McLaren CEO Zak Brown has sent a formal letter to FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem requesting rule changes that would prohibit any single entity from holding stakes in multiple Formula 1 teams. The timing is careful: eleven teams currently sit on the grid, Andretti Global remains in negotiation with General Motors for an eleventh or twelfth slot, and sovereign wealth funds have quietly approached at least three teams in the past eighteen months about minority positions that could scale.
Brown's letter does not name Red Bull directly, but the target is understood. Red Bull Racing and Red Bull's second team—currently branded RB and formerly Toro Rosso, AlphaTauri—operate under common ownership by Red Bull GmbH. The structure has existed since 2005, predating the current Concorde Agreement, and is grandfathered under existing regulations. Brown's argument is prophylactic: if the FIA allows the precedent to stand, nothing prevents a consortium or OEM from acquiring two teams outright and engineering performance allocation across both entries. The cost cap, set at $135 million for 2025, makes a second team cheaper to run than a factory development program, and the constructor points delivered by a coordinated two-car operation could justify the expense.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has not commented. His counterpart at RB, Laurent Mekies, told reporters in Shanghai that the sport "could support tougher independence regulations," a phrase calibrated to sound cooperative without committing to divestiture. Mekies ran Ferrari's sporting department before joining RB in 2023 and understands how quickly regulatory proposals become binding precedent. His tone suggests Red Bull has already modeled separation scenarios: sell RB to a third party, convert it to a customer team under tighter technical restrictions, or negotiate a carve-out that locks the current structure but bans future duplicates.
The $200 million dilution fee introduced in the 2021 Concorde Agreement was designed to make new entries expensive, not impossible. Andretti's bid, backed by General Motors and Cadillac branding, has FIA approval but lacks Formula One Management sign-off. The delay has nothing to do with competitiveness and everything to do with revenue distribution: adding a twelfth team reduces each existing constructor's share of the $1.2 billion annual prize pool by roughly $15 million per season, assuming equal finishing positions. Brown's letter creates a different negotiating constraint. If common ownership becomes explicitly banned, any incoming team must prove complete structural independence—no shared investors, no cross-team technical personnel, no coordinated strategy calls.
The leverage point is Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which holds a $500 million stake in Liberty Media through its acquisition of MotoGP parent company Dorna. PIF has approached Aston Martin, Williams, and Alpine about minority investments in the past fourteen months. None closed. If PIF were to acquire 30 percent stakes in two teams simultaneously, the current rules would allow it; Brown's proposed amendment would not. The FIA's next regulatory session is scheduled for late June in Paris, and team principals expect a draft proposal before the summer break.
Disney's announcement this week of an expanded partnership covering F1 Academy—previously unreported in team-level intelligence briefings—adds context. Disney Consumer Products now holds rights across the main championship and the all-female feeder series, which runs seven rounds in 2025 and aims for ten by 2027. The deal structure suggests Disney sees F1 as a long-term IP play, not a speculative bet, and wants clean governance before committing deeper capital. Tasia Filippatos, Disney's licensing president, told trade press the Academy deal "leading up to the Chinese Grand Prix" was finalized in March, implying Disney was waiting for grid stability signals before signing.
Brown's letter will circulate among team principals before the Monaco Grand Prix in late May. Horner and Mekies will attend that meeting. Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur, whose team holds the longest independent operating history on the grid, has privately supported ownership restrictions but has not commented publicly. Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, who holds a 33 percent personal stake in Mercedes-AMG Petronas, is expected to back any rule that protects constructor autonomy, particularly if it limits OEM consolidation.
The outcome determines whether Formula 1 remains a league of ten or twelve genuinely independent operators or becomes a league where two teams answer to the same boardroom. The FIA's Paris session in June will clarify which world the sport chooses. Red Bull's response—whether it divests RB, negotiates a grandfather clause, or fights the rule outright—will define the next Concorde negotiation cycle, which begins informal discussions in 2027.
The takeaway
Brown's letter forces the FIA to decide whether Formula 1's grid expands as independent operators or OEM-controlled pairs.
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