McLaren CEO Zak Brown submitted a formal letter to FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem on April 22nd calling for explicit regulatory language prohibiting shared ownership across multiple Formula 1 teams. The filing arrives six months before the FIA's governance committee meets to finalize the 2026 Concorde Agreement annexes.
Brown's letter does not name specific targets. It requests that the FIA codify language preventing any single investment vehicle, holding company, or beneficial owner from controlling equity stakes in more than one constructor on the grid. Current regulations permit indirect common ownership through tiered corporate structures, a gap Brown argues creates competitive asymmetry and sponsor conflicts. The letter runs four pages and includes three historical precedents from NASCAR, IndyCar, and the Premier League.
The timing reflects heightened sensitivity around franchise valuations and new entrant economics. Andretti Global's stalled expansion bid included reported backing from Guggenheim Partners and a proposed minority stake structure that would have permitted cross-team investment ties. Liberty Media valued the average team slot at $1.2 billion during closed-door negotiations in February, double the $200 million anti-dilution fee codified in the current Concorde. Brown's camp argues that permissive ownership rules erode that premium by allowing investors to hedge team performance risk across multiple entries.
For sponsors, the risk is adjacency. A title sponsor paying $40 million annually expects category exclusivity within the paddock. If a holding company controls two teams, adjacent livery space becomes polluted. McLaren's recent deals with Google Cloud and British American Tobacco included contractual language prohibiting the team from entering shared ownership with any other constructor carrying a rival technology or tobacco substitute brand. Brown's letter asks the FIA to enforce that separation at the regulatory level, removing the burden from individual contracts.
The letter also signals jockeying ahead of the Las Vegas paddock meetings in November, where teams will negotiate the 2026 revenue distribution formula. Brown has privately argued that permitting multi-team ownership would allow investors to optimize payout structures across entries, extracting Column 1 prize money through one team while banking Column 2 commercial rights through another. Mercedes principal Toto Wolff has dismissed this as "arithmetic paranoia," but three other team principals confirmed to sources they share Brown's concern. One described it as "private equity arbitrage masquerading as sports investment."
Family offices circling F1 stakes are now recalibrating. Two prospective bidders for Sauber, both structured as multi-asset sports holding companies, pulled term sheets in March after learning McLaren and Ferrari were preparing a joint position paper on ownership restrictions. One allocator, speaking anonymously, said his firm had modeled a portfolio approach that would own 12-15% stakes in three teams to create downside protection and upside optionality. If Brown's language passes, that structure dies.
The FIA's response timeline is unclear. Ben Sulayem has not commented publicly, but sources close to the governance committee say the letter will be reviewed during the June technical working group session in Paris. If the FIA adopts Brown's proposed language, it would be incorporated into the 2026 Concorde as an appendix, requiring unanimous team approval. That threshold is high. Red Bull and AlphaTauri operate under a shared corporate parent, though their ownership has been grandfathered under existing rules. Any new restriction would likely exempt legacy structures while closing future loopholes.
Brown's move also complicates Liberty Media's own corporate footprint. The company owns the commercial rights to F1 but does not directly control any team. However, Liberty's largest institutional shareholders include Vanguard and BlackRock, both of which hold minority positions in multiple teams through index funds. Brown's letter does not address passive investment, but legal teams at two constructors are now drafting memos on whether index fund stakes could be captured under broader "beneficial ownership" definitions.
Watch for the FIA governance committee's June session in Paris, where Brown's letter will be formally tabled. Also monitor whether Ferrari and Mercedes file supporting letters, a move that would shift the proposal from McLaren advocacy to constructor consensus. Sauber's ownership auction, now paused pending regulatory clarity, will likely resume in Q3 once the FIA signals its position. Finally, expect Andretti Global to file a counter-memo if the FIA entertains Brown's language—Andretti's legal team has already retained a Geneva-based sports regulatory firm.
The real tell will be Las Vegas. If Brown walks into November's paddock meetings with signed support from five teams, the multi-team ownership door closes. If he walks in alone, the letter becomes a negotiating chip, likely traded for concessions on budget cap enforcement or wind tunnel allocation. Either way, the Concorde annex just got longer.
The takeaway
Brown's FIA letter reframes F1 ownership as regulatory risk, not just dealmaking—family offices now price governance exposure into valuations.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori Press · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.