McLaren launched Papaya Membership at $90 AUD a year. Dr Georgia Carroll paid to join and laid out the actual inventory: virtual Q&As, member days at the McLaren Technology Centre, a Miami takeover experience, and a welcome pack of a pin, a flag, and a lanyard.

Her read, which matches what I found going through the same benefits myself, is that most of it is already free elsewhere, needs extra spend to use, or only works if you live near Woking.

A paid fan membership, to my mind, competes in the same mental ledger as every other recurring payment a fan already makes.

Netflix, Spotify, the SaaS tools they use for work, each one has already set a felt sense of what a subscription should return, and that's the bar I and most fans judge every membership against. Miss it and the membership reads as a money grab.

McLaren's perks, measured against that bar, leave universality as the area with the most room to grow.

Member days require physically getting to Woking. The Miami event requires already being in Miami.

My own money and my own time have gone into versions of these experiences before Papaya existed, and my guess is McLaren hasn't confirmed this. Is that even the one unlock in the tier, member day access, still leaves the fan covering their own flight and hotel.

Paying $90 reads to me as quietly positioned proof of being a real fan, and that framing works against McLaren. Nobody agrees what a "real fan" means any more, and the gatekeeping the phrase implies has already dissolved as fandom has globalised.

Dr Carroll flagged this directly, and my read goes a step further: McLaren didn't need to state it outright, since the FOMO carries the framing on its own. Status-based pricing on a fanbase that no longer buys the status claim is a weak foundation to build a paid tier on.

Fans, in my experience, articulate what they want long before they can name it as a product request, and the research McLaren skipped was already sitting in public.

On Reddit, I've seen Australian fans ask whether McLaren could work with the Australian Grand Prix to get Oscar Piastri fans into the race at a lower cost.

McLaren doesn't hold those ticket rights, but the ask names precisely what an Australian tier of this membership needed to solve for.

Direct research, not global perks assumed to travel. Surveys, one-to-one conversations, and group sessions that read sentiment would beat anything a dashboard tells me here.

Segmentation, for me, isn't a perks exercise. It's how I'd decide what to optimise for on each time horizon.

Treat all three the same, as one global tier at one global price, and the result is perks that satisfy none of them well.

Australia is the clearest test case for this.

Ticket rights sit with the Australian Grand Prix, not with McLaren, so a membership can't discount race entry outright.

It can still fund the relationship; my instinct would be to look at whether profit from the membership could subsidise ticket access in partnership with the Aus GP directly, turning a fan cost centre into something the membership pays for.

A ceiling problem keeps coming up for me with more merch and more experiences.

Fans are weighing Papaya Membership against Netflix, Amex, and Air Canada, and none of those products, in my view, win by stacking on another perk. They win by offering something none of the others can.

McLaren can't out-merch its way past that ceiling. What it can use instead is the one asset none of those brands hold: the largest sponsor roster on the grid, more than 55 partners deep.

That roster, to me, is the actual differentiated product.

A partner like Hilton already runs hotels fans already stay in. What I'd offer Hilton through Papaya Membership is inventory it can't buy anywhere else.

A segmented, addressable group of fans based in the UK, the US, or Australia, with McLaren able to tell Hilton precisely what those fans want in each market.

That segmentation turns Papaya Membership into paid inventory sold into the partner base, on the condition each partner builds something specific to this fan group.

The bar for a partner here, as I see it, isn't full-funnel awareness. It's consideration - a fan who already knows of or holds a Hilton account or an Amex card seeing an experience built specifically for them as a McLaren fan.

Distinct from what Hilton or Amex already give everyone else holding that card. Built well, this is the paid tier's actual point of difference. Built badly, it's the same money-grab problem stacked on the fan a second time.

The crawl stage, as I'd run it, is a presale and an invite-only beta community.

I haven't confirmed McLaren ran anything like this before launch, and my guess, based on the full-price global rollout, is that they skipped straight to run.

My version would have looked like this: a presale, an invite-only beta group, and a McLaren-run, McLaren-moderated chat, watching for five or six months what fans actually ask for between races before setting a single price.

Watch parties solve this for the fan who lives near other McLaren supporters and can show up in person, and that's a minority of a fanbase this global.

I'd keep the crawl stage manual on purpose. Regional, hand-run group chats for a handful of markets won't scale to a global base, and that's fine at this stage. The point is learning what a segment actually wants before building the version that scales.

Yes — McLaren Plus, badged on the website as a free fan engagement programme, functions in practice as a newsletter under a different name.

Dr Carroll's read said it operates as a separate touchpoint from Papaya Membership.

Two products, free and paid, run side by side without a shared spine connecting them, so the paywall drops on top of a free layer that was already doing an adjacent, disconnected job.

My view is that free layer should have been the foundation Papaya Membership was built on.

I haven't been able to confirm McLaren Plus's send cadence or subscriber numbers, and that's a gap worth someone at McLaren clarifying before drawing harder conclusions about how the two are meant to work together.

Churn, not signups, is the number that tells the truth, in my experience.

A launch spike is easy to get excited about; keeping a fan paying past month three is the actual test, and I'd plan for high early churn rather than be surprised by it.

Free-to-paid conversion rate matters more to me than raw subscriber count, since it's the number that shows whether the free layer is actually building the trust the paid tier depends on.

A retention plan needs a specific answer for lapsed subscribers too - a win-back message with a real reason to return.

A job to be done. It needs to save the fan time, save them money, or hand them a decision advantage they can't get for free, on a recurring basis.

An FPL newsletter earns its subscription by telling readers which players to pick.

A stock newsletter runs the same model on market moves.

Operators like Nathan May, Tom Orbach and Tom Alder built paid products around one clear, recurring job the reader can't easily get elsewhere, and that's the standard I'd hold McLaren to.

McLaren documents race weekends and shows behind-the-scenes process, and a fan already gets that for free on YouTube and Instagram, so paying $90 has to buy something specific and recurring that nobody inside the programme has named yet.

Haas launched a free version of the same instinct this season, betting that loyalty compounds without a price tag attached. Williams runs the same bet through WClub. McLaren is the one team charging for it, and, to my eye, the one team whose perks don't yet travel past its own postcode.

Paid newsletter operators have already run this experiment thousands of times, and the fundamentals hold for a racing membership just as well, from what I've seen.

My approach would make the offer hard to weigh against a single issue or perk - bundle in extras like worksheets, archives, or community access so the total value feels too large to price against one benefit.

A single launch announcement isn't enough on its own; most people skim and forget it, so a multi-touch sequence across email and social does the actual work.

Keeping the core value and the sales pitch in separate lanes matters too, so the promotional ask never erodes trust in the product itself.

And the aim, for me, is being the best in the world at one specific job, narrow enough that nobody else does it as well — that's what makes a tier feel un-cancellable. One paid-newsletter breakdown walks through this in more depth.

Every one of these questions reduces to four, for me. What's concretely different in a fan's life six months after this works.

Every subscription already sitting on my own card is the comparison I'm running, and I'd guess most fans are doing the same. If the maths doesn't hold there, no pin, flag, or lanyard closes the gap.