by Toto Wolff celebrated his 52nd birthday – or “49 plus three”, as he prefers to call it – last Friday, at home in Monaco, with his wife Susie and six-year-old son Jack. In the evening, the Wolffs took George Russell and his girlfriend Carmen out for dinner, spending a little valuable downtime with the couple as well as their friends and neighbors of the Farfus ‘, another Monaco motorsport family. It was a rare moment of calm before Toto heads back to Brackley to oversee the final preparations for the new season, which starts in Bahrain in a few weeks’ time.
After spending back-to-back seasons choking on Red Bull exhaust fumes, it’s fair to say Wolff is a man under pressure. Even eight constructors’ titles in as many seasons from 2014 to 2021, let alone seven drivers’ championships, cannot protect you from criticism. And towards the end of last year, after the Mercedes team principal lost his cool with reporters at a press conference in Las Vegas, he was then caught in a furious row with the governing body the FIA over allegations that fell to fast that his wife, who works. in relation to Formula One, he might have passed on confidential material, there were some people who felt there might be pressure to tell.
Did Wolff need the hassle anymore? Was he still 100 percent committed?
Wolff, who owns a third of Mercedes F1, could step down as team principal. Hell, Austria has admitted to having those thoughts himself, especially during Covid when he suffered something of an existential crisis. Others maintain that Wolff is still in the running for the Formula One chief executive job, a role Wolff briefly discussed with Liberty Media boss Greg Maffei before Stefano Domenicali took over.
Wolff, however, has news for his skeptics: He’s not going anywhere.
In fact, he says, just at the start of a wide-ranging interview from his home in Monaco, he has just signed a new three-year deal to remain as team principal and chief executive of Mercedes F1, bringing him home. the end of the 2026 season, the first season of the next set of regulations.
Wolff’s reasoning is simple. He still feels he is the best man to lead the team. Equally important, he says, are Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ola Kallenius, who represent the joint owners of 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 talks about his role progressed. “At the end of the day, as a shareholder myself, I want the best return on investment. And the best return on investment is winning. I’m not going to try to hang onto a job that I think someone is going to do better than me. I make sure I have people around me who can tell me otherwise. In the end the three of us decided: ‘Let’s do it again’.”
‘It’s more of a risk than getting them hurt’
Wolff sits back. It was a brutal end to last year, no question. The Austrian chooses his words carefully when discussing the controversy over the resulting FIA investigation into a possible conflict of interest in the Wolff family. It’s clear that he’s still excited about it. But he insists he is “in a good place” going into 2024 and is 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’re aligned as shareholders.”), and there are no plans to leave Mercedes, now or in the future.
“I have been a member of this team in various capacities,” he says. “I am a joint shareholder. I’m on the table. These are things that will not change regardless of my executive or non-executive role. But I feel good. The danger to me is always greater than the ritual. And that’s why I face the challenges we face today, even though they sometimes feel very difficult to handle.”
Wolff has described the challenge of overhauling Red Bull this year as something like climbing “Mount Everest” and even that is an understatement. But after getting it completely wrong in 2022, and twice with disastrous consequences in 2023, only to admit the need for a radical redesign mid-season, Wolff is at least optimistic that Mercedes will become more competition in 2024. When we speak he has just got off the phone to Ant Davidson, a Sky Sports man who still acts as one of the team’s simulator drivers. “He was driving Melbourne [in the sim],” reports Wolff. “And he said: ‘The car feels like a car for the first time in two years…’ Wolff pauses, knowing that talk is cheap. “Obviously I’d love to correlate this with the track but we’ve seen over the last two years that this hasn’t always been the case,” he says promptly.
Still, the hope for Mercedes fans is that this could be a better season. Wolff says he is happy with the engineering rejig last year, which saw the return of “mega” James Allison as technical director in place of Mike Elliott. He is pleased with how the Mercedes strategy team has adapted the former James Vowles. And he makes a point of saying that he expects his team to be much sharper this year in pitstops, having put more resources into areas such as wheel locking mechanisms and axle materials. “I think the regulations, as they were laid out a few years ago, interpreted them in a very conservative way,” he explains. “And we’ve seen other teams in a different way. So watch this space. I think it will be very different.”
For the most part, Wolff says, he’s happy with his driver lineup. George Russell has had a more difficult second season at Brackley, but Wolff insists the 25-year-old is “absolutely living up to the expectations of the team”. “George is our future,” he insists. “And you know, when I look at all the young men, of the current Formula One drivers, he’s the one I want to be in a car.”
As for Lewis Hamilton, ask Wolff if, at 39, he can still win an elusive eighth world title and it won’t be a breather. “Obviously the answer is in capital letters,” he replied. “There’s a reason why Lewis is a seven-time world champion, and he’s broken every record… his ability is on a different level. If we can give him a car that he feels, that drives in a way that he can trust, he will be at the level required to win the championship. There is no age 39.”
The next major change in regulations won’t take place until 2026. And Hamilton, like Wolff, may have to sign another contract, extending beyond his current two-year deal, if he wants the t -that eighth title. But Wolff has no intention of doing it any sooner than that.
“I always believe it’s possible,” he says of whether Mercedes could scale 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, a huge step they made with one upgrade. We have signed a two-year contract with Lewis, and we have to give him, George and the whole team our full attention in 2024 and 2025. I think it is possible.”
