Toto’s racing heart
Toto Wolff is one of the most prominent and recognizable personalities in the F1 paddock during the last decade. He is most admirable because of his success , his often spoken about wealth of about half a billion dollars and his confidence. He relies on his management skills and his ambition to lead one of the most successful teams of F1 of all time to a series of 7 Drivers Championships and a record breaking 8 Constructor’s Championships, in a dominant fashion most of the time. Toto is the man that is most linked to the rise of Mercedes’ profile as a team almost impossible to beat. Mercedes is depicted as a well oiled machine relying on reason, engineering, hard work and money to operate at the higher level, make little to no mistake, annihilate the competition and win every time.
Toto was always the person to mention that his work most of the time was to stay out of the way of the engineers and talk to the sponsors. He often emphasizes on the fact that the success of the team does not rely on a single person, be it Lewis Hamilton, James Allyson or another great personality within the ranks of the team, but Mercedes is a huge organization of hundreds to thousands of dedicated passionate people working hard to prefect every single detail and most importantly get coordinated to put every little piece together from every department to perfect the outcome. What this states about himself though it is that his main job within the organization is to create all the necessary conditions so that every other team member can do their job and the team can win races and championships. This can be acknowledged during the arrival of Wolff in the team, a team that had been founded by Mr Zack Brawn himself and had two of the most great drivers the sport has seen. Still it did not had the success they expected. That story changed when Toto entered the team as the Team Principal and he did everything to convince the shareholders that the only way for the team to be World Champions was if they invested heavily . He promised them that if they did things his way, putting as much money was needed, the team would reach number 1 in the standings and the return of the investment would be substantial.
For 7 years the Wolff model not only worked but reached a new level of domination in F1, surpassing even the great achievements of the early 2000s Ferrari. Mercedes could simply start the year winning by margins and then would go on to become even better throughout the season or in most frustrating way for her opponents would start the year with a good but not best car and proceed to upgrade it and modify it so that not only would come out on top but usually by a mile. Ferrari tried everything to beat them while Red Bull could not pose a real challenge mainly because of their engine limitations during the hybrid era. Success, glory, historical records and most importantly for some money came flooding to the team and the marketing gains for the Mercedes Vehicles company were incalculable. Toto himself became a multimillionaire and earned the respect of a lot of people in the business world. He himself depicts himself as a successful businessman and has stated that he rather be one than a mediocre racing driver.
That is a big statement considering that he tried to make it as a racing driver during his youth with a lot of entries in the GT championships and some wins in a few endurance races. He loves racing and he loves Formula 1. He never misses a chance to finish a statement with the phrase “our sport we all love so much”. He lives and breathes for racing cars and F1. He is probably thinking now that he could have made it everywhere, however he must be most satisfied and happy to have made it in F1. Sometimes ha has been accused of being there for the money and that would turn away and leave F1 the first day he sensed that there is no more profits to make. That must not be right. Toto Wolff has a racing heart. He has a business mind but a racing heart and those two seem to be entering a race of their own and Wolff and Mercedes F1 are paying the price.
Toto and Mercedes had the magic recipe. Toto had made sure that every condition was met so that they would continue to win for years and decades to come. However this changed during the 2021 season when they dramatically lost the World Driver’s Championships for the first time during Toto’s time with the Team and moreover they started the 2022 season in the backfoot and could not afford to make up for their mistakes before both championships were most certainly lost. Toto did not change, the engineers did not change, the drivers did not change. Everything was still the same but they started losing.
So, maybe what changed and led to the team’s path to second was the budget cap. For the first time in forever the teams cannot spend as much money as they need to develop their car. The development limitation means that the car can go faster but to a certain level. In 2021 they managed to get their car faster than the red bull but by the time they achieved that it was too late. If they had one more race, they would probably not had lost the championship, but even that one race was enough. They got where they wanted but the limitation meant they didn’t do it in time. The situation was even worse in 2022 where the problems with the car were far more. Race by race, step by step, experiment the experiment they are getting closer to the front. But if they had unlimited budget, they would probably had run so much more test in so much more dense timetable and they would had solve their problems far earlier.
Toto Wolff let the budget cap slip. Could he be not powerful enough to stop it? Could he be stupid enough to thing it wouldn’t affect them? No. For some reason Toto Wolff for the first time ever did not do his job appropriately. He let something go by , something that meant that the conditions would not always be met for the team to win. Toto Wolff listened to his racing heart and not a single day goes by that he does not think about it.
” We all lose more than we win in our personal lives” he ahs quoted and that is something true for every human with a beating racing heart like his. That is why we love him, he is a true racer by heart .
