Why McLaren F1 CEO Zak Brown Was the Happiest Man in Abu Dhabi

Yes, Red Bull driver Max Verstappen had the Formula 1 driver’s championship locked up early, but there was another battle going on at the F1 finale in Abu Dhabi last weekend: The coveted 2024 Constructor’s Championship came down to the last lap.

If you watched the television coverage, you know who won: McLaren. And you likely saw McLaren’s CEO, Zak Brown, chugging champagne and dancing with the trophy.

McLaren driver Lando Norris won from the pole, holding off Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz, followed by Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc, but Norris’ victory was enough to narrowly give McLaren the constructor’s title over Ferrari. McLaren last won it in 1998, when Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard were the team’s drivers.

No wonder, then, that Brown, who has led McLaren since 2018, was so happy. It’s something he has worked hard for, but it’s still a consolation prize: He wanted to be a Formula 1 driver. Didn’t happen, but not for a lack of trying.

So who is Zakary Challen Brown?

He was born and raised in Los Angeles, and growing up, he eyed a career playing baseball. That changed when a school friend, who happened to be the nephew of Mickey Thompson, the off-road racer and promoter, took Brown to the Long Beach Grand Prix. It made an impression. Afterward, they had dinner with Mario Andretti.

I interviewed Brown, now 53, in 2011, long before the McLaren deal happened. I asked him about that dinner. Brown replied: “I said to Mario, ‘How do you get started in racing?’ He said karting.” So Brown began racing karts, and he did well. Thus began a journey to F1 that would take him to Europe, because everyone knows that if you want to make it in F1, you start there.

“I went to Europe to race a Formula Ford—I had a $6000 sponsorship from TWA, felt like $6 million at the time,” Brown said. “I won the race and stayed.”

Then came the inevitable intersection of money and talent, the dual fuel of every driver’s path to F1. “I did a couple of years in the Opel Lotus series with some success, a couple of years in Formula 3 with less success—I just never had a full-season budget. When the team I was racing for went bust, I slept on the floor for a year because I didn’t want to go home. I’ve never been a quitter.”

But reality set in. He was in Europe from 1991 through 1994, then he moved back to Los Angeles, then to Indianapolis to pursue plan B: IndyCar racing. “I knew Formula 1 was never going to happen. I did the Atlantic series for a couple of years and some Indy Lights.” On the side, he started a business, founded in the need to eat regularly.

Thus began Just Marketing Incorporated, or JMI. If you recall, Brown had engineered that $6000 in sponsorship from TWA, and when that ran out, “I didn’t have any money or any family in the business, so I pounded the pavement like everyone else.” He learned with every step. Brown was good enough at landing sufficient sponsorship to keep racing, and, back in Indianapolis, thought he might be good enough to broker sponsorship for other drivers and companies. That was JMI’s business model.

Brown raced hard through 1999, then quit to mind JMI, which was when business really took off. “When I stopped racing, I had about eight employees,” he said. By 2011, he had “six offices around the world—a staff of 150.”

JMI was a resource for companies looking to break into racing but had no idea where to spend money effectively. Brown’s company would learn how much they wanted to spend, and would suggest a series, and perhaps a team and driver. His business was, he said, “Probably 40 percent Formula 1, 40 percent NASCAR, and the other 20 percent is a combination of Indy cars, sports cars, drag racing, et cetera.”

Brown and JMI convinced NASCAR’s France family to allow liquor sponsorships for the cars, thus bringing Crown Royal into the sport in 2005. Brown found sponsorship for McLaren’s F1 team, Johnnie Walker whisky, creating an early tie-in with McLaren and its chairman, Ron Dennis. Brown’s close relationship with F1 czar Bernie Ecclestone led to years of rumors that Brown was on the shortlist to become Ecclestone’s successor.

But Brown himself never lost the desire to drive. Along with British racer Richard Dean, Brown founded United Autosports. In 2011, with co-drivers Mark Blundell, Martin Brundle, and Mark Patterson, United Autosports, in partnership with Michael Shank Racing, entered a Ford-powered Riley in the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona. They finished fourth overall, on the lead lap. It was a Ganassi Racing one-two that year, with an all-star driver lineup that included Scott Dixon, Scott Pruett, Juan Pablo Montoya, Graham Rahal and Dario Franchitti.

It was United Autosport’s first Daytona, and first race in the U.S. “It was a little disappointing not to get on the podium when we were a couple of feet away,” Brown said, “but, hey, we’ll take a fourth in that field.” United Autosports is still active in the U.S., with a pair of entries in the LMP2 class for the 2025 Rolex 24.

In 2013, London-based Chime Communications bought JMI for $76 million, renaming it Chime Sports Marketing: Indeed, Justmarketing.com, JMI’s longtime internet address, is up for sale. Brown stayed on for a few years until McLaren came calling in November of 2016, naming him the executive director of the McLaren Technology Group. Then, in April of 2018, Brown became the CEO of McLaren Racing.

Since then, Brown has been sort of a relentless cheerleader, a font of positivity within what can be a very cynical, squabble-filled series. Brown is very active on social media, praising not only his F1 drivers, Norris and Oscar Piastri, but other drivers and teams when they do well.

And the former Indianapolis resident (he lives in England now) couldn’t stay away from the Indianapolis 500: In 2017, McLaren partnered with Andretti Autosport to back F1 driver Fernando Alonso in the race, and two years later, Brown announced that McLaren would partner with the Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports IndyCar team and begin racing full-time in 2020 as Arrow McLaren. Former IndyCar racer Sam Schmidt and businessman Ric Peterson own 25 percent of Arrow McLaren, with McLaren owning the rest.

For the 2025 season, Arrow McLaren will field cars for Pato O’Ward, Christian Lundgaard and Nolan Siegel, and for the Indianapolis 500, in the second year of a deal brokered by Brown, 2021 NASCAR Cup series champion Kyle Larson will again try to do the double—the Indy 500 and the NASCAR Coca-Cola 600 on May 25.

As for Brown, he continues to race in vintage events, often in cars from his own extensive collection which includes models ranging from Ayrton Senna’s 1991 McLaren-Honda MP4/6, the car with which Senna won the Drivers’ Championship, to Dale Earnhardt’s 1984 NASCAR Wrangler Chevrolet Monte Carlo, to a 1972 Condor motorhome that was used by McLaren racers when new.

McLaren’s 2024 Formula 1 performance was beyond expectations, and the Mercedes-powered team will go into the 2025 season with a lot of momentum. In an open letter to McLaren fans, Brown wrote this: “Some people have referred to this as the biggest comeback in the history of Formula 1. I’ll leave that for others to debate, but I will say that I don’t think anyone in their right mind would have predicted us to win the Championship less than two years on from our start to 2023, when we were the ninth, maybe even 10th, fastest team on the grid.

“We’re trying to fly to the moon, and we don’t only want to go to the moon once,” Brown wrote. “We want to win the Constructor’s Championships multiple times. We want to win the Driver’s Championship, and we want to win over and over again in every other form of motorsport we compete in. When we win once, we don’t stop, we dust ourselves down and get ready to win again.”

No doubt about it: 2025 is going to be an interesting year for racing.