McLaren CEO Zak Brown On F1 And Business Strategy At 200 Miles Per Hour

0:00I'm curious from your experience as a race car driver, how that informs and how that helps you as a CEO? Well, I think there's a lot of similarities. As a racing driver, in no particular order, you need to be a great communicator. You need to be a great listener. You need to have a huge amount of trust in your team. Racing's life or death when you're sitting in the racing car. And maybe business isn't quite life or death, but it feels like it. you have to have the best technology the best equipment around you when you kind of list all the things that you have to do to be a great racing driver i think those are all the things you need to do to be a great ceo this week on bold names we have none other than zach brown ceo of mclaren racing which is having one of its winningest seasons in history and he has a new book out where he dishes.

0:57Yeah, that's right. It's called seven tenths of a second, and it is packed full of lessons from the racetrack and from his experience running a company generating more than $700 million in sales each year. From the Wall Street Journal, I'm Tim Higgins. And I'm Christopher Mims. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the bold name companies featured in the Wall Street Journal. Today we ask, what can racing teach us about running a competitive business.

1:33So, Zach, welcome to the pod. And today you're in London and unusually we are in New York instead of on our usual respective coasts. And, you know, I'm going to bet that most people listening to this, they're already a fan. They already know you pretty well by now. but for the listeners who don't know everything that's been going on in 2025 i just want to list for my mother is our number one fan i just want to list uh what's going on 2025 because as you know it's huge right you guys have already uh sewed up the constructors championship so that's by team points for formula one it's mclaren's night they have won the constructors championship the largest trophy at the end of the season there will be celebrations for zach brown your two drivers have been battling each other for the driver's title thanks to the popularity of the netflix show drive to survive

2:26formula one has never been bigger and your memoir just came out right can we i don't know if we can call it a memoir if that's too french because we're all americans here but i just have to say when i line it all up like that how does it feel to be zach brown right now busy busy exciting stressful all the above but uh most importantly i'm having a a great time hanging out with all the men and women here at uh mclaren we're having fun which i think is important in in business in life but not to be mistaken for deadly serious when those lights go out and you go racing we're in one tough industry well you know you see that drama in the show on the nflx show and i'm curious you know what is that show done for the sport the entertainment of f1 i mean it's done wonders for our sport.

3:12So I'll start there. And I don't think any of us envisioned the size of impact that Netflix put on our, you know, what's always been a great sport. They just did an unbelievable job of exposing our, our sport and a lot of the areas in which we didn't allow people in before, but the sport's always been fascinating. It's always been political. It's always been 20 of the coolest racing drivers in the world, big money, sport politics, but we never let anyone see that before. What Netflix has done is where did the sport need to grow? In no particular order, it needed to grow in North America from a geographic standpoint.

3:52Thank you, Netflix. We now have three Grand Prixs in North America and a new Apple deal, et cetera, et cetera. It's a major sport in North America. We needed more women. 75 % of the new fans that have come into the sport are women and youth. And those were the two demographics that we needed. So the sport has never been healthier. I think Netflix has done a great job of capturing how cool our sport's always been. We just never kind of let people in. So if you're a diehard petrolhead, you loved our sport. That's how I grew up. But you didn't really, if you didn't follow it, understand how it all worked and the politics.

4:31Welcome Netflix. Pull back the curtain. And people are fascinated. And now, sport's never been healthier, and I don't see any reason why it's not going to just go from strength to strength. Yeah, I blame you guys for when my son was 11. I asked him what he wanted to do for a job. He's like, race car driver. I was like, all right. You got to be an expensive sport. Beware. Well, one of the things you do really well in the book is you create this thread. So it's a business book, but it's also your personal life story. to understand how you got to where you were at. And so there's life lessons and business lessons that are learned.

5:12So Mims and I thought it would be great to kind of try to pull on some of that thread here for our listeners, take them on this journey. Yeah, as you do in the book. We want to do that in this pod. So I'd like to take you back to 2016 when you went to McLaren. Eventually you became the CEO. And McLaren Racing was in a tough situation. It was close to bankruptcy. It wasn't winning. There were a lot of people that were skeptical that you were the right guy to bring in. They thought you were maybe a marketing guy because that's where you had come out of, right? The marketing business. Yeah, they called you a suit, right?

5:47You're an American. You're an outsider. Right. So I wonder if you could tell us what you learned from being an outsider to the sport and succeeding despite those kind of hurdles. Yeah, it kind of feels like when I came over to race in the early 90s. I knew racing, massively passionate about racing, but I'd never run a racing team before. So I had kind of the street credibility of having been over here for so long and being a familiar face in Formula One. But they all knew me as a marketing guy that used to race. Just to slow down a little bit, that was kind of the marvel or that was the thing of your career.

6:27You'd been a racer, but you needed to raise money as a young guy. So you figured out how to get marketing deals. And eventually you turned that into a marketing business, right? Correct, which I then went on and sold to Time Communications, a London PLC. So I was comfortable with the size of the racing team. We're about 1 ,400 people. When I ran CSM, which is the sports marketing division, that was about 1 ,500 people. I knew the sport inside out. I knew a lot of the people. I never run a racing team. And specifically what I'm not is a technical guru. But I don't think that's my, well, I know it's not my job.

7:05My job is to assemble the best people in the world, getting them working really well together, understand what their needs are, and help them be the best at what they do. So I remember the first time I stood up and I spoke to probably a thousand people in the Formula One team, you know, they're all staring at you and you kind of, you don't know what's going through their mind. And it's probably everything, hey, this guy's really cool. He used to race. He loves Formula One to what's this guy doing here? He's never run a Formula One team. How long is he going to last? And I'm sure it was kind of a mix of everything, but I had to kind of just hold my nerve.

7:44I knew I couldn't go at this alone.

7:51So And when I came in, tried to understand what were our strengths and weaknesses and just try and build trust through transparency, energy through some fun and being hardworking and hard charging and get people believing that we were going to change. And one of the first things we did, our fans have all said we want papaya. So we went to a papaya car. And I remember someone saying – That's the color of the car. The color of our car. And I remember someone saying to me, you're only doing that because that's what the fans want. I was like, is that a trick question? That's exactly what we're doing.

8:28And you used the word earlier, entertainment. We're in, you know, there's some people in our sport and there's some people in sport who don't see sport as entertainment. I don't understand that at all. If you buy a ticket to go watch a firework show, a baseball game, a motor race, a boxing match, a movie, that's entertainment. So we are in the entertainment business. And so I focused on our fans because without great fans, you don't get great commercial partners. Without great commercial partners, you can't invest in great racing drivers and great technology. So kind of making sure that every part of our ecosystem was getting what they needed to see the best of McLaren.

9:10And we created this momentum and the energy that we have inside McLaren now is awesome. You know, we push very hard. We're kind of chasing perfection, knowing you're never going to be perfect, but you still are motivated to chase it. So you get everyone to a mindset of never being satisfied, knowing that you can always improve on what you did yesterday, but do that with a positive intent instead of being this, oh man, this guy's never satisfied. No, it's not that I'm not satisfied. I just know we can always do better. And I know how strong our competition is, that if we don't continue to chase perfection, the competition will pass us.

9:53After the break, Zach meets a sports legend, but it doesn't exactly go as planned. You're 13 and one of the greatest baseball legends in history tells you to f*** off. Can we say that? You just did. I'm glad you said it. What did 13-year-old Zach learn from this experience? Stay tuned to find out.

10:27I feel like these are the two pillars of the Zach Brown playbook. One is your relentlessness, and we'll get to that. But the other one you just mentioned was knowing that you're in the entertainment business and really wanting to serve the fans. And so I see here you're not sitting on the couch, but I kind of want to put you on the couch here and take you back to your childhood. Because this is in your book. It's a very transparent book. It's one of the things that I enjoyed about it was that transparency and really that vulnerability. And let's go back to what, by your own account, is a formative moment for you.

11:03and this is a story I just want to make sure that our readers hear because it's a crazy story. If this is a movie of your life, this story is going to happen. You're 13 and one of the greatest baseball legends in history tells you to f*** off. Can we say that? You just did. I'm glad you said it. But he did. True story. True story. So if you could just briefly relate how that happened and who was the legend in question. So it was probably the start of my sales career, which is figuring out how to get to someone. And I read in the TV Guide. That's how old I am. The TV Guide. There used to be a book that came out every week.

11:48There used to be a book. Here's what's going to be on TV this week. And, of course, it had stories in it. And it talked about how this player played golf at Preston Trails Country Club. So what do you do? I call Preston Trails Country Club because I want to meet my hero, at least have a conversation with him, get an autographed baseball. And that time you lived in where, L.A.? And I was living in L.A. And the golf course is in Dallas. In Dallas. So I'm calling for two weeks. And is this guy in? Is this guy in? Is this guy in? Nope, nope, nope. One day, hold on. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to talk to him.

12:20But I call him in off the golf course. Now that I play golf, I kind of understand why he was a bit agitated because it's not, you know, unless he was on the first tee box. You know, it's 20 minutes to get in, picks up the phone. I'm like, is this Mickey Mantle? And he chewed me out like there was no tomorrow, hung up the phone. So I'm 13. I'm in my room. My mom comes in and she's like, what happened? I tell her the story. She disappears 30 minutes later. She comes in. She goes, pack your bags. We're going to Dallas tomorrow. We're going to spend half a day with Mickey Mantle at the Hilton. And she called him back.

12:55He thought it was a prank call, hence the abbreviated conversation. And yeah, I mean, that's the type of, I think, tenacity you need to have in business. If you want something, you got to go get it. You can't be shy. So that's my Mickey Mantle story. One of my favorite scenes in the book, it's the final race of the 2024 season. Who will we call the champion constructor of the world? This is make or break, especially for your driver. And things are perhaps for your other driver not going well.

13:37Some people might think you're on the radio telling them, you know, blah, blah, blah, you got to do this or it's time to win. You know, everything's on the line. But you highlight that you don't do that, right? There's strict communication channels. You're not on the radio with the driver, micromanaging. And I think this is a management situation that's really interesting for business people out there. I'm based in San Francisco. There's this idea that CEOs in this new era of tech are either sleeping on the factory floor or spending all night coding themselves in it, down in the micromanaging world.

14:12But you're kind of painting a picture here that what's important is to sometimes not micromanage. And I'm curious why this is important, why this is a lesson that some managers should take away. Yeah, I used to micromanage a lot, right? When you start your own company and you're the first employee, you do, you know, I was everything from CEO to mailroom to receptionist to everything else because it was me. And as that company grew, JMI, I'd eventually got to a scale where you have to kind of let go. Just marketing international, JMI. Dress market international and, and, and trust your people. And so now I can't do the work of 1400 people.

14:54And there was a moment where you have to let go and become a manager. And I, I think I've had to learn how to become a manager because that's a different skillset sometimes than being a, a doer. And so, you know, I've got a great leadership team. We all challenge each other. They challenge me. And, you know, I don't care who's right or wrong. I just want the best ideas, which don't have to be my ideas. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. I think you learn by mistakes. Just don't make the same mistake twice is what I say. You know, what I won't do is let a car crash happen. You know, if I see something and I'm just like, no, no, no, because this is just going to end it.

15:41And it comes back to risk versus reward. But who feels excited as a teammate if the boss is coming in and making decisions for them, especially because I know I'm definitely not always right. And so I think you've got to get the right blend of empowering people, trusting people, giving them your insight. If I feel super strongly about something, I'll really step in. But if I'm kind of like, you know what, I do it a different way, but let's try it your way. Usually they're right and I'm wrong, and I'm good with that. You know, it's interesting because it is figuring out that balance is a challenge, right?

16:13And even in your book, you get into kind of showing how it can be a challenge. Another part of your book, you're talking about McLaren getting into indie racing. And it was a little bit of a challenger that those early days, right? You had some problems. And part of your diagnosis really gets into perhaps you weren't putting enough time in it yourself. And so I wonder what's the difference between being a micro and macro? How do you know from your gut when to do what? Well, so I completely screwed that up and that was all on me. I think I underestimated the task at hand. I think I overestimated the majority, not all, majority of people I put in as leadership to go try and tackle the Indy 500.

17:02And then I didn't trust my instinct. I had red flags all along the way early on, but I got talked out of my red flags. And because I was so focused, understandably, on Formula One, it was like, okay, fine. I kind of just heard what I wanted to hear. So I learned so much from that. I don't regret it at all. I certainly didn't feel good about it at the time, but since then we've gone back and we've had our most successful year in IndyCar. We had 12 podiums this last year. We finished second in the championship since not qualifying at Indy. I look back on that in a weird, perverse way. It's kind of fondly because it made me a better CEO.

17:48I think it made us a better race team and it taught us a lot of lessons. Tough lessons, but taught us lessons. After the break, major changes are coming to F1 in the new year. Apple just signed a deal to stream Formula One exclusively for the next five years for$750 million. That seems huge for both of you. It seems like a huge risk, but potentially a huge payoff. How does Zach think F1 can maintain its momentum? That's next.

18:33So you're about to enter a year where you're going to have to use all of that knowledge, all of those hard-earned lessons. I think even casual fans of the sport of F1 don't realize kind of what's on the line for 2026. It's a huge change to the rules. Consequently, It's a huge change to the nature, to the design of the cars. They're like 50-50 electric and gas now. I mean, they're hybrid vehicles. There's going to have to be energy management. I mean, it's a huge technical challenge as much as it is about team strategy. And often the leaders in one area, one era of technology and rules in Formula One are not the leaders in the next era.

19:18Can McLaren hold on to the crown after this transition in 2026? We're going to try like hell, that's for sure. Can we? Of course. Will we? Time will tell. Are we assuming we're going to? No, we're working super hard. I kind of live with a little bit of paranoia and a little bit of fear of failure, which motivates me. We've got unbelievable people, great technology. We're all aligned. The culture in here is awesome. And that's the magic that gave us this great race car the last two years. So that magic still is here. But it's new rules. And someone might figure 2 % separates the best from the worst in Formula 1.

20:01Even the worst Formula 1 team is really good. So we just got to do the best we can. I focused on stability. So we have very little change in our racing team. So the same people that put together the magic this year are the same people that are going to go again in 26. And we just keep doing what we're doing because what we're doing is working. You know, a quick thing that I want to ask you about, because I think it's big not just for you, but for kind of the whole media industry, which is going through a lot of consolidation. It's this Apple deal. Welcome back. Big news today. Apple and Formula One reaching a five year U.S.

20:38media rights deal that will bring all the races to Apple TV in the U.S. Apple just signed a deal to stream Formula One exclusively for the next five years for$750 million. Reportedly. Reportedly, I should say. Everyone has said that for a streamer to be competitive going forward, they've got to have the big sports franchises. I don't need to mention everybody else locking down deals with NBA, NFL, etc. That seems huge for both of you. It seems like a huge risk, but potentially a huge payoff. I mean, what do you think these American rights are going to mean for Formula One going forward? I think it's great, right?

21:17They kind of whet their appetite with the movie. When was the last time you won a race? Sunday, Daytona. Oh, I'm sorry. I meant Formula One. Oh, I'm sorry. Then same as you. Formula One movie, which I understand is the biggest sports movie of all time. Brad Pitt's biggest movie of all time. So huge success. So I'm sure that played into their excitement. And then I think in today's day and age, everyone's watching content, whether it's Netflix, right? That's not, you know, free to air TV. And look at what Netflix has done for our sport. So I think the amount of enthusiasm, Eddie Q, I think, led the charge.

21:58Big car guy. Apple, senior Apple executive. Senior, yep. He's on the board of Ferrari last time. Yep. So you got a big car guy there with a lot of passion who understands the sport. Obviously, they have a tremendous amount of resources. They're global and they have all these different platforms in which they can activate. And so I think it's going to be great what they're able to do. And, you know, I don't really see any downside risk. I only see upside. You know, one of the things we started talking about at the beginning is just the drama around this sport. It's entertainment. Netflix has really put a lot of attention on that.

22:32And this year, one of those big storylines has been how your two drivers, Oscar and Lando, have been neck and neck to take the top position for the drivers. And I think this is something that managers sometimes have to deal with. How do you manage two stars within an organization? Yeah, we should ask our managers, Tim. Well, yeah. I mean, poor Emma Tucker. She's got two wild stallions here that she's got to keep from tearing each other up. Though I've worked for some people who like – they kind of put – the idea is let's put two cats in a bag and see who comes out, right? There's – I think there's different philosophies.

23:09How do you think about how to manage two big personalities, two big stars, people who really are performing for the good of the business? How do you make it a win-win? Yeah, so I think first you need the right characters, right? So we spoke at the top of the hour about culture and environment. I think part of the magic is the two individuals that we have. So it's a great baseline, right? Oscar and Lando are two great guys. Fiercely competitive, but they're fair. I think you treat them fairly, transparently, so we don't take them by surprise. They know what the game plan is. We talk things through.

23:50We like the competition between the two of them. So where a lot of people are like, is it uncomfortable? Are you afraid? Are you scared? No, we're not scared. Like, this is racing. We want to race hard, even internal competition, because I think it raises everybody's game. Best way to win the Constructors' Championship is to have two drivers competing for the World Championship. And the best way to win the World Championship, Drivers' Championship, is to have two drivers competing for it, not just one. Of course, the downside is they can take some points off each other, which happened in 2007.

24:21Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso, our two drivers, tied, and that allowed Kimi Rackinen to come in. But you know what? We'd rather face that consequence than all the other consequences of playing favorites. Because once you've played favorites, you won't have two number one drivers. And that's not how McLaren has ever raced. It's kind of when we hire someone, it's not just for their technical skills or their racing skills or whatever skill they have. It's like, do you also fit the McLaren mold? And our two drivers are wonderful to work with. You know, I want to wrap this up where we began, you know, which is racing as a metaphor for business and for life.

25:07You know, you have talked so much about your experience on the track and forms how you operate day to day. So if we imagine that everything in the world right now is one big racetrack, how are you positioning McLaren for this big pivot in the sport, everything that's coming? And how are you readying it for what comes next? Yeah, I want us to be the most – it depends who the audience is, right? So I'll go through our audiences. First and foremost, fans, because without fans, we won't have any other audiences. I want fans to feel an attachment to McLaren, our drivers, me, anyone that's in a papaya shirt, because that's how I felt towards Mickey Mantle, just being very engaged with our fans.

25:58Our workplace, that's what drives our culture. That's what drives performance. I don't believe other teams steal employees, steal drivers, steal sponsors, steal fans. I think you lose them. So I look in the mirror. If someone can get a logo off my shirt and on a competitor's shirt, shame on me. I clearly did something wrong. Media, we want to be totally transparent with media where they feel they can come talk to us and they're going to get the straight scoop. If we can't say something, it's IP related or what, we'll just be straight. So I want the media to feel like they can get a good engagement with McLaren.