by Toto Wolff celebrated his 52nd birthday – or “49 plus three”, as he prefers to call it – last Friday, at his home in Monaco, with his wife Susie and six-year-old son Jack. In the evening, the Wolffs invited George Russell and his girlfriend Carmen to dinner, and spent a lovely time with the couple, as well as their friends and neighbors, the Farfus, another family of motorsportsmen from Monaco. It was a rare moment of calm before Toto returns to Brackley to oversee final preparations for the new season, which begins in Bahrain in a few weeks.
After successive seasons choking on Red Bull exhaust, it’s fair to say Wolff is a man under pressure. Even eight constructors’ titles in as many seasons between 2014 and 2021, not to mention seven drivers’ championships, cannot protect you from criticism. And towards the end of last year, after the Mercedes team principal lost his cool with journalists at a press conference in Las Vegas, and then became caught in a furious dispute with the FIA governing body over quickly dismissed allegations that his wife, who works for Formula One, could have passed him confidential material, there were some who felt the pressure could be revealing.
Did Wolff need more bother? Was he still 100 percent committed?
It has long been rumored that Wolff, a one-third owner of Mercedes F1, could step down as team principal. Hell, the Austrian has admitted to having those thoughts, especially during Covid, when he experienced something of an existential crisis. Others maintain that Wolff still covets the Formula One CEO job, a role Wolff briefly discussed with Liberty Media boss Greg Maffei before Stefano Domenicali took over.
Wolff, however, has news for doubters: He’s not going anywhere.
In fact, he says, right at the beginning of a wide-ranging interview from his home in Monaco, that he has just signed a new three-year contract to remain as team principal and CEO of Mercedes F1, which will take him to the final of the 2026 season, the first season of the next regulation.
Wolff’s reasoning is simple. He still feels like the best man to lead the team. Equally important, he says, are Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ola Kallenius, representing co-owners INEOS and Mercedes-Benz.
“I think the most important thing between the three of us is that we trust each other,” Wolff says of how conversations about his role progressed. “At the end of the day, as a shareholder, I want the best return on investment. And the best return on investment is winning. I’m not going to try to hold on to a position where I think someone else will do better than me. I make sure I have people around who can tell me otherwise. In the end the three of us decided: ‘Let’s do it again.’”
“The risk is more of boredom than exhaustion”
Wolff leans back. It was a painful end to last year, for sure. The Austrian carefully chooses his words when he speaks about the controversy over the FIA’s aborted investigation into a possible conflict of interest in the Wolff house. It’s clear he’s still furious about it. But he insists he is “in a good place” heading into 2024 and fully focused on getting back to winning ways. There are no performance clauses (“I’ve never had a performance clause. You either trust each other or you don’t. And we are aligned as shareholders”), and there are no plans to leave Mercedes, either now or in the future. .
“I am part of this team in several capacities,” he says. “I am a coercionist. I’m on the board. These are things that will not change any executive or non-executive role you have. But I feel good. The risk for me is always more boredom than exhaustion. And that is why I accept the challenges we have today, even though sometimes they seem very, very difficult to handle.”
Wolff has described the challenge of renewing Red Bull this year as akin to climbing “Mount Everest” and even that appears to be an understatement. But having done completely wrong in 2022, doubling down with disastrous consequences in 2023, only to admit mid-season that a radical redesign was needed, Wolff is at least hopeful that in 2024 Mercedes will become more competitive. When we speak, he has just spoken on the phone to Ant Davidson, the Sky Sports pundit who still acts as one of the team’s simulator drivers. “I was driving Melbourne [in the sim]”Wolff reports. “And he said, ‘The car feels like a car for the first time in two years…’ Wolff pauses, aware that talk is cheap. “Obviously I’d love for this to correlate to the track, but we’ve seen over the last couple of years that it wasn’t always like that,” he adds hastily.
Still, the hope for Mercedes fans is that this could be a better season. Wolff says he is happy with last year’s engineering change, which saw the “mega” James Allison return as technical director in place of Mike Elliott. He is happy with how Mercedes’ strategy team has adapted post-James Vowles. And he points out that he expects his team to be much more precise this year in pit stops, having invested more resources in areas such as wheel locking mechanisms and axle materials. “I think the regulations, as they were put in place a few years ago, we interpreted them in a very conservative way,” he explains. “And we’ve seen other teams do it differently. So he watches this space. “I think it’s going to be very different.”
Wolff says that, above all, he is happy with his driver lineup. George Russell had a tougher second season at Brackley, but Wolff insists the 25-year-old has “absolutely lived up to the team’s expectations”. “George is our future,” he insists. “And you know, when I look at all the young, current Formula One drivers, he’s the one I’d like to have in a car.”
As for Lewis Hamilton, ask Wolff if, at 39, he can still win that elusive eighth world title and he’s not stopping to catch his breath. “The answer is clearly yes in capital letters,” he replies. “There is a reason why Lewis is a seven-time world champion and has broken all the records… his ability is on a different level. If we are able to give him a car that he really feels, that he drives in a way that he can trust, he will be at the level necessary to win the championship. 39 is not age.”
The next big change in regulations won’t be until 2026. And it may be that Hamilton, like Wolff, will have to sign another contract, taking him beyond his current two-year contract, if he wants that eighth title. But Wolff does not rule out doing it sooner.
“We always believe it’s possible,” he says of whether Mercedes could actually climb Everest this year. “You can’t start the season with an attitude of ‘This is not going to be possible.’ We saw last year with McLaren the big step they took with a single update. “We have signed a two-year contract with Lewis and we owe it to him, George and the entire team to give him our full attention in 2024 and 2025. I think it is possible.”
