The Story: McLaren F1 Racing's Human-Machine Interaction w/ Zak Brown

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The best way to describe it is it looks like Star Wars.

This is Zach Brown.

The building was designed by Sir Norman Foster now Lord Foster, who also went on to do the Apple building, which I think was inspired by their visit here, except those are substantially larger.

The doughnuts in Kupertino.

Yeah, and more expensive for sure.

You drive past the beautiful lake and then you come in. You enter what we call the boulevard.

The boulevard, that's what they call the room filled with trophies and iconic McLaren vehicles from the archives of Formula one's second oldest team. History and innovation exist in parallel here, including recent history.

This is the moment that McLaren dreamed of.

Lando Norris Winds the Abby Dabbi Dran Prix McLaren World champions of twenty twenty four. They win the Constructors. As soon as you walk into the McLaren Technology Center, you're confronted with a car that one Formula One's Constructor's Championship last year. That's one of the two world championship titles in the sport, and a prize McLaren had last won in nineteen ninety eight, more than twenty five years ago.

The technology in these Formula One cars is amazing. Most people maybe don't have full appreciation of how much technology or in these race cars, and how much technology there is running the race cars, and how much technology there is in designing and building the racing cars.

Who are definitely cutting edge in every area.

We have a thousand people to put two race cars on the track.

That always blows.

People's mind a way is how large these teams are. Everything is bespoke and then during a race weekend, the race is actually run from both at the racetrack but also back here in mission control. So if you think of NASA, you have those that are in the rocket, but then you've got on the ground the mission is being run, and that same thing takes place here in a Formula One team.

So there's life communication from here to the racetrack during.

Each absolutely simulation communication data will have probably sixty people here at a race weekend as if they were at the racetrack. So if it's three o'clock in the morning here because we're racing in China, then it's three o'clock in the morning here and feed everyone Accordingly.

You're notorious for answering at your emails that at all hours, so I guess that partly explained.

So we're a twenty four to seven business, that's for sure.

Back in the beginning of twenty twenty three, you guys were lagging and then you had this extraordinary win in the Constructors Championship twenty twenty four and first place. Now in twenty twenty five, What were some of the work that happened here that allowed that extraordinary sporting turnaround?

It was people primarily. I mean, we did have some new technologies that came online or wind tunnel I finally got up and running. We'd been renting one out of the country, which was suboptimal logistically and things of that nature. But the biggest thing was people. I put in Andrea Stella in charge of the racing team. He then reorganized it with the same people that gave us the racing car at the beginning of twenty two, pretty much the same group that gave as a World Championship car twelve

When you win a race, how much is the driver and how much is the car?

Well, it has to be both at this level.

But a great driver can't drive around a car that's not capable of winning. So I guess you'd say car first. But four teams all have cars that can win. So the difference between those eight drivers, if you'd like, is old driver. So you definitely need both, but you can't make up for a race car that's not up for it. So that's what everyone focuses on. Here is our job to get the two best drivers in the business first and foremost.

We need to gem a car capable of winning.

How much time has the driver spend here quite.

A bit their simulation marketing days, so I would say they're in three days before a Grand Prix and three days after a Grand Prix, because you spend as much time debriefing as you do preparing for a race weekend.

And you had this kind of life changing experience. Was in nineteen eighty seven when you met.

Mario ANDRETI to tell that story.

I went to Long Beach Grand Prix, which is the second time I had gone, and at that point I wanted to.

Pursue a career in racing.

And I got the chance to meet Mario and I asked him how you get started in racing? That was the one and only question I was brave enough to ask him, and he said karting, And there happened to be an ad in the race program for Jim hole Cart Racing School, and went and bought a goat kart and that was the start of the racing.

Was Mario's a little bit of advice there?

Fine? If we had a guest on the show recently who'd been on the Voice and I had use their proceeds to fund their first reporting trip to Syria. But you also had a game show enabled Yeah, yeah.

I was on Wheel of Fortune teen week when I was thirteen and won the first two rounds, which were a bunch of watches and went on to sell those at a pawnshop. And so after I got my little bit of advice for Mario, I cashed in my winnings, got a go kart and the rest is history.

And when did you first get involved with Formula one itself on the professional side?

My first ever sponsorship was with McLaren twenty years ago.

And how have you seen the sport change, in particular driven by technology in those twenty years technology.

It's the most technically advanced sport in the world. The data that we're pulling off these cars is amazing. The way we're using over three hundred centers on the race.

Car and where are they on the car?

Everywhere?

There's nothing about the race car we don't know. We pulled down one and a half terabytes of data a weekend. We run about fifty million simulations. There's seventy five thousand parts on a Formula one car and you change about eighty percent of the non homoligated part of the racecar over the course of the years.

So we live in a literally in a prototype world.

You mentioned NASA and Mission Control earlier that it's not far off, it's.

Not far off at all, but they're not necessarily trying to get to the moon faster.

We're trying to get to the moon faster every weekend.

And I know you like to bring in sort of outside council from you know, the likes of Michael Jordan and you know, incredible athletes. On the tech side, I mean you mentioned the Apple guys came here and were inspired by the office. You have partnerships with companies like Dell who have their you know, the name on the car. How do you maintain McLaren's edge on the tech side with.

Our partners, and we have some of the most unbelievable technology companies in the world, Google, Dell, Cisco, the list go on of you know, the leaders in their industry. So we work very closely with them. That's one of the things that when we look for partners long ago,

So we have a lot of great technology.

Partners and you'll see over turn Racing who is in charge of the development of the car.

Here a variety of people.

I mean, ultimately the technical team reports into Andrea Stella. We have technical directors three or four that are the best in their disciplines, chief designer, manufacturing, aerodynamics, vehicle performance. So they all come together at a very senior level to build the racing car. So it's those respective groups that about seven hundred and fifty people that are actually responsible for, in one way or another, touching the race car.

When we come back, Zach Brown tells us just how influential F one regulations are on the final design of the race cars. Welcome back. I had the opportunity to sit down with Zach Brown at the McLaren Technology Center and pick his brain about the strategy behind running an F one team. So of course I had to ask Brown about McLaren's team principal Andrea Stella, a highly regarded F one engineer whose promotion may have been a turning point for McLaren Racing.

I wanted him to run the racing team last time around, but he felt he wasn't ready. And he's a gentleman who doesn't lead with his ego. He leads with what he thinks he's capable of and where he thinks he can achieve. And I guess you would say we disagreed because I thought he was ready four years ago.

He didn't think he was ready till two years ago.

We'll never know, but what's clear is he's been ready since he accepted and he's done a fantastic job.

When people look back at this time and write the case study on twenty twenty four and hopefully twenty twenty five, what will they focus on in terms of what the changes that Andrews Seller brought to the team were.

Getting everything to come together. Everything feeds performance on the racing car. So Andrea is responsible for the technical side of the business. But you need to have a great communications department so you have huge fan base. We have a cost cap now, so living within a fiscal challenges, you need to spend wisely, So your finance department plays a massive role. So that's the people that don't touch the race car. But it all feeds into the race car.

You mentioned the cost cap. One of the fascinating things about this sport is how many restrictions and regulations there are. I mean there's this sort of phrase that constraint drives creativity. But can you explain how the rules from the governing body impact the car do you see on the track and how technology what the interplay of technology is to make sure that the car, the message of the track is the best that can be made within the restrictions imposed by the governing body.

Yeah, you've got very sophisticated rules on specification of the car. I think the engineer's interpret if it says you unless it says you can't do it, then they get into a mindset of well then you can do it. So I think that's where the creativity comes in, this interpretation of the rules. And then from a business point of view, we have very few rules compared to other sports. Technically we probably have the most sophisticated set of rules, but

How much do these rules drive the vehicleusy on the track?

Completely one hundred percent. I mean you got to be within the rules, and the tests and regulations around the legality of the cars is immense. Last race you saw the two Ferraris and a Alping disqualified.

That wouldn't have been up to anything they shouldn't have been. But you run the margin of.

Error so close that if you get a little bit wrong that one car was a little underweight and one had.

A little bit too much skidware.

So it is very difficult because you're trying to get to the absolute limit and not go over, and you're talking about less than a kilo underweight on something that's eight hundred kilos. But kilo is a p handful of milliseconds. Ten kilos is three tenths of a second. Entire grid is covered by a second, so you don't want to leave any weight on the table. But if you cut it too close you get disqualified. So the rules definitely drive what the race cars look like.

The other fascinating thing is that the number of hours the car is allowed to actually be on the track is surprisingly very low. Can you also talk about that and how why that makes the work that happens here the technology set, It is important.

Yeah, so there's a big testing restriction. We only get three test days to start the year, and you've got two drivers, so it's very little testing. And you used to have unlimited testing. So you're effectively what you would have tested on track fifteen to twenty years ago with as much testing as you wanted. That's now shifted to CFD wind tunnel simulation in that order.

Can you explain each of those concepts, simulation and wind tunnel on how they apply?

Oh?

Yeah, I mean CfDS all computer generated and so it's a bunch of mathematical equations and aerodynamic flow things.

Of that nature.

So it's effectively designing a race car on a computer and then testing it if you'd like. That'll give you data, so that's fully in the computer, fully in the computer. Then you'll turn that into a half scale or so model of the real race car. You'll stick that in the wind tunnel where are not allowed through regulation have a full scale wind tunnel, so it's it's scaled.

Does that mean smaller? Correct?

And then you have restrictions around how often you can run the wind tunnel, so you need to make sure you're confident that what's coming out of CFD is going.

To work, otherwise you're wasting wind tunnel time.

And how do they monitor how much you use the wind tunnel.

It's all all logged into the FIA, who's our governing body, so they know how many runs.

We're doing and for how long.

You then run the wind tunnel to see if what you've seen in the computer it you know, you kind of see in miniature size real life. Then you input all that data into the simulator. You let the driver then go drive it and see if they actually can see the performance that you think you've found in the in the wind tunnel, and then if you're confident you have, then you go ahead and manufacture the bits for the

And what about AI. I mean, we're kind of in this amazing moment where kind of engineering and design and like everything seems to be being changed by generative AI. Is that I guess simulation is AI essentially, But I mean in a five year view, how much you're thinking about how these longer term technological trends.

May Yeah, we have a team that's dedicated to emerging technologies. We're using AI now, I think you'll never replace the human because there's something that's called kind of race or instinct which is needing to really understand the full environment. I think AI can feed you data and information quicker to make more informed, less cluttered decisions. But I don't see a day where AI tells you when depit.

I can see there being a.

Day when AI tells you what historically has happened and therefore give you some data to make a more educated, quicker decision on We're using AI around marketing, We're using AI around tire data, so we are leaning in and it's a culture where people embrace new technologies. I'm personally someone who gets stuck with what I've been used to in a bit of a creature, a habit, and what you need are in a Formula one team or people that are excited to try something that they've never tried before.

You had a choice back in twenty sixteen right whether to join McLaren or f one itself for it, and you chose McLaren.

Obviously I wanted to go racing.

I felt that the Formula one opportunity is awesome as it was was a little bit of what I'd been doing for twenty years, just on a bigger scale, where McLaren offered me the opportunity not only to continue what I was doing from a commercial standpoint, which I very much enjoy, but when the lights go out near on pitwall, you're racing, and that was something that I felt I had missed from when i'd hung up from driving.

When you arrived, you said you found this place in disarray. How did that become clear to you?

I think it was clear to everyone our results.

We were ninth in the championship, We had very few sponsors, we were losing a lot of money. Fans were disgruntled, employees were disgruntled drivers who were disgruntled. So it wasn't a happy environment. I think was well documented. We had challenges at the shareholder level. They had a dispute. So I think when you've got the very top leadership not aligned, then that's going to have a trickle down impact on

But the first question for you was not about technology or engineering or even about driver recruitment. It was about how you work together to the team.

All about people.

And we see it in all sports, right You see some mega teams with all the all stars and the big names not get it done because they don't work well together. And then you see the underdogs, which are always a great story, you know, kind of overachieve and that's because they came together as a team.

We were a student of management philosophy or of leadership or I mean, where did you was the Zach Brown school?

Just having my my own successful business, which was easier in some senses because I built the culture from one employee at a time versus coming into an environment where it had its own culture and it wasn't a good place and it was a thousand people. So I think it's easier to build than to change. But then I've been around successful people. I've been fortunate as a racing driver to be around a lot of successful racing team

So you came in and you had to turn around job on your hands, and you succeeded. But then beginning twenty twenty three, all of a sudden, it was on your watch and things weren't going well. How did that challenge compare to the challenge of coming into place.

That was worse or a bigger challenge?

Because when I came in, I didn't create the situation we were in.

I knew it was my job to fix it. I made some changes.

Top three people that were running the racing team are no longer here, and so I did identify it.

I saw it coming.

I had some pretty brutal conversations over the summer break. I spotted in June that I didn't like what I was seeing, and there's about six month lag, and.

So fortunately at least had comfort.

I knew why we got into the challenge we were in and what I thought we.

Needed to do to get out of it.

What does it mean for you as a leader? To pull it off.

Very proud of everything that the team is done. We've earned this the hard way.

Some of our competitors have never had financial challenges, so they've had the luxury have been able to focus purely on performance. We needed to focus on economics to be able to pay for the performance. So I think I wouldn't have it any other way.

After the break, we revisit the down to the Wide twenty twenty four Constructors Championship victory with Zach Brown. Welcome back to tech stuff. Let's dive into my conversation with the CEO of McLaren Racing, Zach Brown. I was looking on Twitter this morning and back in twenty twenty three there was this sack Zach hashtag, which is hard to imagine now. And likewise, back at the beginning twenty four, there was a hashtag Lando nowins, So I can.

Imagine a new hashtag for those people. It's not appropriate.

Not for a family friendly, but it must have. You must have been able to put your arm around him in a unique way, having dealt without yourself just the year before.

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I think we'd had a couple of chances to win that we didn't seize the moment. But coming back to you know where he started as a car or driver, I think he had some comfort in knowing that he wasn't winning because the car wasn't yet ready on many occasions, and I think he's now proven that won't give him a car that's capable winning to go out and win.

Going back to started last season, there is a big scandal around Christian Horner, your your counterpartner a red Bull, and in the first episode Drives Survive, it looked like you in a sense smelt blood or when he was when he was in the middle of that media fire store. I mean, did you have a sense in that moment, knowing how important a functional team is as you do, there might be an opportunity that you hadn't expected.

Yeah, I mean our sport maybe more so than other sports. But I want to profess to be an expert on another sports, So forgive me if I have this wrong other sports, but there is a destabilized the competition aspect to this sport, and so I'm sure that happens in other sports, but here you're fighting for employees, drivers, sponsors.

How much does drives change the sport.

It's helped grow it immensely. It's created a tremendous amount awareness. It's shown people that what goes on in the sport, especially off the track. I think people didn't understand that. I think are sport's unique in that aspect where you watch the other majority of the sports, and it's it's pretty much exclusively concentrated on the field of play, where our sport off the field is every bit as fascinating is on the track. And I think that's what Netflix helped capture.

On the Constructors, I mean, some people were saying to you, you know you got this in the bag, Zac, but you didn't. You didn't agree with them, And indeed, I mean that that couldn't have been.

Been closer, couldn't have been Yeah, Atlando not one. We went in one of the constructors, so we never felt we had it in the bag. And you can see how quickly this sport moves. We thought Red Bull would win every race based on the start of the year, and then they finished third in the championship. So I think we're too experienced and been around the block too much to fall for thinking you have anything in the bag and the sport, I mean, ultimately we came down

Then Lando comes.

Out, Carlos and his DRS probably bassism and then you don't know if Lando would have been able to get him back.

And did you have complete conviction in your team that in the clutch moment they'll pull it off.

Yeah, but you never know, driver can overshoot the pitch you have a wheel gun failure. I mean it's two point seven second pit stops not a bad pit stop, and had a lot of confidence, but yeah, of course you've also got nerves very much at the same time.

So now it's a twenty twenty five season. How do you describe McLaren stops the season?

Almost perfect?

First and second in China and first and I think it was ninth in Australia. But we're running first and second quite a dominant performance.

But China was hard, hard work.

So Australia while the conditions were tricky and managing both drivers when we came up on traffic, things of that nature, just racing smart.

But China we had to work hard.

Saturday wasn't a great day in the sense of landing and have a great sprint race. Lewis Hamilton and the Ferrari checked out, so I think we went into Sunday thinking this is gonna be hard work and it definitely was.

And George Russell came out and said McLaren have the can't to win every single race this season. I was struck by that comment. It's a strange comment for a rival driver to say, that's.

Part of the head games and the politics that go on.

That's a way to put pressure on the team kind of if you don't win all twenty four then you've done something wrong and it's a disaster. So that's nothing more than some of the stuff we spoke about earlier, where people put pressure on people in different ways to try and to stabilize it them. So coming out with what appears to be a nice compliment is actually a way to apply pressure.

But nonetheless, you may be right.

I don't actue've we won't win twenty four races this year.

The performance the car is obviously extraordinary. There was a headline Athletic a couple of days ago McLaren's perfect F one problem dual title contenders and a fast car difficult to tame. But I guess the premise was, you're an amazing position. We have two drivers who you know who could win. What this idea that the car is fast but difficult to tame? What does that mean?

You know, anytime you get a car on the limit, it's going to eventually do something that.

You know exceeds its limit.

To the perfect race car, you can still get it to be tricky to drive when you try and go eleven tenths. So I think the drivers you know, over over one lap to extract maximum performance out of the car, it can be a bit tricky, a bit on edge, but that's what race cars do and they're.

On the limit.

So this is this is another flavor of what you described earlier with the one key low on the correct You're always looking for these fine margins and if you get wrong, you can destabilize you. It can be too hard to drive, it can be and breach the regulation. So it's that constant. So that must be very anxiety And do you see it.

Is it's a stressful, stressful being on pitwall.

How do you deal with that?

Just stay calm. It's nice to being on pitwall next to Andrea.

He's very calm and not lett any emotion run in to your decision making process. Passion, I think is very important. I think there's a fine line between passion and emotion. But emotion gets you to make emotional decisions, which is not the most productive way to go racing.

And how are you going to manage the challenge of having two such driver?

Keep doing what we're doing. They get along great.

I think everyone's encouraging all of us that we're going to have some drama ahead of us, so we very well might, but we haven't yet great communication with the drivers. They know the rules of the road, they're free to race. They just need to race each other respectfully. And I think everyone else is waiting for the bomb.

To go off, but we're not. We're quite happy.

And they have both drivers signed up long term, so they know they're going to be teammates for a long time.

They get along really, really well.

Of course they want to beat each other, but I think you can race fairly and squarely.

Of course you're good friends Over at Red Bull have had another rookie starts this season. Is that something you keep a close eye only more focus internally? I mean, how much does how much time do you spend monitoring the vicissitudes of the competition?

Decent amount, but at the end of the day, there's not much you can do about it. So it's more about observing and learning. But you can get obsessed with your competitors and then you're spending more time on them than yourselves.

Being here, you can't help but think about legacy. I mean, it's just part of this building. And I'm wondering, do you think about your legacy at McClaren what you would like it to be.

No, No, I think there'll be a time and place for that, But right now I'm very head down and I feel like it's early early days.

Ah So now, don't really think about that, but I'm sure there will at some point.

But this season, the game is clear.

One drivers and constructors. That's the that's the goal.

Zich Brown, thank you, thank you very much. That's it for this week for tech Stuff. I'm as Voloshin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Adriana Tapier. It was executive produced by me, Karen Price and Kate Osborne for Caneidis Cote and Katria Novel for iHeart Podcasts. The