Zak Brown had originally joined McLaren back in 2016 and became CEO in 2018. In about a year’s time, he appointed Seidl as the team principal. The pair then divided the responsibilities between themselves to play to their strengths.
Several F1 teams have the responsibilities spread through to a number of senior officials, rather than one overall chief. McLaren believes that this process works.
But ,Brown also says that one cannot underestimate how good Seidl is. The German had helped guide McLaren to gain the third spot at last year’s constructors’ championship.
“I think the structure we have at McLaren works extremely well for us,” said Brown.
“Andreas and I have an outstanding working relationship. I think it’s extremely clear what my role is, what Andreas’ role is, and it is very clear to the team too.
“My job as CEO of McLaren Racing is to field the most competitive, financially sustainable racing team, not only in F1, but anything else that we may venture into like IndyCar etc.
“I think my job is to get the best people in the business, and I think we’ve done that. I think Andreas is the best team principal in the pit-lane, in my humble opinion.
“I don’t know how to run an F1 team, it’s not my competency. That’s what Andreas is awesome at. So my job is to give him the freedom, the support, and the financial resources to allow him to do his thing.
“Andreas has full authority to run the F1 team as he sees fit.”
Seidl believes that clarity and transparency between him and Brown over their responsibilities has given a boost to McLaren’s performance allowing to make good progress.
“I think it’s very important, and crucial to the success of an F1 team, to have clear responsibilities, and also clear accountabilities,” he explained.
“I’m very happy with how we have defined responsibilities within McLaren Racing, and I’m very happy with Zak being the CEO of McLaren Racing, and being my boss also.
“He gives me in the end, the freedom and the support I need in order to bring my style and my experience and my way of how I want to set up an F1 team and lead it. And that’s simply great.
“We are aligned on a lot of topics in terms of how we see the steps we have to make within the team.
“I think we can also see in the last three years that we already could make some good steps.
“But we also know that we are far away from where we want to be in a few years’ time.”
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