Zak Brown: My bet is Max Verstappen leaves Red Bull for Mercedes

The CEO of McLaren, Zak Brown, holds Rafael Nadal's racket before the game with Tom Cary — Zak Brown, the CEO of McLaren, builds up a sweat on the tennis court to focus his mind before facing the rest of the day - LAT Images/Steven Tee

The FIA’s swear police would be having a field day. “S---,” exclaims Zak Brown as he dumps a forehand into the net during an early morning game of tennis with the Telegraph at Melbourne’s national tennis centre on Friday.

McLaren’s chief executive, it turns out, plays tennis exactly how you would expect – aggressive, forceful, rushing the net wherever possible and cursing loudly when he makes a mistake.

The American increasingly likes to blow off steam on the tennis court. It began last year when he joined a small group of team members who play regularly, and has rapidly become a key part of his race weekends. Brown was here on Thursday morning, too, and will be up early again on Saturday to thwack a few more balls before qualifying takes place for Sunday’s season opener in Albert Park. “I like to build up a sweat,” he explains. “It helps to focus the mind.”

Brown is hopeful that his team can remain laser-focused as they try to challenge for both championships this season. The 53-year-old readily admits McLaren squandered too many points last year despite having the fastest car for much of it; individual errors, strategic errors, agonising for too long over whether to back lead driver Lando Norris.

But after finally getting over the line in the constructors’ championship – McLaren’s first since 1998 – Brown says morale in the team is “sky high” and he is confident they have learnt from their mistakes.

Zak Brown and Tom Cary shake hands after the match in Melbourne, which was a tie-break victory for the Telegraph — Brown and Tom Cary shake hands after the game – a narrow victory for the Telegraph - LAT Images/Steven Tee

“Definitely,” he says after we finish our match – a sweaty win for the Telegraph in a tie-break – and sit down with some water. “I think we’re much smarter and more confident now. Last season, looking back, I feel we followed too much rather than led. We were kind of in a mindset of ‘Let’s be as good as [our rivals]’. Now, when I talk to the team, we’ve got much more of a mindset of ‘Let’s be better than them’. And with that comes much more of a mantra of, you know, ‘Play on the front foot. Don’t play defence, play offence’.”

It is a mantra Brown has certainly applied in his dealings with Red Bull team principal Christian Horner. The feud between the pair has developed into one of the major narratives in Formula One in recent seasons, beginning when they fell out over Red Bull’s cost cap breach in 2022 and going up several notches last year after Brown called for “greater transparency” in Red Bull’s investigation into Horner following allegations from a female Red Bull employee of controlling and coercive behaviour.

Horner was subsequently cleared of those charges, but the pair continued to trade barbs all year as their drivers duked it out on track. The most recent series of Drive to Survive, released by Netflix last week, spent so much time building up their fractious relationship, it was tempting to wonder whether they were just putting it on for the cameras.

Christian Horner (left) and Max Verstappen chat in Melbourne but Zak Brown believes the champion will leave Red Bull at the end of the season — Brown says the enmity between him and Christian Horner (left) is real – and Max Verstappen (right) could leave Red Bull after this season - Getty Images/Jakub Porzycki

Brown insists the enmity is very real. “Oh, it’s genuine,” he says. “There’s no love lost there. I don’t like how he rolls and no doubt he feels the same about me. But I think it’s good for the sport. You need different characters. You need these rivalries. Some are friendly, sporting rivalries. Some are a bit more vicious. It’s always been like that.”

Brown promptly lands another punch on his rival’s nose when I ask about Oscar Piastri’s multi-year contract extension, which was announced earlier this week. Was he not tempted to wait and see whether Verstappen might be on the market? After all, there has been so much talk about the four-time world champion being unsettled at Red Bull?

“Oh I think he’ll leave at the end of this year,” Brown says. “Most likely to Merc [Mercedes]. There’s been talk of Aston Martin, too, with Adrian Newey joining. But as great as Adrian is – and he’s the greatest ever – you need a whole team around you. You need the culture. That takes time. If I was betting, I’d bet on Merc. In the last 10 years, they’ve won the championship seven or eight times. Last year they won five races. They have stability. We know Toto likes him. And I think we all feel HPP [Mercedes High Performance Powertrains] is best-equipped on the power unit side heading into the new engine regulations next year.

“Plus, George [Russell] is out of contract at the end of this season and Kimi [Antonelli, Mercedes’s new 18 year-old rookie driver] will be on a series of one-years.”

‘I was terrible at school’

It is quite the prediction. But perhaps such punchiness is to be expected. Brown has always been a fighter. He actually has a very interesting and unusual backstory, at least as far as chief executives of Formula One teams go. Growing up in Los Angeles, the son of a travel agent mother and a music arranger father, he was not the easiest of children.

“I was terrible at school,” he says. “I didn’t even graduate high school. I got thrown out of a few.” For what? “Fighting mainly. Lots of fighting. I was an angry kid. And skipping school. I remember my parents getting called in in seventh grade, and my school principal was like ‘Does Zak know there’s school on Friday?’ Because I just never went.”

On one occasion, after he had moved schools yet again, Brown broke the jaw of the president of the student body in a fight over a birthday cake of all things, which ended up being slammed down on his head by said child.

“I was actually trying to be good at the time,” he recalls. “I was being kind of rehabilitated. But I was being a punk and anyway, I blew out the candles on this cake and they throw some cake at me. And it’s like, yeah, whatever. And I’m talking to buddies – I only knew about three or four people at this school. And about 20 minutes goes by and I feel this rush and I turn around and this guy, bam, just like, violently slams the cake down on my head. He made it 15 feet before I got him. Four of the best right hooks you could throw. The fourth one just kind of broke his jaw.”

United States driver Eddie Cheever was one of the inspirations for Brown — Eddie Cheever helped Brown fall in love with motorsport - AP/Al Behrman

Brown does not tell the story proudly, so much as to illustrate how he has changed. Motorsport proved to be his salvation.

“Baseball was actually my first love,” he says. “I was and am a huge [St Louis] Cardinals fan. I always wanted to be a baseball player. And ice hockey is my second love. LA Kings. But somehow I became hooked on motorsport. My first race was the 1981 Long Beach Grand Prix when I would have been about 10. I remember it like it was yesterday. I still have the race programme signed by Eddie Cheever, who finished fifth driving for Tyrrell. I fell in love with it. After that my dad would take my brother and I to NASCAR at Riverside Raceway.”

It would take a few more years before Brown became fully hooked, meeting Mario Andretti by chance through friends at Long Beach in 1987 and asking the 1978 F1 world champion how he could get into racing himself. Andretti suggested he take up karting.

Brown, who famously won a few watches on a student round of the American game show Wheel of Fortune in 1984, pawned the watches to fund his first foray into karting, competing for almost five years in California before making the jump to Europe in 1991.

His parents did what they could to help. “By racing standards they were not rich, but my mom gave me her entire salary the first year I went to Europe, which was $40,000, for which I will always be grateful.”

McLaren CEO Zak Brown chats with the Telegraph's Tom Cary after their match — Brown and Cary chat after their match - LAT Images/Steven Tee

Brown – a self-confessed workaholic – now has a net worth somewhere north of £100 million after he transitioned from racing to marketing, setting up JMI, a global motorsports marketing firm, in 1995, which was sold to CSM in 2013 for $79 million.

In all that time he has lived in Surrey, with his wife of 26 years and two sons, both now grown up. Brown has been in England so long he says he “kind of feels British”. He has also broadened his tastes, becoming an avid collector not only of cars (he now has 50, including Ayrton Senna’s 1991 title-winning McLaren-Honda MP4/6, although he denies they would fetch as much as Bernie Ecclestone’s F1 collection, which sold recently for an estimated £500 million, saying only that they would probably be worth “nine figures”) but also sporting memorabilia (when I asked during our match about the racket he was playing with, he replied that it was Rafael Nadal’s racket, which I assumed meant the model the Spaniard used during his career, but in fact meant Nadal’s actual racket), as well as, most surprising of all, historical documents.

“I’ve got letters from every US president including one from George Washington to one of his lieutenants regarding Benedict Arnold, and Richard Nixon’s resignation letter to Kissinger,” he says, proudly.

Huge collection of mafia memorabilia

“I’ve got one from King Henry VIII. When he wanted to get his first marriage annulled, he sent in someone to go talk to the cardinal about it. So I’ve got that. It was written by his scribe, but then he signed it.

“I’ve got a huge mafia collection – Bugsy Siegel, John Gotti, Al Capone’s first arrest warrant. Bonnie and Clyde. For someone who wasn’t that into history at school, it’s ironic that I’m so fascinated by it now.”

Whether McLaren can make history this year and add a first drivers’ crown since 2008 to their constructors’ title from last year remains to be seen. But Brown believes the building blocks are all in place. Andrea Stella, their team principal, is a calm and stable leader. Rob Marshall, the team’s chief designer (who they nicked from Red Bull) has “made a huge difference”. Norris has learnt from last year and is “ready to win”. “Oscar too,” he adds. Most of all, he wants his team to be on the front foot. “If we get it wrong, we get it wrong,” he says. “But let’s not get it wrong because we don’t try.”

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