Zak Brown

We went back to the papaya, tried to become a more exclusive brand, a more energetic, colorful, friendly, warm, as opposed to what I call kind of Darth Vader.

We were black and gray and cold and...

not very welcoming which I think worked fine in period because there is kind of a lot of Darth Vader fans out there but you know where we were we needed to you want to be Luke Skywalker yeah when we wanted to be Luke Skywalker so we went to the papaya I remember someone said to me you're only doing that because that's what the fans want it was like

It feels like a trick question.

That's exactly what the fans want.

Isn't that what we're here for as our fans?

And then just started building trust with the team, attacked the commercial side because I knew that was an area I could make a difference.

And then if we could get the commercial built up, we could hire the best drivers, we could get new wind tunnels, things of that nature.

And then it just started to feed on itself and has been an amazing run.

It was on the side pod.

And Fernando was one of our big sponsors.

We were close.

I always had confidence our shareholders wouldn't let that happen, but they were pouring a ton of money into the automotive company, and no one's got a bottomless pit, so I knew they would.

find a solution which we did find a solution but we held on as long as we could until we had to have a solution but you know I heard that there was a phone call to Liberty at one point that maybe there was a like Eddie Jordan phoning Bernie in the old days we needed help we needed help and Liberty were great you know they they never needed to help but they were prepared to help but being prepared to help

got some other people to step up.

So, no, we were making phone calls.

It was a pretty dire situation.

And it was one where we were starting to have some on-track success, so I had to kind of shelter the team because there was nothing they could do about it other than just keep performing.

That's going to make my job easier to raise money, raise sponsorship.

So I didn't want to distract them, scare them on something that was out of their control because if they knew what was going on, they would have been terrified because I was.