Following the release of our third annual Sustainability Report, CEO Zak Brown has called on the racing world to join forces and collaborate on creating a more sustainable, brighter future.  

Reflecting on the report, our CEO has penned a column explaining the steps we’ve taken over the past 12 months and what it means for our long-term ambitions. He also reiterated the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion, and detailed why he believes that collaboration across our racing series with partners, stakeholders and our competitors will be critical to achieving our goals.  

Find out what he had to say in his column below... 

Taking time to reflect on our progress  

In our 60th anniversary year, we gave a lot of thought to what we want our team’s legacy to be. We are clear that as a sport, we have a fair way to go to minimise our impact on the planet. And of course, we are under no illusion that the challenges we collectively face are incredibly complex and that our path towards a more sustainable future will face many bumps in the road. But we should also take a moment to reflect on some very significant inroads we made last year – there is much to be proud of.  

We pioneered the use of recycled carbon fibre on our F1 cars at last year’s US GP – an important step towards our ambition of developing a circular F1 car. McLaren was the first team to introduce carbon fibre in 1981, so it was fantastic to introduce a more sustainable alternative.  

What’s just as exciting is the potential to use recycled carbon fibre across other industries well beyond motorsport.  

Prioritising diversity, equity and inclusion 

We continue to focus on opening pathways for people from underrepresented backgrounds to enter our sport and STEM careers more broadly. We are proud to race in Extreme E, a series with gender parity, and to support the all-female F1 Academy series, with driver Bianca Bustamante as the first woman to join the McLaren Driver Development Programme last year and representing McLaren Racing throughout the 2024 F1 Academy season.  

Last year, we launched the 60 Scholars programme together with our partners Google, Cisco and Cadence to support the next generation of female leaders in STEM through an accelerated course of learning and mentorship. Of the 2023 cohort, 35% were from ethnic minorities and I am thrilled that six scholars have since taken roles with McLaren Racing and Extreme E.  

Expanding the areas of sustainability that we can impact and influence  

We launched our Climate Contribution Programme, a collaboration with three organisations: UNDO and Mombak that specialise in high quality carbon removals, and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, dedicated to supporting the restoration of a damaged ecosystem.  

Through McLaren Accelerator—our team of in-house experts who use our know-how, expertise, and high-performance culture to help our partners overcome challenges in their respective sectors—we are using McLaren’s innovation and insights to help accelerate coral reef restoration at scale and work alongside the team of marine scientists to optimise their setup.  

This model is a great example of a more meaningful and impactful approach to collaboration in the sustainability space. We can help tackle some of the world’s biggest environmental challenges by leveraging McLaren’s and our partners’ expertise to directly flow into high-quality sustainability-focused projects. We also see this as a fantastic opportunity to help raise awareness of these important initiatives among our global fan base.  

Making collaboration central to our long-term plans   

As a sport, we must continue to raise sustainability standards and aim to lead by example. But only strong collaboration with partners, other teams, rights holders and regulators can help us have a meaningful collective impact.  

We’d like to see further progress around the 2026 regulations, an opportunity to firmly bake key sustainability requirements into this framework. We are encouraged by the steps the FIA has taken to date, but there is so much more to be done to decouple the environmental impact of our sport from our commercial growth, and to better support the wellbeing of our people in such a demanding, high-performance sport.  

I often say that sustainability is a journey where we will never reach our destination. As a team, we will continue to push, innovate and collaborate to keep up the momentum and build on the success we’ve had to date. At McLaren Racing, we want to play a meaningful part in finding solutions to some of the challenges our planet is facing – and I’m excited about the possibilities and what the next year has in store.  

Forever forward,  
Zak Brown 

You can read our third Sustainability Report in full here.