Zak Brown, McLaren CEO, revealed that a mindset “very special” within the team did not suit him when he arrived at Woking.
McLaren returned to the top of Formula 1, winning its first constructors’ championship title since 1998. So it was a long road back to the top for McLaren, whose heritage and prestige counted for little when the team began to fall in the early 2010s.
After 2014, the calamitous move to Honda saw McLaren find themselves at the bottom of the grid, and the rebuilding project began in earnest with the arrival of Zak Brown in 2016 before he took over as CEO in 2018.
"The guys have done an incredible job since I arrived," he said, when asked if he was proud of the way McLaren has turned things around to stand up to pressure from Red Bull and Ferrari in 2024.
“When I started at McLaren, I remember one of the things that drove me crazy was the team saying, ‘Yeah, the big three,’ ‘the top three,’ and ‘the top three teams.’ We’re not part of this conversation. I was like, ‘We’re McLaren, we’re not in a good place right now, but no, we’re in the big four. We’re just under it. -performance’.”
“It was a very particular state of mind that had taken hold and we had to immediately change it to get back on the right track. We were still a top team. But a top team that had gotten lost along the way.”
-With confidence returning to McLaren, Brown said that mindset is a distant memory.
“Now all the men and women at McLaren who have done such a good job are proud. We talk about the others as the ‘other three best’. It’s great to have McLaren there every weekend, and the people look at where we are on the timesheets. That’s how it should be.”
“Obviously every team has its ups and downs – McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull, Mercedes, but it’s great to be back, and congratulations to everyone at McLaren for getting us back to this place.”
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