McLaren Racing Chief Marketing Officer Claire Cronin Is Here for The Motorsports Fans
McLaren Racing Chief Marketing Officer Claire Cronin is crystal clear on the team’s mission one year into her tenure. “Our vision, quite simply, is to bring McLaren to more fans across more race platforms and more countries than any other sports brand in the world,” she told me as we spoke ahead of the Formula One race’s inaugural year in Miami.
Claire Cronin, Chief Commercial Officer, McLaren Racing
McLaren Racing has a long history in Formula One, a high-stakes glamorous sport that has international appeal, and a season that plays out at racetracks around the world. In recent times the popular Netflix TV Show “Drive to Survive,” introduced a whole new audience to F1. The series centers on the social dynamics among racing teams, their drivers, and team bosses, as they battle for a place on the podium. The McLaren Racing team and drivers Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris are among the charismatic breakout stars and fan favorites.
World champion driver Bruce McLaren, founded and first raced McLaren Racing in 1963. He was killed in a tragic accident in 1970 at the age of 32 during testing at Goodwood in England. The McLaren name lives on as the team is one of the most successful in the sport and carries over into super cars that can be driven on everyday roads, like the McLaren 720s. A low-mileage 1995 McLaren F1 shattered auction records last year, selling for $20.45 million at the Gooding & Company Pebble Beach sale. McLaren’s unique racing footprint extend beyond F1 into its teams that compete in IndyCar, Extreme E and esports.
“I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone.”
Cronin is new to motorsports, but gets excited about the learning curve. “My exposure to F1 growing up was it was always on Channel Four, and that was it,” she says. “I’d heard of Lewis Hamilton, but I didn't follow any of the races or anything.” In her role now, she’s dived in and is ultra enthusiastic about both the teams and the fans.
Cronin brings broad experience to the paddocks. She spent a decade in banking before joining NetJets, owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway. She went on to Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic as Chief Marketing Officer, before joining McLaren Racing. When Cronin accepted the role at McLaren she was eight and half months pregnant. She was intrigued by CEO Zak Brown’s goals. “His vision to make it a much more inclusive, a much more fan centric environment was one that really spoke to me, because I'm a big believer in the power of the sport to unite people.”
While a ticket to a Formula One race is geared toward an elite jet-setting clientele, Cronin emphasizes that the majority of the fan base is watching from home. “Democratizing the experience is something that absolutely fuels all of us as a passion, because we recognize what an immense privilege it is to work at McLaren and have the drivers constantly up and down corridors and have access to that. We want to bring that to people.” Cronin wants to make inroads by making motorsports appeal to a cross section of people. She’s a proponent of projects that appeal to young fans and families, like the McLaren LEGO.
McLaren Formula One driver Daniel Ricciardo. Photo: McLaren Racing
“We want children to start playing with the concept of building with cars as toys. We can start to get that pipeline around that very young age. Because we know — and I know from my time in aviation — that it starts very young in childhood as to when people start to classify careers as for boys or for girls and start to count themselves out on subjects like math and science.”
For Cronin, the way to shift an audience starts by diversifying the organization to reflect the expanding audience, and one key is to focus on gender. McLaren is a popular team among a growing audience that includes Gen Z women. Cronin is encouraged by the shift, but recognizes the work ahead. Women make up 12% of the McLaren Racing roles, a number the company plans to increase by 2030.
“One of the problems I saw when I was at Virgin was that the pipeline of talent would just be 90 per cent male, so even if you had every female who applied, you still are massively off your step in terms of demographics,” Cronin says. Education initiatives such as McLaren Racing Engage engage four charitable partners including the Women's Engineering Society, Smallpeice Trust, Creative Access, and EqualEngineers. These programs are designed to attract more underrepresented applicants to the sport, and ultimately to work for McLaren.
“We can help open up the world of McLaren and show people the different roles are available to them that you wouldn't see just by watching us on the TV,” she says. “We look at education as being a massive part of what we take responsibility for so we can pull people into the business.”
What she brings to the table is the ability to see the bigger picture. The general interest appeal of the Youtube series McLaren Unboxed is a creative platform to interact with audiences in approachable content. Another channel for fandom is through gaming culture, and this growth is reflected in McLaren’s participation in esports. Advanced driving simulators are the ultimate gaming experience. F1 Driver Lando Norris also happens to be an avid gamer and the team plans to launch more fan-driven initiatives to bring these worlds together. McLaren also launched an NFT project designed to draw in young fans.
McLaren has also launched a team in the all-electric offroad series Extreme E, featuring Emma Gilmour, the first woman to drive for McLaren and Tanner Foust, supported by race engineer Leena Gade and her sister, performance engineer Teena Gade. McLaren also returned to Indy Car in 2020 after 40 years, where it is considered among the Big Four racing teams.
Key to McLaren’s continued success is its relationships with industry partners that include Dell, Splunk, Coca Cola and Hilton. A newer partnership with Cisco WebEx helped accelerate a hybrid working both at the racetrack and at the HQ. Cronin said that partnerships are about finding interesting intersections between cool brands and motor sports. Next year McLaren will celebrate its 60th year in motorsports, and as Cronin suggests, McLaren is primed for the fast lane.