5b61620eab8f1b20c7d1df158dc822d5770acc93

Zak Brown defends McLaren tenureship

17:53, 03 Jun 2018

byJake Williams-Smith

Zak Brown has defended his success and role within McLaren. Known for his ability to attract sponsorship, so much so that he has earned the nickname "sponsorship guru", Brown insisted that the team have come a long way since McLaren brought him onboard.

Speaking to the official F1 website, Brown insisted that despite a lack of sponsors tripping over themselves to sign with the team, the progress the team have made over the past few seasons had been encouraging.

"There's two ways of looking at it. We've announced more deals than anyone else. Right, so you can go half empty, half full.

"Half empty is that there's still a lot of orange on the car and, you know, rebuilding competitiveness is going to take a few years, rebuilding commercial is going to take a few years. So that's the half empty.

"Half full is that we've done sponsorship deals with Petrobras, Dell and CMBC. HTC is more of a licensing deal because I want to build on McLaren brand licensing. We do a fraction of what we should be doing and I think we can do a lot more things with our brand, so that's part of that building process."