Zak Brown Believes IndyCar Has A Bright Future And Can Co-Exist With Formula One’s Surge In The United States

The traveling international circus known as the Formula One World Championship has packed up its gear after another highly successful United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin, Texas.

In this “Drive to Survive” Era of Formula One it was another massive crowd that filled COTA for the second year in a row. That, of course, has led to the bi-annual rant among nouveau racing fans that IndyCar and even Nascar are done; that Formula One is leaving the two North American-based racing series in their exhaust fumes.

That is a laughable premise from the standpoint that Formula One came to the United States twice in 2022 and is scheduled to have three F1 events in the USA in 2023 with the addition of a grand prix in Las Vegas.

Compare that to 17 races for IndyCar, 16 in the United States, and 36 Nascar Cup Series races.

Television ratings have improved dramatically for Formula One in the United States but have yet to surpass Nascar Cup Series or even Nascar Xfinity Series ratings.

As for IndyCar fans, many of them often live in a constant state of anxiety. Despite a series that features some of the most competitive racing on the planet, they want IndyCar to destroy its economic sustainability by trying to compete with Formula One on a technological scale.

Formula One’s surge in popularity in the United States can be traced back to the NetflixNFLX
documentary “Drive to Survive” combined with the COVID-19 Pandemic that virtually shut down the world in 2020.

Locked in the house with little to do, viewers discovered the docuseries on Netflix and were intrigued by the many storylines in the world of Formula One.

It became “Must See Streaming” for many fans who seemingly overnight became Formula One fans.

When the citizens of the world were freed from their homes, they decided to see what Formula One was all about by flocking to various Grands Prix throughout the world.

No country saw a bigger surge in interest than the United States.

Formula One has always been the pinnacle of international motorsports, but interest in the United States was saved for the diehards of motorsports who would get up at 5 a.m. to watch F1 on TV on Sunday mornings.

By comparison, many of today’s Formula One fans probably couldn’t spell “F1” before discovering “Drive to Survive.”

Many of the nouveau fans act as if they discovered the sport and have become arrogant in their attitude that other forms of racing in the United States are irrelevant.

That is why Sunday’s crowd at COTA could have been termed “The World’s Largest Gathering of Drive to Survive Viewers.”

Credit Liberty Media with properly marketing and creating new opportunities in the United States after it purchased F1 in January 2017.

The problem with today’s society is the presumption that if one thing is great, everything else is useless rather than the premise, “Why can’t both be great?”

That is the approach that McLaren CEO Zak Brown takes.

He is the team principal of both McLaren’s Formula One team and its Arrow McLaren SP IndyCar team.

Brown got hooked up on racing when he was a youngster in the United States. He sought out Mario Andretti for advice at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach when Brown was a teenager because he wanted to be a race driver.

Brown became much more than a racing driver. He became one of the most dynamic figures in international racing. In his 30s, he moved to Indianapolis and created one of the largest motorsports marketing firms in the United States known as “Just Marketing” before it was sold to CSM.

Brown helped broker Liberty Media’s bid to purchase Formula One.

On November 21, 2016, Brown was announced as the executive director of McLaren Technology Group. On April 10, 2018, he became the CEO of McLaren Racing.

Brown returned McLaren Racing to IndyCar when he purchased a stake in Arrow Schmidt-Peterson Racing in 2019 and created Arrow McLaren SP. McLaren became the majority owner in 2021 and is set to take total control of the team in 2023.

In 2022, McLaren F1 features Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo as its drivers. Ricciardo will leave the team at the end of this year with Oscar Piastri set to take over in 2023.

At Arrow McLaren SP, Pato O’Ward, Felix Rosenqvist and Alexander Rossi will be its three drivers in 2023.

Chip Ganassi Racing driver Alex Palou will continue to drive for CGR in 2023 but is a McLaren F1 test driver.

Palou was impressive when he drove Ricciardo’s car in Friday’s “Free Practice 1” at COTA before the United States Grand Prix.

Palou lapped the 20-turn COTA course in 1 minute, 39.911 seconds for his fastest lap, the 17^th lap of 21 for the IndyCar driver.

“Awesome, I’m super happy,” Palou said. “The session went really well. You always think that you’re ready, but you never know when you come here. Obviously, there’s a bit of pressure of having a car that’s not yours, that has to go out on the track again a short time later, along with all the data that we had to collect for the team.

“I did everything I could in one hour.

“I felt as comfortable as I could expect. Obviously, not my car, not my team environment, either – but I still felt really comfortable, and I think we achieved what we wanted, so really, really happy.”

Brown, who turns 51 on November 7, completely understands that Formula One and IndyCar are two completely different forms of racing that appeal to different fan bases.

He believes Formula One can continue down its international path with an emphasis on technology and IndyCar can continue to grow as a North American-based series that features great racing.

Brown does not believe the two racing series are in competition with each other.

However, he would like to see such IndyCar drivers as Colton Herta and O’Ward get a chance to compete in Formula One. Neither driver have enough super license points to get approved for an F1 ride.

That’s a system Brown would like to change.

“Colton Herta can drive a Formula One car, no question about it,” Brown told me last month. “He can race in Formula One, no question.”

From an IndyCar point of view, Brown believes the series needs to improve its television ratings, add a few more races to the schedule and create a faster race car.

“We can still enhance the schedule and get on the East Coast,” Brown said. “I would like to see us have new cars, but I’m in the minority. The racing is great, but given this sport is about technology and the cars race fine, the issue I have is in five years we are going to be saying the same thing – ‘Good budget. Racing is great. Why change?’

“At what point do you make a change? I think it would give the series a shot in the arm and take technology to the next level.

“I think the budgets here are fantastic. The value for money in racing is the best. The racing is awesome. The schedule can be enhanced. The digital activities that we could do can be enhanced. The drivers are great.

“I would like to see the cars be a little faster with some more horsepower and a new, lighter chassis. I think Super Formula and Formula 2 cars are a little quicker. Refreshing the product, we would benefit from.

“It’s a bunch of little things, other than to come out with another Netflix documentary. Although that seemed to do the track for Formula One. In North America, we were more lucky than good in that outcome.”

IndyCar owner Roger Penske has hinted that the series may one day increase its schedule but has no plans on creating or developing a new car in the near future.

The series has enjoyed a healthy increase in cars on the starting grid and is nearing the 28-car count it once enjoyed during the height of the CART era in the 1990s.

It continues to search for a third engine manufacturer, although none are on the horizon. Toyota’s Group Vice President and Toyota Research and Development President David Wilson recently confirmed Toyota told Penske “Not now, but not no” on becoming the third IndyCar OEM.

A third engine manufacturer would be needed to increase the field even more because both Honda Performance Development and Chevrolet Motorsports have indicated they are at max capacity in the number of teams it can supply with engines.

Brown suggested to Penske Entertainment CEO Mark Miles to get maps of all the major convention centers and football stadiums on the East Coast to find the next, great street race for IndyCar.

“Those seem to be the best places to look for a street race,” Brown said. “Long Beach is around a convention center. Toronto is around a convention center and Nashville is around a football stadium.

“That would be a good place to start.”

Despite the fact that Brown and McLaren benefit from Formula One’s international appeal, he does not believe IndyCar needs any international races outside of North America.

“I’m not a fan of international races for IndyCar,” Brown said. “Going to England and Germany and Australia, I don’t see very many Chief Marketing Officers that are responsible for North America and Australia.

“I would like to see us round out the schedule in North America rather than go international.”

Back in 2017 when McLaren brought two-time Formula One World Champion Fernando Alonso to the Indianapolis 500, serious talk began that McLaren may one day return to IndyCar fulltime.

There were some team members in the IndyCar paddock at that time that expressed a “be careful what you wish for because McLaren will change the game.”

That is exactly what has happened, as Brown’s influence with McLaren has changed the dynamic of the series.

The competitive level has changed as Arrow McLaren SP has elevated itself into IndyCar’s “Big Three” with Team Penske and Chip Ganassi Racing.

“We just want to compete at the front,” Brown said. “It has been the Penske, Ganassi, Andretti show for the past 20 years and we just trying to get in on the game.

“We have had a more successful season, than Andretti, but I’m not going to say we are better or worse than Michael Andretti’s mega-team.”

Arrow McLaren SP will move to a massive new shop in the future that will allow the team to bring in more technical resources as well as increased capacity for a potential fourth IndyCar team fulltime. The team plans on having four cars at next year’s Indianapolis 500.

“It’s all about having a long-term growth plan.”

Long term, Brown believes IndyCar has a positive future. He does not share the anxiety that many IndyCar fans have that the series needs to re-invent itself before it gets swallowed up by Formula One.

With three races compared to 17, and similar television ratings for now, Brown doesn’t believe that is going to happen.

But he admits he never believed he would see Formula One explode like it has in the United States, in such a short period of time.

“I hoped that would be the case, but for a long time we didn’t have a race in the United States before Austin happened (in 2014),” Brown said. “The ratings were that high, then Miami hits and all of a sudden Las Vegas hits.

“We all had a desire for it to be as big as it is in the United States, but not in my world did I think it would be as big as it has become in such a short period of time.”