McLaren Racing has a cult following for a reason — and it’s not just about incredibly fast cars. During the 2022 Smartsheet ENGAGE Conference, we had the privilege of interviewing Zak Brown, CEO, and Ed Green, Head of Commercial Technology, for McLaren Racing — a brand that has become the premiere racing company for Europe and America combined.
Brown is a racing evangelist, entrepreneur, and European transplant. As the CEO of McLaren Racing since 2018, Brown has successfully provided expert strategic direction and contributed to the commercial development of McLaren Racing brands – McLaren Formula 1 and IndyCar programs. Brown is also the chairman and co-owner of United Autosports.
Green is the driving force behind McLaren Racing’s tech strategy. He is responsible for successfully integrating Technology Partners into the McLaren ecosystem and developing services to support the team’s commercial objectives. Green’s dedicated thought leadership paves the way for a new tech-focused vision for all McLaren Brands.
Our conversation with Brown and Green during ENGAGE, uncovered the intricacies and complex work that goes into managing and elevating a longstanding brand that touts its goals as winning and being a global company that is moving at the speed of light. Our very own Matt Lorch from GeekWire Studios interviewed Brown and Green to discuss speed (on and off the track), the technology behind the scenes, and the future of racing. Here are some excerpts:
Matt Lorch: Zak, Formula One racing is the epitome of adapting quickly. Tell us what speed means to you and your team.
Zak Brown: Speed’s everything to us, obviously on the racetrack, but the way you get speed on the racetrack is by having speed off the racetrack. Having the right people in the right roles, but also giving them the right tools and technologies to help them go faster. A racing driver is only as good as the horsepower they have. And the rest of us in the organization all contribute to making a faster race car. It’s about what horsepower we have to be able to do our job to the fullest. And yeah, so the speed is a key ingredient.
ML: Ed, tell me about your role and team and how you help McLaren Racing perform at its best.
Ed Green: My role in the team’s work is to embed Technology Partners we see on the car. It’s not just about putting stickers on the side of the car, it’s about helping the team go faster, both on the track and in the race behind the scenes. It’s looking at our general roadmap and strategy across all of our racing series, which is growing more and more. It’s not just about adding more people to make that happen, it’s about how do we make people as fast as they can be, even in the back office.
ML: So Zak, let’s talk about technology. How does technology play into your drive for continuous improvement beyond the technology that you find in your cars?
Brown: It’s critically important to us. We are now living under a cost cap. So we are restricted in certain areas on how much we can spend. Formula One used to be able to solve its problems by sometimes spending its way out of, problems. Now you don’t have the luxury of doing that. It’s about efficiency, accuracy and you have to use technology combined with, people power to be able to drive the most efficient, quickest reacting racing team. Because we’re trying to put a very fast car on the racetrack, our engagement with our fans and our partners needs to be really fast and very engaging and very responsive. Smartsheet and Brandfolder, is something that we use, and they help a tremendous amount.
We’re a team of about a thousand people. And so we’ll use Smartsheet to get everyone working together to bring a car to launch, which requires the factory floor and marketing, coms, HR, and finance. to be able to do that more efficiently and accurately is, critically important because then you can redeploy those resources that you were wasting time with for more productive projects.
ML: Let’s talk about deployment, Ed. How was Smartsheet first introduced to your team, and how did that go?
Green: We introduced Smartsheet to the team for a car launch. It was the biggest moment of the year, and we wanted to make sure we got that right and there were no better use case to start with then something that would touch every department in the in the business. We worked alongside the pro services of Brandfolder to build us a template for launching, which was the most critical moment of our calendar year. We had over 800 different assets we had to launch in one day, from partners to fans, to social mediaa and 800 assets. It made sense to start with something that everybody in the business would touch. And then from there we’ve worked on use cases, from the clothing department all the way through to the digital team and social out the track.
ML: Zak, the really exciting news for race fans is that McLaren is moving into Formula E. What does that process look like for your team, for McLaren? Take us through the steps.
Brown: Yeah, we’re excited. We’re now in five racing series. We have our Formula One team, our IndyCar team, our Extreme E team, our esports team and now Formula E. We’ve also acquired the two-time world champion Mercedes team. And that was really around our desire to continue to grow around sustainability. We were the first Formula One team to win the Carbon Trust Award back in, I think it was 2011, 2012. A decade on, we’re continuing to progress, and Formula E is a great platform for us to work with our employees, fans, and partners on our sustainability agenda. Because that’s what racing’s about. It’s electric vehicles. As technology continues to grow, we want to be at the forefront of that. That comes from the success we’ve had in what’s called Extreme E, which is a new racing series where you race five different locations around the world that highlights where climate has impacted these various regions. Also, McLaren has their first ever female racing driver, which is great. We believe in gender equality and D and I [diversity and Inclusion], which are very important to us.
Speaker: [Someone from the audience posed a question] You are going to partner together on the sponsor X initiative at the Austin Grand Prix. Can you tell me more about what that means to you?
Brown: Smartsheet did it for the first time in Australia with huge success. Being a force for good is very important to us. STEM is very important to us. So to see what they did in Australia with Deadly Science, a real focus on STEM, and bringing science to the underprivileged and people that don’t necessarily have access to it is a great cause and something that we’re very proud to be associated with. I’m looking forward to our next engagement in Austin.