McLaren Turnaround Zak Brown: Fix the Business First

McLaren's Resurrection: How Zak Brown Rebuilt a Championship Team by Fixing Everything Except the Car First

McLaren was losing £125M a year, finishing ninth, and running out of time. Six years later, they became champions. Most people call this a turnaround. They miss how it actually happened.

Brown didn't start with the car. He started with everything around it. And the sequence of that decision explains why most corporate turnarounds fail.

What Brown Inherited

McLaren had brand and history, but none of the outputs that matter. Ninth place. Broken engine partnership. Demoralized team. £125M in losses. Sponsorship revenue had collapsed because sponsors don't want their logos on a car that finishes fourteenth.

Reputation intact. System broken.

The conventional playbook for an F1 turnaround is technical. Hire a better chief designer. Invest in aerodynamic development. Find a faster engine. Build a better car. The faster car produces better results. Better results attract sponsors. Sponsors fund development. Virtuous cycle. Starts with the car.

Brown didn't follow the conventional playbook.

The Sequence That Worked

Step One: Fix the Commercial Model

Brown didn't fix the car. He fixed the business. No revenue, no investment, no performance. He reversed the constraint.

He rebuilt McLaren's commercial operation from the ground up, securing partnerships with Google, Cisco, Salesforce, and other major global brands willing to invest serious money in a team finishing in the bottom third of the grid. He sold the turnaround before it existed. He positioned McLaren's commercial proposition not as "sponsor a winning team" but as "partner with a brand that's rebuilding, and grow with us." It was honest. It was compelling. And Brown's credibility in the commercial world gave the pitch substance.

The commercial revenue didn't just keep the lights on. It restored profitability and funded the infrastructure investments that would eventually produce a faster car.

Step Two: Rebuild the Leadership

He didn't try to be the solution. He built one.

The most consequential decision was promoting Andrea Stella to Team Principal in late 2022. Stella, an Italian engineer who had worked at Ferrari alongside Michael Schumacher before joining McLaren in 2015, brought technical credibility and organizational discipline.

Brown was the turnaround CEO. Stella was the performance engine.

Brown recognized what many CEOs fail to see: the turnaround leader and the sustaining leader are often different people. He invested in rebuilding the broader leadership team across engineering, operations, and technical development. He created the conditions for strong people to do strong work, rather than trying to direct every technical decision himself.

Step Three: Invest in Infrastructure

Infrastructure doesn't win races immediately. It determines whether you can win later.

With commercial revenue restored and leadership in place, Brown invested in the physical capabilities that produce competitive cars: a new wind tunnel, upgraded computational fluid dynamics, and modern simulation tools.

Wind tunnels don't generate race wins in their first season. The data they produce feeds into design decisions that appear in the car twelve to eighteen months later. Most teams want results before they build capability. Brown did the opposite. He was patient enough to invest in infrastructure he knew wouldn't pay off for years, because the alternative, trying to build fast cars without the tools to develop them, was the cycle McLaren had been stuck in for a decade.

Step Four: Performance Followed

By 2023, McLaren had the third-fastest car on the grid. By mid-2024, they had the fastest. In October 2024, McLaren won the Constructors' Championship for the first time since 1998. In 2025, they won it again. Lando Norris clinched the Drivers' Championship.

The car didn't lead the turnaround. It followed it.

Why the Sequence Matters

Most companies do the opposite. They fix the product first. Then wonder why nothing changes.

The CEO who inherits a struggling company typically focuses on what's visible: better features, faster delivery, clearer differentiation. Fix the product, fix the company. It's intuitive.

The problem is that fixing the product requires an organization capable of building a better product. If the engineering team is demoralized, they won't build innovatively. If the commercial model is broken, there's no revenue to fund development. If the leadership team is weak, product decisions won't be made well.

The product is the output. The organization is the system that produces it.

Brown understood this causality. Fix the organization, and a better car follows. Try to fix the car without fixing the organization, and you're asking broken systems to produce excellent results.

I see this exact misdiagnosis in executive search:

"We need a new VP of Engineering to fix the product." Maybe. Or maybe the system they're operating in can't produce a better product regardless of who leads it.

"We need a new VP of Sales to fix revenue." Maybe. Or maybe the conditions make selling harder than it should be.

"We need a new CMO to fix our market presence." Maybe. Or maybe the organization ignores marketing entirely.

In each case, the instinct is to replace the person. Brown's example suggests the better question: is this a person problem or an organization problem? And if it's an organizational problem, which part needs to be fixed first?

The PE Parallel

Brown's sequence maps precisely to the PE turnaround playbook that works, and contradicts the one that doesn't.

The playbook that doesn't work: Acquire portfolio company. Immediately upgrade leadership. Demand improved performance on a compressed timeline. Wonder why the new leaders fail in the same conditions their predecessors failed in.

The playbook that works: Stabilize the commercial model. Rebuild the leadership team. Invest in the infrastructure that enables performance. Performance improves because the conditions now support it.

This isn't about patience. It's about sequence.

Replace the leader too early, and you install talent into broken conditions. The PE firm that correctly diagnoses whether underperformance is a product problem or an organization problem will make different investment decisions than the firm that defaults to "upgrade the leadership."

The Leadership Calibration

This worked for Brown and McLaren because his calibration matched the constraint.

He wasn't a race engineer. He wasn't an aerodynamicist. He was a commercial strategist and organizational leader. The conditions called for exactly that profile. He didn't try to be technical. He fixed what was actually broken and had the self-awareness to hire technical leaders for the dimensions he couldn't personally drive.

The turnaround leader who tries to do everything ends up fixing nothing. The turnaround leader who identifies which dimension is the binding constraint, addresses it personally, and hires for the others will produce McLaren's result.

The binding constraint at McLaren in 2018 wasn't engineering. It was commercial viability and organizational culture. Brown was calibrated for those problems. Stella was calibrated for the engineering problem that followed. The sequence of leadership matched the sequence of needs.

The Pattern

Most companies try to fix the car. McLaren fixed the system that builds the car.

From ninth in the standings and £125M in annual losses to back-to-back Constructors' Championships. Not through a single brilliant hire. Through a sequence of organizational investments made in the right order: commercial stability, leadership, infrastructure, and then performance.

That's why one wins occasionally. The other wins championships.

The sequence is the strategy.

Charlie Solórzano is a Managing Partner at Alder Koten, a boutique executive search firm specializing in C-suite and board placements across the U.S. and Mexico markets. He advises founders, investors, and boards on leadership transitions using The Race Conditions Model™, a proprietary diagnostic framework built on the thesis that leadership success is determined by conditions, not credentials.