McLaren director Zak Brown’s jaw-dropping car collection

REMEMBER that scene in Jurassic Park where Sam Neill first claps eyes on a dinosaur? He’s amazed and enthralled by the giant scaly lawnmower, removing his hat and Serengetis to gape out of a hideous rectangle-headlight YJ Wrangler.

Then, when the sheer scope of the rest of the park is evident, he staggers around for a bit as if he’s suffering the after-effects of a bad souvlaki. You get the same effect when you take in the extent of McLaren executive director Zak Brown’s car collection.

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Of course he’s got a Ferrari F40 and a Lamborghini Countach. Hasn’t everyone? That’s just beginner stuff. They mix with newer vehicles like an Aventador SV, a 2017 Ford GT, a Ferrari 599 GTO and he flies the corporate flag with a McLaren 675 LT Spider. Which is nice.

It’s when you start on the older road cars in the collection that you realise Brown is a guy who gets it.

Porsche 959? Yep. Then there’s an original Honda NSX. These are proper car guy cars. The overlooked supercar’s there, the Bugatti EB110. Design icons like the Ferrari 275 GTS, the Mercedes 190SL Roadster, a Corvette C2 Split Window and the Jaguar E-Type show a clear appreciation of a certain refined aesthetic.

But it’s when you begin to realise the depth of his competition car collection that you begin to look for a place to sit down. It’s dizzying.

Brown clearly has an eye for a storied provenance. There’s the 1974 Lola T332 of Mario Andretti, Dale Earnhardt’s 1977 Chevy Nova, the Williams FW07B F1 car driven by Alan Jones to kick you off.

Realising belatedly that he was never going to put food on the table with a racing career, he founded Just Marketing International (JMI) in 1995, which has become the world’s largest motorsport marketing agency. The business was acquired for US$76m in 2013 by CSM Sport & Entertainment.