Zak Brown insists his campaign against so-called A/B teams isn’t aimed at any one rival — even as Mercedes drifts into a situation that would test the sport’s guardrails harder than most.
With Flavio Briatore confirming in Shanghai that Mercedes is in negotiations to buy Otro Capital’s 24 per cent stake in Alpine, the McLaren CEO has reiterated a position he’s been pushing for years: one group shouldn’t have a meaningful financial foothold in more than one F1 entrant, because the knock-on effects don’t stay neatly in the boardroom.
“It applies to anybody and everybody,” Brown said. “A/B teams co-ownership, so regardless of who it is, I frown upon it. I don’t think it’s healthy for the sport. So it’s not personal or towards any one team or individual.”
The timing is awkward, because Brown’s argument has always been framed as a principle — and now a heavyweight like Mercedes is being linked to a structure that looks uncomfortably close to the one he’s criticised most loudly. Red Bull’s ownership of both Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls has long been the reference point, with Brown questioning how the sport can sell the idea of fully independent competitors when two cars on the same grid ultimately answer to the same corporate parent.
Brown’s frustration isn’t new. He was already vocal in 2018 about the integrity risks of B-team arrangements, but his view hardened further as the years brought fresh flashpoints — not just political grumbling, but on-track moments that are easy to sell to fans as “helping the other car”.
His most pointed example remains Singapore 2024, when Racing Bulls’ Daniel Ricciardo bolted on soft tyres late and took fastest lap away from Lando Norris, denying McLaren a bonus point in a title fight that centred on Max Verstappen. Brown’s reaction at the time — “That’s a nice A/B-team sporting thing that I didn’t think was allowed” — has become a kind of shorthand for his concern: you don’t need explicit team orders when incentives can be aligned by design.
The controversy around personnel movement has been another sore point. Red Bull’s swift appointment of Laurent Mekies from Racing Bulls after Christian Horner’s departure — with no gardening leave — only sharpened the perception of a two-team ecosystem working as one. Brown has also pointed to Ferrari’s close relationship with Haas as a parallel, even if it’s not a co-ownership model.
Now the Alpine situation risks dragging the conversation from theory into something far more tangible. Briatore, acting as Alpine’s de facto boss, acknowledged the talks publicly in China, framing them as a negotiation with Mercedes rather than with Toto Wolff personally — despite Wolff being identified as the bidder in the background of the story.
“Every day it’s a new situation,” Briatore said at the team principals’ press conference. “But what I want to say, I know it’s a negotiation from Mercedes, not with Toto, with Mercedes, and we see.”
Whether the bidder is the Mercedes organisation or individuals tied to it, Brown’s point is that the distinction doesn’t matter to the competitive reality. In his view, even minority ownership creates a web of incentives that the rulebook struggles to police cleanly — and that fans will sense long before lawyers argue over definitions.
“It hasn’t changed at all, I think I’ve been consistent,” Brown said. “I think A/B teams, we need to get away from as much as possible, as quickly as possible.”
Brown’s fear is less about a single smoking-gun incident and more about cumulative erosion: the quiet advantages that don’t always show up as an obvious breach. Employees “moving overnight”, as he put it, can create an uneven playing field not just in performance but under the cost cap — because if one outfit must pay to release staff or wait out restrictions while another can shift people internally without compensation, the financial impact is real. He also referenced IP controversies, pointing to the Aston Martin/Racing Point brake duct saga as an example of how hard it can be to separate legitimate learning from improper transfer when organisations are intertwined.
“We know IP is a lot in your head,” Brown said, “so when you put that all together…”
That’s the heart of it: Brown’s not arguing that co-ownership automatically equals cheating. He’s arguing that it manufactures doubt — and that doubt is corrosive in a sport that depends on credibility as much as speed. He reached for a mainstream sporting analogy to underline the stakes: two football teams owned by the same group, one desperate for points, the other able to take a loss without consequence. It’s the sort of scenario that, in F1, would live in grey areas of strategy, component allocation, and staffing — the kind of stuff insiders talk about quietly, and fans read into loudly.
“So I think having engine power units as suppliers is as far as it should go,” Brown said. “And then, in my view, all 11 teams should be absolutely as independent as possible… we have seen it compromise the integrity of the sport, and that will be what turns fans off quicker than anything else.”
The irony is that Brown is making this case at a time when the grid is increasingly defined by alliances — commercial, technical, and political — and when the sport’s leadership is constantly balancing the stability of teams with the optics of competition. If a Mercedes-Alpine deal does progress, it won’t just be a question for regulators and rival principals. It will be a stress test of whether F1 is comfortable with multi-team influence becoming normalised — and whether it can convincingly explain to supporters where “partnership” ends and “same stable” begins.
