Zak Brown shares shocking McLaren reality when he took over the team's reins

McLaren boss Zak Brown revealed that when he joined the squad in 2016, it was "toxic". The American took over the team at one of its lowest points. The team had not won a title since 2008 and had not contested for one since 2010, either.

McLaren was still a very competitive team until 2013 when the team took the wrong direction in its development. 2015 the team partnered with Honda, resulting in an even bigger disaster. The partnership meant the team had two world champions in the squad, Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button, but the car was horrible.

The Honda power unit was underpowered and lacked reliability. As a result, the team went from being a strong, respectable contender to an afterthought backmarker. In 2016, Brown joined the team and, on the James Allen podcast, revealed the situation within the squad:

“It was a lot worse than I thought. I came in knowing that things weren’t in great shape. You could see the [lack of] brands on the car, you could see the results. But once I arrived, I realised it was really bad and I had never run a Formula 1 team before. I’d been around Formula 1 my whole life. I was used to an organisation of that size – we had about 1,200, 1,300 people in the [PR] agency I came from – so the size wasn’t an issue, but the departments and the skillsets were definitely mostly out of my area of expertise.

I went about first tackling the commercial side, because that’s where I was most comfortable, and we needed a lot of resources, so I knew that would be the biggest contribution I could make in the short term. I changed the majority of the leadership team, but one at a time I got to know everyone and took a while to turn it around. It was pretty toxic on the shop floor as far as the politics and, as Andrea [Stella, team principal] calls it, poison biscuits (went). There were lots of poison biscuits being passed around."

Talking about the turnaround, Zak Brown revealed that the initial impression within the team was that McLaren would get back to the front once the Honda power unit was replaced.

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McLaren initially thought that it was all down to the Honda power unit

Many within the squad thought that the Japanese supplier was the limiting factor. Talking about how the team found out that this was not the case after the switch was made to Renault, Zak Brown said on the James Allen podcast:

“At the time. I think we were all convinced the problem was the [Honda] power unit. And while that was certainly a big contributor, that was not exclusively the issue and that became very clear once we changed [to a Renault customer engine in 2018] and the results got a little bit better. But we knew we had fundamental problems, so it was quite a daunting task to tackle but we got there in the end.”

McLaren's resurgence's first step was moving to a Renault power unit and ditching Honda. However, it did not transform the entire team and there were still quite a few steps that needed to be made. The team would then first move to a Mercedes power unit in 2020 and it wasn't until 2023 that it became a regular frontrunner and until 2024 that it won a championship.

It has been a long F1 journey for McLaren but it began with Brown identifying what needed to be changed within the squad.