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Brown targeting McLaren title sponsor for 2018

New McLaren executive director Zak Brown says he would like to bring in a new title sponsor to the team by 2018, but feels next season will come too soon.

Brown was named as executive director last week, with the former CSM Sport & Entertainment chief executive set to work alongside Jonathan Neale when he officially starts at McLaren next month. The team has been without a title sponsor since its deal with Vodafone ended after the 2013 season and Brown highlights securing a new partner as one of his priorities.

"Clearly a title partner is something that on a commercial basis, and as something that I'm most linked to, is something that is going to be critically important," Brown told reporters at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. "But I would start taking a look at 2018. 2017 is already kind of here and I don't have any tricks up my sleeve on that one yet."

However, Brown was keen to stress sponsorship was not his main priority, saying there were three areas of focus to which he gives equal weighting.

"I don't think there's a number one, I think there's three legs to the stool as I put it and I think we need all three to be successful to have a bit of an ecosystem. First is the fans, I think we as McLaren - and Formula One as a whole - can improve our engagement with our consumers.

"The more fans we get the more sponsors we get and we want the fans buying our sponsors products and services. Then the more sponsors we get the more money we can get to put into our race team to go faster, and the faster we go the more fans we're going to get because they like the teams that run at the front.

"So I think all three of those are critically important and we need to get all three right. Just getting one right won't make the whole system work."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.