McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown says the IndyCar project is making good progress ahead of a visit from the Arrow McLaren SP team to the Mexican Grand Prix.

McLaren announced its return to full-time IndyCar competition in partnership with Schmidt Peterson Motorsports back in August, since which the team has been working out areas of responsibility and where McLaren can bring additional value.

“It’s going really well, we’re really engaged,” Brown told RACER. “We’ve had our guys out at their place, both technically and commercially. They’re coming to our place, they’ve already been a couple of times.

“They were in Hungary, they’re coming to Mexico, so the ‘let’s all get to know each other but also see what each other’s skillsets and technical capabilities are and evaluate that’ is almost done, to where we have a commercial plan on how we think this can work. 

“Technically we’re almost there. There’s another visit coming our way, but then I think we’ll land on technically this is how it will work, and then we’ve got to start integrating and driving forward. So I’m happy with where it’s at.

“It’s a lot of work. If I look at 2017, it was a brand play. 2019 was all us, and this is a lot of what we can bring to the table with an existing foundation. So it’s quite busy, because there’s a lot we think we can bring to the table. It’s not one or two guys or one or two technologies, it’s everything we can bring that we think can help.”

Brown also said there has been occasions where the IndyCar team has taken lessons from how the F1 side of McLaren operates to try and incorporate in future.

“Yeah we’ve seen that, 100%,” he said. “There are examples, and none I can give away because then everyone is going to go and try to replicate it!”