Thanks in large part to Netflix Drive to survive, motorsports are once again an accepted topic of conversation at cocktail parties, right up there with what happened this week at Succession. Speaking of cocktails, we recently attended an evening gathering at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles where Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren Racing, was the guest of honor.
Brown currently oversees all of McLaren’s racing properties, from Formula 1 and IndyCar to Formula E and Extreme E. His early career was behind the wheel, first as a kart racer and sports cars, and later as a team owner and motor marketing guru. Brown has been with McLaren since 2016, but still owns and drives a collection of vintage cars. During his time on stage, Brown talked about growing up in LA’s San Fernando Valley, where he got his first taste of racing by hanging out at famous hardware stores like upholsterer Tony Nancy’s, famous for his racing cars and his work with celebrities like Steve McQueen. Brown also talked about the aforementioned Netflix Formula 1 show. He noted that the producers take liberties with the edits of the series, but confirmed that the themes and drama on screen are all real.
We had a chance to spend a few minutes with Brown before the festivities began, and he shared his thoughts on the differences between various racing series, how his previous racing career makes him a better coach and more.
c/d: When you have a company like McLaren, where you make a consumer car and you have a motorsports division, what is that relationship like? In which direction is information traveling these days? Does it come from the production car and then integrated into the racing, or does it go from the racing car to the production car?
Zak Brown: Usually happens with cars from racing to production. The relationship between me and Michael Leiters, who is our new CEO, is amazing. We share a brand, so we work very closely together. Their customers are fans of McLaren Formula 1 and vice versa. I’ll get to the technical stuff in a second, but from a marketing standpoint, a lot of our fans have a lot of aspirations, so we have [F1 drivers] land [Norris] and Oscar [Piastri] Signature hoods for dealers. They have 500 customers that come to Miami. These joint marketing efforts are very good for us, for our sponsors, because the automotive brand is very premium. In terms of technique, we have people who cross. It’s not much to take a part from a Formula 1 car and put it in a road car. We’re trying to make parts that last 200 miles. They are trying to make parts that last 200,000 miles. Let’s go for optimal performance. They have an element of comfort and safety on the go. So there’s not a lot of items that come out of our car, but something like, how to manage heat in the engine, we have materials that we can share with the automotive company. They might apply it in a different way, but they take that knowledge and expertise and put it into the road car. [The] the shock structure is another. If you go back a long way, we were the first team to have carbon fiber tubing and we’re the first automotive company to exclusively use carbon fiber tubing in a road car.
c/d: What do you think of Formula E? As mainstream motorsports look to incorporate more electric technology, will Formula E and Formula 1 finally be the same?
ZB: I think motorsports fans like multiple forms of motorsports. Obviously, electrics are here to stay, but we as a sport don’t necessarily have to go exclusively down the route of adjusting exactly… how things are in transportation. People don’t ride horses to work anymore, but there are still horse races. We are introducing sustainable fuels and biofuels. I think the end result will be a couple of different ways to propel an engine. Hydrogen, electric, hybrid, biofuels. I don’t see a day when they will all converge under the same technology.
c/d: McLaren isn’t exactly where you want it to be in the F1 points right now. What is the process of developing an F1 car?
ZB: Our car is definitely not where we want it to be. We knew that at the start of the season. I think the car is underdeveloped, but I don’t think it’s inherently a bad car. Formula 1 is different from most other forms of racing because of the constant development of the car. We change 80 percent of the race car from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. We make a new car part every 14 minutes. Not literally every 14 minutes, they don’t come out of the oven [at] this rate, but on average.
As fast as the sport moves on a weekend, it all starts six to twelve months in advance. If we identify a problem today and take six months to fix it, that doesn’t mean we won’t have something else new in the car next weekend. But this piece may still not address the specific issue. You start in design, then it goes to the wind tunnel, then it goes to CFD, sometimes in parallel, then you go to simulation. We do all this before manufacturing the part and putting it on the car. The time from concept to fixing it on the race car can be anywhere from three months to nine months, depending on the size of the part. So our updates that we have in Baku, we launched in December. It’s a bit contradictory. In one aspect the sport is moving very fast, in another it is actually quite slow.
c/d: How much can you find out about a car just from simulations and the wind tunnel?
ZB: You have envelope [a] 95 percent correlation rate between what you see in the CFD or wind tunnel and what you actually do in the car. But, for example, last year’s porpoise caught everyone off guard. It was something we didn’t have that many problems with. I’m not sure if this was by design or a bit of luck because everyone else had a lot of porpoise, but we realized we had a downforce problem. If we had more downforce, we probably would have had more porpoise.
c/d: That “not going fast enough to have a problem” problem.
ZB: Correct. This happens from time to time. Now with the cost cap, you have to be much more efficient with yours [spending] and much more sure of your decisions. Because if you’re going to do three or four forwards over the course of a year, historically you could do 10 and throw six. But now you don’t want to throw money away because you want every penny you spend to go towards the car’s performance. So if you’re developing 10 wings to land on four, that’s six wings you’ve spent money on that could have been spent elsewhere on the car. With the cost cap, you can’t just throw out concepts and hope they work.
c/d: Do you think the Drive to survive model could be applied to other forms of racing? Do you think American racing, like IndyCar or NHRA drag racing, would be just as exciting?
ZB: Definitely. CW is doing IndyCar, [100 Days to Indy]. Netflix with Formula 1, they have come into view. I think all these forms of racing have what Formula 1 has, which is incredible competition on the track, incredible competition off the track, politics and great business drama. The playing field is as big off the court as it is on the court. I think drag racing has some pretty interesting characters. I think it’s all about personalities. World rally [Championship racing] it is quite fascinating. These guys are crazy, and I don’t think anyone fully appreciates it. I don’t think even I fully appreciated it [it] until I rode with Carlos Sainz. It would be a great sport to go behind the scenes.
c/d: Has your life changed with the popularity of Drive to survive? Is it weird to suddenly find yourself a TV celebrity?
ZB: I wouldn’t say it changed my life. It’s new You are recognized practically everywhere, worldwide. You have to be alert in the sense of, for example, when you make phone calls, you read things, because you just don’t know if the person next to you knows you or not. That’s probably the only thing that’s different. If I wanted to go out and have a great night, like 20 years ago, I wouldn’t be able to do that now. But I don’t do it anymore anyway.
c/d: Working as you do with both American and European races, do you think there is a big difference between the two?
ZBI wish IndyCar and Formula 1 could meet in the middle. This would be the most optimal form of race. Politically, Formula 1 is an extremely unpleasant environment. Very unpleasant. IndyCar for the most part is more like “Let’s all go celebrate Bob’s birthday Friday night!” They are still fierce competitors, but I think it engages some of the drivers when they are friends. If you have to make a little bit of an aggressive move, I think if that’s your friend you’re racing against, I don’t see how that doesn’t set you back a little bit. On the other hand, Formula 1 drivers can sometimes… well, crash into each other. I think they are both great. But I think that often the greatest strengths of one end are also the greatest weaknesses and this is the case with both series.
Senior Editor, Features
As a late-game activated sleeper agent, Elana Scherr didn’t know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a veterinarian-astronaut-artist and got closer to the latter by attending art school at UCLA. He painted pictures of cars, but he didn’t have one. Elana reluctantly got her driver’s license at 21 and discovered that not only did she love cars and wanted to drive them, but other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant that someone I had to write about them. Since receiving the activation codes, Elana has written for numerous automotive magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports and new car reviews.
