Zak Brown isn’t shy about it: without Formula 1’s cost cap, McLaren might not be here to enjoy its renaissance.
Speaking on the How Leaders Lead podcast, McLaren’s chief executive traced the team’s revival back to a moment of crisis. As COVID-19 stalled the world and squeezed balance sheets, F1’s long-discussed spending limit snapped into focus. The numbers were supposed to land much higher, Brown said, until the pandemic forced the sport to rethink.
“That was huge,” he said of the cap talks. “We were lucky on timing from a COVID point of view… it put the sport under an immense amount of pressure.” Crucially, it also gave Brown leverage: “We got a little bit lucky with the timing because it allowed me to push even harder to get the budget cap down.”
F1 had been eyeing a $175 million ceiling. By 2021, that arrived at $145m. It dropped again to $140m in 2022 and $135m in 2023, tightening the field’s margins and, in Brown’s view, its competitiveness. “Last year we had seven multiple winners,” he noted. “Four different teams won races. The top three teams swapped the constructors’ championship late in the year. And that’s because now we’re all playing with the same size bat.”
It’s not lost on anyone that McLaren has thrived in this environment. The Woking outfit was teetering in the late 2010s and early 2020s, stuck behind the spending arms race of the hybrid era as development budgets ballooned. The cap—and the discipline it enforced—leveled just enough of the playing field for the papaya cars to punch back.
The turnaround became unmistakable in 2024. A mid-season upgrade lit the fuse, propelling McLaren into the title fight and, ultimately, to the constructors’ crown at the final round. Max Verstappen retained the drivers’ championship for Red Bull, but McLaren’s surge underlined Brown’s point: when the chequebooks shrink, execution matters, and smart development can outgun brute force.
There’s a certain self-interest in Brown’s argument, sure. Yet the broader trend is hard to ignore. As costs compressed, resource allocation and operational sharpness moved to the front of the grid. The cap didn’t magically erase disparities—facilities and head starts still count—but it did stop the biggest players from running away every winter.
F1 enters 2025 with that tension still defining the sport: spend smart, move fast, and live inside the lines. McLaren, once on the brink, now looks like a team built for that reality.
