McLaren’s Papaya Revolution is Being Shaped by Women
At Regatta Harbour, the papaya was impossible to miss. Caps, jerseys, tote bags, phone cases, personalised papaya nails. McLaren Racing Live had the usual ingredients of a Miami Grand Prix week event: drivers, music, sponsor boards, cars. But the crowd told its own story.
There were women and girls everywhere. This is a growing theme that McLaren have arguably understood faster than most other Formula 1 teams on the grid. Female fans are not a side-effect of modern F1, they are part of the business now.
In Miami, across McLaren Racing Live and Zak Brown’s appearance at The Autosport Business Exchange the following day, the message was clear enough: women matter to McLaren, as fans, as consumers, as future engineers, as drivers, and as part of the team’s idea of itself.
Few people at McLaren have had a closer view of that shift than Louise McEwen. As Chief Marketing Officer, McEwen oversees the team’s brand narrative and creative identity across its racing portfolio. She first worked with McLaren as a consultant in 2014, before joining as Brand Director in 2017. More than a decade later, she says what kept her there was simple: “The size of the opportunity, and working with incredible people.”
That opportunity looks very different now. McLaren is no longer just selling speed, heritage and the occasional race win, it’s selling a version of F1 that feels warmer, more wearable, and easier to step into. The team’s papaya has become less a colour than a calling card.
Zak Brown has been open about how deliberate that shift was. Speaking at The Autosport Business Exchange in Miami, the McLaren CEO said the team had once felt “very exclusive” and “not very warm”. His comparison was blunt, “I kind of felt we were Darth Vader. We were dark, we weren’t very warm.” The return to papaya was part of changing that. “Let’s go over to the Luke Skywalker side and be warm and welcome and inclusive,” Brown said. “So we went back to our papaya, which is our history, and we did that because that’s what the fans told us they wanted.”
For McEwen, that idea is not just marketing language. At last year’s Miami Grand Prix, she became only the 11th woman to stand on a Formula 1 podium, accepting McLaren’s Constructors’ trophy after Oscar Piastri took his first stateside Grand Prix win. “I can’t believe it’s nearly a year since I took the top step,” she says. “Honestly, I’ve been reflecting on it a little bit as we approach the race, and it still gives me goosebumps.”
At the time, McEwen was not even aware that she had made history. It was only once she left the podium and social media picked it up that she realised she was the 11th woman to stand up there. “It never really crossed my mind,” she admits. “It was just such an incredible moment in my career, standing up there, but accepting the trophy on behalf of all the men and women back at McLaren, it was a real honour.”
But perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects was the response she gained back home from friends, family, colleagues, and peers in the industry. People telling her what the image meant. Her 10-year-old daughter came home from school and told her, “Mama, my teacher Googled you at school.”
“Hopefully, [it has] given many younger girls who might be contemplating a career in the industry and around motorsport – hopefully inspired them that little bit more,” McEwen says.
Zak Brown picked up the same thread at The Autosport Business Exchange in Miami the following day, placing McLaren’s shift within the wider business of modern F1. Since Liberty Media acquired the sport, he said, F1 needed to grow in four areas: financial stability for the teams, more women and diversity, a younger audience, and presence in North America.
Miami sits almost too neatly at the centre of that. It is a race weekend, but also a content machine, a luxury market, a sponsor playground, and a fan event rolled into one. For McLaren, it is exactly the kind of place where the team’s modern identity makes sense.
The numbers explain why the sport is paying attention. Women now make up 42 per cent of F1’s global fanbase, up from 37 per cent in 2018, with 43 million new female fans joining the sport in 2025 alone. According to F1’s own data, three in four new fans are now female.
Still, the numbers only tell you so much. They cannot tell you what it feels like to be in a crowd where the old assumptions about who F1 belongs to start to look outdated. They cannot tell you why a fan buys a Reiss jacket instead of a standard team shirt, or why a teenage girl might see an F1 Academy driver and think the sport looks less closed off than it used to.
That is where McLaren has been smart. It has not treated the growth in female fans as something separate from brand, fashion, or access. It has folded it into the way the team shows up.
For years, women’s F1 merchandise felt like a late addition. Smaller sizes, unisex, boxy fits, the occasional pink version, and very little sense that anyone had thought about how female fans actually dress. McLaren’s recent clothing strategy has moved away from that. Its collaborations with Reiss, Levi’s, Hollister, Abercrombie & Fitch, and M&S Kids suggest a team trying to make fanwear that works outside a grandstand.
McEwen says Reiss stood out because they understood that point early. “I think Reiss was really proactive and really first in their thinking,” she says. “I think the fact that they had ranges for women and men was really important. We knew we had a really strong female fan base, and we really wanted to serve that audience in ways which they didn’t get anywhere else.” Three years on, McEwen says the Reiss collaboration has “gone from strength to strength”, offering fans “a little bit extra that they don’t normally get within typical apparel ranges within motorsport”.
The team’s recent move from Castore to Puma fits into the same pattern. Puma brings scale, a long history in motorsport, and the ability to move beyond traditional kit. For McEwen, the appeal was not just the technical teamwear but the lifestyle possibilities around it.
“We’ve obviously got lots more collaborations to come out this season,” she says. “Having lifestyle ranges that work within that, more leisurewear, as well as, obviously, the typical track collaboration kit that you see that we wear week in, week out. So I think there’s a huge amount of opportunity.”
But McLaren’s strongest case is not that it has noticed female fans. Everyone has noticed female fans. Its strongest case is that it has started building around them in several directions at once: events, apparel, academy seats, development pathways, and workforce targets.
McEwen says inclusion has long been part of the team’s thinking. “I think as a team, we have always really looked at being inclusive with everything we do,” she says. “Certainly diversity and inclusion is a really important part of our agenda.”
She points to F1 Academy with obvious pride. “We’re the only team on the grid right now to have two drivers in Formula 1 Academy, which we’re super proud of,” she says. “And we’ve got three female drivers in our driver development programme.”
Ella Lloyd is continuing in F1 Academy with McLaren, building on a debut season in which she earned Rookie of the Year. Ella Stevens also represents the Papaya team, driving the F1 Academy McLaren Oxagon entry. The second car, announced at the end of 2025 in partnership with NEOM, was presented by the team as a further commitment to opening pathways into motorsport for women.
There is also Ella Häkkinen, announced in November 2025, as the youngest member of the McLaren Driver Development Programme. The 15-year-old Finnish driver, daughter of two-time Formula 1 world champion and McLaren legend Mika Häkkinen, has already made a name for herself in European karting. She won at the 2024 Champions of the Future Academy in Cremona and has taken further wins and podiums across the continent.
There is always a risk, with young female drivers, that they become symbols before they are allowed to become themselves. F1 Academy drivers should not have to represent the entire future of women in motorsport every time they get in a car. But seats matter. Programmes matter. Being able to point to a pathway matters.
The harder question is whether the women in the crowd can imagine themselves anywhere beyond it. That is where McLaren’s Engage programme becomes relevant. In Miami, Brown also spoke about diversity inside McLaren itself, including the team’s aim for 40 per cent of its workforce to come from underrepresented groups by 2030. That includes women, ethnic minorities, disabled people, neurodivergent people, LGBTQ+ communities, and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
The aim is not just to make F1 look more diverse from the outside, but to make the industry more accessible from the inside. McLaren Racing Engage works with organisations including Girls on Track UK, with programmes covering mentorship, STEM outreach, student conferences, insight days, and community events.
This work is arguably less visible than a Miami crowd and less glamorous than a clothing collaboration. But to many, it is also more important. A fan can buy into a team in one afternoon. Becoming an engineer, strategist, mechanic, designer, or senior leader takes years. If F1 is serious about women, that is where the work has to hold up.
McEwen suggests McLaren has “the strongest fellowship of female fans on the grid”, something she describes as a source of pride. It is a difficult claim to judge from the outside, but it tells you how the team sees itself. McLaren is no longer treating women as an audience it might want to win over one day. It sees them as part of its current strength.
That does not mean the job is done. The growth of female fandom in F1 has already attracted plenty of lazy assumptions: that women are only here for the attractive drivers, the WAG fashion, the drama, the edits, and the romance of it all. The truth is less convenient. Many are here for those things, and also for the racing. They do not cancel each other out. A fan can care about strategy and style, tyre degradation and teamwear, qualifying pace, and who cut a better silhouette in the paddock.
McLaren seems more comfortable than most teams with that mix. Its version of modern F1 does not ask fans to choose between performance and culture. It lets both sit together.
When asked what she would change about the relationship between fashion and motorsport, McEwen does not overthink it. “Just keep talking more and more,” she says. “I think we’ve really just only started, and I think there’s more we can do, particularly on that off-track lifestyle-wear that we’ve just seen get so much more traction.”
Then she adds: “I’m just excited to see more of it. Really just supercharge it, if we can.”
At Regatta Harbour, that did not feel theoretical. It was in the crowd, in the clothes, in the phones held above heads, in the girls who did not look surprised to be there.
The women were already part of the picture. McLaren is now proving that they are part of the plan.