On the brink of insolvency five years ago, the team is now dominating on the Formula 1 track—and, under the leadership of CEO Zak Brown, building up its sponsorships to rival Ferrari and Mercedes.
When McLaren drivers Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri crossed the finish line in third and fourth place at the Singapore Grand Prix in October, the chase for Formula 1’s constructors’ championship was over. For the second consecutive season, McLaren had claimed the sport’s ultimate prize, and that left Zak Brown with a pivotal decision to make: how to properly celebrate.
For the 54-year-old McLaren Racing CEO, though, there wasn’t much question how to surround himself.
“With your racing team—and not just the racing team at the circuit, but the entire racing team, which is made up of 1,400 people at McLaren,” Brown says, knowing all too well that the latest McLaren dynasty was preceded by a painful 26-year title drought. “So pretty exciting times.”
With three Grand Prix races still remaining in the F1 season—starting with Las Vegas on Saturday, followed by Qatar and Abu Dhabi—McLaren could soon collect even more hardware. Norris is in pole position to capture the drivers’ championship, a feat no one has managed in a McLaren since Lewis Hamilton did so in 2008, and his closest competition in the standings is his teammate Piastri, 24 points back.
Just as impressive as any trophy, however, is what McLaren has accomplished off the track.
In 2019, Forbes valued the team at $620 million, on $165 million in revenue the preceding year. While only three teams were worth more, McLaren was by far the least profitable outfit in the sport, with an astonishing $137 million operating loss (earnings before interest and taxes) in 2018.
Six years later, Forbes estimates McLaren’s Formula 1 team is worth nearly seven times as much, at $4.4 billion—and up to third place on the grid—after revenues grew to $614 million in 2024. The team’s operating profit also soared to $61 million in a new era of financial responsibility under the series’ cost cap, which was implemented in 2021 to limit spending in several areas related to racecar research and construction.
At the center of McLaren’s turnaround is Brown, a former marketing executive who took over the team in 2018. His commercial-first approach, a departure from the age-old idea that winning is the best way to attract sponsors in Formula 1, has enabled the organization to rival the pace of the sport’s financial giants, Ferrari and Mercedes. Forbes estimates that roughly 70% to 75% of McLaren’s revenue comes from its commercial operations—as opposed to prize money and central league revenue from media rights and race-hosting fees—with the vast majority of that total from the robust stable of partnerships Brown has assembled, including prominent brands like Google, OKX, Cisco, Dell, Hilton and Lego.
“Zak flipped the model and said, ‘Let’s go be really visible, get sponsors and treat them really well, and we’ll use that money to reinvest in engineering and people, and we’ll win races,’” says Ricky Paugh, the founder and managing partner of 1440Sports, a consulting firm that specializes in motorsports and golf sponsorship and has worked with McLaren. “He has created a flywheel that he’s running right, and people are just trying to catch him with engineering, and that’s just not going to happen.”
Along For The Ride: The sponsors covering McLaren’s racecar helped the team post $614 million in revenue in 2024.
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And Brown is only upping the ante. In August, McLaren announced that Mastercard would become the Formula 1 team’s title sponsor next year, filling a naming rights slot that had been vacant since Vodafone split with the team after the 2013 season. The deal, which is reportedly set to run through the mid-2030s and pay roughly $100 million annually, is “the biggest partnership that McLaren has ever put together,” Brown says.
If McLaren can continue its championship-winning ways, it should have plenty of other opportunities to grow its business. But in Formula 1, where the difference between success and failure can be a tenth of a second, Brown isn’t taking anything for granted.
“It’s not if we don’t win the championship at some point—it’s when, and so we need to keep our feet on the ground,” he says. “So we tend to sell ourselves as a top-three team, and if we can over-deliver, fantastic. But [let’s] not put ourselves in a position where that becomes the expectation.”
It’s hard to blame Brown for staying wary. A year after he joined the racing division’s parent company—now known as McLaren Group, which also manufactures sports cars through the separate McLaren Automotive subsidiary—as executive director in 2016, the Formula 1 team puttered to a ninth-place finish in the constructors’ standings for the second time in three seasons. Morale was low on the factory floor, the fans were upset, and the commercial situation wasn’t much better. Brown recalls the organization having “record-low corporate partnership” when he assumed the CEO role with McLaren Racing in 2018.
Quick Turnaround: McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown has two star drivers in Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri but isn’t taking anything for granted. “We need to keep our feet on the ground,” he says, five years after the team was in dire financial straits.
David Davies/PA Images/Getty Images
He was perfectly equipped to change that reality, however. For two decades, Brown had run Just Marketing International, an agency that he founded in 1995, brokering deals to bring companies like Subway, Crown Royal, LG and UBS into Nascar and Formula 1. Chime Communications bought JMI for $76 million in 2013, and once Brown had transitioned to McLaren, he set his sights on building up the team’s sponsorship.
“For my skill set, I certainly wasn’t ready to jump into our [aerodynamics] department and start making recommendations on how we can improve,” says Brown, a California native who got his start in motorsports as a driver in lower-level series. “If I could bring in great corporate partners, that would let us invest in our people, our infrastructure and our team and get some momentum going.”
To be fair, McLaren wasn’t exactly starting from scratch, as the second-oldest team currently on the Formula 1 grid, behind only Ferrari. In 1963, legendary driver, engineer and executive Bruce McLaren launched the outfit, which joined the series three years later and subsequently introduced innovations such as the first carbon-fiber chassis while pioneering the use of nostril vents to improve aerodynamics. From 1974 to 1998, the team won eight F1 constructors’ championships, and under the McLaren Racing umbrella, the organization has excelled in other racing series as well. To this day, it is the only group to have won the “Triple Crown of Motorsport,” which consists of the Indianapolis 500, the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race and Formula 1’s Monaco Grand Prix.
But as McLaren slid down the F1 standings in the 2010s, the brand needed significant reinvention, notes chief marketing officer Louise McEwen. So after Liberty Media Corporation bought Formula 1 for $4.7 billion in cash and stock in 2017 and began making a slew of changes to revitalize the racing series, McLaren audited its fan base and recrafted its identity, returning to the iconic “papaya” orange color scheme that first appeared on the organization’s F1 cars in 1968 but had been abandoned in the 1970s.
Leaders Of The Pack: Norris is in pole position to capture the F1 drivers’ championship, a feat no one has managed in a McLaren since 2008. His closest competition in the standings is his teammate Piastri, 24 points back.
Clive Rose/Getty Images
McLaren also lured in sponsors over the years using its racing teams in other series, like IndyCar and the all-electric Formula E.
“We were able to offer the partners coming to the sport something that perhaps others couldn’t at the time because we were looking left and right instead of just forward about that winning factor,” McEwen says. “So I think we had lots of different levers versus just solely on track, and some of that appealed to some of our different partners.”
McLaren began climbing the F1 standings, but the Covid-19 pandemic nearly ground its momentum to a halt. To stave off insolvency, the organization took out a crucial loan of roughly $185 million from the Bank of Bahrain. McLaren found a more sustainable lifeline by selling a minority stake to MSP Sports Capital in December 2020 at a $750 million valuation.
Under Brown’s leadership, and with the 2021 introduction of F1’s cost cap paving a path to profitability, McLaren made that investment more than worthwhile. Two months ago, MSP sold its stake back to McLaren Group’s owners—Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund, Mumtalakat Holding Company, and the Abu Dhabi investment vehicle CYVN Holdings—in a transaction that valued the full racing division at £3.4 billion (or $4.5 billion), roughly six times MSP’s buy-in price.
Brown’s group isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, either. Before the 2025 season, the Formula 1 team added deals with Okta and Allwyn and renewed existing partnerships with Alteryx, Medallia, Salesforce, Smartsheet and Stanley Black & Decker.
McLaren’s success on the track has also helped deliver more exposure for the logos painted on its cars. According to sponsorship analytics firm Blinkfire, McLaren generated roughly $210 million in ad value for its partners solely from its social following over the past 12 months—up 8% year-over-year and second in Formula 1 only to Ferrari, which dropped nearly 14% in the same timeframe—and it also ranked second with the total number of engagements on its social media posts.
Still, Brown and his team will face challenges. A sweeping set of new technical regulations in Formula 1 next year, requiring cars to become smaller and lighter, could threaten McLaren’s lead on the track. There are also only so many hours in the day for the team’s drivers to make appearances for brands, and a finite amount of sponsorship inventory the organization can offer. One way to combat both issues would be to enter additional racing series, which Brown plans to do with the World Endurance Championship in 2027, after McLaren exited Formula E this year.
Regardless, Brown is thinking big, suggesting that McLaren could one day reach $1 billion in revenue—a threshold that, among all the world’s sports teams as of Forbes’ most recent franchise valuations, has been reached only by the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and La Liga’s Real Madrid.
“It won’t happen tomorrow,” Brown says. “But it’s something good to shoot at.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinbirnbaum/2025/11/20/how-mclaren-staved-off-financial-ruin-and-revved-its-f1-business-into-high-gear/
