drivers and show our race cars and experience our brand to the 99 percent of the fans that watch us on TV but never have a chance to get close to a race car.”
That logic extends across McLaren’s expanding motorsport footprint. Brown pointed to partners crossing series as evidence of a portfolio that creates compounding value – BAT moving from F1 into IndyCar, Arrow Electronics making the reverse journey from IndyCar title partner to F1.
“We’re obviously a Formula 1 team, an IndyCar team and soon-to-be World Endurance team,” said Brown.
“We’re the only team to have ever won the Triple Crown – Monaco, Le Mans, and Indy – we’re going to go for it again. We did those in three different decades but I would like to do them all in what we’re calling the ‘Papaya Era.’
“Our fans love it, our partners love it and our partners are really leaning in. So it’s an opportunity for our employees to get other experience – it’s created a lot of synergies on our fan base and our partner portfolio.”
