McLaren boss Zak Brown has said it is unfair to frame Andretti’s failed bid to join Formula One as proof of an anti-American bias in the sport.
Andretti’s application to enter F1 in 2025 or 2026 was rejected by F1 owners Liberty Media, although the door is open for entry in 2028 if it can secure a commitment from General Motors to build its own engine as part of the project.
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At the start of May, racing legend Mario Andretti, father of team boss Michael, went to Washington in support of a letter to F1 written by a group of representatives from Congress.
A bipartisan group of senators have also written to President Biden’s administration calling for an investigation into whether the decision violated antitrust laws. The senators insinuated “foreign automakers” had aligned together to block the bid.
Brown, the only American F1 team boss, disagreed with the suggestion, pointing out how much the sport has changed since Liberty Media’s takeover in 2017.
“I don’t think there’s an anti-American culture within Formula One at all,” Brown told ESPN.
“When you look at the sport you’ve got European manufacturers, you’ve got Ford from North America, you’ve got Honda from Japan. So the sport is extremely global. I’ve never come across any favouritism or negativity towards any region of the world. The whole world participates in Formula One.
“As it relates to America, Liberty’s American, we’ve gone from one race to three races in America, including the single largest investment Formula One has ever made in anything, in Vegas. You have Ford who have recently entered the sport. You have myself running one of the top teams in the sport. You have Netflix, which has been fantastic for the sport globally but specifically North America. And now on the tail end of that we have Brad Pitt who’s going to do a global movie, that is U.S.-based, which will do wonders for the sport.
“I think what Liberty has done for the sport is amazing. If you look at what we needed to do for the sport, we needed cost controls, we have it now and it’s producing the closest grid in the history of Formula One.”
Brown also pointed out McLaren’s raft of new U.S. sponsors such as Dell, Cisco and Coca-Cola, and the American consortiums which have recently invested in Alpine and Aston Martin.
He added: “I’m sympathetic to the frustrations [of Andretti]… but the ‘Formula One isn’t welcoming America’… I think it’s unfortunate that the root of the issue [has moved away from being] between Andretti and Formula One and adding value.”
That was a key part of F1’s decision to deny Andretti’s entry.
In F1’s decision, it said: “Our assessment process has established that the presence of an 11th team would not, on its own, provide value to the Championship.”
It was a controversial statement, but Brown said it speaks to how much F1 has changed under Liberty.
“Historically in Formula One it was enter, show up and the sport didn’t care if you didn’t make it half way through a year. So in the past you had Lola start a team and they go bust after three races. I think Liberty is now in a position where you’ve got 10 very healthy teams so they’re doing to hold an 11th and 12th team to the extreme highest criteria and extreme due diligence, which I think is right.
“Previously there was always a team going bust next year. Now you have over half the grid is profitable. And these franchise values, I think Williams was bought for $150 million, I don’t think five years later you can buy that team for less than a billion and a half. So the value creation has been immense.”
There has been a big shift in opinion from one of Andretti’s major allies, FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem, who started the process to find an 11th team in January 2023. At the Monaco Grand Prix he suggested Andretti explore buying an existing team instead of pushing on as a potential 11th.
Brown agreed with Ben Sulayem, saying: “That would certainly be the easiest thing to do. There doesn’t seem to be anyone who wants to sell at the moment, that being said, but that just means the offer needs to be bigger. There’s always a number but no-one has a ‘for sale’ sign from what I can see on their front door.”
Liberty Media and F1 teams also appear to be in agreement on this. In Monaco, Red Bull boss Christian Horner echoed Ben Sulayem’s position by saying Andretti should look to copy the example of Audi and buy an existing outfit — something Andretti tried and failed to do with Sauber in 2021.
Asked whether the major players all being on the same page proved Andretti’s point about a concerted effort to block its bid, Brown said: “There’s a lot of similar views because it’s a topic that garners a lot of similar views. I don’t think it’s a function of teaming up. I can tell you, I haven’t spoken to Christian Horner in a while, as you can imagine!
“Throw a topic out there for the NFL or the MLB or the NBA and if it’s a view that all the people in the sport have a similar view on, that’s not because they’ve collaborated. I think it’s just a common view.
“You could throw out ‘should we have 26 races,’ and I think you’d hear 10 teams saying ‘we don’t think we should have 26 races.’ That wouldn’t be us collaborating, it would just be all the teams’ views. So I don’t think that the majority of the teams having some commonality in their views is anything other than that being their view and everyone is similar landing in a similar place.”