Zak Brown does not have the time, nor the patience, for chancers. The straight-talking Californian-raised McLaren chief executive is revelling in his team’s ascendancy back to the top of the sport, fighting the likes of Ferrari and Mercedes. But most of all in recent months, Red Bull .
On track, this front-of-the-pack dogfight has mushroomed between three-time world champion Max Verstappen , Red Bull, and one-time race winner Lando Norris , McLaren. The pair, somewhat uniquely within a sport famous for its fierce rivalries, have a close relationship off-track. A friendship and a bond that nosedived three weeks ago in Austria.
They collided while vying for the lead , following a handful of near-misses, and two races were ruined in an instant. Verstappen was the driver punished by the stewards – a 10-second penalty rendered irrelevant on the timesheet as Norris was forced to retire – for not leaving the obligatory ‘width of a car’ on track for Norris at the tricky upwards hairpin.
Yet Verstappen refused to apologise and Red Bull boss Christian Horner laid the blame at Norris’s door, saying over team radio: “He didn’t behave correctly there Max, desperately unlucky.” Brown, aboveboard and unequivocal at the best times, was not having a bit of it. Both then and now.
“It seems to be that Red Bull are scared of Max,” the McLaren CEO tells The Independent . “We’re very honest with our drivers. If nobody tells him that what he did wasn’t within the regulations, why should he think otherwise?
“But to have Christian come on the radio and actually squarely point the problem at Lando – who are you kidding? Everyone has seen it. The regulations are very clear – you’ve got to leave a car’s width. He didn’t. Why did he have to say anything? It just felt wholly inappropriate.”
Brown and Horner have history. Two years ago, when Red Bull infamously breached the first year of the F1 cost cap, the American executive was typically frank in his assessment, saying the overspending “constitutes cheating”. Horner defended his team, as you may expect, with robustness and was “appalled” by Brown’s assertion.
For Brown, more so than any personal vendetta, his attitude is simple. “I only respond to things when I think they’re not right,” he says.
“I speak up on issues. It just seems I have more issues with him [Christian], more than others, because he says and does stuff I think is wrong.
“It’s less about getting under each other’s skin and fighting because we were not competing with them during the cost-cap [episode]. I just felt the integrity of the cost cap was critical for the success of Formula 1 and if it wasn’t taken seriously, the sport would be damaged forever.
“I was trying to protect the integrity of the sport and they didn’t take it seriously. That’s why I spoke up.”
Integrity is something Brown insists is “critical” as the fulcrum for any team, in any sport, as he mulls over his time in papaya in his first-floor office in the McLaren motorhome. So much so that, during this interview just shy of 15 minutes, he mentions the word “trust” six times.
Brown, a former racer on both sides of the Atlantic before entering the extensive world of motorsport business, joined McLaren in 2016 and became CEO in 2018. He took over a team with a prestigious history but atrocious present, finishing second-last in 2017. The team Ron Dennis had built into an F1 giant over 37 years was at rock bottom.
Asked how he compares the outfit he took over to the one he presides over now, Brown responds: “It is night and day. The majority of the people are the same but the culture is radically different.
“The environment was pretty toxic, there wasn’t a lot of trust or belief. It was all really bad. When I started, people were guilty until proven innocent. It was damaging to the culture.”
Now, McLaren have risen from the ashes. Brown has launched teams in other competitions, such as IndyCar and Formula E, and has over 45 brands on board as sponsors, more than any other team in the pit lane.
And alongside team principal Andrea Stella – the ex-Ferrari engineer who has been integral to McLaren’s racing renaissance – Brown now has an F1 team on the cusp of consistent race victories. Two young drivers, in Norris and Oscar Piastri, at the top of their game too.
So, what’s changed? It’s back to that buzzword again.
“Trust with each other,” he says. “There’s a big culture difference in not creating conspiracy theories out of nothing. Andrea has done an outstanding job in setting a clear direction and getting the team into a mindset of just doing incrementally better every day.
“Learning from mistakes, embracing mistakes, as opposed to blaming someone else.”
With this, we come full circle back to the present-day and the war of words, on the gravel and off it, with Red Bull. “When they blew through the cost cap…” Brown begins. “We’d have just owned it. Instead, it was a bunch of excuses, trying to downplay, almost insulting the rest of us because while you can say it was for sandwiches, I have to feed my team like everyone else.
“It was trying to pull the wool over the eyes. That needed to be called out.”
The absorbing animosity of this squabble makes for an intriguing tone as the season enters its second half in Hungary this weekend. Off the back of near-misses in Montreal, Austria and Silverstone for an increasingly irate Norris (who still has just that one grand prix win to his name in Miami in May), the gap to Verstappen in the championship is 84 points. The gap to Red Bull in the constructors’ championship is 78 points. Opportunities still beckon.
“We’ve been very close,” he says of recent strategy mishaps and misfortune. “Lando is a very nice guy, but don’t mistake that for what he’s like when he puts the visor on.
“In Austria, that was our race to win. We’ve been close to catching Max but have ran out of time. It’s sometimes the way the strategy plays out. But I think once a couple more wins come our way, it will become easier to close out those wins.”
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