McLaren F1 Team Nearly Folded in 2020. An American Exec Just Led It to the Top

When golden boy Lewis Hamilton abruptly left McLaren for Mercedes in 2013, life in Formula One turned sour for team Papaya. Hamilton brought McLaren a drivers’ championship in 2008, but upon his departure, McLaren started falling back, first to the midfield and then quickly to the backmarkers. 

In 2015, McLaren finished ninth, second-to-last on the grid, just four years after the team finished as the runner-up. 

The team’s financial situation grew dire to a point that CEO Zak Brown admitted Sunday, ahead of the final race of the 2024 season in Abu Dhabi, McLaren was “on the brink.” The saving grace was an investment of around $240 million from U.S. private equity firm MSP Sports Capital, valuing the team at $746 million. 

“We were in a situation where if we didn’t have a cash injection, we would have been a risk at [not] starting the year,” Brown said.

On Sunday, just four seasons after the investment, Brown hoisted the constructors’ championship for McLaren—its first since 1998. 

Key Moves

Brown, an American businessman and former race driver, joined McLaren as executive director in late 2016 before transitioning to CEO in 2018. He described the situation at the U.K.-based manufacturer as “chaos” when he first arrived. 

In an interview with Motorsport.com, Brown said his initial priority was to solidify the rest of the team’s top executives. “The first thing I did was change the leadership team, kind of one by one,” Brown said. “I didn’t come in with that in mind, but I quickly identified this place needs new leadership.”

Then he facilitated one of the team’s biggest decisions: Changing engine suppliers. McLaren ditched Honda in 2017 after just three years and shifted to Renault, a competitor on the grid now known as Alpine. The team returned to the midfield following the switch, then in 2021, decided to change engines again, returning to the Mercedes engine it used for 20 years before switching to Honda.

The move didn’t immediately show results in the championship—but an adjustment to its driver lineup was one of its last major tweaks. McLaren moved on from veteran driver Daniel Ricciardo in 2022, ending a two-year relationship that ended with the Australian scoring less than a third of the points of his teammate, Lando Norris.

The Papaya brought in Oscar Piastri, another Australian, in 2023. After some growing pains in his rookie season, Piastri finished fourth in 2024, the highest of any second driver on the grid, which ultimately made the difference in the constructors’ battle against Ferrari and Red Bull.