‘No superstars' and the power of anxiety: How McLaren is building the next F1 dynasty

New York Times

10 hours ago

When Zak Brown sold his marketing company in 2013, its new owners brought in someone he calls 'a shrink dude' to analyze his leadership style.
He told Brown there were two types of successful people in the world: those who are motivated by the thrill of victory and those motivated by the fear of defeat.
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'I'm motivated by the fear of defeat,' Brown told reporters at the Belgian Grand Prix in July. 'The unhealthier and more stressful version.'
While standing on the podium at last season's Formula One season finale in Abu Dhabi, where McLaren clinched its first constructors' championship for 26 years, defeat will have been the furthest thing from Brown's mind.
Since taking the reins as the CEO of its racing division in late 2016, Brown has overseen McLaren's evolution from a team stuck in the shadow of past glories to one that now sits atop the F1 world once more.
The 2024 constructors' title win came after a remarkable turnaround both on and off the track for McLaren, led by Brown and team principal Andrea Stella. Retaining that championship already appears inevitable as we sit here in F1's summer hiatus, given the current 299-point buffer to second-place Ferrari.
The greater unknown is which McLaren driver, Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri, will win his first F1 crown in 2025. They're separated by just eight points with 10 races to go. The team itself isn't ruling out its rivals (reigning champion Max Verstappen sits 97 points behind Piastri, with over 250 points still available) but, barring a shock turnaround, McLaren will have its first drivers' champion since Lewis Hamilton in 2008.
The good times have returned. But to Brown and his leadership team, this isn't about building an organization that can win one championship; it's about creating a dynasty and staving off future defeat for as long as possible.
'Where we are today is not going to continue forever, right? That scares me,' Brown said. 'So I wake up every day with a certain amount of anxiety, which propels me forward. That drives us. And that's where I'm going to continue putting my energy. I want to prolong, and delay the inevitable.'
Two years ago, McLaren was just starting to see the green shoots of recovery.
Its 2022 campaign was derailed by aerodynamics flaws and reliability issues with the car, which left Brown concerned with the direction in which the team was heading. McLaren then missed offseason car-development targets going into the following season, but an upgrade package at that year's Austrian Grand Prix started a lift in performance that shows no sign of slowing.
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'It's easy to be good once you get good,' Brown told The Athletic in an interview earlier this year. 'It's harder to be bad and to come out of bad. That's when it tests you. It just made us a lot stronger as a team.'
The one thing Brown and his leadership team did not force was change. There was trust in McLaren's new infrastructure, such as its wind tunnel, that was coming online thanks to fresh investment. This was aimed at enabling the team to compete with better-resourced rivals. But crucially, there was also trust in the workforce at the team headquarters in Woking, on London's southwestern outskirts.
Some tweaks, not a total overhaul, in McLaren's technical leadership and structure were viewed as the key to progress.
'We had a thousand people. I changed three,' Brown said. 'So, the same 997 that gave us the car at the beginning of 2023 are the same 997 people that gave us the car that just won the world championship. I changed three. Yes, I added (chief designer) Rob Marshall. But 98 percent of the same racing team that gave us the ninth-place car gave us the championship car. That's the power of teamwork and culture.'
Stella, McLaren team principal since the start of 2024, told The Athletic that the team never had a 'deficit of talent'. He insists it was 'much more about unleashing, recognizing and empowering this talent. For me, as a team principal, I'm a lucky team principal. I inherited a team that was already quite capable.'
The McLaren 'way' of going racing while fostering a healthy culture has been a cornerstone of the Brown-Stella era. Team members are encouraged to be open and honest, taking part in regular staff surveys so those at the top can take the temperature of the team.
'Culture is a way of pursuing performance,' Stella said. 'But hopefully it's also a way of creating an environment that people want to be part of. Because if somebody doesn't want to stay, you're not going to be (able to keep them). And we also don't want to retain people that don't want to stay.
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'I certainly don't want to have the responsibility of having made a decision that goes against people's genuine interests. You want to make the team interest and the personal interest match, but this cannot only be created on the grounds of remuneration or a benefit or perks.'
The team culture had to be authentic. A certain bond and togetherness is to be expected of a group that's risen from point-scrapers to serial winners, but McLaren says its highs are never taken for granted.
After McLaren won the 2024 constructors' championship, the Crown Prince of Bahrain arranged for the entire team to be flown from that race in Abu Dhabi to his nearby homeland to party through the night (McLaren Group is owned by Bahrain's sovereign wealth fund). The team went back again in the morning to either catch pre-booked flights home or stay on for a post-season test.
It gave the traveling team members the chance to soak in their achievements together after the season's ups and downs – one where Norris lost an outside shot at toppling Verstappen for the drivers' title, too.
Peering from plane windows approaching Manama, Bahrain's capital, team members watched the city turn the orange of McLaren's car livery as authorities changed the color of its street lights in recognition of the title win.
Reaching the summit in F1 is one thing. Staying up there is an entirely different question.
McLaren only won last year's title by 14 points over Ferrari. Verstappen still retained the drivers' crown. And Mercedes had ended the year strongly, too. With a lot of attention rightly going to the new regulations coming in 2026, this season had the potential to be very open.
The result of all that was McLaren got aggressive, adopting what Stella referred to as an 'innovative' car design that looked to capitalize on the base established the previous year. While its rivals made progress, it wasn't anywhere near enough to keep up with the champions' papaya-colored cars, setting Norris and Piastri up to win 11 of the first 14 races this season.
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What changed to turn a strong team into a dominant one? Well, in fact, it's what didn't change that was so powerful for both Stella and Brown.
Winning a championship meant, yes, some practical conversations were required around team racing rules between the two drivers. But the core values at McLaren remained unchanged. The focus was stability.
'Despite the team having changed the status, way, ethos and culture that we used to actually get out of the mud, somehow that is what we wanted to retain,' Stella said. 'We didn't want to change who we are. We actually talked a lot internally about almost recognizing how we made this possible and what elements, therefore, we needed to protect from changing.'
Piastri told The Athletic earlier this year he was always struck by McLaren's 'desire to win, leaving no stone unturned at certain points, especially when we were struggling'. The Australian had joined the team for his F1 debut when it was at its unexpected low ebb early in the 2023 season.
But Piastri found it hard to identify an exact catalyst or reason why McLaren has since grown so strong. Like many, he is full of praise for Stella's influence, but said there was 'not one single thing that you can pick out that is special or makes the team so good. It's a combination of so many things. It's hard to put my finger on exactly what it is, but there's just a great sense of teamwork, leadership, dedication'.
For Norris, who has raced for the team since his 2019 rookie season, the only thing that changed between 2024 and 2025 was the spotlight McLaren faced, especially from its rivals. This makes any mistake all the more costly, but he felt the team had handled the pressure perfectly.
'It's the external stuff that changes,' Norris said earlier this year in Miami. 'But that's out of your control. The team is doing a very good job of dealing with that and carrying on with what they've got.'
Stella knows what it is like to be part of one of F1's greatest teams. He worked directly with the great Michael Schumacher at Ferrari through that team's sustained successful run in the early 2000s.
One parallel he draws, in a news conference at the Hungarian Grand Prix earlier this month, between Ferrari then and McLaren now was: 'There are no superstars. It's like a proper team journey, and this includes the drivers.'
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Balancing the desires of two young, hungry drivers such as Piastri and Norris, both seeking their first individual world championship, with the success of a team is tricky.
The issue flared on occasion last year. In Hungary, Norris had to give up the win to Piastri. At Monza, Piastri hurt his teammate's title chances with a fierce Lap 1 pass. At times, Piastri was asked to help Norris' long-shot bid. But managing a season-long title fight between its drivers is a new challenge for McLaren.
And yet, again, nothing has changed. McLaren enforces the same team rules as last year, telling its drivers they are free to race, so long as it stays fair and doesn't jeopardize the team's overall result.
In the past, famous teams have given one driver priority in a title fight. This included Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost at McLaren in the 1980s. Hamilton and Fernando Alonso for McLaren in 2007. Or Hamilton and Nico Rosberg with Mercedes in the 2010s. These were explosive affairs that risked fracturing those teams.
But McLaren saw no need to prioritize. Piastri's step forward in one-lap pace in 2025 has left him and Norris trading wins back and forth through the season, regularly sharing the same few meters of track.
'Our drivers are treated equally and fairly,' Brown said at Spa last month. 'There's nothing in their contract that gives one priority over the other, nor have they ever asked for that. They just want fair and equal treatment.'
The policy has worked. The one moment of contact between the team's two cars so far, when Norris ran into Piastri's rear in Canada, was handled immediately: Norris took full blame. McLaren feels it emerged stronger as a team after that incident. Subsequent close, hard but fair battles in Austria and Hungary were both encouraged and allowed to play out free of interference, bar team radio reminders to keep things contactless.
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The drivers have welcomed this approach. While both are fiercely determined to win this year's title, their relationship has remained very friendly.
Brown says it is 'the best it's ever been'. He believes the ability to keep peace within a season-long title fight is not only down to McLaren's culture, but also the individual characters of Norris and Piastri. 'They're going to be racing against each other for a long time in the same team,' Brown said.
Indeed, both are on long-term contracts, with Piastri having renewed his ahead of the current season. 'So it's important that the relationship continues to grow, because the relationship is not just about this year, but it bleeds into next year,' Brown added. 'They're going to be together for a long time.
'That's our greatest strength in McLaren. What's producing the on-track results in the car is the entire culture inside McLaren, the way of working, which is set from the highest levels.'
The greatest tests of that strength may still be to come.
Once the constructors' title is sewn up, potentially as early as the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in a month's time, McLaren's drivers will have just one championship to go for: their own.
However that plays out, there is likely to be one winner reveling in his first crown, having achieved the ultimate goal in their sport, and a crestfallen loser, knowing perhaps his best chance has passed by, both in the same McLaren garage. These figures will, almost certainly, be teammates wearing papaya race suits.
Brown said at Spa that McLaren would deal with this potentially awkward dynamic just like any other issue. It will focus on communication and discuss with both drivers how they want to handle each scenario.
'We'll just sit down, actually have a conversation,' Brown said, 'and go, 'One of you is going to win; it's going to be the best day of your life. One of you is going to lose; you're going to be (down). How do you want us to handle it? Do you want us to jump up and down and celebrate this guy won?'
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'So we're fully aware and sensitive of: how do you celebrate that situation? The way we think (about) it comes back to thinking about our people.'
Pulling off a cordial, fair championship fight between such evenly-matched teammates across the course of a whole season would be an impressive achievement.
But as much as Norris and Piastri have raced so far with McLaren's bigger picture in mind, they must do so through to the end of the season in Abu Dhabi on the first weekend of December. If they want to create and keep a dynasty, having the best drivers — Brown is adamant he has F1's top line-up — will be an integral part.
The 2026 season will change the F1 picture again, as the sport's new car-design regulations arrive.
For the first time in over a decade, McLaren won't be playing catch-up after a rule change. It'll be the team that the others have their sights on beating. This means, just as it has done in 2025, it will need another step forward. But for Stella, so long as McLaren retains the approach that has got it this far, and keeps understanding what it can do better, that will put the team in a good place — regardless of where it stands compared to its rivals.
'You always need to acknowledge the gap between where you are and where you want to be, because only once you identify this gap can you actually do something about it,' Stella said. 'If you think you're already at the level, that there's no gap, then you're not going to have any incentive. You're not going to have any action defined in relation to the opportunity.
'For us, humility is a very fundamental component of our identity. It's one of the things that we should not change.'
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
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