McLaren should announce “one or two” more sponsors, according to Zak Brown
Lacking sponsors after its last three catastrophic seasons with Honda, McLaren is considering announcing one or two more partnerships for the upcoming year.
Since his arrival at McLaren in 2016, replacing Ron Dennis, Zak Brown has been responsible for the commercial aspect of the team based in Woking.
The task for the American is not easy considering McLaren’s poor results in recent years. The team struggles to remain attractive, and sponsors are not lining up to appear on the orange and black cars: Coming out of ninth place in the championship last year, it doesn’t make it easier to find partners, so if we can quickly demonstrate that we are no longer a team stuck in ninth place, it will only get better. Brown admits to Motorsport.com.
However, the team does not want a title sponsor like Red Bull with Aston Martin or Mercedes with Petronas: “We do not want a title sponsor, but let me clarify what that means. We want a main partner, who will be at the level of a title sponsor. I think unlike NASCAR where a team’s title sponsor gets a lot of mentions, I don’t think many people refer to Mercedes as Petronas Mercedes. They call it Mercedes. You never hear commentators say it and it’s never written that way. So, I want to keep the name McLaren and not change every three or five years by being called West McLaren, Vodafone McLaren, or Marlboro McLaren. We are McLaren,” clarifies Brown.
With the recent announcement of a partnership with Dell, McLaren still thinks it has one or two announcements to make from a commercial perspective: We are on track to meet our financial goals in terms of sponsor revenues for this year, and I think this will only strengthen the momentum. Everything is going very well on the commercial front. We announced Dell, so we are now at three announcements. I expect to have one or two more before the start of the season. concludes Brown.
