Zak Brown CEO, Mclaren Racing

The man heading Mclaren’s F1 team talks about his incredible collection of road and racing cars – and karts

HAVING A FAVOURITE COLLECTION OF model cars as a youngster is, I’d wager, par for the course for most people reading this magazine. Retaining some of that collection in a half-forgotten box somewhere as an adult? Also pretty common. Owning the full-size, real-life version of most of the model cars in that box? Not so much. When that collection includes racewinning F1 cars, Indy cars, endurance racers and touring cars, together with some all-time-great road cars, this is a particularly unusual case study.

Zak Brown’s career – or careers, plural – is a case study far from the norm too. The 52-year-old CEO of Mclaren Racing has also been a racing driver, built a global marketing company from scratch, become a media mogul and a co-owner of a front-running race team – all before taking the reins at Mclaren’s F1 operation in 2016. But he’s always been a fan, first and foremost: of cars, and above all, motorsport.

‘I always used to collect model cars – still do, in fact; they’re all over my desk,’ he explains. ‘So I’ve always been a collector, but I never thought I’d be fortunate enough to be in a position to be able to afford anything other than in 1/24 scale. But as Richard, my best mate and business partner, pointed out when he found a box of mine in his house, “Now you own half the cars that you used to collect as models.”’

That’s Richard Dean, who co-founded race team United Autosports with Brown in 2010. Starting with an Audi R8 GT3 car, a unit and a truck, it’s since become a considerable operation in its own right and has won races and titles in the LMP2 class in the World Endurance Championship and at Le Mans. The racing car contingent of Brown’s collection is kept at United’s main HQ at Wakefield. As you might expect of a motorsport superfan, his collection concentrates more on race than road cars, with around 40 historic competition cars.

‘I collect the cars I grew up watching, the drivers I idolised, the teams I idolised,’ Brown says, enthusiastically rattling off the drivers and race wins belonging to each car. ‘My first love was Formula 1 and Indycar, so I’ve got a dozen Formula 1 cars, all race winners, all driven by World Champions, all my favourite teams: Mclaren, Williams, Ferrari, Lotus. And favourite drivers: Mario Andretti, Nigel Mansell, Ayrton Senna. On the Indy cars, same thing: Emerson Fittipaldi, Bobby Rahal, Al Unser Jr, all the drivers I grew up idolising. And then on to the great sportscar legends: Jaguars, Porsche 962s, Can-am cars. It’s about 40 race cars from that kind of 1970s-onwards era. I’m not into things before the ’70s because I just didn’t watch them. I much prefer the Goodwood Festival over the Revival, for example, because I’m just not a ’50s, ’60s person. I am on the road car side,’ he qualifies, ‘but not on the race car side. It’s kind of the higher-horsepower, big-downforce, loud race cars for me.’

Brown experienced plenty of noise and downforce during his racing career, which took in single-seaters and GT cars, and included a podium finish in the 1997 Daytona 24 Hours. He stopped pursuing a driving career in 2000, although he returned to the sport on a more casual basis (though still in high-end events such as the Ferrari Challenge, Spa 24 Hours and British GT Championship) in the mid-2000s. Today, he predominantly competes in historic racing, in cars from his collection.

Though Brown says there isn’t a theme as such to his collection, he has one major criterion for his racing cars: ‘The car has to have won a race in period, or I won’t buy it. It could be my favourite driver, my favourite team, my favourite race; but second place – not good enough.’

Not everybody involved in motorsport enjoys driving on the road, but that’s not the case with Brown. ‘I also love road cars. I have 15 of them,

and they range from Ferrari F50 and 288 GTO to a Porsche 959 and Carrera GT, Mclaren Speedtail and a P1, Lamborghini Aventador, and then more classic cars: I have an Aston Martin DB6 Volante, Jaguar E-type, AC Cobra 289 and a Bentley 4¼ Litre, which I’d always wanted – that’s quite fun.’

He mentions he also picked up a recently rebuilt Porsche 911 by Singer the night before our interview. What spec did he go for? ‘The 4-litre, and it’s actually in a Mclaren white; I wanted a colour no one else has. Akzonobel does their paint, and they’re also a sponsor of ours, so I went through the Mclaren catalogue, picked out a white and asked to do the Porsche in that colour.’ Nice to have a bit of Mclaren DNA in the car? ‘Exactly!’

Mclaren is a brand Brown felt an affinity with long before he became involved with the company. ‘It’s always been my favourite team. Senna was my favourite driver when he was with Lotus and when he went to Mclaren in ’88, that’s when I really started getting into Formula 1. The combination of Mclaren’s dominance, Prost and Senna, that is when I totally fell in love with Formula 1. Already Senna was my favourite; he kind of converted me to a Mclaren fan and I’ve been that ever since.’

The Senna fascination extends to one of the smallest vehicles in Brown’s collection: the DAP kart the Brazilian raced in the 1981 world championships. ‘Richard’s driven that, I don’t fit,’ he smiles. ‘I would need to change the seat, and I don’t want to change its history.’ He also has a kart raced by double F1 champ Mika Häkkinen ‘in either the European or Finnish championship, so two cool karts. The history of racing all starts with karting.’

Brown himself started in karts, and moved from his native California to the UK in the early ’90s looking to progress his career in cars. He met racing driver and instructor Richard Dean when he enrolled on a course at the Jim Russell school at Silverstone, later becoming an instructor himself.

In 1995, he founded Just Marketing International, later shortened to JMI, an advertising agency specialising in motorsport. Brown and his team went on to broker sponsorship deals for major companies in F1, rallying, NASCAR and beyond. Brown’s business interests extended to multiple areas of the sport on different sides of the fence; from 2016 Brown was also non-executive chairman of the Motorsport Network group, which owns media titles such as Autosport and motorsport.com plus merchandise and ticket commerce platforms. He left the role in 2019.

He’s best known for his tenure at Mclaren Racing in the post-ron Dennis era, however. Although the team hasn’t won a race since Daniel Ricciardo’s Italian Grand Prix victory in 2021, it experienced a remarkable turnaround in form last season, with podiums aplenty for Lando Norris and remarkable rookie Oscar Piastri. Is there a secret? Brown says it is simply down to having the right people in the right place. ‘Everybody is doing a great job, and everybody is proud of everyone in the team. It’s culture and technology – both of those things – but it starts with the people.’

Does Brown’s racing experience make it easier for him to manage drivers? ‘Definitely,’ he replies. ‘While I can’t drive as fast as Lando, I can think like him. And I think that does help in a racing environment, because I know when drivers are in a good mood, bad mood, what the adrenaline’s like in the car and as soon as you get out of the car, how long it takes to calm down.’

Brown has some first-hand experience of Norris and Piastri’s cockpit environment in that he’s driven the Mclaren MCL35 in which Ricciardo won at Monza – a car that’s now a part of the collection. ‘From a driving experience, it’s just indescribable how unbelievable a current Formula 1 car is: from a pure driving experience, there’s nothing like it.’ How different is the MCL35 from Brown’s favourite car in his collection, Ayrton Senna’s ’91 Mclaren MP4/6? ‘In many ways the later car is easier to drive, because it’s the perfect race car, right? So you don’t need to worry about heel and toe, about locking the rear brakes if you get your blip wrong, or stalling, because it has anti-stall anyway. It’s unbelievably fast – I wouldn’t want to see what it’s like on the limit – but it gives you confidence because it’s got so much downforce. It just doesn’t do anything other than go extremely fast. It doesn’t do anything scary, whereas an ’80s-era car has the same amount of power but nowhere near the downforce, you gotta blip the throttle and they’re a lot more squirrely.’

And his favourite on the road car side? ‘I love my new Mclaren Speedtail. It’s an unbelievable driving experience. And if I were to pick one non-mclaren to be a little less PC – even though the Speedtail really is my favourite! – it would be my Porsche 959. I’ve driven it in all weathers. Love that car.’

With the Mclaren Automotive road car business and the F1 operation both headquartered at the Mclaren Technology Centre in Woking, does Brown get involved at all in the street car side of the brand? ‘I’ve got a great relationship with [Mclaren Automotive CEO] Michael Leiters. We talk all the time and we share our brand; we share a lot of customers, we collaborate a lot. I don’t get involved in the automotive business; I don’t say, “Hey, I think that should be a four-door car instead of two,” but we’re very complementary and work close together.’

In (presumably infrequent) times away from business and cars, Brown the collector also accumulates baseball memorabilia and – interestingly – historical documents, predominantly letters, including signed missives from US presidents, UK prime ministers, royalty, and mafia members. Among them, Richard Nixon’s resignation letter to Henry Kissinger, and a letter from Henry VIII to a cardinal, discussing an annulment of one of his marriages.

Back in motorsport, Mclaren’s link with United Autosports becomes deeper this year as the team will run two Mclaren 720S cars in the World Endurance Championship’s new LMGT3 class, meaning the Mclaren marque will once again race at Le Mans. And Brown hints that a future bid for overall victory isn’t out of the question: ‘I think Mclaren needs to be back at Le Mans and hopefully this is the start of the road to a long history back there. And, you know, we’d love to be in LMDH [the joint top class, together with the LMH Hypercar category] one of these days…’ Richard Dean too has previously stated United Autosports’ interest in running in LMDH with the right manufacturer partner. That could well be Mclaren; watch this space.

Given the amount of time Brown spends at races and in the air, he gets to visit United’s HQ and his collection ‘probably three, four times a year. Not as much as I would like, but because I don’t go up that often, it makes every visit special.’ Given the sheer volume of work, travel time and business interests Brown takes on, how does he manage his work-life balance? ‘That’s probably the biggest area of regret over the years,’ he says. ‘Being there for the family, the birthdays. I don’t regret anything in business – even though that doesn’t mean everything was always perfect, and I learned from that – but worklife balance is the hardest. I’m fortunate that my wife travels with me to a lot of races, my kids are now old enough to travel and they enjoy the sport, so that’s made it better but it’s far from perfect.’

Is there anything left he’d like to add to his collection? Any boxes unticked? ‘A Le Mans winner,’ he replies, near-instantly. ‘But they’re not inexpensive,’ he adds with a wry smile. You sense for Brown there will always be itches left to scratch – and that maybe a few more models in that box may gain real-life counterparts.

‘SENNA WAS MY FAVOURITE; HE CONVERTED ME TO A MCLAREN FAN’