Wolff signs a new deal at Mercedes – ‘I’m not going anywhere’

Exclusive: The long-time boss at Mercedes has signed a new three-year deal and is already plotting Red Bull’s downfall

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 their six year old son Jack. In the evening, the Wolffs took George Russell and his girlfriend Carmen out for dinner, spending a bit of precious downtime with the couple as well as their friends and neighbours the Farfus’, another Monaco motorsport family. It was a rare moment of calm before Toto heads back to Brackley to oversee final preparations for the new season, which begins in Bahrain in a few short weeks.
After successive seasons spent choking on Red Bull’s exhaust fumes, it is fair to say Wolff is a man under pressure. Even eight constructors’ titles in as many seasons from 2014 to 2021, not to mention seven drivers’ championships, cannot shield you from criticism. And towards the end of last year, after the Mercedes team principal lost his cool with reporters in a press conference in Las Vegas, then got caught up in a furious row with governing body the FIA over swiftly-dropped allegations that his wife, who works for Formula One, might have passed confidential material to him, there were some who felt that pressure might be telling.
Did Wolff need the hassle any more? Was he still 100 per cent committed?
There have long been whispers that Wolff, who owns a third of Mercedes F1, might step down as team principal. Hell, the Austrian has admitted to having had those thoughts himself, notably during Covid when he experienced something of an existential crisis. Others maintain Wolff still hankers after the job of Formula One chief executive, a role Wolff briefly discussed with Liberty Media boss Greg Maffei before Stefano Domenicali took over.
Wolff, though, has news for his doubters: He is not going anywhere.
In fact, he says, right at the start of a wide-ranging interview from his home in Monaco, he has just signed a new three-year deal to stay on as team principal and chief executive of Mercedes F1, taking him through to 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. Just as importantly, he says, so do Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ola Kallenius, representing fellow 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 talks over 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 on to a position that I think somebody is going to do better than me. I make sure that I have people around who can tell me otherwise. In the end the three of us decided: ‘Let’s do it again’.”
Wolff sits back. It was a bruising end to last year, no question. The Austrian picks his words carefully when discussing the controversy over the FIA’s aborted probe into a possible conflict of interest in the Wolff household. It is clear he is still livid 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 no plans to exit Mercedes, either now or in the future.
“I’m part of this team in various functions,” he says. “I’m a co-shareholder. I’m on the board. These are things which will not change whatever executive, or non-executive, role I have. But I feel good. The risk for me is always more bore-out than burnout. And that’s why I embrace the challenges we have today, even though they sometimes feel very, very difficult to manage.”
Wolff has described the challenge of overhauling Red Bull this year as akin to climbing “Mount Everest” and even that feels like an understatement. But having got it completely wrong in 2022, doubled down with disastrous consequences in 2023, only to admit midseason that a radical redesign was required, Wolff is at least hopeful that 2024 will see Mercedes become more competitive. When we speak he has just got off the phone to Ant Davidson, the Sky Sports pundit who still acts as one of the team’s simulator drivers. “He 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 would love this to correlate to the track but we’ve seen in the last two years that this was not always the case,” he adds hastily.
Still, the hope for Mercedes fans is this could be a better season. Wolff says he is happy with the engineering rejig last year, which saw the “mega” James Allison return as technical director in place of Mike Elliott. He is happy with how Mercedes’ strategy team have adapted post-James Vowles. And he makes a point of saying that he expects his team to be a lot sharper this year in pitstops, having put more resource into areas such as wheel-locking mechanisms and axle materials. “I think the regulations, how they were laid out a few years ago, we interpreted them in a very conservative way,” he explains. “And we’ve seen other teams doing it differently. So watch this space. I think it’s going to be very different.”
Most of all, Wolff says, he is happy with his driver line-up. George Russell had a trickier second season at Brackley, but Wolff insists the 25-year-old has “absolutely met the team’s expectations”. “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 would want to have in a car.”
As for Lewis Hamilton, ask Wolff whether, at 39, he can still win that elusive eighth world title and he does not pause for breath. “The answer is clearly yes in capital letters,” he replies. “There is a reason 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 actually feels, that drives in a way that he can trust, he will be on the level that’s needed to win the championship. 39 is no age.”
The next big change in regulations is not until 2026. And it may be that Hamilton, like Wolff, has to sign another contract, taking him beyond his current two-year deal, if he wants that eighth title. But Wolff is not ruling out doing it sooner than that.
“Always believe it’s possible,” he says of whether Mercedes could actually scale Everest this year. “You cannot start the season with an attitude of ‘This is not going to be possible.’ We saw last year with McLaren, what a huge step they made with a single upgrade. We’ve signed a two year deal with Lewis, and we owe it to him, to George and to all the team to give it our full attention in 2024 and 2025. I think it’s possible.”