Toto Wolff: ‘There are times you just need to survive day by day mentally’

‘I don’t feel pressure as it’s my comfort zone,” Toto Wolff says as he prepares to lead Mercedes into the last three races of another complicated season for his once-dominant Formula One team.

“That’s not a macho sentence because I feel awful and vulnerable at other times, which is more related to life. I’ve always had mental health struggles, but that’s because of my upbringing. That’s why my professional frustration doesn’t come anywhere near those other experiences I went through.”

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The 52-year-old team principal has already opened up about his traumatic childhood and depression while revealing fresh insights into Lewis Hamilton’s departure from Mercedes – and expressed concern about the way Red Bull’s Christian Horner behaved in the bitter fallout last year between the FIA, Formula One’s governing body, and Wolff’s wife, Susie.

“We all have to carry our baggage,” he says, “and what I perceive as trauma and humiliation as a child wouldn’t move the needle for someone who grows up in Syria or takes a boat over the Channel to survive. We shouldn’t be feeling sorry for ourselves.”

Wolff will return to his bruising past, but, as a billionaire F1 boss, he reiterates that his problems are of the most privileged kind.

He steered Mercedes to eight consecutive constructors’ championships, from 2014 to 2021, but the next two years the team finish third and second. This season Mercedes will end up no better than fourth and Hamilton, who won six of his seven drivers’ championships with Wolff, is leaving for Ferrari next year.

Wolff and Hamilton joined Mercedes in 2013. Much has happened since, including Wolff buying a 30% ownership stake in the team, but next year will be very different without Hamilton. “There is an emotional side because we’ve been on this journey together,” Wolff says as the F1 circus heads to Las Vegas this week.

“The friendship will change, but not the depth of emotion. On the contrary. This will be a new friendship with Lewis.

“On the professional side, I always see benefits in change. We have new regulations, we have reshaped our organisation and we’re embarking on a new era with our senior driver [George Russell] turning 27 and the junior driver [Kimi Antonelli] being 18. We have two drivers barely older together than Lewis [who is 40 in January]. That’s very exciting.”

Remembering the moment in January when Hamilton told him he was joining Ferrari, Wolff says: “I wasn’t shocked at all. I knew this was happening a few weeks earlier when I got a phone call from Carlos Sainz [who has lost his seat at Ferrari to Hamilton] and his father. He said: ‘Something is cooking.’ I said: ‘Why would that happen before the start of the season?’

“But that same afternoon I received calls from a few other drivers that were close to Charles Leclerc [who remains at Ferrari]. Fernando Alonso too. I think it started from Leclerc knowing over the winter and then his closest allies hearing there was a seat free [at Mercedes]. I said to Susie: ‘This is happening without us officially knowing.’”

Wolff texted Frédéric Vasseur, his counterpart at Ferrari, to say: “You’re taking our driver?” When he received no response, which was unusual because he and Vasseur get on well, Wolff knew he had lost Hamilton. Did he not want to call Hamilton directly?

“I did not want to put him in a situation where he had to lie to me because at that stage the contract wasn’t signed.”

When Hamilton came to see him a couple of weeks later, without realising Wolff already knew the situation, the driver found it difficult. “I saw the pain in him to tell me,” Wolff says. “My feeling was ‘Why now? When are we announcing this?’ He said: ‘Well, it’s leaking.’”

Wolff says it spared him a far more tangled conversation with Hamilton when he might have had to tell his driver he was too old for his contract to be renewed. “I would have done it,” Wolff says quietly. “But that would have been a real horror for me and for him.”

F1 is a ruthless business, but last December Vasseur and eight other team principals came out strongly in support of Toto and Susie, the managing director of the F1 Academy, an all-female series run by the owners. The FIA announced its plans to launch an investigation into a potential conflict of interest after an unnamed source suggested Susie had shared confidential technical information with her husband. She was furious and believed a misogynistic attack had been made on her integrity.

“I can take lots of shit,” her husband says now. “I’m used to it. But if your wife is being dragged into a conflict she has nothing to do with, and her reputation is immaculate, that’s where the fun stops.

“But the response was great. I didn’t make a single phone call to any team. Fred took it into his hands and said: ‘This is just so unfair. From Guenther Steiner [the former Haas team principal] to James Vowles [the head of Williams], everybody jumped on to this. They were all ready, but for Christian, to sign a document in our support.”

Wolff suggests Horner tried to distance himself. “As far as I understand it he said: ‘I’m having my own Sky interview and I’m going to say I’m not part of it. I’m not signing the document.’ The other nine teams said: ‘Fine.’ But obviously he was advised that wouldn’t look great and he should be part of the statement.

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“In the second iteration, he tried to get the word ‘official’ in the statement. He wanted a note to say that no one [among the team principals] officially complained to the FIA. The other teams said: ‘Fine. We do our declaration and you do your own.’ At the end, he signed it.”

The FIA quickly closed its investigation but will Wolff talk to Horner? “No. I don’t think you can rely on what he says.I think [Susie] was collateral damage and lots of it was out of disrespect for her achievements as a female racing driver and as a contributor to change. It was also trying to cause shit to me by disrespecting my wife, diminishing the painful journey she went through to achieve what she did in and outside the car.”

It is in keeping with Wolff’s candour that he allowed the writer Matt Whyman to stay embedded with the team despite their recent travails. Whyman’s inside story of the past two seasons is a revealing and absorbing read and he admits early in the book that, after Mercedes’s disastrous results in testing before the first GP of the 2023 season, he expected their collaboration would be swiftly terminated.

Wolff insisted Whyman should remain. He now says: “You learn much more in adversity because this is when your culture and resilience is tested. You rarely come back from a race and say, ‘Why the hell did I win?’ We say that the days we lose are the days our competitors need to fear the most, because we learn the most.”

He argues “there are peaks and troughs which, in our world, relate to technical regulations. Over the last eight years we went through two regulatory changes where they tried to stop us [dominating F1].

“The nature of the game is you change regulations to keep racing competitive. After the last changes we didn’t get it right. If you look back in 10 years and say we finished third and second that sounds respectable. But when another team [Red Bull] won almost all the races it’s not good enough.

“I’m OK with the 2024 season because we won three races and we’ve shown respectable performances. And if we have to take fourth place this is the season to do it. The lower you’re placed in the championship, the more incremental wind tunnel time you’re allowed by the regulations for the 2026 car. We’re in a position to reap the benefits by having more development allocation.”

Wolff’s achievements were forged in adversity. “My father died when I was 15. But he was seriously ill with brain cancer for 10 years so, as a small boy, I had to take control of the situation.

“My mother wasn’t as present because she had to survive herself. It was me looking after my younger sister. I wanted to be responsible for myself, I didn’t want to be embarrassed for my parents. I wanted financial control of my life. It started when I was eight and brutally kicked in. I had no choice.”

Was he lonely as a boy in Austria? “No, I was in survival mode. There was not time to feel sorry for yourself. There was a really bad moment when I was 12 and called to the headmaster who said: ‘You’ve got to go home because your school fees are not paid.’ You go back to class, pick up your bag, explain to your sister in a 45-minute tram journey why we are out of school. She’s 10 and can’t comprehend it.

“But most of the trauma was seeing my father dying. As a boy you idolise your father and then as a teenager you need to be able to hate your father to have a balanced relationship. I couldn’t do either.”

Are his mental health problems related to such pain? “When you go through hardship as a child, and you can’t process it, it comes back. In really tough life situations – death, illness, separation – it hits me. It never has anything to do with business or sport.”

Wolff is in his comfort zone when there is a lot going on. “It’s harder if I take myself off the hamster wheel. It’s not even off-season. It’s more when we have a shut-down period for two weeks in the summer. I’m careful to keep myself busy with stuff I enjoy. I’m not a person for a month’s holiday.”

Have there been times when he found it hard to even get out of bed? “Yes, yes. There are times where you just need to survive day-by-day mentally. I had spells of it over all my adult life. My best friend killed himself when I was around 30. These things are very difficult and I think of him all the time. But you have to make peace with it.”

Wolff pauses. “I want to destigmatise mental health. That’s why I’m speaking about it.”

He smiles when I ask if he has made peace now with his struggles? “It became much easier since I went past 50. I don’t know if you read [Arthur] Schopenhauer but he basically views all life as constant suffering. The closer you get to the end of suffering, the better. I feel that relief. I’m over halfway there.”

We share a few laughs and agree to do an interview when Wolff is still at Mercedes when he is 80 and I’ve made it past 90. “After a while a certain easiness kicks in about life,” he says with a grin. “We’re not going to survive. So let’s just make the most of it.”

• Inside Mercedes F1: Life in the Fast Lane by Matt Whyman is published by Century

• In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978