Team culture is a vital component of any thriving workplace and McLaren CEO Zak Brown has credited giving it an overhaul for propelling the team back to the top echelons of Formula One.
The Woking-based team sealed the 2024 F1 constructors' championship over Ferrari (RACE) in a dramatic end to last year's season, which also saw McLaren driver Lando Norris come second in the drivers' championship.
Speaking about the nail-biting finish to the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix at the Autosport Business Exchange on Wednesday, Brown said the riveting race had come down to "seven-tenths of a second of a pit stop", which allowed Norris to come out ahead of Ferrari's Carlos Sainz, sealing the team's win.
"Pretty exciting and really cool that it came down to McLaren versus Ferrari because that's what I grew up watching," he said.
This victory marked a stark turnaround from where McLaren stood in 2016, when Brown joined the team as executive director. McLaren finished sixth in the team standings that year and dropped even further down the rankings to ninth place in 2017. He took over the reins as CEO in 2018.
It was something of a natural career move for Brown, who had spent 10 years as professional racing driver before moving into the business side of the sport. He then founded JMI in 1995, which became the world's largest motorsport marketing agency and was acquired by Chime Sports Marketing, where Brown took the role of group CEO before he moved on to McLaren.
However, when he joined the F1 team, Brown said he realised that the situation was "a lot worse" than he thought. "I came in knowing that things weren't in great shape ... you could see the results," he said. "But once I arrived I realised it was really bad."
Culture was one issue Brown noticed, saying that it seemed "pretty toxic on the shop floor", where the team's racing cars are developed and assembled. Accordingly, driving a change in culture required a "critical" focus on middle and upper management, not just top management.
McLaren CEO Zak Brown pictured at the 2024 Mexico City Grand Prix. ·REUTERS / Reuters
The reason being, he explained, that the "people that have the biggest influence with the largest group of people is that ... layer of management that probably touch 600 people in the organisation".
Brown said that while it was easy to say "here's what we want to be ... you need to make sure it permeates through the entire organisation", adding: "I think we have been extremely transparent with our team [and] taken all the politics out of the team."
The McLaren chief also said he sought to get "conspiracy theories on the shop floor" out of the team's system, and that avoiding a "blame culture" was key to the team's eventual turnaround.
"It's so easy in this sport, it's very frustrating that if you make a mistake, a driver makes mistake, strategy, tyre, mechanical ... you kinda get angry at that person and that's very unhealthy – you win or lose together, it's a team effort," he said.
But while the 2024 constructors' championship win sealed McLaren's successful to the top of F1, that's not to say there haven't been some bumps in the road. At the start of the 2023 season, Brown openly admitted that the team had not hit some of its car development goals.
When asked at the ABX event whether being so open about these shortcomings was bad for team morale, Brown said he believed the team appreciated this honestly. "I think it actually helped morale that we just told it as it was," he said.
McLaren's Lando Norris enters turn 13 during the 2024 US Grand Prix. ·USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Connect / Reuters
"I think it was refreshing for the team because when I joined and I kind of sat back and listened to a lot of people on the team that are no longer there, there was a lot of 'it wasn't my fault. It was his or her fault...'," Brown added. "It kind of doesn't matter who's fault it is because we're all on the same race course, we just need to work together so I think the team very much appreciated that."
Looking ahead to the 2025 season, Brown said he believes the McLaren team has more confidence in its decision-making on the back of last year's successes.
"I think now we've got some confidence that we know how to win again and we will do that differently than we did this year," he said. "I think the field's going to be even tighter than last season. I see the top four teams being just as tight as they were at the end of the year. I wouldn't be surprised if you see the turnaround we had, so there's no reason why other teams can't have that type of turnaround."
Brown also said he believed F1 was in store for an "epic season". F1 has a growing fanbase, with Reuters reporting that Nielsen Sport said it was now the most popular annual sporting series, having amassed more than 750 million fans worldwide.
F1 is a subsidiary of Liberty Media Corporation (FWONA), which said in November that the group had generated revenue of $911m in the third quarter, up from $887m for the same period in 2023. The company said F1 race attendance to that point in the season had grown to 5.8 million with "sellout crowds at nearly all races".
