Beyond the limits: ambition, performance, and partnership

A McLaren Formula 1 car ends the season as a different machine from the one that started it. About 80% of it changes between the opening race in Melbourne and the finale in Abu Dhabi. The change comes from thousands of small fixes, each one raced, measured, and rebuilt week after week. Championships are won in the margins, one fix at a time.

Zak Brown runs the team behind the last two Constructors' Championships, a driver-turned-executive, who took McLaren from midtable to back-to-back titles. He sat down with Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang for the latest episode of The Airwallex Podcast, and he's specific about what he changed and the order he changed it in to get the team to the top. That order is the lesson for any CEO scaling a fast, multi-market business.

Fix the culture first

When Zak took over, McLaren sat ninth in the championship on its lowest sponsorship revenue on record, 26 years on from its last title. Before anything, ahead of the car or the driver lineup, he set on fixing the culture. Inside the team, politics and blame set the tone, and a group busy pointing fingers never “takes responsibility and accountability” or gets to the work of fixing what's broken.

So he rebuilt how the team treated itself. Blame gave way to accountability, with room to make a mistake once and a rule against making it twice. If your numbers are sliding and the team is blaming each other for it, fix the blame first. The operational repairs you need won't hold in a group that doesn't trust itself, and partners can get wise really quickly to a team that's difficult to deal with.

Work backward from the win you want

Zak wanted to win races, so he reverse-engineered what that took and worked the chain backwards. Winning needs a faster car. A faster car needs better R&D and technology, like a new wind tunnel. The wind tunnel needs money the team didn't have. More money means more sponsors, and sponsors need fans worth paying to reach. So the first job sat at the far end of that chain, working out what McLaren's fans wanted from the team.

The thing that looks broken is seldom the thing to fix first. Trace the result you want back through the chain that produces it, and the constraint that binds you tends to sit somewhere you weren't looking.

Every department contributes to the end goal

Around 1,400 people work across McLaren Racing. On a race weekend about 125 deploy, with 65 to 75 trackside and another 50 to 60 running mission control back at the factory in Woking, Surrey, all working towards the same goal. A championship is a team output, and everyone from the pit crew to the marketing department to the finance team owns a slice of the lap time.

That reframing changed how he chooses partners. Values come first and economics second, and he sorts every partner into one of two jobs. Some deepen the bond with fans. Others help the team run the business better.

Airwallex sits in that second group. We became an official partner of the McLaren Formula 1 team in February 2024, supporting global financial operations through treasury management, cross-border pay-outs, and its settlement product suite. 

Getting to the top and staying there are different jobs

Zak won't say which is harder, getting to the top of staying there. After 14 wins and 34 podiums in 2025, along with winning two championships, the team has dropped to third place this season.

But that's the nature of Formula 1. Success is never permanent. Every race is another opportunity to learn, adapt and improve. The organisations that stay ahead aren't the ones that stop changing after they win. They're the ones that keep questioning how they operate, from the factory floor to the finance team.

For Zak, building a championship team has never been about finding one magic ingredient. It's about creating an organisation where every person, every process, and every partner contributes to performance. Because whether you're chasing milliseconds on a race track or building a global business, sustained success comes from continuously improving the system behind the results.