‘I’m staring into the abyss’: How Toto Wolff drives Mercedes’ F1 team

It’s best not to bad-mouth your colleagues if you work for Toto Wolff. The CEO, principal, and part-owner of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team has no time for back-biting or office politics.

“If I get an email from someone saying something about another person, I’m just forwarding it to everyone,” he says. “I don’t accept arrogance. I don’t accept being untruthful. I value humility, loyalty, and integrity. I am 100% transparent with everyone.”

What Wolff calls his “tough love” approach helped steer Mercedes to a record eight consecutive Constructors’ Championship titles between 2014 and 2021. After ceding its lead, first to Red Bull and then to McLaren, his team is atop the standings again and favored to win the 2026 season.

The stakes are high, with victory on the track bringing in prize money and enhancing the team’s attractiveness to sponsors like Petronas and Microsoft. Mercedes brought in about $865 million in 2025, including its share of the sport’s broadcast revenues, and it could become the first F1 team to pass $1 billion in revenue this year.

Wolff’s competitive intensity has meanwhile made him a much-memed star of , the Netflix series that has turned F1 drivers into pop-culture figures and helped to transform the motorsport’s popularity, especially with younger audiences. Wolff’s success with drivers like Kimi Antonelli, the 19-year-old who is favored to become the youngest world champion ever, has also made him a sought-after voice on leadership, even though he says he has trouble with the term.

“There is a historical context that … the German translation of leader is ,” Wolff explains. But the bigger reason that he dislikes the word leader is because it implies that just one person is the deciding factor in an organization. “I can’t stand organizational charts where somebody puts me on top of a page with some kind of reporting lines downhill, like roots into the ground, because I don’t perceive myself as that person.”

He doesn’t struggle with decision-making, he clarifies; his push to be independent as a child, after watching his father suffer with terminal brain cancer, taught him to make decisions early. Instead, he strives to avoid calling the shots without being in alignment with his colleagues.

“I’d like to develop an organization where the collective is so strong, [and] feels so empowered and safe, that a healthy debate can be held to come to the best possible outcome,” he explains. “That doesn’t mean that I’m seeking consensus, but it means that the most compelling argument is going to prevail.”

Arguments are “tough-love moments” that Wolff encourages, though he draws a distinction between dissent and confrontation. “Unless you have a loose screw, confrontation is not a nice state of mind,” he says. But a clash of opinions between two talented individuals with the right values can be positive because open debate shapes better decisions.

The key is to approach such situations “with curiosity rather than with combat,” he says. It is instinctive to want to push back when challenged, but instead you can ask why an intelligent, competent colleague has such a different opinion from your own. Understanding the other side of an argument is critical for CEOs to hone their own points of view, he adds.

Despite Wolff’s belief in constructive tension, he screens out people who are aggressive, erratic, or manipulative when hiring. And he has preached a zero-tolerance approach for prima donnassince he arrived from Williams F1 in 2013, at a moment when Lewis Hamilton was Mercedes’ most famous driver.

“He was already a superstar, I was new, and I said this team [does not have] two superstars; this team has two-and-a-half thousand superstars,” Wolff recalls, referring to his staff. “I make no difference in my behavior, my respect, my criticism, whether you have 10 million followers on Instagram or whether you are an anonymous person, because they are all the same for me.”

Business leaders perennially look to the sports world for lessons in building winning teams, and Wolff thinks the comparison between running an F1 franchise and a mainstream corporation holds up well enough. In both cases, the CEO is trying to build a group of talented people and align them behind shared objectives.

What is “a little bit easier” in a sports team is that there is no question about whether you have succeeded or failed, he says. The stopwatch never lies, and when Mercedes wins, “that’s a kind of direct gratification.” When it loses, “what’s the opposite of gratification? Pain.”

But reporting corporate earnings four times a year for investors to critique sounds like “a walk in the park” to Wolff, compared to the scrutiny he faces at F1. “We report 24 times a year, and if we’ve won on the weekend, Mercedes is the greatest team of all time,” he says, channeling the feedback he gets from the sport’s backseat drivers. “If we lose, literally a week later, [some fans will say,] Mercedes is on the way down, and Ferrari has the upper hand, and Toto Wolff should resign.”

He feels lucky that F1 has become so culturally relevant, but it means that “everybody” has an opinion on his team’s performance, and on his own judgment. “Being under the magnifying glass is a curse and a blessing. The blessing is that we all love working in a sport that’s so popular. The curse is that you’re getting heavily scrutinized and criticized — for the right and the wrong reasons.”

Wolff has learned not to let his emotions swing with the fortunes of his team, and says he takes inspiration from a line in Rudyard Kipling’s poem , which he pulls up on his phone: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you / If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too,” he begins. Then he admits he cannot remember which phrase inspired him most, “because that whole thing is so good.”

Wolff, who drove competitively in the 1990s before becoming an investor, says Mercedes has a good car this season, a strong organization, and two drivers in Antonelli and George Russell who he would choose over any others. But the car’s reliability has been uneven so he is not allowing himself to relax.

“My mindset when winning is always that I’m staring into the abyss. You know, it could be all over tomorrow,” he says. He enjoys each victory in the moment, “but the next day it’s all gone because the worry of losing kicks in.”

That attitude troubled colleagues like Aldo Costa, Mercedes’ former engineering director, who told Wolff the team wasn’t celebrating its triumphs enough. His response: “Celebrating a success is looking backwards because that’s already happened, and we’re already in the future, and that means nothing’s been won yet.”

But he reconsidered, and now allows more room to mark each win, pulling people together for a team photo on the track rather than letting everyone dash off to catch flights home. On the Monday after a winning race, Wolff will convene a town-hall meeting where everyone gets a commemorative T-shirt and a glass of champagne.

His previous approach, he concluded, was making his team “more miserable than other people because the short moments of joy are so short.”

Mercedes’ eight-year winning streak was cut short in 2021 when Lewis Hamilton lost the drivers’ championship to Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. It was a moment when “I allowed myself to doubt myself and the people” behind the Mercedes car, Wolff admits.

Rather than wallow in doubt for too long, he recalled a previous chairman’s comment that F1 is “physics and not mystics,” and concluded that Mercedes was no longer the engineering leader it thought it was. In an effort to get the organization to confront reality, he asked his colleagues a series of questions: Did Mercedes have the best people in the best positions? Was it setting the right objectives? Did it know where it had gone wrong, and why? “These are the fundamental questions that you need to constantly ask yourself,” he says.

Five years after Mercedes’ winning streak was interrupted, Wolff pauses when describing his feelings about its comeback. “What’s a smaller word than revenge? The kind of satisfaction of proving everybody wrong.”

Asked what role Mercedes has played in F1’s newfound popularity, Wolff says it has a formidable brand and has tried to be a responsible stakeholder for the sport. “The drama” of Hamilton’s 2024 exit from the team and Mercedes’ gamble on the young Antonelli have also “provided good content,” he notes.

The renown that the sport’s higher profile has brought him has made him no less self-aware, he insists. “I have a wife who very much keeps me on track,” he says, and “a group of people that I work closely with [who I] have always encouraged to tell me if I’ve been an idiot or not.” He would have no problem stepping back as team principal and CEO if he thought somebody else could do the job better.

“This is again the thinking of the abyss,” he says. He has seen people who “flirted so much with their own fame and thought they were different and better, and [they] just stumbled and failed. So I’d rather stay balanced.”

People may treat him differently because he is often on TV, he says, but fame doesn’t have a lot of benefits — “other than getting a better table in a restaurant.”

• Kimi Antonelli’s prodigious success is in part the product of Mercedes’ system for identifying and developing young talent,The Athletic writes. The team first spotted the Italian when he was racing go-karts at age 11, and supported him through his F4 racing career before elevating him to F1. Mercedes’ young driver program is “much more focused on the human side rather than the technical” aspects of racing, the program’s head said. “We are not building robots.”