Why McLaren's CEO Believes It's 'Arrogant' to Call Themselves 2025 Favourites
Jan.24 - McLaren CEO Zak Brown says he does not regard the Woking based team as the favourite to win in 2025.
The last several years have been a rollercoaster for the famous Formula 1 outfit - with Brown even admitting the company came close to collapse amid the covid crisis of 2020.
"We were on the verge of bankruptcy," he told Auto Motor und Sport.
"If we hadn't received a cash injection from our shareholders in Bahrain and an external financial investor, things would not have continued. But McLaren has been profitable since 2023."
Not just that, McLaren won the constructors' world championship in 2024, even if Lando Norris fell short in the drivers' standings.
But the British driver said in an interview for the World Economic Forum this week that he could "smell" the title.
"It was within reach," said Norris, 25. "This year I need to fix certain things, work on them and come back stronger and that's what I'm ready for.
"I think one thing we've realised as a team is that now that we're there we need to make it easier for ourselves to win races. But last year I was close and I had that feeling of 'Ok, this is more or less what it is'."
Red Bull officials, in particular, are pointing at McLaren and Ferrari as the early favourites for 2025, admitting they have the most consistently fast cars at the moment.
But Brown denies McLaren is the overall favourite.
"It would be arrogant to think like that," said the American. "For me, there are four teams that can win. And we are one of them."
Team boss Andrea Stella says a big step forward for McLaren was being able to fully control the destiny of its wind tunnel testing and aero development.
"When we were still in Cologne at Toyota," said the Italian, "we'd finish a new part and take two days to get it in the wind tunnel. Now we can test it in two hours."
The downside of being the reigning constructors' champion, however, is that McLaren is now the team with the lowest allocation of wind tunnel time in 2025.
Stella says he isn't too worried.
"We are focusing on quality rather than quantity," he insisted. "We have increasingly strengthened our knowledge and introduced more efficient test procedures."
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