Toto Wolff, the Compulsive Perfectionist Behind Mercedes’s Formula 1 Team

A few minutes before the start of the Dutch Grand Prix, held last month in a scorching sun at Zandvoort, a coastal circuit not far from Amsterdam, Toto Wolff, the principal of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team, stepped onto the grid. The Grand Prix begins when a row of five red lights over the starting line go out one by one, but for a short time before that, the track is the scene of a twenty-thousand-horsepower mob.

Each of the long-nosed unearthly machines is staffed by a mobile intensive care unit with generators, steel carts, laptops, tire blankets and uniformed mechanics in helmets and fireproof gear. Umbrellas cover the drivers’ cabins. Billionaires stalk the web. Race marshals hold clipboards in red gloves. The noise is incredible: helicopter blades, high-speed wheels, desperate howl of cars, massed emanations of the waiting crowd.

In Zandvoort, speakers pierced the sky with dance music. The afternoon was wet; the air felt saturated. Wolff was at home. He is tall, dark and Austrian. He could pass for a Sacha Baron Cohen character or someone who walks past you at the airport smelling good wearing loafers and no socks. He worked the gridiron in a white shirt emblazoned with the Mercedes star and the logos of twelve other corporate sponsors, black pants, team-issued Puma trainers and a friendly smile. He kissed people’s cheeks, touched elbows, gave impromptu TV interviews and shouted last-minute thoughts to his drivers. Somewhere in the fumes was death. Two Formula 1 drivers were killed within three years at Zandvoort in the 1970s. At one point I found myself at the pit lane when three cars came out with their red taillights flashing. The speed was like a whip.

Wolff, who is fifty years old, is the best team boss in the recent history of the fastest motorsport in the world. Formula 1’s “Formula” refers to a set of rules first introduced after the Second World War to bring some order to the desire to race dangerous cars on the tarmac of foreign cities. While Nascar is all left turns, cars that look like cars and spectator-friendly oval tracks, Formula 1 has a crazier, purer heart: the oldest tracks date back a century. Competitions last about ninety minutes. They twist, sweep and descend hills, sometimes along existing streets. Cars that began as death traps for daredevils are now paragons of extreme technology, flying algorithms that vie for advantages in hundredths of a second – the distance of a yard over a three-mile track. The sport is esoteric, but globally so. Last year’s Mexican Grand Prix attracted three hundred and seventy thousand spectators. The Singapore race goes through the city at night. (Drivers can lose six pounds from stress and sweat.) The average television audience for a Formula One race is about seventy million people—four times the size of a typical NFL game—and the best drivers earn football star salaries and lasting fame. When Ayrton Senna, a three-time world champion, was killed in a race in 1994, the Brazilian government declared three days of mourning. A million people waited in the heat to pay their respects and many spoke of their own saudade-an inexpressible state of longing for something that has disappeared.

Between 2014, when Wolff took over at Mercedes, and 2021, the team won the world championship eight years in a row – an unprecedented achievement. (In Formula 1 there is a constructors’ championship for the most successful team and a drivers’ championship, which is awarded at the end of about twenty races.) Each team has two drivers. The star of Mercedes is Lewis Hamilton, who earned about sixty-five million dollars last season. During the team’s winning streak, Hamilton won six individual world titles, bringing his career total to seven. No one has ever won eight. “I couldn’t think of a better friend. I couldn’t think of a better boss,” Hamilton told me of Wolfe.

Formula 1 is currently on the rise, especially in the United States, thanks in part to the Netflix series, Drive to Survive, which has embroidered the nerdy part of the sport with artful camerawork and bitchy insight into the lives of its characters. Wolff, who speaks five languages ​​and whose wife, Susie, is a former contestant, is one of the show’s natural stars. Of the ten team principals in the sport, only Wolff and his great rival Christian Horner, a Briton who manages the Red Bull team, have won a world championship. But unlike Horner and the rest of his peers, Wolff also co-owns his team. His one-third stake in Mercedes is conservatively valued at around five hundred million dollars. He sees himself both as a competitor and as someone who shapes the future of a multibillion-dollar business. “Other crew chiefs, and I don’t mean this in an arrogant way, are only incentivized for performance,” Wolff said. His rivals see that. “He plays a game and is always one move ahead,” one of them told me.

But this season, Wolff and Mercedes failed to win a single race. The Dutch Grand Prix was the fifteenth of the season and Mercedes’ best results so far have been a couple of second places. (In 2020, the team won thirteen of seventeen.) Hamilton, who joined Formula One as a rookie in 2007, has never gone a season without winning at least one race. Ahead of the US Grand Prix in Austin on October 23, the team was third behind Red Bull and Ferrari – its worst position in a decade. Watching Wolff and Mercedes lose their way was as disconcerting as it was refreshing, like watching Roger Federer throw his serve, the Yankees miss the playoffs, Simone Biles miss the crossbar. It is understandable to some extent. “We haven’t gone from being an eight-time world championship winning team to not being able to build cars,” Hamilton said. “We just … it’s wrong this year.

The ostensible reason was a change in the rules. Every few years, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, which has run the Grand Prix since 1906, forces teams to redesign their cars. Usually the official logic is about safety or making it easier to overtake cars, but there is almost always an unspoken motive: to disrupt the existing order of things and prevent one team from gaining a permanent advantage.

In the past, Mercedes has benefited from these changes, adapting faster than its competitors. But the 2022 reset was unusually large. One of the aims of the new rules was to reconfigure the downforce generated by the cars, reduce the amount of “dirty air” left in their wake and allow for closer racing. At a pre-season test event in Bahrain in March, Mercedes’ new car – the W13 – appeared to embody the boldest interpretation of this idea. It was leaner and more futuristic than the others. “People were watching this thinking, Wow. The Mercedes are going to blow up the field,” George Russell, the team’s other driver, told me. “Within reason, we thought so too.”

But the W13 proved capricious. Data collected in the wind tunnel or through computer modeling is not reflected on the track. At high speed, the car bounces, an effect known as porpoising. “My back is killing me!” Hamilton screamed on a long straight in Baku in June, where the floor of the car repeatedly hit the tarmac at more than two hundred miles per hour. Attempts to solve the problem only revealed more problems. “We tried and tried and failed. And I tried and I tried and I failed,” Hamilton said. Andrew Shovlin, director of track engineering at Mercedes, who has a Ph.D. in the dynamics of military logistics vehicles, compares fixing the W13 to peeling an onion. “Even the aerodynamic bounce manifests itself in about three different mechanisms,” he said.

The other reason for Mercedes’ poor performance was a sense of injustice and doom. In 2021, with five laps to go before the final race of the season, Hamilton led the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on his way to an eighth individual world title and sole greatness. Hamilton had won the previous three races; he had the car on the line. “He was undefeated and we were undefeated,” Wolff said.

On the fifty-third lap in Abu Dhabi, the race was interrupted by a crash and then a safety car took over. (In Formula One, when there is danger on the track, a sports car with flashing lights leads a majestic, confused procession of cars until the danger is removed.) Under normal circumstances, the Grand Prix would have finished behind the safety car, with the order of the race intact. But the race director, an FIA official named Michael Massi, took the decision to divert a group of cars to allow a final lap of the race between Hamilton and co-driver Max Verstappen of Red Bull. The drivers were tied on points in the world championship standings. Verstappen was on new tyres; he pulled past Hamilton and took the title. The FIA ​​later concluded that Massi had made a “human error” and he resigned from his post. But the result remained.