Seven Tenths of a Second, page 1
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Contents
Dedication
Abu Dhabi, 2024
A Competitor at Heart
Chapter 1: Taking the Brave Pill – The Mick and Me
Chapter 2: Finding Inspiration
Chapter 3: Fortune Teller
Chapter 4: An MBA in the School of Hard Knocks
Chapter 5: Green Flag
Chapter 6: Hustle
Chapter 7: A Passion for Deals
Chapter 8: The Fire Always Gets Bigger
Chapter 9: School All Over Again
Chapter 10: The Papaya Era
Chapter 11: Timeout
Chapter 12: Weekend Warriors
Chapter 13: Crisis Management
Chapter 14: Stick or Twist
Chapter 15: Rebirth
Chapter 16: Lando and Oscar
Chapter 17: The New Piranha Club
Chapter 18: Fast Forward
Triple Crown
Acknowledgements
Index
About the Author
_153889253_
This book is dedicated to my brother Kasey.
Abu Dhabi, 2024
I sleep okay the night before the race. Not great. I never sleep great. I drink a lot of coffee. I’m a million-miles-an-hour guy. Sleep’s a casualty. This is going to be the biggest day of my life, either the good way or the bad way, and I sleep okay. I’m surprised.
The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix doesn’t start until 5pm, local time. So I have to get through the day and try not to think too much about the evening. I host a lunch at the Hilton for our sponsors. A lot of big-hitters are here. Around sixty, I’d say. The food’s good. I make a speech. I’m grinning a lot. I’m faking the grin. Inside, I’m not grinning. There’s too much at stake.
I say it’s business as usual. I say that to myself, too. But I know it’s not business as usual. To look at me on the outside, I’m in a great mood. I’m upbeat. I’m smiling. The sponsors are smiling. Everyone’s patting me on the back. They’re saying, ‘You’ve got this thing wrapped up.’
Our drivers, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, drop in to say hello and press some flesh. They bring the stardust. They’ve nailed it in qualifying. Lando’s on pole. Oscar’s next to him on the front row.
On top of that, Ferrari is struggling. Ferrari is the only team that can ruin this day for us, and even though Carlos Sainz qualified third, his Ferrari teammate, Charles Leclerc, is way back in nineteenth. ‘You got this,’ everybody keeps saying. ‘It’s over. It’s done. It’s in the bag.’
Here’s the math: we’re going into the final race of the 2024 season with a twenty-one-point lead over Ferrari. We need to score twenty-four points, between the two drivers, to guarantee the constructors’ title. Or twenty-three, if Ferrari does not win the race.
If one of our drivers wins, that’s enough. That’s the simplest way to seal it. If Lando wins or Oscar wins, we’ll have our first constructors’ title since 1998, when Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard are our drivers.
That’s more than a quarter of a century ago. A quarter of a century since McLaren won the constructors’ title. A team once so mighty it pits Alain Prost against Ayrton Senna in its cars and wins fifteen out of sixteen races in 1988. A team that takes Emerson Fittipaldi and James Hunt and Niki Lauda and Prost and Senna and Hakkinen and Lewis Hamilton to the F1 drivers’ title.
If we don’t win the race, there are other permutations. We could still win the constructors’ title by finishing second and seventh, say. Third and fifth would be enough, too. And, anyway, Leclerc’s nineteenth on the grid and we’re one and two. Maybe I don’t need to worry about the math.
But I’m bound to worry. This is big. This is big for me and it’s big for the team. I’m a hustler and a disruptor, I’m a Valley boy from Los Angeles who doesn’t do great in school and comes to Europe to try to make it as an F1 driver, and hustles and works hard to build up the most successful motorsports marketing company in the world and make a success of myself and now I’m here.
When I join McLaren at the end of 2016, don’t forget, everyone says I’m a brash American and they’re a lost cause. Everyone says they’re finished. They’re stinking the place out. Road & Track magazine runs a feature on me a couple of years after I arrive. The headline reads: ‘Zak Brown’s Impossible Task: Saving McLaren Racing’.
We used to call it a ‘journey’ that we were on. At some point this season, I change the word to ‘quest’. A journey is how you get to work every day, pretty boring, point A to point B. Flying to the moon is a quest. That’s what we’re on.
I never think it’s an impossible task. It’s tough, but with a lot of help from a lot of very smart people, a lot of very good people, we do save McLaren. We turn it around. And we bring it to this point, where I’m in Abu Dhabi and we’re within an ace of bringing twenty-six years of hurt to an end.
At the lunch, people are still patting me on the back. But I know it ain’t over till it’s over. In business, time kills deals. Don’t get lazy on the five-yard line. You’re not in the end zone yet. Things happen. So don’t let up. Make sure you’re in the end zone before you spike the ball. You can fumble on the one-yard line. I’ve seen it happen.
Anticipation, excitement, adrenaline, nervousness all start to build. Being with the sponsors is a good distraction. Wyc Grousbeck, then owner of the Boston Celtics, is at the lunch. He’s brought his Celtics NBA Championship ring and he’s showing it to all of us. He’s saying that if we win, we’ve got to get rings made up to celebrate.
After the lunch, I’m driven to the track. I’ve got the Netflix Drive to Survive crew with me in the car. We get to the Yas Marina Circuit. And now I’m starting to get myself into the mindset that I have to tackle it like it’s just another race.
Stop thinking about the championship. Just approach it like you’ve approached the other twenty-three races this year and everything will be fine. It’s one of those things where you pretend you’re not thinking about it, you’re trying not to think about it, but of course you are thinking about it.
I walk into the garage, say hi to the team. The mechanics are prepping the car. Go into the engineering office. Business as usual. Business as usual. Keep repeating it. Andrea Stella, the team principal, the best in the business, my right-hand man, the man who runs the racing team, and I talk to the drivers, just as we do every Sunday before a race, to go through strategy.
This time, what we talk about mainly is Max Verstappen. He’s qualified fourth but we know he could still be a factor at the first corner. We know he could pull something. And, most of all, the last thing we want is for Lando and Oscar to get into a tangle with each other at the first corner.
Not only do you not want them to take each other out, but they also need to help each other. If they’re too cautious, you’re leaving the door open for Max and Carlos to come through the gap. So you can’t be so concerned with not hitting each other that you end up getting done by the second row. The instruction to Oscar is not to fight Lando too hard, but don’t give him so much space you’re inadvertently opening a gap for someone else.
The red lights go out. The cars accelerate off the grid. My heart’s pounding. Max has already won the drivers’ world title by then. He’s got nothing to lose. He’s aggressive enough when he has got something to lose, so I guess it should be predictable that he’s going to do something aggressive.
That’s exactly what he does. He careens into the first corner, a left-hander, and takes Oscar out as Oscar turns in. Both cars spin round in a pirouette blur. Max rejoins. Oscar rejoins, too. But he’s at the back of the field.
Lando’s clear in front but Carlos is second. And Leclerc? He makes up eleven places on the first lap. He’s up to eighth by the time they come back around and cross the start–finish line for the first time.
Before the race, when everyone’s slapping me on the back and saying, ‘You got this,’ we know
Put a heart monitor on me at that point and I think the screen would explode. Lando’s clear in the lead and looking good but now we’re only one mishap from disaster. The idea the race might be a McLaren procession is gone. It’s disappeared. Now things are unbelievably tense.
The next two hours are the most stressful of my life. Carlos is never far away. I worry about reliability issues. I worry about pit stop issues. And so, to sit there, to be in a position where you must win, for two hours, is hard.
You start telling yourself you can hear stuff in the car, just as you do when you’re a driver. There are phantoms everywhere. You start worrying about safety cars.
So even though Lando looks serene and I’m totally comfortable with how he’s doing, I’m watching other cars battling it out for eighth and ninth and I’m thinking, ‘If they crash into each other, the safety car’s coming out and then all bets are off.’
It doesn’t matter if eighth fighting ninth is nothing to do with the championship. It can still have consequences. It’s what happens in the duel between Max and Lewis in Abu Dhabi at the end of the 2021 season.
Lewis is winning the race and on course for the championship. There are only six or seven laps left. Then Nicholas Latifi puts it in the wall at Turn 14 and everything changes. The safety car comes out and Max gets his chance and everything Lewis has worked for that season is over.
So, again, Lando’s the least of my concerns. He’s been on fire all weekend. He’s been dominant. When Lando gets into the zone, he can be unbeatable. It’s extraneous things that concern me.
I sit there on the pit wall and I keep my counsel. You might think it’s all sound and fury and heat and dust sitting there a few feet away from cars flying past you down the straight, but I find it quite calming.
Once you put the headset on, you’re in your own world. And the team is extremely disciplined from a communication standpoint. It’s all business, no emotion. It doesn’t matter if you’re first or twentieth, you run the race kind of the same way.
You don’t see the cars in front of you. You’re staring at a bunch of Dell computer screens and data. You only see the cars when you turn around for a pit stop. So I actually find pit wall to be quite soothing.
The rest of the day, there’s so much activity and so many sponsor commitments, and then the race starts and you get on the pit wall and it’s kind of like you’re in a bubble, and you’re listening and everyone’s calm. Everyone’s got a process, no banter.
Every communication has a purpose. It’s not that different to when you’re racing cars. When you put that helmet on and you’re sitting in the race car, you’re by yourself. There’s a freedom to that. I’m in my world now. Nothing’s going to distract me.
Even when the carnage at the first corner happens, the team stays calm. I pay lip service to the idea that it’s just another race. They actually put it into practice. There’s no panic. They’re problem-solving, they’re adjusting, they’re focusing on what we need to do. And, now, that means getting Lando home in first and making sure Oscar has the best possible recovery from last place.
I’m doing the math all the time. How many positions does Charles have to gain? Can Oscar recover enough to win points? I’m thinking championship thoughts and, even if the team is too, all their energy is expended on managing this race.
I look back on it now and I think the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix is almost all my life lessons coming together to try and get across the line and win that world championship.
We have to keep our composure. We have to be perfect. Lando has to be perfect, strategy has to be perfect, reliability has to be perfect, the pit stops have to be perfect.
You cannot let the emotion of the situation creep in, because I am a big believer in the fact that passion is great but emotion is very dangerous, and there is a fine line between the two. Just like my chairman at McLaren, Paul Walsh, always says to me: ‘There is a fine line between bravery and stupidity.’
If you get emotional, you start to not think clearly. You make mistakes. Over the course of that season, we make plenty of mistakes, so now’s the time to learn from all of them, to eliminate all of them.
When I see Oscar get taken out, I don’t get on the radio to Lando. I stay off the radio. It’s not my role. I don’t interfere. It’s not my job. I’m the CEO. I’m not the team principal. We have a streamlined channel of communication between team and driver and I am not part of it and I don’t want to be part of it.
And anyway, the last thing you want to do is give Lando information that is not going to help him. We need Lando to win the race whether Oscar is seventh or eighth or wherever. We know if Lando wins the race, it doesn’t matter what else happens because that will win us the championship. So we become laser-focused on winning the race.
Giving a driver information that he doesn’t need or can’t use puts things in his head. He is trying to win the race, but if you add the pressure of saying, ‘If you don’t win, we are not going to win the world championship,’ he is not going to drive any better. He is already doing everything he can.
You are just putting incremental pressure on him. He doesn’t need to know that. He doesn’t know what’s going on further back down the field and that’s intentional.
I am just talking to Andrea Stella. I don’t start getting in the ears of everyone else in the team in a situation like that. We have a very strict protocol on conversations. Only one person talks to the driver and that’s the engineer. My conversation is with Andrea on the pit wall.
Now is not the time for me to jump in. That is not what I do on pit wall. I observe. I ask questions. I make suggestions. Andrea runs the racing team. What we have to do is stay on plan.
When we make a mistake at Silverstone in the British Grand Prix earlier in the season, a race we should win, it’s because we don’t trust our instincts and we go off plan and we lose the race. Everything that we learn over the course of the year, we put into practice in Abu Dhabi.
Maybe, after the mayhem of that first corner, it looks easy for us. Lando continues to lead but he is under an immense amount of pressure. He can’t afford a mistake. We can’t afford a mistake.
We start thinking about his pit stop. We know that Ferrari has gone for the undercut and has done a 2.2-second pit stop with Carlos, and so we know everything is riding on Lando’s pit stop on Lap 26. Have I got trepidation when he’s coming into the pit lane? Have I got fear? All of the above.
It’s so easy for it to go wrong. The driver needs to stop perfectly on his mark. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. If he doesn’t stop exactly on his mark then someone in the pit crew has to adjust their body slightly to apply the gun or change the tyre.
Someone has to lean forward. Someone has to lean back. Maybe someone has to take a small step to the side. That can cost you a tenth of a second. Maybe a fifth of a second. That can be fatal.
You are only as fast as your weakest link. Do people wheel-nut strip? Do they not get it on right? Does something get blocked? There is so much that can go wrong. So it’s the same with the pit crew as it is with Lando: try and forget the stakes; just keep doing what you are doing.
They are trained to do two-second pit stops. There is no point saying to them, ‘Guys, if you screw this up, we lose the world championship.’ Everyone understands the consequences of failure. There is enough pressure as it is.
Carlos is a couple of seconds behind Lando. The undercut is usually the way to go. You pit first. You will make up some lap time because you get on a fresher set of tyres sooner. But when you are enough in front, you can key off of letting the P2 car pit first because you know they are going to try to close the gap. So the trick is you pit right after they pit, the following lap.
Ferrari pits first and does a 2.2-second pit stop. That’s fast. We try to do our pit stops under 2.5 seconds. So 2.5 seconds is an average pit stop. It is not good. It is not bad. But when you are running a race simulation, you assume you are going to do a 2.5-second pit stop.
