Zak Brown says the early termination of McLaren's deal with Daniel Ricciardo has taught him to include more performance clauses in the team's contracts with its drivers in the future.
McLaren and Ricciardo will part ways at the end of the current season, a year before the term – the end of 2023 - contractually agreed between the two parties.
McLaren's hiring of Ricciardo in the spring of 2020 - even before the Covid-disrupted season got underway – offered the promise of a fruitful partnership between the Woking-based outfit and the eight-time Grand Prix driver.
But the partnership which cost McLaren an estimated $20 million a year, while it yielded a remarkable win at Monza last season, failed to live up to either team or driver's expectations. It was also a failing that Brown never anticipated.
"He came in having won seven grands prix and was the hottest driver that you could get and I think we maybe assumed, and I think kind of rightfully so, that he was going to pick up where he left off," said Brown of Ricciardo, speaking on The High Performance podcast.
"My one learning there would really just be contractual. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done differently for him as a driver.
"I’m sitting here right now thinking ‘I don’t think we could have done something differently to make him more competitive. We tried all that.
"To end the relationship early, we’ve had to write a big cheque, which is fine because that’s the deal we cut.
"I think what I’ll do differently next time is maybe have some more performance protections for us and not just assume that a great driver’s going to always be great.
"That’s the one learning, it’s more of a contractual one. But it’s a big one."
Both McLaren and Ricciardo have been unable to pinpoint the root cause of the Aussie's significant underperformance relative to teammate Lando Norris last season and even more so this year.
But Brown insists his team did everything it could to make things work with its driver.
"We’ve tried changing cars and offering to change people and it’s been over two seasons, two different cars so we thought ‘year one maybe he just didn’t gel with the car, so let’s see what will happen in year two, it’s a totally different car’," Brown explained.
"But we got to the point where our only strategy was hope, and I think hope’s not a great strategy.
"It’s a great mystery. We saw in Monza, it’s in there. There’s no doubt; the guy did not win eight grands prix by accident. We just weren’t able to unlock it together.
"And Lando’s driving great and getting the car to perform, so I don’t think there’s anything sitting here that we would’ve done differently or could’ve seen or should’ve known.
"I think the only thing is just from a business standpoint we could’ve contractually kind of [asked] ‘what if it doesn’t work?’ and I think we went into it so excited and not really thinking of a downside scenario.
"But you don’t also know if you would’ve got those contractual protections; sitting here now I can say, ‘well, I wish I would’ve had this in the contract’, but who knows whether he would’ve agreed to it.
"But he also might have because he would’ve been going, ‘well, that’s never going to happen, I’ll agree to things in contracts’."
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