A significant change in ownership of McLaren’s racing division, and therefore its Formula 1 team, has completed the recovery from its quietly dire position just a little under five years ago.
McLaren Group Limited - comprising Bahrain's sovereign investment fund Mumtalakat, McLaren majority shareholder, and CYVN Holdings in Abu Dhabi - has purchased all the shares of McLaren Racing’s minority shareholders, primarily MSP Sports Capital.
MSP is the investment consortium that helped save McLaren in December 2020, when it agreed to buy an initial 15% stake for £185million.
As that would rise to a maximum of 33% by the end of 2022, it constituted a valuation of ‘only’ £560million. Now, the purchase of its shares is widely reported to have valued McLaren Racing at more than £3billion.
Aside from costing McLaren’s majority shareholder a large sum to reclaim ownership, and rewarding MSP handsomely for its investment, the Mumtalakat/CYVN combination is a simpler structure that is aligned with its parent company.
It also shows how McLaren’s on-track performance is not the only thing that is unrecognisable from a few years ago.
The significance of MSP’s original investment has never been understated by McLaren. Zak Brown, McLaren Racing CEO, told The Race one year on from the original sale that “without [it], we might not be sitting here.”
The MSP investment was the culmination of vital work in 2020 to save McLaren from a disaster of one kind or another, after investment from Mumtalakat and a sale and lease back of the team’s Woking headquarters - not to mention redundancies and a loan from Bahrain’s national bank.
MSP’s capital helped stabilise the business and restore the foundations of what would leave to McLaren’s rise to being 2024 constructors’ champion and dominating both 2025 championships. While it is unlikely McLaren would have just suddenly disappeared into financial oblivion, as an alternative solution to MSP would have been sourced, it’s unlikely it would have been the same.
McLaren could easily have slipped into a weak existence consistently focused on survival rather than success, propped up by cash influxes.
In that scenario, its current success would be impossible. Not just in F1, but in establishing itself as a regular winner in IndyCar, and launching its top-level return to the Le Mans 24 Hours with a World Endurance Championship programme.
“I’m very happy with what McLaren looks like today,” Brown said recently.
“We’ve got a great Formula 1 team. We’ve got a great IndyCar team, it’s kind of knocking on the door of big success. Of course, we’re getting involved in WEC, which we’re very excited about.
“We’re the only team to have won the Triple Crown. Hopefully we can do it again, maybe even get a little bit greedy and not just win the three big races, but win the three championships!
“Doesn’t all have to be in the same year, but wouldn’t that be sweet?
“Those are the three series that make most sense for our brand. In our view, the three most popular, historic, iconic racing series.
“It gives our sponsor partners flexibility to kind of dial up, dial down. You’ll see a lot of our sponsors cut across multiple forms of our racing. It gives our fans something to turn into, and then it gives me something if I have a Formula 1 weekend off, I got another couple racing series I can go to!”
Back in 2020 McLaren competing in these events and championships, let alone winning them, would have seemed a lot further away than just a few years - and like a complete pipe dream, rather than a legitimate ambition.
