McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown has submitted a formal letter to FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem calling for explicit rule changes that would prohibit any future common ownership structures across multiple Formula 1 teams. The letter, filed directly with the sport's governing body, represents the first on-the-record push by a team principal to close what Brown characterizes as a competitive integrity gap in F1's current governance framework.
The timing is structural, not reactive. F1 team valuations crossed $2 billion per grid slot in recent transactions—Williams sold for approximately $200 million in 2020, Aston Martin's parent company now trades with an implied team value north of $2.5 billion, and Alpine remains on the block with Renault's board reviewing strategic options. As the next wave of ownership turnover accelerates, Brown is positioning McLaren as the defender of competitive separation before a well-capitalized buyer attempts to assemble a two-team portfolio under a single corporate umbrella.
Brown's concern centers on the regulatory ambiguity. Current FIA statutes do not explicitly prohibit a single parent entity from owning multiple constructor licenses, provided the teams operate with separate technical and commercial leadership. The loophole exists because F1's ownership rules were written in an era when team valuations hovered below $500 million and the commercial appeal of a multi-team play did not justify the governance complexity. That calculation has reversed. A Saudi or Qatari sovereign fund, a private equity platform with automotive LPs, or a consortium led by a tech billionaire could now credibly bid for two teams simultaneously, leveraging shared infrastructure, wind tunnel time arbitrage, and coordinated driver development to create a 20-car grid where two teams functionally operate as one 40-car entity split across two garages.
The competitive imbalance Brown flags is not theoretical. Toro Rosso and Red Bull Racing operated under Red Bull GmbH ownership for two decades, with Toro Rosso serving as a driver academy and aerodynamic test bed that fed talent and data upstream. The FIA permitted the arrangement because Red Bull maintained separate technical directors, distinct chassis homologations, and no documented evidence of IP transfer. But the driver pipeline was indisputable—Sebastian Vettel, Daniel Ricciardo, Max Verstappen, Carlos Sainz, and Pierre Gasly all moved through the Toro Rosso system before securing Red Bull seats or being sold at premium valuations to rival teams. Red Bull's dual-team structure effectively gave them four cars of race data every Sunday while competitors ran two. Brown's letter argues that future iterations of this model—bankrolled by entities with deeper capital and fewer operational constraints—would render the constructor's championship meaningless.
What makes Brown's move noteworthy is the timing relative to F1's governance calendar. The Concorde Agreement, which governs commercial and sporting regulations through 2025, is up for renegotiation in 18 months. Any ownership rule changes Brown is advocating would need to be codified in the next Concorde iteration or risk being tabled until the early 2030s. Brown is opening the negotiation now, before a forcing event—a surprise dual-team acquisition by a sovereign fund, for example—puts the FIA and Liberty Media in a defensive posture. The letter is a preemptive strike disguised as a governance clarification request.
The second-order effects touch sponsorship and broadcast valuation. Brands pay F1 teams on the assumption that ten independent constructors are competing for podium finishes, creating maximum on-track volatility and storyline diversity. If two teams share a parent company, even with separate technical operations, sponsors begin to question whether they are buying exposure on a genuinely independent competitor or a subsidiary asset whose success is managed to benefit the parent portfolio. Broadcast rights holders, who paid Liberty Media $3.2 billion in aggregate annual fees for the current cycle, price F1 content based on competitive unpredictability. A grid where two teams coordinate—even indirectly through shared factory infrastructure or aligned driver contracts—degrades that product and gives broadcasters leverage in the next rights negotiation.
Brown's letter does not name specific potential buyers, but the market has narrowed the list. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has explored F1 team acquisitions twice in the past 24 months, according to paddock sources with direct knowledge of the approaches. Qatar Sports Investments, which owns Paris Saint-Germain, has held exploratory talks with Alpine's advisors. A U.S.-based private equity fund with automotive sector LPs circled Sauber before the Audi deal closed. None of these parties have publicly disclosed multi-team ambitions, but the capital profile and strategic rationale are identical: own two teams, split fixed costs across both operations, run a 40-car data set, and extract value from driver contract arbitrage.
The FIA's response will clarify whether F1's governance structure is designed to protect competitive integrity or accommodate financial engineering. Brown has forced the question into the open, and the grid's other independent teams—Ferrari, Mercedes, Aston Martin, Williams—will now need to declare whether they view shared ownership as an existential threat or an acceptable evolution. The letter itself is short, likely fewer than 1,500 words, but the implications run through every franchise valuation model currently circulating among family offices and sovereign funds.
The next checkpoint arrives in June 2025, when the FIA's World Motor Sport Council convenes in Paris for its mid-season governance review. Brown's letter will be on the agenda. If the FIA declines to act, McLaren will have its answer, and the race to acquire a second team will begin in earnest.
The takeaway
Brown's FIA filing opens the Concorde renegotiation early, forcing governance clarity before a sovereign fund or PE platform attempts a two-team play that splits the grid's economics.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.