By Alan Baldwin
LONDON, June 1 (Reuters) - McLaren boss Zak Brown uses a 'Star Wars' analogy to explain the turnaround at the team since he joined and led them back to the top as a force in Formula One.
The second most successful team on the grid celebrate as reigning champions their 1,000th F1 start at this weekend's Monaco Grand Prix, the circuit where they debuted 60 years ago and also won last year.
McLaren were going through tough times when Brown, an American whose marketing career took off as
his own dreams of racing glory stalled, arrived on the scene in late 2016 before becoming chief executive in 2018.
"Our factory is amazing. It kind of looks like Star Wars. I felt we were Darth Vader. We were dark, we weren't very warm," he recalled at an Autosport Business Exchange conference during last month's Miami Grand Prix, which would have been the 1,000th race but for the cancellation of two Middle East rounds.
"And it was like 'let's go over to the Luke Skywalker side and be warm and welcoming and inclusive."
NINTH OF THE 10 TEAMS AND STRUGGLING
In 2017 McLaren were ninth of 10 teams in the championship. They scored just 30 points, far fewer than they took at Miami alone this year.
A much-trumpeted engine partnership with Honda, meant to revive the glory years of old, had turned sour as McLaren proved slow and unreliable.
"I think about my first day joining. It was a dark environment and that was literally from the paint on the race car being black and dark grey to the walls. You could feel it was a cold environment," Brown told reporters at the Woking factory last month.
"It wasn't a happy environment. The partners weren't happy, our drivers weren't happy, the majority of our race team wasn't happy. A lot of conspiracy theories running around.
"I think we're a much more vibrant team now. There was a huge amount of talent in here. It was just about unlocking it, providing motivation, excitement, bringing some fun back."
McLaren were dominant in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost under the visionary leadership of Ron Dennis, whose legacy lives on in the space age factory as well as the sportscar business.
Dennis, a big fish in what was then the 'Piranha Club' of team bosses, was ousted by the majority shareholders in late 2016 after several years of upheaval.
The team livery had gone from red and white during the Marlboro years to Mercedes silver and then all-black, reflecting different partners.
Brown set about building a fresh identity by going back to the original orange 'papaya' colour of founder Bruce McLaren.
"Someone said to me at the time 'you're only doing that because that's what the fans want'," he recalled. "I was, like, 'Trick question? That's why we're doing it'.
McLaren, without a constructors' title since 1998, returned to the top in 2025 and completed their first title double of the century last year with Lando Norris taking the drivers' crown and Andrea Stella as principal.
In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, McLaren were in desperate need of cash. Now, with Bahrain's Mumtalakat and Abu Dhabi's CYVN in full ownership of the team and Formula One booming, the team is valued at more than $5 billion.
"We've got the team working really well together," said Brown. "We've been very stable. We've all been together for quite some time."
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
