Seriously? You've never heard of McLaren. Oh, brother. You live in a cave or something?
How many times do you need to see me running to Costco in my bright orange 720s. You think that's a Porsche you uncouth POS? Get a life!
The Bright-Orange, Baby-Faced, Comeback Team Tearing Up Formula One
With an American CEO and a pair of drivers under the age of 25, McLaren has surged back to life and is chasing a stunning world championship
McLaren’s .Lando Norris during the Singapore Grand Prix. Hasan Bratic/Zuma Press
By Joshua Robinson, WSJ
Oct. 18, 2024 7:00 am ET
Early last year, the top technical minds at McLaren stood in front of their $15 million Formula One car and publicly announced, in no uncertain terms, that they hadn’t gotten it quite right. The pace was off. The aerodynamics were lacking. And the team had nowhere to hide: things were going to be rough going for a while.
Then McLaren’s worst fears all came true once the car actually hit the track. “It was even worse than I thought it was going to be,” McLaren’s American CEO Zak Brown says. “We were the ninth, 10th quickest team.”
That’s ninth, 10th quickest out of 10—not the sort of place that an outfit with McLaren’s heritage, or budget, felt it belonged. This is a team with the second most race victories in Formula One history, behind only Ferrari. The McLaren name is synonymous with Senna, Prost, and Lauda. So that kind of last-place futility was an insult to its past and, increasingly, a real threat to its future. Sponsors had all but deserted the team in 2016. They wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.
Then came the upgrades.
Midway through the 2023 season, McLaren began trickling out a series of improvements that had been years in the making. And by 2024, the bright-orange team that had bet on young drivers, poached key engineers from its rivals, and gone through three engine providers in five seasons was finally ready to compete again.
“I know we sucked,” Brown would tell people around McLaren’s space-age headquarters in the English countryside. “But don’t worry…Good is coming.”
Lando Norris reacts after winning the Singapore Grand Prix. Photo: Qian Jun/Zuma Press
Now, good is here. Heading into this weekend’s U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, McLaren has five race wins—its best haul in more than a decade—and sits on the edge of its first constructors’ world title since 1998. A season that began with months of dominance by the all-conquering Red Bull team is turning into the year that McLaren surged back to life.
The most surprising part of all this is what McLaren did when it wasn’t winning. During that run of barren years, the team also reinvented its image to become the most popular Formula One team to the fan base that F1 coveted most: Americans.
Gone were the days of all-gray-everything imposed by its visionary chief Ron Dennis as he scooped up championships in the 1980s and 1990s. What had been a revolutionary level of corporate professionalism and stern attention to detail now struck Brown as a little soulless and unfriendly. So the first thing he did was revive another color scheme that McLaren had originally debuted in the 1960s. They painted the cars papaya orange.
“I felt like this place was Star Wars, but we became a little bit Darth Vader,” Brown says. “And Darth Vader is cool, but I wanted us to be Luke Skywalker.”
His timing couldn’t have been better. McLaren soon became the star team when the first season of a fly-on-the-wall series called “Drive to Survive” hit Netflix. Mercedes and Ferrari had originally been too skeptical to participate. But that only freed up more airtime for the boys in the orange overalls to work their charm on American audiences. Not only was the U.S. the biggest market for McLaren’s road car business, it was turning into McLaren’s corporate lifeblood with roughly half the team’s sponsors now based in the U.S.
And in the process, McLaren came to embody something that Dennis’s winning machine had rarely been. The papaya version was now a plucky underdog.
“I’d like to keep us there,” Brown says. “We certainly still have the underdog mindset. We’re not sitting here feeling like we’re leading the world championship right now.”
But over the second half of this season, there’s no question that McLaren has been the most impressive team on the circuit. Its two drivers have combined to win four of the past six races, putting the 24-year-old Lando Norris in the title fight and establishing 23-year-old Oscar Piastri as a legitimate contender in seasons to come.
All of a sudden, Red Bull winning seven of the first 10 Grands Prix this year feels a long time ago.
“People are like, ‘Red Bull’s car got slower.’ No, it didn’t,” Brown says. “Everyone else just got faster.”
What also happened is that Red Bull got more chaotic. Internal turmoil over the past year worked to McLaren’s advantage as it swooped in to pry away at least three senior figures, including chief designer Rob Marshall in January and its head of strategy last month.
At the same time, McLaren has been pushing the F1’s technical boundaries harder than it has in years to extract maximum performance out of their car. The clearest example came this summer in Azerbaijan where Piastri took first place and Norris grabbed the fastest lap with help from a daring rear wing that immediately caused the rest of the paddock to freak out. McLaren’s rivals argued that the wing flexed in an illegal way, and the sport’s governing body backed them up. The loophole was closed, but McLaren already had the points in the bank.
“That’s what Formula One is for,” Norris said. “Exploring everything within the rules.”
McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri ahead of the Austin Grand Prix. Photo: Panoramic/Zuma Press
Those rules will change radically in 2026, with a new set of specifications that sends everyone back to the drawing board just as McLaren hits its stride. But Brown knows that it’s simply the nature of F1 to run out of time.
With the first McLaren championship in a quarter-century to secure this season, he isn’t worried about which loopholes his team might exploit a year and a half from now.
“We might be the ones that figure something out. We might not,” Brown says. “I can’t lose sleep over that. I can only just keep doing what we’re doing.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com
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