How McLaren's £26m-per-year workaholic rebuilt the Manchester United of Formula One - with a little help from FREDDO bars
- McLaren have enjoyed a resurgence under the guidance of Zak Brown
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McLaren threaten to rule the world of Formula One now, but a moment to wince then. We’ll come back to that.
McLaren’s former boss Ron Dennis, a legend of grand prix racing and now a knight of the realm for his contributions to F1 and British industry, was apt to describe the team he had run since 1980, as the Manchester United of the sport.
Twenty world championships supported his assertion. He ruled in his perfectionist way from his office lair close to the front doors of the astonishing Norman Foster-designed confection never known so modestly as a factory but as the McLaren Technology Centre, in Woking, the town of his birth before he turned himself into something approaching a billionaire, seriously rich in any case.
It was a futuristic building and raised the standards for the whole sport. Some called it SMERSH. Never did a drop of dust settle on the floor, and the idea of a dirty garage was as far from imaginable as possible. Guests would be swept by car around the man-made lake outside, with bucolic Surrey in the eyeline beyond it.
McLaren counted Ayrton Senna and Lewis Hamilton among its star world champions, and their cars - and those of founder Bruce McLaren, a New Zealander who died driving aged 32 at Goodwood in 1970, seven years after founding his eponymous team - were displayed in the boulevard.
So that was the scene of nearly uninterrupted success, of sporting history and cutting-edge vision. ‘We exist to win,’ was Ron’s mission statement.
CEO Zak Brown, pictured with Lando Norris, has had a major impact at McLaren
Former McLaren CEO Ron Dennis once described the team as the Manchester United of F1
The decision was made to jettison team principal and Dennis' heir Martin Whitmarsh
And now to that moment to wince. Enter Zak Brown. He was widely perceived as a successful but brash Californian marketing executive and a one-time racing driver, and had taken over as McLaren chief in 2016, Dennis having been pushed out in a putsch led by his one-time chief ally and business partner, the French-Saudi entrepreneur and TAG owner Mansour Ojjeh (a very personal dispute that I couldn’t even try to get past the lawyers).
Team principal and Dennis' heir Martin Whitmarsh was also jettisoned. At a pre-season launch not long afterwards Brown excused his team’s non-performance by stating that McLaren could not be expected to compete with richer rivals. Who couldn’t wince at that admission?
Heavens, what had happened to the Manchester United comparison? Since when were McLaren mid-table flotsam and jetsam and owning up to the prospect?
Well, the fact was that like the United of today indeed, empires fall, and Brown was stating the reality. The team had lost Vodafone, their main sponsors; Mercedes, their championship-winning engine suppliers; and Hamilton, their star driver. It was a sad story of gradual decline, and yet a bloated staff earning fortunes and believing themselves too grand to fail persisted to drain resources.
One marketing executive back then was paid £700,000, which, as I joked to an employee, was less than Lando Norris earned when he was to drive for them as a rookie some years later. (He is now considerably better rewarded, as he ought to be, £20million-plus).
Hamilton had spotted McLaren’s decline earlier than most. Hence, in large part, why he decamped to Mercedes.
Things got worse. Performance tailed off further, fluctuating at best. Brown was under pressure. The team’s majority shareholders are the Bahraini royal family, for all McLaren compete under the British flag. They had doubts in those early days and I well remember a day in the Gulf kingdom when Brown was under serious pressure as his thobe-clad masters circulated in the team’s hospitality area, the atmosphere electric with whispers. But they are loyal, and their loyalty has paid off now that McLaren last year won their first constructors’ title this century, ending a drought dating back to 1998.
And perhaps the nadir, at least financially speaking, came during lockdown. ‘We were on the verge of going under,’ admitted Brown. The Bahraini sovereign wealth fund – Mumtalakat – would have bailed them out in the last resort, but it was still a sticky time that resulted in staff being put on furlough as a matter of necessity.
Staff at McLaren were being rewarded in bonuses of 30-pence chocolate Freddo bars in 2018
It could be argued that Brown stuck too devotedly to Fernando Alonso while he was at McLaren
From these ashes, rebirth.
I asked Brown what the nadir was. ‘Freddogate,’ he said, laughing. That was a story we ran in Mail Sport, revealing that staff at this multi-million-a-year company were being rewarded in bonuses of 30-pence chocolate Freddo bars.
I never knew who gave me that story, actually. A phone call from someone whose identity I did not recognise rang me out of the blue. He then sent me from a disguised email address pictures of staff holding their Freddos.
The individual ‘whistleblower’ talked of a demoralised staff. We published the story and I was banned from the McLaren motorhome for the impertinence, a sentence issued by a senior executive who I shan’t name, though whom I previously always got on well with, who is no longer there.
Brown now agrees that the publication of that article hastened him to reevaluate his staff and slowly, and sometimes swiftly, to move out the deadwood, importantly changing the culture. Eric Boullier, the then team boss under Brown, was axed within days of Freddogate breaking.
A revolution was afoot. Still results oscillated. An engine deal with Honda was a failure. Perhaps Brown stuck too devotedly to Fernando Alonso, his favourite driver of the time and still a friend of his, though possibly not the man for the situation McLaren were then in.
That said, Alonso drove superbly in his first Indianapolis 500 in 2017 (as well as subsequently), and would conceivably have won that great prize but for his Honda engine blowing. It was one of the best performances on the track I have seen.
Brown, 53, is a motor-racing fanatic. ‘I’m a workaholic,’ he once told me. ‘I don’t do vacations well.’
Brown, who earns £26million a year, describes himself as a 'workaholic' and somebody who 'doesn't do vacations well'
Bringing in Andreas Seidl as Team Principal helped to bring greater order to McLaren
Seidel was then replaced with Andrea Stella, a clear-thinking team principal without an obvious salient ego
The hugely talented Oscar Piastri will be looking to achieve big things with McLaren
He welcomes that you can subscribe, at a cost, to buy access to online services on flights, as he criss-crosses the world, not least between home in Britain and his native USA, where McLaren also compete. He is a WhatsApp user and email-firer of Olympian standards in the air and on the ground. Wherever he is in the world, he rises at 6am and works to 10pm.
It helped him turn his own enterprise Just Marketing International (JMI) into motor racing’s biggest such business prior to his elevation to McLaren – certainly contrary to Dennis’s wishes.
On the pit wall, he says he does nothing. He is not super technical. Of course, he well understands the rhythms of a race weekend and the intricacies of the sport. He admitted self-deprecatingly of his role in Melbourne last month, at the race won by Norris, that he was designated to turn around and put his hand out to assess whether it was raining.
‘I felt like the kid who never gets picked for sport, finally being given a role,’ he said.
Let’s not feel too sorry for him, mind. He earns a whopping £26million a year, more than double what his less-than-friend Christian Horner generates at Red Bull. This largesse is derived in some measure from the financial deals he has pulled off, a continuation of his acumen in his previous life at JMI, and a central underpinning of the McLaren renaissance.
The car is emblazoned with advertising, a sine qua non of success in Formula One, and last year in Las Vegas journalists were invited to his latest mega-deal unveiling as partners of Mastercard. In the MGM Grand hotel, Cirque du Soleil, performed in celebration of this accomplishment.
Brown had gone by the time the cast took to the stage that day, the vertiginous ballet perhaps too much for him. ‘I’m scared of heights,’ he said. Really, the ‘workaholic’ was off, big honours having been paid to Mastercard, to the next important thing to crack.
Aware that he cannot be the technical guru, he has pulled off two transformative acquisitions. First, bringing in Andreas Seidl, a German, as team principal. He helped sort things out. But he was ‘control and command’, as one insider described his leadership style to me. But he brought order.
Then, he replaced Seidel with Andrea Stella, a more empathetic Italian, a clear-thinking team principal without an obvious salient ego.
It was a masterstroke. With Stella and two fine drivers in Norris (yet entirely to prove his mettle in a harsh judgment here) and Australian Oscar Piastri (hugely talented but with it all ahead of him), the only fear is that the restoration of the House of McLaren is that they will be so dominant this year as to ruin the season.
And then the opposition would be the ones wincing.
