For Toto Wolff, this is the calm before the storm. And calm, of course, is a relative concept. We’re speaking exactly a month from the first day of the Formula One season, and the small talk has gotten big. There’s mention of dozens of destinations and stop-offs in short order, long-haul flights and hotels here and there and a quick zip to Bahrain for some final technical testing before the season proper begins.
All morning, the lobby of the Edition Hotel on Berners Street has had the feeling of a theatre’s green room on the first night. Or perhaps just the lobby of a hotel where a Formula One team has descended en masse with black jackets, highly engineered suitcases and glowing power banks plugged permanently into their phones. These are the articulated pistons and mechanical sprockets of some unfeasibly slick and powerful machine. And all the while, there’s the sense that someone important is about to descend.
Formula One seasons have the air of presidential campaigns to them. A multi-month tour of big decisions, scattered wins, losses, setbacks, breakthroughs, big money backers fused with a whirl of press conferences, precise technical analysis and armchair scrutiny. There’s certainly some - thing presidential about Toto Wolff. Barack Obama – who has, to my knowledge, never successfully run a Formula One team – used to have only two suit and shirt options in his wardrobe to reduce decision fatigue in a day that would be filled with big choices. Similarly, Toto Wolff eats the exact same meals every day: pumpernickel bread with butter and ham for breakfast; chicken breast with tomato salad for lunch; the same for dinner. Then there’s the bearing, the manner: tall, stately, with excellent posture; a calm presence; a relaxed and genuine smile. Good handshake. Classy. Upright. Never had an off day in his life.
Sunspel jacket, £445, sunspel.com; Polo shirt, Toto's own; L'Estrange trousers, £129. lestrange.com; IWC Schaffhausen Big Pilot’s Watch Shock Absorber XPL Toto Wolff x Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One™️ Team, £79,700, iwc.com
Except that’s not true. It couldn’t be true, of course. No man is an island, and nor is he a president. (Even recent presidents aren’t really presidents, you may have noticed.) One of the most powerful things that Toto Wolff has done during his long and very successful tenure as the team principal, CEO and co-owner of Mercedes is talk openly about his struggles with mental health. He has been honest and transparent about his bleak periods of depression. Wolff remembers attending a party during his earliest days in the sport and leaving feeling absolutely destroyed – thinking to himself that surely these sleek, laughing, debonair people on the terrace with the large format champagnes had never had a dark day in their lives, and thus that he could never be like them. He realises now that this is all nonsense, of course, and that everyone is struck by their own mental health problems at various times. His intention has been to show the truth away from the champagne terrace, and to make others aware that even hyper-successful people can be unwell and heavily burdened. His own challenges in his childhood, he has said, with the illness and death of his father at a young age. It has followed him throughout his first successful career – that of a venture capitalist in the late nineties and early noughties. It seems almost unthinkable that it has stayed with him across his second, even-more-successful career at Mercedes, too, where his team has dominated the sport for around a decade, with Sir Lewis Hamilton in the driving seat. But of course it has. Perhaps this is what gives Wolff his zen-like equanimity that emanates from him during our short conversation in a busy hotel conference suite on some Monday mid-morning.
There’s a sense of stoic perspective at play – never congratulating himself or his team too much, and never berating himself or his team too much either. The Scottish footballer and Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly famously said how, “People think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that”. I suspect Wolff would appreciate the joke, but dismiss the premise. “We drive racing cars around in circles to entertain,” Wolff says with a soft smile. The middle of the storm – the eye at the mathematical centre of the cyclone – is almost always the quietest place of all.
Joe: It’s a month before the season starts. If you look into your crystal ball, what do you feel in your gut is going to be the outcome?
Toto: I trust my gut. There are more nerves going from here upwards than from the brain downwards. It can give you a good indication. However, I’m a glass half-empty person, so I’m always sceptical about potential outcomes. As this is the last year of these regulations, I don’t know what to expect. We need to be realistic and careful with our assumptions and predictions.
Last year, we were between the quickest and fourth quickest, and the same with all the other teams. We had dominant victories like the one in Las Vegas and we also had some underperformances. So, let’s see. If we’re doing a good job until the first race, hopefully we will be competitive.
Joe: One of the things that I think a lot of people admire about you is your sense of perspective on everything. You don’t celebrate your wins too wildly and you don’t commiserate the losses too heavily either…
Toto: I think it’s important to be stable and provide a steady shoulder while a lot of people oscillate between exuberance and depression depending on the race result. I try to not do that. It’s almost like the contrary. I try to keep more to myself after a race win. I don’t go to the podiums anymore. This is not my thing, but I’ll be alone in the garage.
Joe: And what’s that moment like when you’re alone? If you’ve won, are you secretly celebrating by yourself?
Toto: I’m not celebrating, but there is a contentment that I have and I’ll call my wife. I don’t need to be with a big cheery crowd. Meanwhile, on the other side, when we have underperformed, this is where I feel I need to be with the team and be more upbeat. And in the past, that would have been the opposite. I would have been extremely happy when we won and very frustrated or sad when we lost. And I think this has turned the other way around for the benefit of the team.
Joe: Why do you think that is? Was there a turning point when you realised that you could flip it on its head and it might be even more effective?
Toto: I think I always work with pressure, but there came a certain point two years ago when it was going really bad that I felt that my pressure is not helping the mission.
Joe: During the season, do you believe in the idea of a work-life balance where you can switch off completely?
Toto: I think work-life balance – does that really exist? Or is it all life? I think if you’re miserable in your work and you need to balance and call the other thing life, for me, that kind of doesn’t work.
Joe: It’s funny that we feel like we always have to put those two in opposition.
Toto: I guess if people hate their job, they’re looking forward to the weekend and holidays, then this is life and the rest is just earning mode. And unfortunately, so many people have no choice. What I’m trying to do is maintain that balance between decompressing and spending more time with the family rather than, on the other side, which is only ever travelling.
I try to literally have that every week. Sometimes it’s just a day or two, when I’m coming back from a race week and I try to have a Monday that’s a bit calmer. I’ll stay and work from home and pick my son up from school, things that I don’t get to do when I’m all in, in the season.
Sunspel jacket, £445, sunspel.com; Polo shirt, Toto's own; L'Estrange trousers, £129. lestrange.com; IWC Schaffhausen Big Pilot’s Watch Shock Absorber XPL Toto Wolff x Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One™️ Team, £79,700, iwc.com
IWC Schaffhausen Big Pilot’s Watch Shock Absorber XPL Toto Wolff x Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One™️ Team, £79,700, iwc.com
Joe: I know that something that’s very important to you is routine. You eat the same thing most days. Is that still true?
Toto: Yeah, that is particularly true especially when I’m travelling. I know what’s good for me and I don’t experiment a lot with foods because when you’re far away, you don’t want to have some kind of bug. And on the other side, at home, it’s pretty much along the same lines.
Joe: Do you have any particular pre-race rituals on a race morning?
Toto: Absolutely. On the weekend it’s so frantic, and it’s important to have a certain routine. And my routine is like a machine in the morning. I get ready, I have my assistant and my driver who meet me at the hotel, we go to the track and we have our first strategy meeting that I’m participating in online from my office. I have breakfast, then the second meeting with the driver, strategy meeting with the drivers, and then, generally, I keep the Sunday free to have more spontaneous meetings, whether with internal colleagues or pop-up meetings with partners or any other Formula One business.
Then when the cars go out of the garage to their installation labs and then onto the grid, this is where I’m completely alone by myself in my office. Sometimes Bradley, my head of strategic communications, is with me or my wife, but it’s literally 45 minutes of total blackout. And then I go to the garage, sometimes on the grid, but crowds are not my thing, so not always. And then it rolls.
Joe: What’s happening in those 45 minutes? Are you listening to music? Are you doing press-ups?
Toto: No, I think this is another time to have a little bite to eat; also, the same thing, an espresso and some chocolates. That’s the ritual.
Joe: Do you remember what your first automotive memory was?
Toto: I came from a financially difficult environment and family, and there’s a few moments that I can remember as being very special. A friend of my father’s had a black Porsche Turbo. I asked whether I could ride in the car on a Sunday, and I did that. And I still know exactly where it was and how it was. Then a few years later, again, a father of a friend had a Mercedes 500 SEC AMG, until today a dream car for me. So, it was more road cars that fascinated me rather than race cars.
Joe: You drove and raced to a pretty good level yourself. For someone who’s never raced cars, what’s the feeling of doing that like?
Toto: I think it’s different for everyone. For me, it was driving a machine on the very edge, controlling something that you actually needed to take beyond control in order to be quick, and deal with a certain degree of risk, which I have never done outside of a racing car. As well as that, it’s about calculated risk. I know what the worst case is, but in a racing car, you don’t know what the worst case is, and it could be potentially lethal. So, your state of mind is completely in the situation. You have no capacity to think about your life or anything else because cognitively you need all the bandwidth to be able to drive this car. That is something that fascinated me.
I guess everything that you’re trying to do well, that needs lots of brain power, puts you in the same kind of meditative state. Kitesurfing is something that I did in the past and that was something that takes all your brain effort in order to do it well. I guess wherever you’re trying to push the limits and you’re trying to be as good as you can, whether it’s ping-pong or kitesurfing. I do freediving, for example, also. You don’t think about anything else when you’re doing that. Racing cars was the same when I did it.
“I think whoever is successful and doesn’t admit that luck was on their side at certain stages is just untruthful”
Joe: Freediving – that can be pretty risky as well, right?
Toto: Well, it’s a calculated risk because you need to know what you do. There are certain safety measures that you have to always respect because it’s the water and I tried to adhere to them.
Joe: Before this, you had a career in finance, VC and private equity. What was that like? Are there parallels between the two, and did you take a lot from that world into the one you’re currently in?
Toto: So, when my racing stopped, I had to have a bit more of a conventional job. It was the days of the first tech boom and the internet hype in the end of the 1990s, and I stumbled into this investment world and venture capital, but it was more venture than capital. That company grew because we hit the timing right, and I spent the next 20 years being focused on growing the company.
Joe: That’s interesting. The timing was obviously important, and you were speaking just then about calculated risk. Are you someone who also believes that luck is an important element in success?
Toto: The calculated risk formula for me is that I take a risk if I can live with the worst outcome. If the worst case doesn’t affect my life to a degree that I would dislike, then I can choose to take the risk. I think whoever is successful and doesn’t admit that luck was on their side at certain stages is just untruthful. Doors open at a certain time and you’ve got to be there to walk through them, but it’s also luck. Timing, in a way, is luck. Meeting the right people is luck. Now, I’m not saying that everybody’s career is purely down to luck. You’ve got to be open for things to happen to yourself in terms of opportunity, to grab opportunities when they are there.
Joe: So that was your first career. And then the second one is what we’re obviously talking about today. Do you think there’s room for a third chapter in your life? Is there some unexplored industry that you’d like to also go into at some point?
Toto: I’m 50 and a bit now. There’s nothing that I would want to do differently to what I do today: running the team; being a co-owner; having the opportunity to look long-term and continue to develop it. On the other side, I keep an open mind on what’s happening in the world of finance, politics as an entertainment factor, the social experiment that’s happening at the moment in the US.
This morning on my way to London on the flight, I thought maybe in the future about having some kind of activity in private equity in the sports field. That could be something that could be interesting, but it wouldn’t change anything around my ownership of the team. Maybe there could be a point where I think that my contribution is not good enough anymore and somebody else can run with the ball faster than I can. But I would nevertheless remain a shareholder of the team while also concentrating on something in the investment world.
Joe: I’d love to ask you about the gorgeous watch on your wrist that has been grabbing my eye throughout this conversation, in a very chic shade of Petronas green…
Toto: So, we have a great sparring partner with IWC and with Chris Granger, who is the CEO, and he is always up for adventures. A few years ago, we designed a watch together that was the first limited-edition Toto Wolff watch, and that was a success, a perpetual calendar.
After that we thought, let’s do something even more adventurous. So we took the shock absorber watch, which can sustain 20,000Gs, and we felt that, because I have a history of being annoyed in the garage and then using my fist, that I needed a watch that can sustain a lot of Gs. Then we gave it a spectacular look away from racing green, and utilised the Petronas green, which has become the embodiment of Mercedes racing. And, yeah, that’s a limited edition we’re doing now, which we’ve launched today. I’m proud – the design process between Chris and myself and our teams – that’s something I really enjoy.
Joe: What has your life in Formula One taught you about life away from it?
Toto: We’re blessed to be in a sport that’s growing, attracts a lot of attention, and provides opportunities. We need to carry that holy grail of a sport carefully. On the other side, you return home, or you come back to your other business activities, and Formula One is just Formula One. We drive racing cars around in circles to entertain, and it’s become a business because we generate return on investment for our partners by showing them to audiences or telling a narrative. But then there’s so much else happening in the world, and when you come back on planet Earth after a race weekend, you realise it’s just Formula One – it’s not changing the world.
Joe: Do you have a personal motto or a mantra that you carry around with you?
Toto: I read it somewhere, so it’s plagiarism to a certain degree. “Play hard, forgive quickly, and apologise when you’re wrong.”
Now, read our interview with F1 star Oscar Piastri...
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