Bernie being Bernie: Ecclestone’s backhanded salute to Zak Brown — “not very talented,” except at winning
Only Bernie Ecclestone could deliver a put-down and a pat on the back in the same sentence and make it sound like common sense. McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown was the latest recipient of the former F1 boss’s peculiar brand of praise: not “very talented,” Ecclestone told him to his face, but supremely gifted at the thing that matters most — hiring the right people and keeping them aligned.
Ecclestone, speaking to sport.de, didn’t sugar-coat it. “Zak Brown is doing a very good job. I recently said to him, because I’ve known him for a long time: ‘I don’t think you’re very talented, but one of your talents is that you choose the right people to work for you’… He has the right people around him and he keeps them together. The people at McLaren are doing a good job.”
Hard to argue with the results. McLaren broke their decades-long title drought with the 2024 Constructors’ crown and have spent 2025 running the table. The team holds a commanding points lead — into triple-digit, runaway territory — and the Drivers’ Championship is a strictly internal affair, with Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris out front. As it stands, Piastri holds a 31-point cushion over Norris with eight rounds to go, while McLaren’s constructors’ advantage sits at an eye-watering 337 points.
Ecclestone couldn’t resist rubbing in a familiar theme either: luck. “You can see how lucky these guys are to be in the right team at the right time,” he said of Piastri and Norris. Plenty of gifted drivers never got the shot, he added. That’s true enough — but it’s also where Brown’s fingerprints are all over McLaren’s resurgence.
Since stepping up to McLaren Racing CEO in 2018, Brown’s superpower has been organization-building. He inherited a team on the floor and didn’t try to be the smartest engineer in the room. He hired them. He backed them. And crucially, he promoted them when it mattered. The decision to elevate Andrea Stella to team principal for 2023 after Andreas Seidl’s exit has proven a pivot point. Within a season, McLaren were Champions again for the first time since 1998, and by 2025 they look like a machine that knows exactly how to win on Saturdays and Sundays, in cool air or hot, on street tracks or power circuits.
The driver line-up? That’s Brown’s ledger, too. McLaren fought for Piastri — literally, in the courts — before the Australian had turned a wheel in F1. It looked bold at the time and obvious now. Three seasons in, he’s leading the championship with Norris as his closest shadow. If you’re keeping score in Woking, that’s the best problem a team boss can have.
McLaren’s turnaround hasn’t just been about lap time. Off track, Brown has kept the commercial engine purring. From 2026, Mastercard is set to become title sponsor — a big-money deal that underlines the team’s momentum and its pulling power with blue-chip brands. When you’re winning, the paddock doors swing open. When you’re led coherently, they stay that way.
There’s a reason paddock folk talk about “systems” as much as setups these days. In modern F1, the head coach model matters. You need a leader who knows where to point the money, which specialists to empower, and when to get out of their way. Brown’s not CAD-ing new floors or writing tyre models; he’s built the structure that lets Andrea Stella and his technical lieutenants iterate without drama and execute under pressure. Ecclestone, for all the needle, basically said as much.
As for the “lucky” tag, McLaren have made a habit of manufacturing their own fortune: decisive calls on personnel, brave driver choices, and a relentless ability to course-correct when they’ve been off the pace. That’s not luck; that’s stewardship.
Ecclestone’s delivery may be barbed, but the message lands. Brown doesn’t have to be the cleverest engineer in Woking. He just has to be the best CEO in the pit lane. And on current evidence — a dominant constructors’ campaign, team harmony, and a title fight no one else is invited to — he’s exactly that.
Whatever you think of Bernie’s phrasing, the scoreboard reads the same. McLaren are back where they’ve wanted to be for two decades: on top, in control, and making it look almost easy. The rest of the grid can argue semantics; Brown and McLaren are busy collecting points.
