McLaren CEO Zak Brown has issued a rallying cry at the team’s Woking HQ, insisting the world champions will be winning races “sooner rather than later.”
After winning the constructors’ championship in the last two years and the drivers’ title with Lando Norris last season, McLaren have endured a difficult start to F1’s new era this year.
Oscar Piastri has failed to start either race in Australia and China while Norris also failed to start the grand prix in Shanghai. Norris also finished a distant fifth at the Melbourne season-opener.
The reigning world champion already trails championship leader George Russell by 36 points but Brown implored to team personnel back at base that positive results are on the horizon, ahead of the next round in Japan on 29 March.
“We got to get ready for Japan,” he said, in a video published on McLaren’s X page.
“We’ve got the two best drivers in the world, we’ve got the best racing team in the world, the best culture in a racing team
“So let’s just get on with it, go to Japan, race these cars. We’ll all continue to do what we do and I’m looking forward to when we win races.
“I guarantee you when we win our next race, which will be sooner rather than later, we’re not going to be thinking about speed traces or batteries or anything. We’re going to be winning grand prix races.”
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella acknowledged after the race in Shanghai – which saw McLaren’s first double DNS in over two decades – that the electrical failures on both cars were out of the team’s control.
Regrouping and moving forward 🤝#McLarenF1 pic.twitter.com/eOBiS6lH9g
— McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team (@McLarenF1) March 19, 2026
"It is a tough moment, that's for sure,” he said. “If we consider that Oscar has not been able to start a race in the start of the 2026 campaign, that's pretty difficult for Oscar to process.
"But, at the same time, and this was testified and witnessed in the conversation with Lando and Oscar after the race, both remain quite positive.
"I think what we have gone through at McLaren in terms of the journey from 2023 has been such a good journey of developing a culture, a mindset, what we call internally a winner's mindset. Just a positive attitude, which focuses us on what we can control.
"In this case [in China], there wasn't much we could have controlled, so we just take any possible learning and we go again."
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