Now, seven years on and two constructors’ titles later, Brown still sees that colour change as fundamental to McLaren’s resurgence.
“[That time] was as bad as you could get, right?” he told a recent Beyond the Grid podcast. “You’re ninth in the championship. You have very little sponsorship. Fans aren’t happy with you. And what was worse was the environment, the lack of trust and transparency inside the factory was not good.
“What was great was our brand, our history… I thought there has to be greatness in here. I’ve hung out with McLaren for a long time. I remember when we just almost took for granted you’re going to finish first and second. I remember those years.
“And so first thing I want to do is kind of rebuild trust through transparency and kind of hit on all the different areas, right? So from a fan point of view, all our fans wanted us to go back to papaya. So we went back to papaya. That’s what our fans wanted.
“That brought some energy, some colour to our team. We were very dark and exclusive, and we weren’t inclusive, and it was kind of a quiet place. You would walk around here and you could hear a pin drop.”
A first victory at Monza in 2021 in the new papaya era
Having set the mood, Brown then set about bringing in new sponsors and the new figures who would rebuild the F1 team to its current state, including the late Gil de Ferran and current team principal Andrea Stella, building a “momentum” that carried the team to the front of the grid.
It’s a lesson that Williams appears to have taken note of, as it revives its own heritage with a new 2026 logo containing the leaning “W’ that adorned its championship-winning cars of the past.
New Williams logo, inset uses the leaning ‘W’, as worn by Frank WIlliams and Patrick Head in 1980
Grand Prix Photo
Team boss James Vowles has taken a similar approach to Brown since joining Williams in 2023, when he spoke of using its history as a foundation to build a modern F1 team.
Now it’s Audi’s turn to reveal whether it will harness its own historic successes, of Bernd Rosemeyer’s legendary 1930s wins for Auto Union, as it returns to F1 in 2026.