Zak Brown’s Past “Dodgy Decisions” Called Out as McLaren’s Key Problem With Deteriorating F1 Performance: “He Got Rid Of..”

Back-to-back horrendous starts to the season. Untimely and highly controversial ousting of Daniel Ricciardo, the only race winner for the team in the last decade. These are some of the decisions that McLaren’s CEO Zak Brown will walk around with on his conscience for the rest of his life. However, according to British former team boss Peter Windsor, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Windsor believes that Brown’s decisions ever since his McLaren appointment have led to the team’s current state.

In his YouTube video as quoted by Motorsport Week, Windsor has blamed Brown for many decisions in addition to the aforementioned. Starting off small, Windsor did not like Brown’s decision to change the MP nomenclature and to start the MCL series. He then talked about one of Brown’s most shortsighted decisions.

“Then, when he went in, he got rid of [the] Honda engines pretty quickly, which were free to McLaren, and replaced them with Mercedes, which he had to buy, and I think the number is $28 million,” disclosed Windsor. “So he got rid of Honda. And Honda went on to win World Championships and he’s a Mercedes customer team. You have to say, looking back now, it was a pretty dodgy decision.”

Talking about Ricciardo’s ugly dismissal, which Brown feels he was wrongly accused of, Windsor had the same opinion as before. “I think hiring Daniel was a good thing and he had a really harmonious team there. Now he’s hired Oscar to replace Daniel, which I think is a dubious call again,” he concluded.

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Accumulation of these decisions, believes Windsor, is the reason behind McLaren’s current state. However, the American is still at the helm with no signs of change in management. However, an Aston Martin insider believes the team’s downfall is not to be blamed on the people.

Aston Martin’s ambassador believes the downfall of McLaren can be blamed on the outdated and secondhand tools more than the people

It is a good time to be part of the Aston Martin team as they are in seventh heaven after the opening three races. However, this isn’t a stroke of luck, hours of hard work were put into manufacturing the AMR23. The state-of-the-art facilities and incredible team of engineers always help. This is exactly what Spanish former driver and Aston Martin’s ambassador Pedro de la Rosa believes, McLaren is currently missing.

Not the personnel, but the facilities at their disposal, which he revealed in his conversation with the F1 Nation podcast.

He said, “Interesting thing about McLaren is that I don’t think they have a problem with the people. The biggest issue I would say is the tools, the wind tunnel. You know they have been working on the wind tunnel of Toyota, for now, more than 10 years. This is something that if you are fighting against the top guys, they have their own tools, you need to have your own tools. Otherwise, you cannot keep the development pace”

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We are not sure if Brown will agree with De la Rosa’s hard-to-swallow comments. However, no one can deny the Woking outfit is at a poor stage currently and they need to make drastic changes to see some positive results.