McLaren CEO Zak Brown on the business of F1: sponsorships, Drive to Survive, AI regulation, and poaching wars

McLaren CEO Zak Brown on the business of F1

Zak Brown traces his entry into motorsports to the 1981 Long Beach Grand Prix, where a 10-year-old version of himself encountered a Formula 1 car for the first time. He funded his racing career through sponsorships after winning cash on Wheel of Fortune's teen week, using the prize money to buy his first go-kart. Without family resources to sustain a racing career, he became expert at understanding what companies actually needed — not logos on a car, but measurable business outcomes.

That insight became an agency. Brown positioned himself as a neutral broker who understood both sides: what motorsports could deliver, and what corporations were trying to do with their marketing spend. When his racing career ended, he leveraged those relationships not around himself but around the full portfolio of series — NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula 1. It became, as he puts it, a big business "by accident."

The McLaren partnership model

Brown brings the same logic to McLaren. Partners fall into two buckets. Consumer brands — Mastercard (now the naming partner), Monster, Google — are expected to help build and engage the fan base. Technology partners — Google, Dell, Cisco, Workday — are integrated into operations, improving HR, finance, race car production, and financial forecasting. The commercial relationship only begins with the check; the ongoing work is understanding each partner's specific business objectives and engineering value around them.

Brown describes the Formula 1 paddock as "24 Super Bowls from a consumer point of view, and 24 Davos from a business-to-business point of view." C-suite executives converge at every Grand Prix, and McLaren's commercial team actively facilitates deals between partners behind the scenes — dinners, introductions, shared campaigns. When Cisco runs a global television campaign, every other McLaren partner benefits from the visibility. The ecosystem compounds.

“We're pulling down one and a half terabytes of data a weekend. We run 50,000,000 simulations. We have 300 sensors on the race car... AI is here in a big way. We're fortunate to have Gemini as a huge partner of ours... I think there will be regulations around AI that don't exist today, that will exist in one year, two years, three years, four years, and then there'll be another technology.”

Drive to Survive

Brown was an early supporter of Netflix's Drive to Survive, though at the time he expected it to be routine shoulder programming with limited impact. Two teams declined to participate in season one and faced criticism from their own partners and fans as a result.

Brown's instinct was straightforward: a sport that made him fall in love with racing at age 10 should be as inclusive as possible. Liberty Media had three growth targets when it acquired the sport — younger audiences, more women, and US expansion. Drive to Survive delivered on all three by pulling back the curtain on a sport where, as Brown notes, as much drama happens off the track as on it. Twenty drivers and ten teams made it easy for new audiences to follow the characters.

Technology cycles

McLaren pulls down 1.5 terabytes of data per race weekend, runs 50 million simulations, and carries 300 sensors on the car. Roughly 80% of the car's 50,000-plus parts change over the course of a season. A car that qualified on pole at the season opener, left untouched, would finish last by year's end.

AI is now a significant factor, with Google's Gemini integrated as a partner. Critically, there are currently no FIA regulations governing AI usage — only restrictions on CFD and wind tunnel time. Brown expects that to change within one to two years, drawing a direct parallel to how aerodynamic rules evolved: teams push an advantage until regulators close the loophole, then find the next one. George Kurtz, on a prior episode, raised the possibility of compute restrictions on teams, a direction Brown views as inevitable.

The regulatory cat-and-mouse extends to espionage. Three-dimensional scanning of rival cars in the paddock was a common practice before it was banned. Brown recounts a more extreme example from 25 years ago: someone in the grandstand at the Australian Grand Prix hacked McLaren's radio communications and told driver Mika Häkkinen to pit. McLaren was running first and second and managed to recover.

Talent and contracts

F1 has no trade windows or salary disclosure rules. Senior personnel operate under multi-year contracts with garden leave provisions and non-competes, and teams increasingly sign talent earlier to keep rivals from accessing it. The cost cap creates a genuine bind: parking a departing employee on garden leave burns budget that could go toward car development, but releasing them early hands a competitor institutional knowledge. Brown frames it as "a fascinating game of poker, chess, and backgammon" — and part of what draws audiences to the sport.

Advice for a $100M company entering F1 sponsorship

Brown's guidance is consistent with his agency philosophy: start with what you're trying to achieve, then assess whether the existing partner ecosystem around a team is synergistic or conflicting. A $100M revenue company should look for teams whose partner base does business in adjacent categories, because much of the ROI comes from B2B introductions at race weekends rather than trackside branding alone.