McLaren's Boss Called a Crash Amateur Driving on Live TV, Then Took It Back

The wreck had barely settled in Turn One in Austin when the microphone arrived.

Zak Brown, the chief executive of McLaren Racing, was standing in the pit lane after a first lap crash involving his two championship contenders and rival driver Nico Hulkenberg. Television cameras found him within seconds for a live reaction. From the pit wall, it had looked to Brown as if Hulkenberg had wiped out his drivers. Angry and still full of adrenaline, Brown blurted out his verdict for everyone watching. That was some amateur driving.

It is a moment Brown now uses as a warning about what happens when passion tips into emotion. Leaders do not need to settle everything in the heat of a Sunday race, he says. If a decision can wait, it should wait until Monday or Tuesday, when people are rested and have seen the facts. In Austin, he had seen the crash only once, with no replay and no data.

When he finally watched the replay, his first judgment fell apart. Hulkenberg had not, in Brown's later view, been at fault at all. It was a racing incident, the kind of split second tangle that happens when three cars arrive at the same corner at speed. Brown had accused a fellow driver on live television, and hundreds of millions of people had heard it.

So he did the only thing he thought was right. He went back on television and apologized to that same vast audience. He said he had been angry, that his passion had turned into emotion, and that he should have waited for the replay before judging. Once words are out on live TV, he says, you cannot unsay them.

At McLaren, that distinction drives how the team reviews failure. The group of about 1,400 people holds a hot debrief right after the event for an open and frank conversation, then a colder one later when tempers have cooled. Thick skin is required, and blame is not the point. Brown says he can live with mistakes, as long as no one makes the same one twice.