Revered or reviled? McLaren CEO Zak Brown could have run IndyCar; he wants to dominate it
INDIANAPOLIS – Zak Brown loves to win, whether it be an IndyCar oval in Texas, a Formula E street circuit in Sao Paulo or when Formula 1 cars rip and roar around Monza. And when he does, the intrepid businessman with Hollywood roots and an affinity for flair is willing to do just about anything.
Want an F1 test? Care to see your boss sport a brand-new tattoo? Want to party with one of racing’s boldest and brashest personalities in the middle of Miami nightlife until the wee hours of Monday morning? Give Zak Brown what he wants, and he’ll give you the world.
Just don’t ever think of crossing him. That’s what $30 million lawsuits are for.
Because Brown, the McLaren Racing CEO, who this year just struck a contract extension through 2030, sees the way two-time IndyCar champion Alex Palou double-crossed him last summer as an unforgiveable sin. The racing executive whose guiding principle may be his catchy line, “People don’t steal things; people lose things,” doesn’t see Palou’s about-face as a loss. He feels he was outright cheated – not by the rival IndyCar team owner with whom he shares a blood feud, but by Palou, the driver Brown had courted while Palou was allegedly under contract to Chip Ganassi Racing the previous summer.
“If I’m Chip (Ganassi), and you’ve got a championship driver, you don’t want to lose him, and you’re going to do everything you can to keep him. I don’t have any issue with Chip,” Brown told IndyStar last month during one of multiple exclusive interviews over the past 18 months. “I have an issue with the guy who signed the contract, who’s cashing checks and took all the deliverables and who isn’t honoring his contract.
“Where he went, I don’t blame that racing team. They’re just doing what they’re trying to do.”
It's what you would've done, Brown is asked.
“100%.”
Because in the fall of 2022 – and as recently as the middle of last summer – Palou appeared to be Brown’s meal ticket to IndyCar stardom.
Brown was once a young, aspiring racecar driver who briefly competed in Europe with a dream of F1 until he realized he didn’t have the chops, and then shifted onto the IRL track in the mid-‘90s, until the bottom fell out of that, too. Now he finds himself on the cusp of breaking Roger Penske's and Chip Ganassi’s long-held stranglehold on the sport.
He chose correctly in the fall of 2019 when he handed a 20-year-old Pato O’Ward a lifeline. Two years later, Brown signed away a championship-winning Team Penske engineer to lead his trackside engineering program – a move that irked Penske and Team President Tim Cindric so much they enforced a six-month, non-compete clause. Brown also signed Indy 500-winner Alexander Rossi and multi-time Champ Car title-winning engineer Craig Hampson leading into the 2023 season. Brown’s transformation of Sam Schmidt and Ric Peterson’s longtime IndyCar outfit three years into what started as a technical alliance with Arrow McLaren SP, and just one year into majority ownership, has the makings of a Hollywood story.
But outside a victory inherited this spring after Team Penske’s vacated win at St. Pete, Brown and Arrow McLaren haven’t bagged an IndyCar win in 22 months.
“We’re all disappointed we haven’t gotten more wins after all this investment,” Schmidt told IndyStar this week. “We’re hoping to see a better qualifying average, and last year we had three or four DNFS. (It was actually eight.)
“That’s unacceptable.”
With a scoff, a grin and a sarcastic laugh, Ganassi told reporters two months ago that Brown "needs a win."
In a Formula 1 landscape shrouded by Red Bull dominance, Brown’s transformation of McLaren since he took over as CEO in 2018 has the papaya program positioned as a dark-horse Max Verstappen challenger, currently sitting 3rd in the Constructors’ Championship after Lando Norris’ breakthrough win this month in the Miami Grand Prix.
In IndyCar, less than a year after Palou reconsidered his future, Arrow McLaren has had a revolving door of drivers in the No. 6 car, along with another free agent in Rossi at year’s end, a new shop to move into and an ever-challenging on-track battle to fight. In the background, there exists a trail of head-scratching exits within the most robust marketing/communications/sales teams in the series – perhaps, some theorize, bigger than that of the series itself.
And in the face of a pivotal few months for the team’s future, Schmidt, the team’s founder and now minority owner, is preaching continuity.
Will Brown’s unquenched, unrelenting drive to be the best, a personality that shot him to the top of the sports marketing world and landed him in his dream job, let the 52-year-old take a beat and see if his latest well-laid plans can properly launch?
“I probably wouldn’t do business the same way (Zak) does, but at the same time, I live vicariously through him," Schmidt said. "If I wasn’t in this wheelchair, I’d be all over (Brown’s 50-deep vintage car collection). I might not do it the same way, but he runs circles around everybody.
“His mind is constantly working. I tried three years to get a deal done (for ‘The Double’ with Kyle Busch) but couldn’t get it done. He landed Kyle Larson.”
'I wasn't a role model student for anyone other than a convicted felon'
That Brown achieved all this – rising through the sports business world to CEO of McLaren Racing, with competitive teams in IndyCar, Formula 1, Formula E and Extreme E – without the tutelage of a college degree is more than impressive.
That he did so as a possible high school dropout seems almost fictional.
“I never went to my high school graduation. I’ve been told I graduated, but I’ve never seen my diploma,” Brown told IndyStar last August. “If someone said, ‘Would you bet your life on you having graduated?’ I wouldn’t bet my life on it.
“I wasn’t a role model student for anyone other than a convicted felon.”
As Brown explained, the last straw in his high school career at University High School was fighting his class president. “I wasn’t the best student,” he said, “but I could kick some ass.”
But an entrepreneurial spirit helped mold Brown in his teenage years. Having first attended the Grand Prix of Long Beach as a 9-year-old with his parents in 1981, Brown caught the racing bug hard and begged his father to take him and his brother to any races they could catch at Riverside and Pomona. Six years later, he found himself back at the GP with his best friend’s family to watch Mario Andretti win on the streets of Long Beach for the fourth and final time. During that weekend, Brown had the good fortune of bumping into Andretti and asked him, plainly, “How do you get started in racing?”
Andretti’s answer was simple: go-karts.
As part of the teenager’s storybook childhood, Brown had been on Wheel of Fortune’s ‘Teen Week’ and won a handful of nice watches. Having seen an ad in the race program for Jim Hall Kart Racing School, Brown sold his watches at a pawn shop for a couple grand and purchased a kart from Pitt’s Performance in Van Nuys, Calif. As he details, he effectively quit school and began working at the Racing School as a factory driver who built karts with whatever entry-level knowledge he had with a toolbox in his hand.
“I definitely pissed off some customers,” he said.
As his racing career took off – taking him to Europe in pursuit of F1, before a return back to the states to hunt down an IRL ride – Brown explains he found a rather unique way to fund it all.
“My mom was a travel agent, and she didn’t have any money to help me race,” said Brown, who added his mom went so far one year as to essentially give him her whole salary, with enough saved up to keep the lights on, but she could do no more. “But she met someone at TWA Airlines who was willing to sponsor me with airline tickets.
“So I’d take those and then go to people and say, ‘Give me $50,000 for my racing, and I’ll give you $50,000 in airline tickets.”
Just Marketing Inc.
As Brown’s sponsorship sales expertise took off, his racing career somewhat waned. He moved back to Los Angeles in 1994, during which his house got knocked off its foundation during the 6.7-magnitude Northridge Earthquake. Still holding onto faint IndyCar driver dreams, he and his girlfriend at the time (now his wife, Tracy) moved to Indianapolis, sight unseen, in hopes that being near to the Racing Capital of the World would give himself a leg up.
“A lot of people started going, ‘You should just stop racing and do the sponsorship stuff. That’s where you can be very good.’ And that, of course, isn’t what you want to hear when you’re racing,” Brown said.
He and Tracy moved into a rental home just south of 86th Street. and Ditch Road on the northside of Indianapolis. It was there where Just Marketing Inc. was born. Initially partnering with agency Patterson Thomas to help launch the company, Brown soon had an office overlooking Monument Circle which he used to lure his first clients.
Ruthie Culbertson, employee No. 1, who was working in the Indy Lights paddock where Brown was racing at the time, remembers an overwhelming sense of likely regret after the up-and-coming racecar driver sweet talked her into joining his side hustle.
“I’m going to go work for a 24-year-old? What am I doing?!” Culbertson remembers thinking. At the same time, Brown’s ability to read and work a room, forge promises he had not the faintest idea how to deliver on – and then do so anyways – and network his way into six- and eventually seven-figure sponsorship deals in the racing world was almost intoxicating.
“The gift at 24 to read a room and figure out people’s needs, he’d have people signing on the dotted line and throwing money at us even before he even walked out the door,” Culbertson continued. “Within four years, the growth was exponential. I mean, every single year, it seemed like things doubled. The guy could sell ice to an Eskimo standing right on it. It was just so incredible.”
As Culbertson remembers, Brown’s use of selling airline tickets for funding continued at JMI, though not all of his ideas landed. She credits her old boss as being one of – if not the -- first in the racing industry to attempt to popularize the idea of track days for an average race fan looking to see what their idols experience in the cockpit. Hendrick Motorsports has since popularized the idea with their ‘Track Attack’ program.
Brown’s idea? ‘Zak Attack.’
“He pioneered a lot of things that may not have stuck because it just wasn’t quite a good fit at the time, but he had big ideas before a lot of the big ideas,” said Culbertson, whose parents lived a couple doors down from Brown on Trace Lane at the time. After Sunday family dinners, she says she’d bring him over leftovers.
As JMI blossomed, Brown struck a final racing deal and so badly wanted to put that career to rest at the end of 1999.
“At the start, the business was the necessary evil to keep the racing going, but within a couple years, it started going the other way, to where I was enjoying the success of the business, and the racing wasn’t going so well,” said Brown, who was running in the American Le Mans Series at the time. “In my final two years, I wanted to stop after 1999, but my contract went through 2000, so I honored my contract – unlike some people in IndyCar today.”
Why Zak Brown turned down IndyCar's CEO position
As much as JMI reached new heights each year within some corners of the American open-wheel landscape, Jon Flack remembers joining what he characterized as a relatively unknown firm when he was hired in January 2002 as an executive vice president of client services. Previously, Flack had worked for more than two years with Conseco locally, inking deals with the Pacers, Colts and NCAA, among others.
“I had a lot of questions about JMI – and about Zak, to be quite honest,” said Flack, who joined when Brown’s company still had fewer than 10 employees. “They were very open-wheel-centric. Smaller deals, namely one-offs, and they weren’t touching NASCAR.
“Quite frankly, when I joined the company and would reference the name to people, some might’ve heard of Zak, but very few. And even fewer had heard of JMI.”
Shortly after accepting his job offer, Flack remembers a frank conversation with his wife over dinner where they both wondered aloud, ‘Do you think this thing’s gonna make it?’
As Flack explained, JMI’s telltale startup culture still seven years in positioned it somewhere that “one bad call from a client could force us to shut the business down.”
Flack would go on to stay for 14 years – and so much of that boiled down to a two-year project Brown, Flack and others credit with taking JMI to another level entirely. At the time, signing many liquor brands as sponsors in NASCAR had been banned, and a similar restriction on tobacco products soon followed. But Brown began reading the tea leaves and sensed a possible shift.
JMI landed a deal in 2003 to promote Smirnoff Ice Triple Black, a malt-based beverage owned by alcohol behemoth Diageo, which wasn’t beholden to the advertising ban. Two years working closely with Diageo helped introduce the massive company to a previously untapped market, while restrictions on the liquor ban began to fracture. When it did completely in 2005, JMI brought Diageo’s Crown Royal to the burgeoning NASCAR stage.
Next: A $100 million deal with Johnnie Walker, also a Diageo brand, in Formula 1. Around the same time, Brown and JMI were able to turn a similar smaller win with Black & Decker and Dewalt in Porsche Super Cup into McLaren F1’s deal with Hilton that the team still owns today, after the Black & Decker CEO shifted to the worldwide hotel brand.
“Zak kinda created an industry in motorsports that hadn’t been there before, repping companies that wanted to be involved in motorsports but didn’t know how to,” Schmidt said. “We as a team worked really hard to cut out those guys, cause they made our lives really difficult. If we could provide the infrastructure to show the companies everything JMI did, then there’d be no reason for them.
“But he was able to locate Diageo, who hadn’t even thought about motorsports and taught them how to make money out of it. It’s genius, and he built it – and he wasn’t so human-ly tied to it that he couldn’t sell it.”
In 2008, Brown sold 70% of JMI to Spire Capital and Credit Suisse. WPP purchased an additional 20% -- 10% from both sides – in 2012. And in 2013, Brown sold the entire company to CSM, who then named him CEO of roughly 1,500 employees. Around the same time, Hulman & Co. CEO Mark Miles had approached Brown about taking a newly formed IndyCar CEO position.
“I definitely seriously considered it, because I love IndyCar, but ultimately I made the decision to go to Europe,” Brown told IndyStar last year. “It was an awesome job – and it would still be an awesome job – and I have a lot of passion for IndyCar and a lot of things I think I could do to help contribute, but all I have is a voice.”
Does he think the series would look any different had he taken a step back from having one foot out the door to Europe in May of 2013?
“Ummm, probably,” Brown laughed. “Probably.”
'Making a deal with the devil'
After years of his CSM CEO role feeling like the first ‘job’ that he’d had in decades, Brown reached what many close confidants say seemed like was always a likely destination, hinted at by the McLaren F1 fire suits and Ayrton Senna helmets on display in JMI offices wherever he went.
In 2016, Brown left his post at CSM and was named executive director of McLaren Technology Group – the role he served as when he helped usher in F1 legend Fernando Alonso’s Indy 500 debut in 2017. A year ago, as part of a massive operational structural overhaul, Brown survived the carnage and was named CEO of McLaren Racing.
Greeted with “a very disgruntled workforce, shareholder fights and a blank racing car” after McLaren finished 9th in the Constructors’ Championship with only $30 million pounds in sponsorship on the books, Brown got to work at an overhaul of his own.
Two years later, McLaren was 3rd in points. Despite sporadic rough patches on- and off-track in recent years, Brown has ultimately weathered the ship and has two young drivers under contract through at least the end of 2026.
“We were like Darth Vader (before Brown took over as McLaren Racing CEO). We were dark, not approachable, not inclusive, and that’s when we went to papaya,” he said. “No, we want to be Luke Skywalker. We want to be the good side of ‘Star Wars’, and I think the Darth Vader side worked for that generation. But I wanted to be the fan favorite."
According to recent fan surveys, Brown’s version of McLaren has done just that – in IndyCar and F1.
“I felt like I could fix this on the commercial side, because (McLaren) is an unbelievable brand, and I felt like that’s something I could really jump into. Really, it’s all about, ‘What do you want to get out of a relationship with McLaren?’ as opposed to, ‘What do I want to sell you?’ Typically, if you have happy partners, you get what you want. You don’t lead with what you want. You lead with what they want, and inevitably if you give them what they want, you get yours, too.”
That principle proved true with Schmidt and his IndyCar team co-owner Ric Peterson, who first discussed some sort of partnership with Brown in 2018 – to the point of doing due diligence – before talks stalled and Brown brought Alonso back to the 2019 500 in an alliance with Carlin that failed in major and widespread ways.
Schmidt and Peterson only benefited.
What followed was a ‘engagement period’ between the two sides after forcing a technical alliance starting with the 2020 IndyCar season, where McLaren got a half-dozen stickers on Arrow McLaren SP’s cars in return for engineering help from across the pond. Seeing some initial benefit in the first year-plus of the partnership, Schmidt and Peterson agreed to sell a 75% ownership take in the team to McLaren, giving Brown full control – and quietly raising some questions in the paddock, Schmidt said.
“Our positioning at JMI was that we were brand-centered, and so we had to look at all of the best options available, and that means when the client directs you on what they want to do, there’s one winner at a bunch of losers,” Flack said of his JMI days. “After as many years in the business as we’ve had, you’re going to have a lot of friends and you’re going to have some enemies.
“When people learn that I worked with Zak for many years, 50% of people will tell me they think he’s the best thing since sliced bread, and 50% would like to whack him in the parking lot, and the origins of many of those feelings go back to a deal somewhere. If you look at his current clashes of personality today and really trace back the origins of those, in many cases, they go back to deals during the JMI years.”
Schmidt says he remembers colleagues asking him why he’d “made a deal with the devil” that led to the dropping of his and Peterson’s initials off the team name at the end of the 2022 season.
“But it’s the devil you know vs. the one you don’t. We covered all our bases, and he executed on it the way he said he would,” Schmidt said. “In my mind, people always have one strike already, so if you double-cross me, then we don’t do deals anymore.
“Ric and I both wish our names were still there, but from a valuation perspective, we know it couldn’t stay there forever. Once you buy more than 50%, you can do whatever you want with the name. The tradeoff is the budget is 140% of what it was before, going from 60 bodies to 110 – with the commercial side from four to 15.”
Two years of turbulence
And so there Brown sat in Arrow McLaren’s conference room in October of 2022, spinning the temporary pause of Palou’s arrival to the team as a major win, while turning the page on a notable leadership loss he genuinely felt – or at least said – the team was better for. The change-related chaos on the F1 side after Brown’s promotion seemed to come much quicker than the seemingly constant leaky faucet that has plagued Brown over in IndyCar.
Ashlee Huffman was dismissed, after spending 12 years at JMI and nearly three at CSM before she was brought on as Arrow McLaren SP’s managing director of the commercial side. Months into her new role, alleged sponsor frustration – according to multiple sources who were granted anonymity to discuss the various recent personnel moves – is said to have cracked the foundation of the team’s commercial and marketing side that had been beefed up in the fall of 2019 with JMI and CSM disciples midway through 2020.
Exits of Phil Zielinski (director of communications), Mark Myers (director of partnerships), Jeff Darks (head of marketing), Mo Murray (vice president of marketing and commercial) and Reid Atherton (senior director of commercial) – for the team with far-and-away the deepest, strongest, most successful marketing and communications team in the paddock – remains curious.
No departure, however, is said to have been as directly related to Brown's leadership style as the exit of president Taylor Kiel in the days after the end of the 2022 campaign. Those who remain in Kiel’s corner feel as if the loss of his 15 years of team experience was simply a matter of time, in order for Brown to get his people in to run the show. Brown maintains the team was sorely missing a stronger leader.
Brown is occasionally accused of a never-ceasing work ethic that bleeds down the chain of command – to the level that some team members say they felt expected to keep their phone ringers on at night for calls from across the Atlantic. Others say Brown simply hired those whom he saw pieces of himself. Those who didn’t – or couldn’t – fit that mold would find an organization no longer fit for their personalities.
“This is a tough business. It’s not for everyone,” said Brown, who said McLaren Racing has made strides in recent years to develop programs to support families of employees constantly on the road. “Not everything works according to plan, but there’s no one left that we’d hire back, respectfully, so therefore I’m not too disappointed. So much about putting a team together is getting the chemistry right, not just the technical skillset.
“If you don’t fit in, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad guy or gal; it just means they didn’t fit into what we have.”
Said team sporting director Tony Kanaan, who’s known Brown for 30 years: “To have a good team is not about hiring the best people. It’s about making the best out of people, and I think Zak does that really well. Like every team, you sometimes see people who don’t agree with the new mentality, and they leave, and that’s just part of it. That happens everywhere, every year.”
Brown vs. Ganassi feud: An old deal gone awry
But it’s been a particularly rocky, unpredictable, and at times defeating, couple years for Arrow McLaren – at least when it comes to Brown’s pedigree of success, McLaren’s perceived technological advantages, the team’s seemingly endless budgets and the star driver that never was.
Across nearly two dozen race weekends with team principal Gavin Ward – lured away from a lead engineer role at Team Penske two years ago to fill Kiel’s vacancy – Arrow McLaren has just a single win, technically speaking. And it’s not one they were able to celebrate live. That remains the team’s only podium through five race weekends in 2024. Meanwhile, Brown continues to walk a fine line of being one of Penske Entertainment’s vocal critics and trusted confidants.
The team lines up with three cars in the first three rows for Sunday’s Indianapolis 500 with as great a shot to win as anyone not named Team Penske, in spite of a truly chaotic – but ultimately successful – couple hours of qualifying Saturday with miscommunication, mechanical issues and one car deemed illegal in post-session tech. The team remains one of IndyCar’s most frequent in the news, equipped with maybe the widest variance in results among top teams.
That ultimately rests at Brown’s feet, as he approaches five years in IndyCar full-time. For two of them, the pursuit of Palou and a years long feud with Ganassi have, some might argue, occupied a significant amount of bandwidth for a team trying to usurp the Kings of IndyCar. Brown’s successes that led him here have almost never been small.
And so this big whiff had and an outsized impact on his team, that remains an anomaly.
“I race hard. I race to win, and I don’t believe people steal things; I think other people lose things and leave the door open. I always hear people say, ‘Oh, they stole my driver,’ or, ‘They stole my sponsor,’ but you lost them. You left the door open, so I made a move,” Brown said last year. “I assume everyone’s calling everyone on my shirt, and if someone on my shirt wants to go to someone else’s shirt, I’m going to look in the mirror and go, ‘Where did I go wrong?’”
So how does he see that motto when it comes to Palou and Ganassi, with whom he had a falling out with years ago related to a deal-went-sideways at JMI according to multiple sources. Since then, Brown has made two passes at hiring Scott Dixon, thought he had Palou, hired Kanaan after two years at CGR to make his 500 goodbye tour in papaya, landed longtime CGR sponsor NTT Data and even hired away mid-level staffing.
“While I think it’s pretty well-known Chip and I aren’t best friends, I actually don’t have an issue with this. There was some business we did together at JMI that I felt he didn’t honor,” Brown said of Palou staying last year. “Now personally, would I bring someone back to my team that had done that to me?
“No, but that’s probably a lesson for me in looking into someone’s character. When someone does ‘that’ to someone else, you have to have a long think, ‘Would they ever do that to me?’ And I think we know the answer to that now.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: McLaren boss Zak Brown wants to win 2024 Indy 500, dominate IndyCar
