He starts with the obvious question: is McLaren still really in the title fight? On paper, it is easy to doubt. The season has already had ups and downs. Mercedes looks stronger at the moment.
Ferrari is expected to be quick at this particular race. Brown looks at the length of the modern calendar and sees something else. With so many grands prix packed into the year, it can feel like having two seasons in one. In the last few years, both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships have swung late. Because of that, he is not ready to declare anything over in the first third of the schedule. For him, there is still time to turn things around on track.
He is also more relaxed about McLaren’s technical base than he was at the start of the year. The team runs Mercedes power units, and the relationship with Mercedes’ High Performance Powertrains division has taken time to settle. Now, Brown feels McLaren understands the engine much better and can unlock more performance and reliability from it. That shift in confidence makes him think McLaren will grow stronger as the season goes on. He also likes to remind people that McLaren has already shown you can win championships even when you are only a customer team. In his mind, not being the factory squad does not have to mean starting from behind.
Looking further ahead, Brown’s default plan is to stick with Mercedes engines into the next rules cycle. He calls Mercedes a strong and stable partner and sees no reason to walk away without a clear gain. The only thing that would make McLaren rethink its power-unit supply is a new set of engine regulations that creates a better option. For Brown, ‘better’ has to mean two things at the same time: the package must be strong on performance and it must make sense on cost. There is no point chasing an ambitious engine project that blows up the budget and drags the team backwards. Until those future rules are written and public, he sees little value in daydreaming about other paths. The job now, he suggests, is to keep improving what the team already has.
His tone shifts when he talks about how teams themselves are structured. One of his long-running concerns is the rise of A-B team models. In simple terms, this is when a main team has a close partner or satellite team, or when there is shared ownership between two entries. Parts, staff and data can move easily between them. To Brown, these arrangements are not just untidy; they are risky. In his view, Formula One cannot keep selling itself as a clean, winner-takes-all fight while also normalising teams that share owners, parts and agendas. He thinks the sport should have 11 completely independent teams. Each team should race for its own best interest. Each should follow the same financial rules. Each should vote on regulations without having to think about what a parent company or bigger ally wants. In a series now packaged globally as pure rivalry, he sees any hidden strings as a direct threat to the story fans are being asked to buy.
He says he has been raising this issue for about ten years. In that time, he has spoken to many other team bosses, including Mercedes’ Toto Wolff, and his sense is that, in private, most of them agree with him in principle. Brown also appears to believe the rulemakers and Formula One’s commercial leadership understand the problem perfectly well, which only makes the slow pace of change harder to justify in his eyes. The series is healthier today than it has ever been: bigger audiences, more races, more sponsors and more media money. In his view, that is exactly why now is the time to shut down cosy ownership links, not allow them to deepen under fresh branding. Fans are paying for a sport built on simple, direct rivalries. Anything that blurs that picture does not just weaken the show; it invites fans to wonder how real the competition actually is.
There is another twist here. McLaren does not have a seat at one of the key tables where the future is mapped out. Because it is not an engine manufacturer, McLaren is not part of the closed meetings where future power-unit rules are drafted. On that front, Brown and his team must simply wait to see what the final regulations say. Only then can they decide whether to get more involved or even consider some kind of new engine project. He says it would be a distraction right now to chase every possible scenario. Better, he argues, to focus on getting the current car and current partnership right and then react to the rulebook once it is real instead of hypothetical.
That does not mean he is happy with the rules as they stand. Brown is open about the fact that the sporting and technical regulations still need work. He believes everyone in the paddock knows there is room to make Formula One better. The problem, as he sees it, is that too many teams still treat every rules discussion as a chance to tilt the table their way, even when that clearly hurts the bigger picture. He wants them to stop gaming the system for one more year of advantage and start acting like they care whether the sport still looks credible five years from now. He expects a lot of wrestling over the details of any reform. Some proposals, he knows, will be watered down to the point of having little effect. Others will die in committee, victims of the same short-term thinking he is criticizing. Even so, he is hopeful the sport will still move forward. To him, it would be a missed chance if Formula One did not use its current boom to repair weak spots that have been obvious for years.
The race calendar is one of those weak spots. The schedule keeps growing and moving into new cities and countries, often with one eye on television windows and the other on commercial expansion. At the same time, recent years have shown how quickly races can be cancelled or reshuffled by events far outside the paddock’s control. Brown does not publicly second-guess the people running the calendar, but he is clear about his own wish list. In a perfect world, he says, the only change fans would notice is that one more race gets added. He does not want to see classic grands prix vanish to make room for experiments. For now, he describes the situation as day by day. There are still a few months before final calls must be made about the end of the season. He remains optimistic that most of the planned events will go ahead and that any early-season cancellations can be replaced. But the subtext is hard to miss: push the calendar much harder and Formula One starts to look less like a championship and more like a delicate content machine, one unexpected shock away from serious disruption.
Behind all of this is a simple idea: Formula One is not just a racing series now. It is a global entertainment product that lives on television, streaming platforms and social feeds as much as it does on asphalt. Brown understands that as well as anyone. He talks about independence, clarity and fair rules not only because they matter for lap time, but because they matter for trust. Fans need to believe that every car on the grid is trying to beat every other car, not quietly serving another master. Sponsors and broadcasters want to back a sport that looks serious and clean. Regulators want to see a system that does not leave too much power in too few hands.
Across his comments, Brown keeps circling back to the same core message in different forms. On track, he says, McLaren is still alive in the fight and has the tools to get stronger with Mercedes power. Off track, he wants Formula One to lock in a future where teams stand on their own two feet, where the rules keep evolving for the better, and where the calendar grows without hollowing out the sport’s credibility or history. The details may be complex. But the way he frames it is not: either Formula One cleans up its ownership ties, tightens its rulebook and treats the calendar as something more than an endlessly extendable product line, or it risks slowly eroding the trust that helped turn a niche motorsport into a global obsession.