McLaren CEO Zak Brown On F1 And Business Strategy At 200 Miles Per Hour

Bold Names

The Wall Street Journal

Technology

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What business lessons are forged at 200 miles per hour? On this week’s Bold Names, McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown joins Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins to talk about his new book, “Seven Tenths of a Second.” A racecar driver turned executive, Brown leads a global racing organization worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We talk about the pressure and focus required to run a winning Formula One team, and what racing has taught Brown about leading a competitive business. To watch the video version of this episode, visit our WSJ Podcasts YouTube channel or the video page of WSJ.com. Check Out Past Episodes: How Uber Plans to Win the Self-Driving Car Race 70,000 Bets a Minute: How FanDuel’s Parent Is Winning at Sports Gambling How Tubi Is Coming for Netflix and YouTube in the New Streaming Wars Space Trucks: One Startup’s Plan to Get the U.S. Back on the Moon Let us know what you think of the show. Email us at [email protected]. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Read Christopher Mims’s Keywords column.Read Tim Higgins’s column. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Find your perfect home on Realture.com.
0:02.5	The perfect home in the perfect neighborhood, in the perfect school district perfectly close to work, but perfectly far enough away to escape to.
0:09.8	With over half a million new listings every month on Realture.com, you won't miss out on your perfectly perfect home.
0:16.0	Trust the number one site Real Estate Professionals Trust.
0:18.9	Search now on Realture.com.
0:20.5	Based on average new for sale and
0:22.3	rental listings July 24th through June 2025. Number one trusted based on August 2025 proprietary survey
0:28.3	among real estate professionals. I'm curious from your experience as a race car driver, how that
0:33.5	informs and how that helps you as a CEO. Well, I think there's a lot of similarities.
0:39.2	As a racing driver in no particular order, you need to be a great communicator,
0:45.5	need to be a great listener.
0:47.3	You need to have a huge amount of trust in your team.
0:50.2	Racing's life or death when you're sitting in the racing car. And maybe business isn't quite life or death.
0:55.2	But, you know, it feels like it.
0:57.8	You have to have the best technology, the best equipment around you.
1:03.6	When you kind of list all the things that you have to do to be a great racing driver,
1:07.5	I think those are all the things you need to do to be a great CEO.
1:14.8	This week on bold names, we have none other than Zach Brown, CEO of McLaren Racing,
1:21.9	which is having one of its winningest seasons in history, and he has a new book out where he
1:26.9	dishes.
1:32.6	Yeah, that's right. It's called seven-tenths of a second, and it is packed full of lessons from the racetrack and from his experience running a company generating more than $700 million
1:37.7	in sales each year. From the Wall Street Journal, I'm Tim Higgins.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 2 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Wall Street Journal, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Wall Street Journal and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.