There is a particular kind of restlessness that never fully leaves a racing driver, even one who traded the cockpit for a corner office. Zak Brown, the American CEO who has spent the last ten years reconstructing McLaren from a cautionary tale back into a constructor worth fearing, still talks about cars the way someone talks about a first love — with longing, with precision, and with the faint sadness of knowing the distance between you has only grown.

When Brown arrived at McLaren in 2016, the team was in freefall. The Woking outfit that had once defined Formula One dominance — eleven constructors' championships, drivers like Senna and Häkkinen writing their names into the sport's mythology — had become a case study in institutional rot. The partnership with Honda had produced arguably the least competitive power unit of the hybrid era. Morale inside the factory was corroding. The sponsorship pipeline had dried up. What Brown inherited wasn't a sleeping giant; it was a giant that had forgotten it was supposed to be giant.

The turnaround Brown engineered was structural, not cosmetic. He rebuilt the commercial operation, brought in Andreas Seidl to run the team, and made the culturally difficult but necessary decision to exit the Honda partnership and pursue a Renault supply deal — later transitioning to Mercedes power units. He also did something harder to quantify: he changed the atmosphere. McLaren's papaya orange livery, dormant for decades under chrome and silver, came back. The team started talking about itself like a competitor again rather than a legacy brand cashing in on memorabilia.

The on-track results followed, slowly, then quickly. Lando Norris emerged as one of the grid's most complete drivers, and the 2024 season saw McLaren mount a genuine constructors' championship challenge that the paddock had stopped expecting from them. The team crossed its 1,000th Formula One grand prix — a milestone only a handful of constructors have ever reached — and marked the occasion with a limited-edition version of the McLaren Artura road car, produced by McLaren Special Operations, finished in the race team's livery. It is the kind of gesture that only lands right when the racing results back it up. McLaren's do.

Brown's background is worth keeping in focus when evaluating what he has built. He came up not as an engineer or a strategist but as a driver — talented enough to compete at the professional level, self-aware enough to recognise the ceiling. He shifted into motorsport marketing, building Just Marketing International into the sport's largest sponsorship agency before selling it and eventually landing at McLaren. That path matters. He understands the commercial grammar of the sport in a way that pure racing lifers often do not, and he understands the emotional grammar of it in a way that pure suits never will.

What Brown will say, if you give him room to say it, is that the FOMO — his word — about actually being in the car never disappears. Watching Norris place the MCL38 exactly where it needs to be through a high-speed corner, or seeing Oscar Piastri execute a strategy call with the composure of a ten-year veteran, Brown is processing something more layered than executive satisfaction. He is watching people do the thing he wanted most to do. The fact that his decisions made it possible does not entirely close that gap.

There is also a business dimension to McLaren's story that the pure racing coverage tends to flatten. The organisation is not simply an F1 team; it is a road car manufacturer, a technology company, and an entertainment brand competing for the same premium consumer attention as Ferrari, Red Bull, and a growing roster of new entrants backed by sovereign wealth and streaming money. The 1,000-race milestone and the Artura 1000GP edition are not nostalgia projects — they are brand architecture, reminding a global audience that McLaren's lineage is unbroken and its present is worth investing in.

A decade is a long time in Formula One, where the regulations change, the power structures shift, and the teams that look dominant in April can look ordinary by September. Brown has lived through enough of those cycles to resist triumphalism. He speaks carefully about the work still ahead, about the gap to the very top that has closed but not fully closed. That careful accounting is probably why McLaren is still in the conversation at all. The FOMO, it turns out, keeps you honest.