McLaren have decided they’ve had enough of the sport’s comfortable grey areas — and they’re pushing the FIA to stop treating “independent constructors” as a nice idea rather than a hard line.
Between Miami and Canada, CEO Zak Brown wrote to FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem calling for a rethink on common ownership and what Brown describes as “axes of alliance relationships” between teams that are supposed to be competitors. The thrust of the letter is straightforward: ban future co-ownership structures and start the process of unwinding those already in place, because the longer Formula 1 tolerates A/B team dynamics, the harder it becomes to credibly police the rulebook’s intent.
It’s not framed as a shot at any single outfit, but nobody in the paddock needs a flowchart to see why the topic has returned with force. Mercedes’ confirmed interest in buying the 24 per cent stake in Alpine currently held by Otro Capital has put the idea of a de facto satellite team back on the table — and it’s landed in a championship that already contains one long-standing example of common ownership in Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls, a structure that’s been allowed to persist largely because it predates the modern governance and commercial era.
Brown’s argument is less about headline legality and more about what these relationships make easier. When teams share ownership — or even operate in tight strategic lockstep — the sport creates “unintended but very real consequences”, as he put it, including smoother personnel movement and the ability to sidestep obstacles others can’t, like the practical impact of gardening leave. Even if everyone stays technically within the lines, Brown’s point is that the playing field can still tilt in ways that are difficult to quantify and even harder to prove after the fact.
That’s the element that tends to make rivals bristle. F1’s regulatory architecture is built to define what can be shared, what must be developed in-house, and what must never cross the boundary. But integrity isn’t only about whether an IP transfer can be evidenced in a tribunal; it’s also about whether the competitive ecosystem encourages behaviour that the rules are constantly chasing rather than preventing.
Brown urged the FIA to consider a prohibition on future co-ownership arrangements and to tighten the net around existing alliances so the sport doesn’t drift further into a two-tier grid. He even pointed to UEFA’s multi-club ownership guardrails in football as an example of how a governing body can spell out structural remedies — independent trusts, restrictions, and clear, enforceable constraints — when common ownership risks distorting competition.
“We need to eliminate any further alliances,” Brown wrote, “whether through ownership, strategic participation, or any other equivalent form of control or influence, and we need to work together quickly to start the process of unwinding those already established to ensure that the future integrity of the sport is not compromised.”
In Montreal, McLaren team principal Andrea Stella didn’t just echo the sentiment — he sharpened it. Speaking in the team bosses’ press conference, Stella framed it as a foundational matter: this is, in his words, “a championship between independent constructors”, and if that’s the principle, it should be “enforced totally”.
What McLaren want now, Stella suggested, is for the paddock’s broad philosophical nodding to turn into something that bites: a framework that doesn’t simply rely on everyone behaving impeccably, but one that actively limits the scope for influence, control, and convenient pathways that aren’t equally available to all.
There’s an important nuance in Stella’s phrasing. He isn’t arguing that the current system is automatically corrupt; he’s arguing it’s incomplete — that there’s “more that we should do” if the sport is serious about fairness, and about ensuring the technical, sporting and financial regulations mean what they claim to mean in practice.
Sitting alongside Stella were two of the key figures from the one common-ownership model F1 already lives with: Red Bull CEO and team boss Laurent Mekies, and Racing Bulls boss Alan Permane. If McLaren’s vision were implemented to the letter, it would inevitably raise questions about whether the Red Bull model could remain as-is. Yet both Mekies and Permane were careful to steer the discussion back to outcomes rather than structures — and to argue that the sport already has mechanisms in place to keep competitors separated.
Mekies said Red Bull would support further steps if stakeholders believed more was required to ensure “11 teams racing independently on track”, but he pushed back on the idea that ownership itself is the core issue. In his view, collaboration exists across the pit lane in multiple forms — power unit supply, gearbox and suspension supply, partial ownership — and the key is making sure independence is protected regardless of the commercial arrangement.
Permane went further on the practical reality of living under those constraints. Racing Bulls, he said, operates as a customer under the regulations, taking permitted components such as suspension and gearboxes from Red Bull Racing and following the rules “very rigorously”. He stressed that considerable internal effort goes into ensuring the relationship remains compliant — time and energy, he noted, that could be used elsewhere if the governance burden wasn’t so high.
That, perhaps, is the point McLaren are really trying to ram home: if the sport has reached a stage where significant resource is spent simply proving separation, maybe the model itself deserves scrutiny. Brown and Stella are effectively asking whether F1 wants to keep expanding a web of permissible closeness and then building ever more elaborate fences around it — or whether it’s time to draw a cleaner line and stop the argument repeating every time a stake sale, supply deal, or “strategic partnership” appears.
And with Mercedes’ Alpine interest hovering in the background, the political timing is obvious. The next debate won’t be about whether anyone has cheated; it’ll be about whether the FIA and F1 are comfortable with the perception of influence — and whether perception, in a sport that sells itself on competition as much as technology, has become a competitive factor of its own.
