Zak Brown has been fighting the same fight for years. The McLaren CEO wants eleven independent teams on the Formula 1 grid, full stop, and he has never been subtle about the fact that the Red Bull and Racing Bulls arrangement offends him on principle. Now Mercedes is circling a minority stake in Alpine, and Brown has picked his moment to make the point again.

Mercedes, which already supplies Alpine with engines and gearboxes for the 2026 season, is in discussions to buy the 24 percent of the Enstone team currently owned by American investment consortium Otro Capital.

Otro bought in for around €200 million in 2023. Three years on, the stake is reportedly worth north of €500 million, putting Alpine’s total valuation somewhere between €1.7 and €2 billion. Christian Horner and a separate investor group are believed to be circling the same shares.

Brown hasn’t hidden his thoughts on this. Any move that deepens the technical or ownership link between two teams is bad for the sport.

Why Brown Says It’s a Competitive Problem, Not a Paranoid One

Brown’s case rests on examples.

He points to Daniel Ricciardo’s fastest lap in Singapore in 2024, when the Australian, then driving for Racing Bulls, took the bonus point off McLaren and handed it to Max Verstappen in the middle of a title fight. He cites the Ferrari and Haas staff swaps, where engineers move between the two outfits without the financial friction an independent team would face to poach the same people. He brings up the 2020 “pink Mercedes” controversy, when Racing Point arrived at Silverstone with a car that looked suspiciously like the previous year’s championship-winning Mercedes.

And he reaches for a football analogy that cuts closer than the F1 version: imagine two Premier League clubs owned by the same group, playing each other on the final day, with one facing relegation if it loses. Everyone watching knows how that match ends.

“We’ve seen employees move overnight between affiliated teams, creating unfair advantages,” Brown argues, per reporting this week. “We often have to wait a long time or make financial deals, which in turn affects our budget. That is not fair and gives others a financial and sporting advantage.”

The Mercedes Factor Makes This Awkward

Brown has to navigate this claim carefully, however. Mercedes is McLaren’s engine supplier. Has been for years. Any criticism of the Silver Arrows’ investment plans is, by definition, criticism of a company Brown depends on to bolt power units into his cars every other weekend.

Brown insists the objection is structural, not personal.

“It applies to anybody and everybody. A/B teams and co-ownership are detrimental to the sport.” He says the same standard applies to Horner’s Alpine bid as to Toto Wolff’s. He has also, perhaps pointedly, welcomed the idea of Horner returning to the paddock and praised current Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies for running a cleaner separation between Red Bull and Racing Bulls than previous regimes managed.

This comes as Concorde Agreement discussions are reportedly touching on whether Red Bull should eventually divest one of its teams over time, and the FIA is expected to tighten its cross-ownership rules. Brown’s public lobbying lands in the middle of that negotiation window, and McLaren’s CEO is betting that fan appetite for eleven genuine competitors will carry the argument in his favor.

Brown also confirmed the pickup of Gianpiero Lambiase, Max Verstappen’s long-time Red Bull race engineer, who joins McLaren after 2027.

“With his experience and age, Lambiase can stay with McLaren for a very long time and continue to grow,” Brown said. Stability, in other words, is what McLaren is building toward. Competitive-balance stability on the grid, as Brown tells it, requires the rest of F1 to stop building in the opposite direction.

Whether the FIA agrees in time to stop the Mercedes-Alpine deal is the question the next twelve months will answer.