Our 60th anniversary season provided us with an opportunity not just to look back on where we’ve come from and what we’ve achieved, but what we want our future to look like.   

Sustainability plays a vital role in that vision. We measure our success not only in silverware but also in our impact on creating a brighter, cleaner future.   

Our third annual Sustainability Report maps out our continued efforts in our four key pillars - net zero, circular economy, diversity, equity & inclusion, and health & wellbeing – and the work still to be done.   

The report is packed with vital information, key learnings, and progress updates, but it’s a lot to digest and wrap your head around. So, we’ve pulled out our key takeaways and simplified them for you so that you can better understand them and why they’re important.  

Here’s everything you need to know.   

1. Adopting a data-first approach to establish credibility and transparency  

To set the standard, we need to be credible. That’s why our approach is rooted in data, and why we’ve invested resources into improving how we track, store and measure our sustainability data.  

However, in the same way you couldn’t mark your own coursework at school, we can’t just trust that we’re moving in the right direction without having our work checked.  

To this end, we’ve had our greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint assured by the Carbon Trust for the second year in a row, ensuring we’re equipped with the right insights to make decisions. 

We’ve also become the first motorsport team to have our net-zero targets approved by the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi), the leading recognised standard for net-zero targets, and we ranked ninth in the 2023 Global Sustainability Benchmark in Sports – the highest-performing motorsport team.  

We’re self-aware enough to realise not everything is in our control – and that’s okay. There will be issues and problems we can’t impact and challenges we can’t tackle alone, but if this leads to collaboration and knowledge sharing, that’s a victory. We want to set the standard, but that doesn’t make it a competition - it’s about leading by example.  

In 2023, we were able to influence the F1 regulations by working with the FIA and our competitors to allow for sustainability investments outside of the cost cap. Despite this important step, there remains a lot of work to do to enable our sport to minimise its sustainability impacts. Moving forward, we’ll push even harder to influence regulations and the broader F1 ecosystem.  

2. Controlling the controllable and influencing wider change 

We're not only taking steps to influence issues outside of our control but also working harder than ever to drive what is within our control.  

Overall, we have reduced emissions from our facilities and fuel usage by 25% compared to 2019 through some key initiatives. 

We now use renewable electricity in all our sites, and we’ve installed a HVO biofuel tank at the McLaren Technology Centre, which will reduce emissions of outbound journeys by up to 90% compared to regular road diesel.  

Where possible, we send our freight by sea rather than air, which in 2023 saved 97% of emissions per kilo and has avoided a total of 1,215 tCO2e since 2021. For the Las Vegas Grand Prix, we transported freight from Austin using a combination of rail, trucks using biofuel, and electric trucks.  

Whilst we’ve been working on optimising our own operations, we’ve also grown as a company, joining Formula E and running a third car with Arrow McLaren. Naturally this has increased the amount of activity we do, with more races meaning more people, freight and travel, and additional supply chain spend. This has caused our indirect emissions to rise compared to 2022, and counterbalances the gains that we’ve made in our own operations.  

But it’s not necessarily bad news. Across all of our race series combined, we’ve seen a 16% reduction in emissions per race in 2023 compared to 2022. This is a good sign that we’re finding ways to do more racing for our emissions overall, and highlights some great insights and learnings we can take forward from our different series to apply in our own operations.  

New technologies will play a key role in enabling us to operate at lower carbon intensities, and we are implementing a sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) programme in 2024, which will help to reduce our emissions without compromising our ability to go racing. 

We must also influence the areas where our emissions are out of our direct control. Alongside our internal efforts, we’re continuing to work with the FIA and F1, targeting the 2026 regulation changes as an important opportunity to collaborate and enable further progress.   

3. Building a legacy with the Climate Contribution Programme  

It would be easy to get caught in the cycle of working to become more sustainable without actually considering why you’re doing it and what real-world impact it has.  

Greenwashing has understandably led to scepticism when it comes to climate projects - it’s now more important than ever for companies, like ourselves, to use our platforms for genuine good, to accelerate progress and thoroughly consider the reasons behind a project beyond how it looks.   

Reducing our emissions alone isn’t going to be nearly enough, and that’s why, in 2023, we launched the Climate Contribution Programme, which will allow us to contribute to projects we truly believe in.  

This has seen us partner with three organisations to date. UNDO, a world-leading carbon dioxide removal project. Mombak, an organisation based in Brazil working to reforest the Amazons. And the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, who are focused on scaling solutions that restore and enhance the resilience of coral reefs and ocean habitats. 

By working with external organisations, we can influence positive change on a broader scale and raise awareness of projects outside of motorsport. We can use our platform as a globally recognised sports team with racing and engineering expertise to help remove carbon from the atmosphere and support the restoration of damaged ecosystems.  

We have the power to influence, and we believe we can use this to inspire true change and drive innovation.   

4. A circular economy brings significant innovation opportunities  

Our long-term circular F1 car project has continued since the release of our last Sustainability Report, but we’ve also made inroads in other areas as we work towards a more circular economy, where we minimise the resources we consume and the waste we produce, and maximise their value.   

In 2023, we decreased our hazardous recycled waste by 80% by upgrading our machinery and reducing our use of coolant and cutting oil. We also use soluble oil and water to clean and maintain our machines, and our electronics waste is now refurbished, redeployed, or reused.   

As part of our Circular F1 Car project, we worked to develop our understanding and use of data. This allows us to trace the journey of the materials we use - equivalent to 550 F1 cars in weight across a season - from extraction through their use phase all the way to disposal. Thanks to this, we can identify more opportunities for recycling, waste reduction, and circular economy practices and share our findings with the wider motorsport community.  

Our biggest victory in this area in 2023 was our use of recycled carbon fibre on the MCL60 in the US Grand Prix. Since then, we’ve continued investigating the possibilities and tested its capabilities in other areas, including on show cars and pit crew equipment. This work is being completed alongside our continued use of flax fibre and bio-based vacuum bags.   

5. Making diversity, equity and inclusion central to our identity  

We want to become a leading voice in sport for diversity, equity and inclusion, and a brand for good, inspiring a new and more diverse generation to pursue careers in motorsport, providing them with the opportunities to achieve their dreams.   

By 2030, we want 40% of our team to be made up of people from underrepresented groups, which includes women, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, neurodivergence, the LGBTQ+ community and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds.  

Last year, 45% of new starters, and 29% of our team overall, came from underrepresented backgrounds. Twenty per cent of our team, and 31% of our early careers’ population, are now female.   

We’ve explored various routes as we continue to drive this change, the most notable being our 60 Scholars programme, which provided 60 aspiring STEM leaders with technical masterclasses and an event at the MTC featuring talks from current female leaders.   

Alongside this, we launched the award-winning Returnship programme, aimed at reigniting the careers of women wanting to return to roles in STEM, with 60% now in permanent positions. Our work also includes partnerships with F1, FIA Girls on Track UK, Creative Access, The Smallpeice Trust and the Women’s Engineering Society, among others.   

We now have 70 STEM Ambassadors - a 71% increase from 2022 - from a variety of backgrounds, working in various technical and non-technical roles, who reached 4,800 students in the 2022/23 academic year.  

You can read our 2023 Sustainability Report in full here.