McLaren boss Zak Brown slams bloated IndyCar fields and ‘poorly-executed’ races

Packed IndyCar starting grids has Zak Brown calling for better race quality, not quantity.

McLaren CEO Zak Brown has laid out his biggest concerns with the IndyCar series — and he touched on everything from its bloated fields to poor officiating.

The longtime “quantity vs. quality” debate has come into play. IndyCar often praises its full fields and high overtake counts as being indicative of a healthy series — but Zak Brown has other ideas.

Zak Brown: “Poorly-executed” races and quantity over quality

In an interview with Motorsport.com ahead of last Sunday’s Toronto street race, Brown didn’t hold back in offering his perspective of the IndyCar series — starting with the fact that the sport needs an officiating overhaul.

“If you look at Detroit, Laguna, these were poorly-executed races,” Brown said. “I know it was pre-hybrid, but those were bad races because where we were restarting, restart procedures, things of that nature.”

Though he did praise race steward Max Papis and IndyCar president of competition and operations Jay Frye for “listening well,” he believes that the primary problem stems from the fact that IndyCar has failed to levy strong enough penalties.

“If you give someone a free shot at someone and their penalty is to just give the position back, it’s not really a penalty,” Brown said. “All that encourages is overdriving and irresponsible overtaking at times. ‘Hey if I get it wrong, I just have to give it back.’”

In order to prevent “banzai” style racing, Brown suggested adopting a strategy utilized in Formula 1, where penalized drivers will have five to 10 seconds added to their next pit stop. He argues that it would create a better quality of racing.

And speaking of quality, Brown had plenty to say about the large fields in the IndyCar series.

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“We need to shift into quality versus quantity,” he told Motorsport.com. “We tend to [prioritize] car count quantity. I think our car count is too high.

“I don’t think we need 27 cars. I think 20, 22, 24, great cars [is enough]. I think we’re focusing too much on the quantity, and we need to find a better blend of quality versus quantity.”

There’s a lot to unpack in Brown’s statements.

First and foremost, it’s clear that Brown is approaching IndyCar through a very Formula 1-focused mindset, and the American open-wheel series has often worked hard to differentiate itself from its international counterparts.

In fact, F1 drivers like Kevin Magnussen have praised IndyCar for its “very simple” regulations when compared to F1.

However, Brown’s F1 mindset may also be clouding over recent history.

While American open-wheel has existed for over a century, its history is packed with strife, drama, and near failure. American open-wheel has fractured multiple times, creating series and sanctioning bodies variously known as Champ Car, the Indy Racing League, CART, and USAC.

The current iteration of IndyCar was created when CART and Champ Car reunited in 2008, largely to avoid bankruptcy.

Large car counts in a race, then, have been one of the easiest factors by which IndyCar has been able to measure its growth. Further, a high number of overtakes in a race were also seen to indicate a competitive field.

Brown’s concerns are certainly understandable; IndyCar is approaching two decades since reunification, and it has greatly evolved in that time period. If anything, Brown has perfectly illustrated just how far the series has come since 2008.

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