There are certain senior figures in Formula 1 whose authority derives from destiny. They were always going to end up there. They grew up karting in Europe – or, more likely nowadays, studying aerodynamics at Oxford or Cambridge or Imperial or UCL – they were spotted early, they were polished relentlessly, then they found their way into the F1 system as though by natural law.

Zak Brown is not one of those people. His authority comes from adaptation: from having repeatedly looked at the reality in front of him, accepted it without sentiment, then changed course – decisively, energetically and almost always successfully. That is why his F1 journey – which began when his parents took their 10-year-old to the 1981 United States Grand Prix West at Long Beach because it seemed like a nice day out for a family who lived in Southern California, and has now culminated in his being the man who rebuilt McLaren into the dominant force of 2024 and 2025 – feels not just improbable but quietly astonishing.

Brown’s story starts not with lineage or legacy, but with noise, colour and speed. He was born and raised in Los Angeles and, like many Angelenos at the time, his family knew next to nothing about motor sport. “We went to Long Beach in 1981 for no other reason than that the circus was in town,” he says. “My parents didn’t know anything about racing and I didn’t know anything about racing either.” They went as punters – mum, dad and brother – and they sat in a grandstand, absorbing the spectacle rather than the subtleties.

What lodged itself in young Zak’s mind was not technology or tactics, but sensation. “It was the speed and the sound,” he says, “and the atmosphere, too.” He remembers the Williams 1-2 finish, he remembers the distinctive white-and-green livery of Alan Jones’s and Carlos Reutemann’s all-conquering Williams FW07Cs, he remembers walking through From that point on, motor sport crept into his the aquarium where all the F1 cars were displayed before being towed out and he remembers his first autograph: that of Eddie Cheever, who finished fifth. At the time, none of it meant much. Although he did not yet know it, the racing bug had bit and, in hindsight, it meant everything.From that point on, motor sport crept into his life in fragments.

“Kids are tough in LA. I think that’s part of who I am. Elbows out. A bit of a street fighter”

On television, it was the Indy 500 that caught his attention, partly because it was accessible and partly because it was American. The only F1 driver he really knew much about was Mario Andretti, who was a household name in 1980s America. Zak’s father, sensing an interest, began taking his sons to events: mainly drag racing at Pomona and IMSA at Riverside. The latter, in particular, left a deep impression. “It was a fantastic circuit,” Brown says the thick end of half a century later. “Just awesome.”He became a car kid, then a Hot Wheels kid, then a motor sport obsessive, albeit without much structure to it. F1 existed at a distance, filtered through ABC’s Wide World of Sports, Jackie Stewart’s “funny voice” as Brown still teasingly describes it, and impossibly exotic images of the Monaco Grand Prix. “I had no idea where Monaco was,” Brown admits, “but I knew it was the pinnacle of everything.”

The real ignition point came in 1987, via a friend at high school whose family were involved in racing. That year, they went together to the Long Beach Grand Prix, which was an IndyCar (or, to be precise, CART/Champ Car) race not an F1 race, no longer as wide-eyed children but now as enthused and engaged teenage fans. That weekend, through his friend’s family, 16-year-old Zak briefly met 47-year-old Mario, who won the race in his Newman/Haas Lola-Chevy. It was only a fleeting encounter, and Brown asked Andretti only one question, but it was the only question that mattered: “How do you get started in racing?”

“I wasn’t enjoying racing and at the same time my sponsorship business was starting to build”

“Karting,” Andretti replied.

That was it: that single word. “Mario was and still is my number-two hero, right behind [Ayrton] Senna,” Brown says. “So when he said ‘karting’, that was it.” But Zak was 16 – pretty old for a novice. Moreover, he lived in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away from the heart of F1. Worse, he had no money – a prohibitive impediment now and already a big problem then. And yet, in that moment, F1 became not just a fantasy but a plan. What followed was not glamorous. Los Angeles, Brown insists, was a hard place in which to grow up if you were not insulated by wealth. “It’s a rough, aggressive city,” he says. “I was mugged three times. I went to school with people who were stabbed and, yes, even killed. There were, of course, pockets of great privilege – Beverly Hills, for example – but we didn’t live in that kind of neighbourhood.” His family was working class. Both parents worked. They were not poor, but they were not rich either, and there was no spare money. “As far as contributing financially to racing,” he says, “forget it.”

Brown improvised. He pawned watches to pay for his karting. He effectively stopped going to school. He threw himself into racing with the single-mindedness of an ambitious lad who felt that he had nothing to fall back on. “Kids are tough in LA,” he says. “I think that’s part of who I am. Elbows out. A bit of a street fighter. LA toughened me up.”

By the late 1980s his ambition had crystallised. IndyCar would have been the more obvious route for an American teenager, but Brown’s sights were set elsewhere. “F1 was the dream,” he says.

“England?” I ask.

“Not England as such – just F1,” he replies. England was merely the geography that came with it – so, sure enough, in 1991, aged 19, he packed up and moved to the UK. It was a leap of faith in the purest sense. His first Vauxhall Lotus race was funded by a loan from his friend, the actor Mackenzie Astin. A promised drive with David Sears fell through. He scrambled for budgets that he barely understood how to raise. In 1992 his mother gave him her annual salary – $30,000 – to keep him going. It was generous and welcome, but nowhere near enough.

He lived in Heathfield, East Sussex. The team he was racing for went bust. Suddenly, he had nowhere to live. Richard Dean, a racing driver who would later become a close friend and business associate, offered him an air mattress in his sister’s living room in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, which must have felt very foreign to an all-American boy born and raised in Southern California. The rent was £35 a week. Brown took it. He drove daily to Donington Park to wash cars and work as an instructor, just to survive.

Are you getting the picture? What I am describing was not the life of a future F1 team boss. It was the life of a young man clinging to a dream by his fingernails.

He raced Formula Opel Lotus and Formula 3 but always in the B or National class, and never a complete season, never with a top team and never with a full budget. “I did half seasons,” he says. “I was constantly broke.” Nevertheless, in Dutch Opel Lotus he finished fourth in the 1993 standings, a year after Jos Verstappen had graduated as champion. In F3 he occasionally sat on the same grid as Christian Horner, albeit Horner was in the A class. It was Jan Magnussen who dominated F3 in 1994. Dario Franchitti was also a force, driving, like Magnussen, for well-to-do Paul Stewart Racing, and Zak ruefully remembers that he felt as though they belonged in a different universe.

At the time, Brown did not fully accept what such discrepancies meant. “You’re in denial,” he says, “and you stay that way for quite some time. I guess it’s human nature because you want more than anything else to be a winner.” He could always point to circumstances: his was an older chassis; he had fewer sets of tyres and often therefore had to make do with rubber that was past its best; and he never had the budget to do enough testing. But, despite those conflicting variables, there were moments that cut through nonetheless, hard though they were to accept. Brown’s team-mate, Johnny Mowlem, was quicker in the sister car. At one point, the team put Mowlem in Brown’s car, and Mowlem lapped it seven-tenths faster than Brown had. “That’s when I guess it should have become clear to me,” Brown says, “that it wasn’t the car.”

Marketing guru Brown and Bernie Ecclestone would meet regularly – here at Barcelona, 2015
Still, hope lingered and what finally shifted things was not failure but opportunity. In 1993 Zak secured his first proper sponsorship deal, with Trans World Airlines. When TWA asked him whether a sponsorship could be arranged for another driver, Brown gritted his teeth and delivered exactly that – placing it with the Nigel Mansell-backed Madgwick Formula 3000 team.

“It was all about money and I totally accepted that. But I’d earned my place at F1’s top table”

It was the first time that Brown had done a sponsorship deal not for himself but for someone else, and it changed everything. “That got everyone’s attention,” he says, “because, of course, Nigel was big news. Now people saw that I could bring them money.”

Suddenly, those ‘people’ were telling Brown to stop racing and start concentrating on sponsorship. At first he resisted. Racing was still the dream – besides, although he was not as quick as Magnussen, Verstappen or even Mowlem, he was proving to be a decent pedaller. But reality has a way of asserting itself, and he decided to try his luck at home. So he moved back to Los Angeles, only for his house to be destroyed in the Northridge earthquake of January 1994, which killed 57 people and injured more than 9000. “I hated LA anyway,” he says, “so I left.” He moved to Indianapolis; he raced a bit in Formula Atlantic, Indy Lights, and sports cars; and he did a bit of testing, too. But by 1998 the joy had gone. “Yeah, to be honest, I wasn’t really enjoying it,” he says, “and at the same time my sponsorship business was starting to build.” Everyone around him was telling him the same thing. Eventually, he listened. In 2000 he stopped racing for good.

That decision coincided with his first NASCAR sponsorship deal. NASCAR was booming. Brown, now 29, and fully focused on business at last, rode the wave. “NASCAR turned me into a millionaire overnight,” he says, without false modesty. From that point on, he was all in. His ambition sharpened. “Now I wanted to win the world championship of sponsorship.”

Momentum followed momentum. JMI, his company, grew rapidly from 2001 to 2004. Then came his F1 debut – albeit not in the form that he had dreamed of years before. His first F1 deal was with Hilton Hotels, with McLaren. It was relatively small, but it opened the door. Johnnie Walker followed, also with McLaren. One by one, his first five F1 deals went to the same team. Thus began a relationship with the world-famous Woking outfit that would, eventually, come full circle.

Brown’s rise in the sponsorship world was fuelled not just by hustle, but by insight. He understood brands. He understood teams. And, crucially, he understood that most people on either side of the table did not fully understand the other. “I knew their businesses,” he says of sponsors such as Hilton Hotels and Johnnie Walker, “and I knew McLaren’s business, too. So I had both angles covered.” It gave him confidence and leverage, and the result was success.

He did not burn people. He delivered. He built credibility. Soon, Bernie Ecclestone was having lunch with him several times a week. Ron Dennis would take his calls immediately. “It wasn’t because I was their buddy,” Brown says. “No, it was all about money and I totally accepted that. But it showed that I had credibility. I’d earned my place at F1’s top table.” By the mid-2000s, JMI was growing exponentially.

Brown never planned to sell it but in 2007 the US investment bank Allen & Company invited him to New York. He went with no intention of doing a deal. “I had no idea how companies were valued,” he says. “I had no idea what EBITDA multiples were.” So when a group of senior executives from Credit Suisse and Spire Capital slid an offer across a boardroom table, the printed side of the document facing down, he turned it over – and laughed. Then he said yes. The offer was $45m for a 70% shareholding.

“OK, I was paying myself a couple of million a year by then, but here was a big whack that was ready to be wired over to me straight away. It was a game-changer for me,” he says. The deal was closed in 2008. Two days later, Brown won a Ferrari Challenge race in Montréal. Stefano Domenicali handed him the trophy. The symbolism was almost too neat. “Not a bad week,” Brown says, chuckling at the absurdity of his own understatement. “Not a bad week at all.”

JMI’s name was changed to CSM, but Zak was still in charge. “Was it an earn-out situation for you?” I ask him.

“No, they paid me up front, but there was a claw-back clause,” he replies. Corporate life followed, which was “quite fun” at first but was then followed by restlessness. “I’m a racer and I got bored of having to work on rugby and cricket and all that,” he says. By 2013 he was ready to move on. F1 beckoned again, albeit this time not as a driver or a dealmaker, but as a leader.

Actually, there were two options. One was to join F1 itself, under Chase Carey, F1’s chairman and chief executive, with a clear succession plan that could have made Brown the next Carey – or indeed the next Ecclestone, which is how the F1 media tended to refer to the opportunity at the time. The other was to join McLaren. Ron Dennis was interested in hiring Brown and he made a substantial offer, but Zak sensed that Ron wanted his money-making skills more than his management abilities. Then McLaren’s ownership changed, Dennis was ousted, Shaikh Mohammed Bin Essa Al Khalifa and Mansour Ojjeh took control, and everything shifted.

“Mansour called me, and he told me that I wasn’t getting off the phone until we did a deal,” Brown remembers. He felt trusted, he felt wanted and he felt something else, too: a chance to be right inside the sport. “When the five lights went out on the startline gantry, Bernie always went home. When those lights go out now, I’m on the pitwall.” His past as a driver mattered, and the racer’s passion won the argument.

He arrived at McLaren during the winter of 2016/2017 – full disclosure, I was serving as communications director at that time. The contrast between image and reality was stark. The brand was iconic, the history was unmatched, but the present was grim. Financial losses were huge. Sponsors were disappearing. Honda, the team’s engine partner, was struggling. Things were getting worse: the team finished sixth in the 2016 constructors’ world championship, and ninth in 2017. And, culturally, it was broken.

“I’ve always been good at hiring people and I could see when things weren’t gelling”

“I was shocked,” Brown admits, “but, yes, if I’d known how bad it was, I probably would have joined anyway.” What he found was not a single problem, but systemic dysfunction: silos, paranoia, mistrust, dislike, bitching and tons of difficult internal politics. Racing and commercial departments did not respect each other. Board-level disputes filtered downwards. Leadership churned. “It was chaos,” he says, “and that wasn’t any one person’s fault. But without alignment and collaboration at the top, the whole thing falls apart.”

Brown attacked the commercial side to begin with, because that was his comfort zone. The racing side took longer. He did not pretend to be an engineer. Instead, he focused on people, structure and environment. “I’ve always been good at hiring people,” he says, “and I could always see when things weren’t gelling.”

Nonetheless, there were missteps. He replaced Honda with Renault, but progress was still slow. There were a few public embarrassments, too, including the Daily Mail’s infamous ‘Freddo-gate’ story of 2018, the result of an internal leak about 25p Cadbury Freddo chocolate bars being offered in lieu of bonuses. “I guess Freddo-gate, as it was called, underlined just how toxic things had become,” Brown remembers. He was irritated by the leak, and he was disappointed by the lack of loyalty shown by the anonymous whistleblower, but he was not shaken by it. “I didn’t feel like I’d created the problem, because it had started before me,” he says, “although obviously I had to solve it.”

Eventually, improvements were made. The 2021 season was a turning point. Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo scored five podium finishes between them, two of them bagged on a glorious afternoon at Monza on which Ricciardo won, Norris was second, and Brown celebrated with his first tattoo. McLaren finished fourth in the constructors’ world championship, beaten by only Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari. Yet, as is so often the case, progress was not linear and a series of problems disclosed themselves when in 2022 the team’s French Grand Prix upgrade failed to deliver the performance hike that its inventors had predicted. Brown sensed trouble. He asked questions and the answers he received revealed processes that would require amendment immediately; if not, Zak felt, 2023 might end up being a disaster. He wrote everything down, then he confronted the issues head-on, and team principal Andreas Seidl resigned. Brown is keen to portray Seidl’s departure as an amicable one, as you would expect, but surely it must have been a disappointing one, too. The truth is that quite a few senior roles were redefined and, under the stewardship of the newly promoted Andrea Stella, the entire technical structure was rebuilt.

The 2023 car was mediocre at the start of the season, exactly as Brown had not only feared but also warned. “At the launch we told the media that the car was going to suck,” he remembers. It did. In the first eight grands prix of the 2023 season, the team’s best result was an attrition-assisted sixth place for Norris in Australia. Then came Austria – and the first serious upgrades under the new regime worked, resulting in a heartening fourth place for Norris. Next time out, at home at Silverstone, Norris was second and his rookie team-mate Oscar Piastri fourth. Two weeks later, at Hungaroring, Norris was second again and Piastri fifth. From that point on, McLaren’s trajectory was unmistakable, and the pair delivered seven further podium finishes before season’s end.