“At the launch we told the media that the car was going to suck,” he recalls.
So it proved – the team’s best result in the opening eight races was a sixth place in Australia.
But upgraded machinery introduced at the Austrian Grand Prix marked a turning point, and McLaren ended the season strongly, with Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri accumulating multiple podium finishes in the second half of the year.
The recovery has since turned into championship glory.
McLaren won the constructors’ world championship in both 2024 and 2025, taking 14 grand prix victories in the latter season, with Norris claiming the drivers’ title.
Brown credits much of that success to Stella. “He’s calm, measured and ego-free – the very opposite of me,” he says.
Brown credits Stella for the sucess of the past years
Grand Prix Photo
The interview also covers Brown’s unlikely path to the top of the sport. He grew up in working-class Los Angeles, was mugged three times as a teenager and pawned watches to fund his early karting.
He moved to England aged 19 with little money and no connections, spending periods sleeping on an air mattress in a Sheffield living room for £35 a week and driving to Donington Park each day to wash cars.
Brown pursued a racing career through the early 1990s but eventually accepted he was not fast enough, and retired from driving in 2000, going on to build his sports marketing business, JMI, which attracted a $45 million offer for a majority stake in 2008.
McLaren had been one of his key clients throughout, and when the opportunity arose to join the team in a leadership capacity, he took it – drawn, he says, by the chance to be genuinely inside the sport.
Brown says he has no intention of leaving. Asked how long he wants to stay, his answer is immediate: “I’d sign a contract tomorrow to be here until 2040.”
Matt Bishop’s full interview with Zak Brown appears in the April 2026 issue of Motor Sport.