McLaren Racing completed its clean sweep of the 2025 Formula 1 World Championships in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, with Lando Norris adding the Drivers’ title to its already-claimed Constructors’ crown. And while the team basks in its glory, CEO Zak Brown is pulling back the curtain on his own rise to the pinnacle of global motorsports. His new autobiography, Seven Tenths of a Second, explores the high-pressure decision-making, commercial savvy, and relentless competitive drive that helped revive one of racing’s most storied teams.
Brown’s career arc is as unconventional as it is impressive. Rather than reaching the top step as a driver, he ascended through the business ranks, leveraging his marketing instincts and unshakable love of racing. After joining McLaren as executive director of McLaren Technology Group in 2016, he was later appointed CEO of McLaren Racing, where he helped transform the team from a dormant powerhouse into a modern Formula 1 juggernaut.
His leadership culminated in back-to-back Constructors’ Championships in 2024 and 2025, propelled by the balanced pairing of Norris and Piastri, one of the strongest driver duos in the sport.
“The name of the book, Seven Tenths, comes back to Abu Dhabi in 2024,” Brown tells our duPont REGISTRY Talks podcast. “It took us all year, 1,400 people, lots of grands prix, you can do all this preparation, and yet it came down to our final pit stop. Had we been seven tenths of a second slower, Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz would have come into our DRS range and probably passed us and cost us the championship. I’d like to think Lando would have passed him back, but I’m glad we didn’t need to find out!”
Moments like that pit stop – the razor-thin margins between triumph and defeat – form the spine of Brown’s story: “I’ve been born for 53 years, at McLaren for nine years, and it all came down to seven tenths of a second. And really, what that means is everything matters – in business and in life. And it could be a big decision, small decision, who would have thought after all these decisions, all these grands prix, all these pitstops, that seven tenths of a second was the difference between winning and losing the world championship.”
That philosophy, he explains, is what guides his leadership: energy, focus, and urgency: “Fortunately, and I like to think that I’ve always been one that’s been high energy, I tell people to do everything to the best of their ability – go, go, go! Because it might just come down to seven tenths of a second.”l
Brown’s talent for deal-making began long before he joined McLaren. Early in his racing career, he hustled for sponsorship simply to stay on track. When his driving ambitions ended, he redirected that commercial creativity into building Just Marketing International, a groundbreaking motorsport-focused agency that transformed global sponsorship acquisition. That success set the foundation for his role in reshaping McLaren into a championship-winning force during Formula 1’s modern era.
But for all the glamour of F1 – the global travel, the luxury marketplaces the sport touches, and the world’s most advanced high-performance machinery – Brown’s approach remains disarmingly grounded. Perfection, he insists, is an illusion.
“You can demand perfection, but you never get perfection, right?” Brown states. “As soon as that new front wing’s out, it might be better than the old one, but you can still make it better, right? So you’re constantly chasing perfection. It’s like that Wile E. Coyote cartoon, where he’s got a carrot in front of him and he just keeps chasing it, but you don’t get any closer to it.”
Instead, Brown attributes McLaren’s resurgence to culture, clarity, and collaboration – principles that translate beyond the paddock into any high-stakes business environment: “I think it’s all teamwork. It’s transparency. It’s tough love, it’s fairness, and recognizing we’re not going to get it perfect.”
For readers of duPont REGISTRY, Brown’s story resonates not only as a behind-the-scenes look at the luxury world’s most technologically advanced sport, but also as a study in leadership at the highest level. As Zak himself states, it’s a business book rather than just another racing tome.
Seven Tenths of a Second offers rare insight from one of motorsport’s most influential figures, revealing how a blend of passion, precision, innovation, and relentless drive helped restore McLaren to its place among the elite.
Images: McLaren Racing
