A few minutes before the start of the Dutch Grand Prix, which was held last month in baking sunshine at Zandvoort, a beachside racetrack within commuting distance of Amsterdam, Toto Wolff, the principal of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team, walked out onto the starting grid. A Grand Prix begins when a row of five red lights above the start line is extinguished, but, for a short time before, the track is a twenty-thousand-horsepower mob scene.
Each of the unearthly, long-nosed machines is attended by a mobile I.C.U. of generators, steel trolleys, laptops, tire blankets, and uniformed mechanics in crash helmets and flameproof gear. Umbrellas shroud the drivers’ cockpits. Billionaires stalk the grid. Race marshals hold clipboards in red gloves. The noise is beyond belief: helicopter blades, high-speed wheel guns, the desperate howls of the cars, the massed emanations of the waiting crowd.
In Zandvoort, loudspeakers laced the sky with dance music. The afternoon was humid; the air felt saturated. Wolff was at home. He is tall, dark, and Austrian. He could pass for a Sacha Baron Cohen character or for someone who breezes past you in the airport, smelling good, wearing loafers and no socks. He worked the grid in a white shirt emblazoned with the Mercedes star and the logos of twelve other corporate sponsors, black pants, team-issued Puma sneakers, lovable smile. He kissed people’s cheeks, touched elbows, gave impromptu TV interviews, and yelled last-minute thoughts to his drivers. Somewhere in the fumes was death. Two Formula 1 drivers were killed in the span of three years at Zandvoort in the seventies. At one point, I found myself by the pit lane when three cars leaped out, red tail-lights flashing. The speed was like a whip.
Wolff, who is fifty, is the best team boss in the recent history of the world’s fastest motorsport. The “formula” of Formula 1 refers to a set of rules, first enshrined after the Second World War, to bring some order to the urge to race dangerous cars on the asphalt of foreign cities. Whereas Nascar is all left turns, cars that look like cars, and spectator-friendly oval tracks, Formula 1 has a madder, purer heart: the oldest courses date from a century ago. Races last around ninety minutes. They twist, sweep, and go down hills, sometimes on existing streets. The cars, which started out as death traps for daredevils, are now specimens of extreme technology, flying algorithms that fight for advantages of a hundredth 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 runs through the city at night. (Drivers can shed six pounds in stress and sweat.) The average television audience for a Formula 1 race is around seventy million people—four times that of the typical N.F.L. game—and the best drivers earn soccer-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 saudade—an inexpressible state of longing for something that is gone.
Between 2014, when Wolff took charge of 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, awarded at the end of some twenty races.) Each team has two drivers. Mercedes’s star is Lewis Hamilton, who earned around 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 Wolff.
Formula 1 is currently surging in popularity, particularly in the United States, in part because of a Netflix series, “Drive to Survive,” which has embroidered the nerdery of the sport with artful camerawork and bitchy insight into the lives of its protagonists. Wolff, who speaks five languages and whose wife, Susie, is a former racing driver, is one of the show’s natural stars. Of the ten team principals in the sport, only Wolff and his archrival, Christian Horner, a Briton who runs the Red Bull team, have ever won a world championship. But, unlike Horner and the rest of his peers, Wolff is also a co-owner of his team. His one-third stake in Mercedes is conservatively valued at around five hundred million dollars. He sees himself simultaneously as a competitor and as someone who is shaping the future of a multibillion-dollar business. “The other team principals, and I don’t mean this in an arrogant way, are incentivized for performance only,” Wolff said. His rivals see this. “He’s playing a game and he is always one move in advance,” one of them told me.
But this season Wolff and Mercedes have failed to win a single race. The Dutch Grand Prix was the fifteenth of the season, and Mercedes’s best results so far were a couple of second-place finishes. (In 2020, the team won thirteen out of seventeen.) Hamilton, who joined Formula 1 as a rookie in 2007, has never gone a season without winning at least one race. Ahead of the U.S. Grand Prix, in Austin, on October 23rd, the team was languishing in third place, behind Red Bull and Ferrari—its worst position in a decade. Seeing Wolff and Mercedes lose their way has been as disconcerting as it has been refreshing, like watching Roger Federer shank his serve, the Yankees miss the playoffs, Simone Biles miss the beam. It is understandable, up to a point. “We’ve not gone from being an eight-time-winning world-championship 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 overseen Grand Prix racing since 1906, forces the teams to redesign their cars. Normally, the official logic has to do with safety, or with making it easier for cars to overtake one another, but there is almost always an unspoken motive: to upset the existing order of things and to stop one team from gaining a permanent advantage.
In the past, Mercedes profited from these changes, adapting faster than its rivals. But the 2022 reset was unusually far-reaching. One of the aims of the new rules was to reconfigure the downforce generated by the cars, to reduce the amount of “dirty air” left in their wakes and to allow for closer racing. At a preseason testing event in Bahrain, in March, Mercedes’s new car—the W13—appeared to embody the boldest interpretation of this idea. It was skinnier and more futuristic than the rest. “People were looking at that thinking, Wow. Mercedes are going to blow the field away,” George Russell, the team’s other driver, told me. “Within reason, we thought that as well.”
But the W13 proved capricious. Data collected in the wind tunnel, or through computer modelling, didn’t pan out on the track. At high speeds, the car bounced, an effect known as porpoising. “My back is killing me!” Hamilton yelled on a long straight in Baku, in June, where the floor of the car repeatedly hit the asphalt at more than two hundred miles per hour. Attempts to resolve the issue only uncovered more problems. “We’ve tried and tried and failed. And tried and tried and failed,” Hamilton said. Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’s trackside-engineering director, who has a Ph.D. in the dynamics of military logistics vehicles, compared fixing the W13 to peeling an onion. “Even the aerodynamic bouncing manifests itself in about three different mechanisms,” he said.
The other reason for Mercedes’s poor performance was a sense of injustice and doom. In 2021, with five laps remaining in the final race of the season, Hamilton was leading the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, on his way to an eighth individual world title and solitary greatness. Hamilton had won the previous three races; he had the car on a string. “He was unbeatable and we were unbeatable,” Wolff said.
On lap fifty-three in Abu Dhabi, the race was interrupted by a crash, and then a safety car took over. (In Formula 1, when there is a hazard on the track, a sports car with flashing lights leads a stately, jumbled procession of cars, until the danger is cleared.) Under normal circumstances, the Grand Prix would have finished behind the safety car, with the race order intact. But the race director, an F.I.A. official named Michael Masi, made the decision to divert a group of cars to enable a final lap of racing between Hamilton and the second-place driver, Max Verstappen, of Red Bull. The drivers were equal in points in the world-championship standings. Verstappen was on fresh tires; he slipped past Hamilton and took the title. The F.I.A. later concluded that Masi had made a “human error,” and he left his post. But the result stood.
Whenever Abu Dhabi came up in conversation, Wolff talked himself up into a rage and then slowly talked himself down again. “How much injustice is happening in the world every day on a terrible scale, human tragedies?” he said. “I’m finding peace with myself.” But Mercedes hasn’t won a race since. “For Toto, it was more than a disaster,” Frédéric Vasseur, the team principal of Alfa Romeo, and one of Wolff’s closest friends in the sport, said.
One evening in Zandvoort, I sat with Wolff in a corner of the team’s motor home. European house music played at a low volume. Beautiful people walked past outside. Wolff occasionally knocked on the tinted windows in greeting, but people had a hard time seeing who it was. He spoke in somewhat Nietzschean terms about the season so far. Wolff likes aphorisms about the necessity of failure. He struggles with depression and has been seeing a psychiatrist for almost twenty years. During his team’s long winning streak, he often talked about what was then an infrequent experience of learning from setbacks. “You rarely come back from a race weekend where you’ve won and you say, ‘Why the fuck did we win?’ ” he told me. “But, you know, it’s really deep when you’re losing.” I asked Wolff to describe his feelings about the W13. “In the moment,” he said, “I hate it.”
The history of Formula 1 says that, once a winning team loses its way, it might never recover. At the start of this century, Ferrari, the most successful racing team of all time, won six consecutive championships under Ross Brawn, a legendary technical director, until it, too, was derailed by rule changes. The weekend before the Dutch Grand Prix, Mercedes had endured a horrible race at Spa, in Belgium. Hamilton crashed on the first lap; Russell finished fourth. During qualifying—when drivers compete to set the fastest lap time, and thus determine their starting position—the Mercedes cars ran almost two seconds per lap slower than Red Bull’s car driven by Verstappen. Two seconds is geological time in Formula 1. Valleys form.
Wolff has, in a way, been waiting for this moment ever since he took over at Mercedes. I asked him if it was a relief that the slump was finally here, and no longer an imagined downfall. Wolff feared that he was adapting too well to losing. “I’m not sleepless,” he said. “I’m not. But, at the same time, it frightens me that I’m not sleepless. Has my ambition gone? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Not at all.” An old friend of Wolff’s explained to me that he was unzufrieden—unsatisfied—with himself, whatever the situation. Seen that way, losing was not so different from winning. “It’s this ambivalence in me,” Wolff said, of finding that he was able to cope. “On one side, it’s really good. I’m surviving it. On the other side, I don’t want to have this feeling.”
The car was quicker at Zandvoort. The track returned to the Grand Prix calendar only last year, after a thirty-six-year absence, as a home race for Verstappen, whose father, Jos, was also a famous Dutch driver. About a hundred thousand people trooped into the grandstands each day to drink beer, perform the wave, and join in great wordless roars that, whenever Verstappen drove by, briefly overwhelmed the unending, choral whines of the cars. But the course was short and twisty, with banked corners, and these features played to the strengths of the Mercedes car.
Hamilton and Russell qualified to start from the fourth and sixth places on the grid, and, in a virtual meeting on the morning of the race, Mercedes’s engineers outlined a possible strategy to win. One of the W13’s few advantages, relative to the quicker cars of Red Bull and Ferrari, was that its tires tended to keep their speed for longer. Pit stops and tire changes have been a tactical puzzle in motor racing for more than a hundred years. (At the first Grand Prix, at Le Mans, in 1906, mechanics slashed off worn tires with knives.) After running simulations of the race all night at the team’s headquarters, in Brackley, England, Joey McMillan, a senior strategist, explained to the drivers that, if they used slower but longer-lasting hard tires, they would have to stop only once during the race—compared with two likely stops for their rivals—giving the team a slim chance to secure its first victory of the year. McMillan pulled up a screen with twenty lines (representing the twenty cars in the race) and showed their likely progression, with Hamilton’s Mercedes just hanging on to first place at the end.
Wolff’s voice came on the call. The idiom of Formula 1 is a Ph.D.-level patter of ride heights, tire-degradation curves, strat modes, and gurney flaps. Wolff was a racing driver before he dropped out of college. On race weekends, he sees himself as a sparring partner for the engineers. He asks blunt questions and states his fears. Often, he advocates for the drivers. “I’m a translator,” he told me. “He’s an out-and-out racer,” Hamilton said. In the meeting, Wolff addressed Hamilton and Russell: “Are you two O.K. with that?,” referring to the plan McMillan had outlined. “If we see the opportunity for a win and we take a risk . . .”
“Of course,” Russell replied. It is his first season on the team. He has never won a Grand Prix.
Hamilton paused. He is, by nature, an introvert. He has won a hundred and three Grand Prix races—twelve more than any other driver.
“Er . . . I suppose so,” he said. “Let’s see how it is.”
The starting lights went out. The cars jostled away. Unlike most team principals, who sit with a clutch of strategists and engineers on the pit wall—a macho zone, right next to the track—Wolff perches at a desk in the team garage. He has no active role during the race. “I give input, sometimes I’m more firm,” he said. “But they’re still flying the airplane.” The pit-wall team doesn’t watch the cars go around. They keep their eyes on churning columns of numbers, like traders in a Wall Street boiler room: lap times, splits, telemetry graphs, a bunch of G.P.S. dots, whizzing around the track. “They are living in the data world,” Wolff said. “But there’s a human in the data.”
For the first two-thirds of the race, the Mercedes plan worked perfectly. Hamilton and Russell moved to the front, while the cars around them stopped for fresh tires. “I might be dreaming,” Wolff said over the radio. With twenty-four laps to go, Verstappen was back in the lead. But he was only eleven seconds ahead of Hamilton and had to stop again—meaning that Hamilton would have another chance to overtake and hold on for the win. “Just keep pulling him toward you,” Peter Bonnington, Hamilton’s race engineer, told him. On Wolff’s screen, the colored lines of the computer model updated constantly, fluctuating between a Hamilton and a Verstappen victory.
“This sport is never going to give you perfect information,” Wolff told me later. On lap forty-eight, a car belonging to AlphaTauri, the eighth-ranked team in the championship, stuttered to a stop. The interruption led to a “virtual safety car,” a period of the race in which drivers have to slow down and are not allowed to overtake one another. Verstappen used the opportunity to switch his tires, and Mercedes’s tactical advantage was lost. “That V.S.C. stuffed us,” Hamilton said. A few laps later, another breakdown led to the appearance of an actual safety car. During these suspended passages in a race, the team radio is a cacophony of requests, calculations, and controlled panic. Verstappen changed his tires again, putting on soft tires—the quickest of the lot. Russell changed his, too. “Fucking good work!” someone yelled over the radio. “What did we do?” Wolff asked.
When the race re-started, Hamilton was in the lead, but on old, hard tires. “It’s going to be difficult to stop Verstappen,” Wolff murmured. With shades of Abu Dhabi, the Red Bull driver overtook Hamilton again, on the main straight, in front of his home crowd, and pulled away. “You fucked me over!” Hamilton shouted at his engineers. “I can’t tell you how pissed I am right now.” A few laps later, Russell passed him as well. Hamilton finished fourth, outside the podium places. Russell came in second, his best result for Mercedes.
Afterward, the air was dense with orange flares. Verstappen sprayed the customary champagne. A sea mist was coming in, and Red Bull stunt planes turned loops over the beach. Hamilton smiled regretfully through his TV interviews. “The emotions were just out of control—it was so close,” he said. “We haven’t had a win for so long and all of a sudden we were right there.” I caught up with Wolff in his office in the motor home. He was changing out of his race-day uniform. “That was great fun,” he said. “But you need to always put yourself in the shoes of the driver. . . . Lewis is not in a great place.” Over all, it had been Mercedes’s best weekend of the season; the W13 had been competitive at last. But Wolff sensed that losing had its uses, still. “Emotionally,” he said, “maybe this win would have come too early.”
One of Wolff’s heroes is Alfred Neubauer, who, in the nineteen-twenties, invented the role of racing-team manager. Neubauer helped create the Silver Arrows, Mercedes’s factory team, which raced in unpainted aluminum cars. In 1926, Neubauer came up with a system of colored flags, numbered signals, and hand gestures to communicate with drivers during a race. The sport was barely a sport. Drivers rode with their mechanics and eschewed seat belts, preferring to be thrown clear in a crash. In July, 1928, Neubauer used his flags and signals at a Grand Prix for the first time, at the Nürburgring, a very long, arduous track in the Eifel Mountains, south of the Rhine. “The tremendous pace began to tell,” Neubauer wrote, in a bracing account of racing from that period:
On the fourth lap, Ernst von Halle, a German amateur driver, rolled his car and suffered a contused lung. He died soon afterward, at the age of twenty-three. On the fifth, a Bugatti, driven by Čeněk Junek, a Czech, somersaulted through the air, killing him on impact. Rudi Caracciola, Mercedes’s star driver, passed out briefly from the engine heat. The team’s veteran, Christian Werner, had his shoulder dislocated by the force of holding the wheel. Neubauer revived him during a pit stop with fortified wine, black coffee, and the yolk of a raw egg. “It worked wonders,” Neubauer wrote. Mercedes came in first.
Neubauer possessed, in his own description, a towering rage. But he had a special love of drivers. Under his leadership, Mercedes dominated the sport twice, in the thirties and the early fifties. (The Formula 1 championship dates from 1950.) The legends of the Silver Arrows included Caracciola; Juan Manuel Fangio, an Argentinean; and Stirling Moss, an Englishman. “I believe that when someone like Alfred Neubauer uses the term ‘artist’ in relation to a driver, he knows what he’s talking about,” Moss told an interviewer once. “Driving is certainly like ballet in that it is all discipline, rhythm, movement.”
At 6:26 p.m. on June 11, 1955, a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR driven by Pierre Levegh collided with an Austin-Healey at the Le Mans twenty-four-hour race, broke apart, caught fire, and flew into the crowd. Levegh and eighty-three spectators were killed. “I was barely conscious of what was happening simultaneously before my eyes,” Neubauer wrote. Another car bounced down the track and ran over a police officer in front of him. The race continued. Mercedes won the world championship three months later. Then the Silver Arrows withdrew from Grand Prix racing for half a century.
I once asked Wolff what attracted people to Formula 1. “It’s an alpha-male thing. You want to beat the other guy,” he replied. “It’s very archaic.” About a thousand people work exclusively for the Mercedes team. (Another thousand or so make Formula 1 engines, which Mercedes supplies to three other teams.) At the start of the 2021 season, Wolff sent an all-staff e-mail asking employees—everyone from aerodynamicists to catering staff—to find out who their opposite number was at Red Bull. “Look at him/her every day,” Wolff wrote. “Put the picture right in front of you so you know whom to beat.”
By that logic, Wolff’s mind should be full of Horner, the Red Bull principal, whom he disdains. Like Wolff, Horner started out as a racing driver. He later led Red Bull to four successive championships before Mercedes began to win, and the animosity between the two men is a major plotline in Formula 1. From race to race, Wolff and Horner snipe at each other’s tactics, drivers, budgets, and respective adherence to the sport’s ever-changing rules. Last season, at the peak of the championship duel, Horner was asked, while sitting next to Wolff, to describe the relationship between the two teams. “There is no relationship,” he said. Wolff rolled his eyes.
In March, Horner referred to Wolff as a tax exile who runs his team remotely. (Wolff’s home is in Monaco.) Wolff tries, not always successfully, to find the higher ground. “It is the emotion that takes over and says, What a fucking arsehole. But maybe he is not,” he told me. Wolff likens Horner to a yapping terrier. He does not consult a picture of him every day. “He’s just so simple,” Wolff complained. (Horner declined to speak to me.)
Wolff’s executive style combines empathy with a hysterical attention to detail. The race calendar requires him to travel more than two hundred days a year. He has missed two Grand Prix in ten seasons. He tries to stay in the same hotel room each year for each race and to be picked up by the same driver in the same car wherever he lands. (For European races, his motor home moves from track to track.) Wolff eats the same meal—grilled chicken and vegetables—for lunch and dinner, preferably alone, when he is away from home. His sleep schedule was designed with the help of a NASA scientist. He seeks the outer limits of control. “Whatever I do, I do not take risks,” he told me. “My assessment is: a risk is something that I couldn’t cope with, if the worst happens. So I’m not doing it.”
He makes unreasonable demands of others. “You don’t get to where he is by being a guy that’s super nice with everyone,” Susie, Wolff’s wife, told me. (One of Wolff’s favorite phrases is “tough love.”) In July, 2014, Susie, who is Scottish, became the first woman in twenty-two years to take part in a Formula 1 race weekend, when she drove a car for the Williams team in a practice session at the British Grand Prix. She said goodbye to Wolff in the paddock. “He looked at me. There was a pause and I thought, O.K., he’s going to say something really nice,” she recalled. “And he looked at me, deadpan straight, and said, ‘Don’t be shit.’ ”
On his first day at the Mercedes factory, in January, 2013, Wolff found a couple of old coffee cups and a discarded newspaper on a glass table in the reception area. At the time, the team boss was Brawn, the former Ferrari technical director—a lion of the sport—who had led his own team, Brawn GP, to the world championship in 2009. “I went up to Ross and said, ‘I have just been in reception. . . . It doesn’t look like a Formula 1 team,’ ” Wolff recalled. “And he said, ‘That doesn’t make the car quicker.’ And I said, ‘For me it does. Because it means a sense for the detail.’ ” Wolff’s daily schedule is a mess. Meetings overrun constantly, often because Wolff gets into personal conversations with his staff, an unusual tendency in a data-driven culture. “He was always willing to spend hours with people discussing their situations and their challenges,” Brawn told me.
Wolff probably goes too far. “He is a bit maniac,” Vasseur, the Alfa Romeo team principal, said. “Even during holidays, he is not able to switch off completely.” James Vowles is the Mercedes team’s chief strategist. To improve rapid decision-making during races, he has embedded with emergency-room doctors, aircraft pilots, and day traders. “Truthfully, he overthinks,” Vowles said, of Wolff. “That’s his big problem. He tries to take a problem and think it to a range that is just not possible.”
In 2019, Wolff hired Miguel Guerreiro, a hygiene manager, to travel with the team and to make sure that the Mercedes motor-home bathrooms were spotless at all times. Wolff insisted on a cleaning rota that reflected the various rhythms of the race weekend, and showed Guerreiro how he liked the toilet brush to be shaken dry (twice) before being replaced in its holder. “I want the brush to be exchanged every day or every other day,” he told me. When I expressed disbelief about this, Wolff called Guerreiro over.
“Miguel, can I steal thirty seconds of your time?” Wolff asked. “What did we discuss yesterday?”
Guerreiro replied, “Exactly how the toilets were functioning and how we could improve because—”
“We discussed about the soap—that you can’t really reach it well. You don’t know where the sensor is.”
“Yes,” Guerreiro said. “And the paper, you can’t really see it. . . .”
There were traces of water droplets on the mirror. The door handles needed a wipe. “We have done pretty well, Miguel and I. Everybody laughed about us at the beginning,” Wolff said. But, according to Wolff, the team suffered from less diarrhea and fewer viral infections than their rivals. “We’re talking about feces and all this shitting,” Wolff said. “The point is that I want to set the standards in what I do.”
Torger Christian Wolff did not grow up a racing fan. He has a childhood memory of being called in, on a summer’s day, to watch Niki Lauda drive in a Grand Prix somewhere. Lauda—a three-time world champion—was Austria’s greatest racing driver. In 1976, he was almost killed at the Nürburgring. (After winning the 1968 German Grand Prix, in thick fog, the Scottish driver Jackie Stewart called the course “the Green Hell.”) Lauda’s Ferrari swerved off the track, hit an embankment, and burst into flames. He suffered lung damage and severe burns to his hands and face, and went into a coma. He returned to racing forty-two days later. For the rest of his life, Lauda wore a red cap, sponsored by various corporations, to cover his scars.
Wolff loved to drive. At the age of eighteen, he took a Volkswagen Beetle up to the Höhenstrasse, a curving, cobbled road through the woods in the northwestern part of Vienna, where he lived, and went as fast as he could. He practiced every night. “When it was raining, it was even better,” he said. He didn’t worry about the Beetle’s straight-line speed—it was about not slowing down for the bends. (“The straights don’t count, the straights are just there to join the corners,” Moss, the great Mercedes driver, once said. “But in the corners there is something to see, sometimes.”) Wolff crashed the Beetle into a tree.
In the summer of 1990, Wolff drove from Vienna to Amsterdam with friends. They borrowed a Peugeot 605 limousine and took turns, on the German Autobahn, trying to cover two hundred kilometres every hour. “We were real, complete idiots,” he said. “If my son would tell me such a story, I would give him—how do you call it when you punch somebody?” (Wolff has a five-year-old son with Susie, and two children from a previous marriage.) On the way back, the group stopped at the Nürburgring, to watch a friend, Philipp Peter, compete in the German Formula 3 championship. Wolff showed me a photograph of himself, kneeling by Peter’s car on the starting grid, in a state of bliss. It was his first time on a racetrack. That night, Wolff went to a bar with a group of drivers. “There was nothing else anymore,” he recalled. “It’s like an identity I got.”
He was, deep down, unhappy. “There was too much bitterness. There was too much self-felt humiliation,” he said. Wolff’s father, Sven, who was Romanian, was an entrepreneur. In 1973, when Wolff was a year old, Sven set up Kunsttrans, a freight company specializing in the transport of art. Kunsttrans was a success, and the family lived in Vienna’s eighteenth district, a well-to-do neighborhood.
But, in 1980, Sven was diagnosed as having a brain tumor. A couple of years later, the business went under. Wolff’s parents separated, and he and his sister moved out with their mother, Joanna Bednarczyk, a Polish anesthesiologist. Sven died in May, 1987, when Wolff was fifteen. When I asked Wolff if he was similar to his father, he said, “Now you’re talking about heavy stuff. . . . I have no idea.” Joanna was often elsewhere. “I don’t think she is a naturally made mom,” he told me. “She lived her own life.” Wolff dates his aversion to risk-taking—his urge to control catastrophe—to the unravelling of his bourgeois childhood. “I was eight or nine or ten, and I wanted to be in control,” he said. “And I wasn’t.”
A hopeful racing driver needs financial backing to succeed. “Zero with me,” Wolff said. “I had to build it all on my own.” He leased a SEAT Ibiza and went to driving school. Hamilton’s parents also separated when he was young; he grew up in social housing in Stevenage, a commuter town in Hertfordshire. “Toto hasn’t come from a privileged background,” Hamilton said. “I think that’s probably what connected us quite a bit.” Wolff spent three seasons on the Formula Ford circuit—the minor leagues of European motorsport—and showed promise, but nothing more. Younger drivers came through, a shade faster. One Christmas, he stood in a golden cape and golden face paint outside a sponsor’s electronics store and handed out cards to shoppers. In the spring of 1994, Karl Wendlinger, another Austrian, crashed during practice for the Monaco Grand Prix and suffered terrible head injuries. Wendlinger and Wolff shared a sponsor, who withdrew from the sport. Wolff went to business school.
In 1998, he spent a few months on the West Coast of the United States, observing the dot-com boom. He returned to Vienna and told René Berger, a friend whom he has known since he was eight, that he was going to be a tech investor. Berger teased him: “I said, ‘Yeah. They waited for you.’ ” Berger was planning a career in social-democratic politics. He joined Wolff instead. Wolff discovered that the most popular Web site in Austria belonged to a free text-messaging service, called SMS.AT, which was run by a teen-ager named Markus Schwab, in Graz. Wolff drove to meet him in a Porsche. According to Wolff, Schwab agreed to sell Wolff half the business, as long as Wolff could find investors and Schwab could borrow the Porsche. Wolff raised the money. Schwab sold the rest of his stake soon afterward. “He got bought out for twenty million euros or so,” Wolff said. In 2006, after a series of mergers, the company was sold in a deal worth two hundred and seventy-five million dollars.
Investing in startups enabled Wolff to go back to motorsport. He became a manager of drivers, nurturing younger talent and learning the commercial side. “Toto told me, and I think it was 2000, in the kitchen of our office, ‘One day, I will own a Formula 1 team,’ ” Berger said. In 2003, one of Wolff’s clients, a Canadian driver named Bruno Spengler, signed with ASM, a French Formula 3 Euroseries team managed by Vasseur. ASM’s engines were made by a small high-performance-car company called HWA. It was named for Hans Werner Aufrecht, a venerable engineer who started making specially modified Mercedes sports cars in the late sixties.
In 2006, Wolff acquired a forty-nine-per-cent stake in HWA. Aufrecht, who is now eighty-three, loved listening to the younger man explain the future of the business. “He understands,” Aufrecht told me. “In German, we say, ‘Er kann um die Ecke schauen’—he can see round corners. . . . When he makes his strategy, he is not only looking straight forward. He is also looking what is coming from the side.”
In his thirties, Wolff went back to racing. “I wanted to prove to myself . . . could I have made it?” he told me. He was the runner-up in the Austrian Rally Championship. He won a twenty-four-hour race in Dubai. In the spring of 2009, he set out to beat the lap record for the Nordschleife, the north loop, and the longest section, of the Nürburgring. The track was taken off the Grand Prix circuit after Lauda’s crash. The Nordschleife is almost thirteen miles long and has around a hundred and seventy corners. The lap record for a GT car—the most powerful road car—was seven minutes and seven seconds. (Lauda drove a slightly longer version of the loop in six minutes and fifty-eight seconds in a Formula 1 car in 1975.) Friends warned Wolff not to do it; Lauda, whom he had come to know, told him it was a waste of time.
On April 15, 2009, Wolff broke the record by five seconds on a warmup lap. He was driving a blue Porsche 911 RSR. He sensed that his tires were going. “This is where I broke my rule to take the calculated risk,” he said. He went for the record proper: “All the power on. All the funky stuff.” Wolff’s right rear tire burst on a section known as the Foxhole compression. The car hit a steel guardrail at a hundred and seventy-nine m.p.h. and caromed down the track for more than two hundred metres. Video of the crash shows Wolff calmly turning off the ignition, undoing his harness, removing the steering wheel, and climbing out of the car. He stretched his back. He took off his gloves, stepped over the guardrail, and passed out.
He regained consciousness in the ambulance. He had a severe concussion and a broken vertebra. The force of the impact dislodged Wolff’s olfactory nerve. He couldn’t smell or taste for six months. He was thirty-seven years old. “That’s the moment where I realized that was not intelligent,” he said. Back in Vienna, Lauda had little sympathy. “You deserved that outcome,” he told Wolff. Aufrecht forbade him to race again. At the time, Susie was driving a Mercedes in the German touring-car championships. She had seen Wolff once or twice on the circuit, but they had never spoken. When news came in of Wolff’s crash, the other drivers on her team suggested that she call Wolff—the part owner of HWA—on their behalf, to wish him well. Wolff was recently separated. “It was supposed to be a ten-minute call that lasted an hour,” Susie said. They married in 2011.
Seven months after the accident, Wolff became an investor in Formula 1, buying a sixteen-per-cent stake in Williams Grand Prix Engineering. Williams, a British team led by Frank Williams, a charismatic veteran manager, had been a pioneering force in the sport in the eighties and nineties. Wolff’s role was financial, but he loved the hustle of the paddock, which was then ruled by a generation of aging garagistes, as the Europeans called them, mostly British, mostly self-made, mostly egotists: Williams, who was left in a wheelchair after a car crash in 1986; Ron Dennis, the owner and team principal of McLaren; Eddie Jordan, an Irish karting champion who first put Michael Schumacher, the great driver of the nineties and two-thousands, in a Formula 1 car; Max Mosley, the long-term president of the F.I.A. and the son of the British fascist Oswald Mosley; and Bernie Ecclestone, a marketing genius who controlled the commercial rights of Formula 1 from 1978 to 2017. “These were iconic figureheads, larger than life,” Wolff said. “I find myself between these guys. But, in a way, for a long time under the radar.” In a sport rampant with grudges and betrayal, Adam Parr, Williams’s chief executive at the time, noticed that Wolff had a gift for avoiding conflict. “You throw a stone into that pond and it reverberates for decades,” Parr told me. “He was a very smooth pebble.”
In March, 2012, Parr resigned. Williams, who was turning seventy, asked Wolff to help run the team. “It was a vacuum,” Wolff recalled. For the first time, people looked to him on race weekends. “I could feel that they were following me with such an energy,” he said. “And I was trying to give the energy back.” In May, Pastor Maldonado, a Venezuelan, won the Grand Prix in Barcelona—Williams’s first win in almost eight years. By that time, Susie was on the team as a test driver. She and Wolff celebrated with tacos on the beach. “She said, ‘Remember this moment,’ ” Wolff said. “ ‘We’re Grand Prix winners for the first time.’ ”
That summer, Wolff took a call from Wolfgang Bernhard, who was on the board of Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz. In 2010, the Silver Arrows had returned to Formula 1 racing for the first time since 1955. Mercedes had acquired Brawn’s title-winning team from 2009, which had used Mercedes engines, and retained Brawn as team principal. Schumacher, who had driven for Brawn at Ferrari and was now forty years old, signed up to drive. But the team underperformed, finishing fourth two years in a row.
Bernhard asked Wolff to give a presentation to Dieter Zetsche, the chief executive of Daimler, on the company’s return to Formula 1. “You need more money,” Wolff told Zetsche. He showed that Mercedes was spending less on its engineering than Williams, which had finished five places behind in the championship. Brawn had also made the case for more investment, but had not been given the funds. In Wolff’s view, Brawn was undermined by his position as the previous owner of the team. “The problem was he couldn’t say why,” Wolff said. “It was very difficult for Ross, who sold his business for a small fortune to Mercedes, to say, ‘Actually, we need more money than I thought.’ ”
In January, 2013, Mercedes restructured the team. Wolff bought a thirty-per-cent stake, for thirty-eight million dollars, and became an executive director. Lauda also took a ten-per-cent share. The previous autumn, Lauda and Brawn had persuaded Hamilton to join Mercedes. With an increased budget and arguably the most talented, and unfulfilled, driver in the sport, Mercedes was ready to challenge for the championship. Initially, Brawn and Wolff worked well together. “He was always, you know, reasonably polite,” Brawn said. In 2013, the Silver Arrows won three races, enjoying their best Grand Prix season since the fifties. But Brawn was conscious of Wolff’s board-level connections at Mercedes and his own ebbing hunger for the sport. “I was on a decline, and he was on the ascent,” Brawn told me. “I knew I was on a decline because my interest, the way I was racing, the way I was involved, was less motivated. He could see that.” Brawn left Mercedes at the end of the year.
The standard criticism of Wolff is that it was Brawn who built Mercedes’s winning machine and he merely steered it. (Lauda, whose red cap hangs on a set of headphones in the team garage, died in 2019.) Horner, the Red Bull boss, often refers disparagingly to Wolff’s route into the sport. “He has a financial background and is very driven by what the balance sheet says,” he said earlier this year. Brawn and Wolff remain civil and respectful of each other. “I once said to him, ‘Toto, you’ve done a great job. You didn’t drop the ball,’ ” Brawn said. “And he was quite offended. He said, ‘Is that as much as you think of me?’ ”
Since 2017, Brawn has been a senior executive at Formula 1, the company that controls the commercial rights to the sport. He played a role in devising the onerous rule changes that tripped up Mercedes this season. I asked him what he made of Wolff’s recent struggles. “He walked into a successful organization. He has now had his first trouble, his first major trouble,” Brawn said. “These ups and downs are always the real measure.” We talked about the misfiring W13. Brawn couldn’t resist a dig at the investor who supplanted him. “I mean, there’s so many clever people there,” Brawn said. “I’m astonished that they haven’t got on top of it.”
After Zandvoort, the Formula 1 teams moved to the Autodromo Nazionale Monza, in a former royal park outside Milan. The beach-party atmosphere of the Dutch seaside gave way to something graver and more reverential. The Autodromo was celebrating its centenary. At Monza’s first Grand Prix, in September, 1922, a young Alfred Neubauer prepared to drive an Austro-Daimler Sascha, with the race number 8. But, during a practice session, his teammate, Gregor Kuhn, flipped off the road and died. The team withdrew. One morning, I walked the inside of the track and heard a loudspeaker playing Rossini through the trees. Monza’s nickname is the Temple of Speed. People know its corners’ names—Curva del Serraglio, Parabolica—by heart. The course is famous for its long straights and fast chicanes, both of which were considered problematic for the W13.
On the Friday before the race, I watched the team practice. Wolff was in his usual position in the garage, at the end of a central bank of screens, which separated Hamilton’s and Russell’s cars. The drivers would burn out for a lap or three and then head back to the pit lane, where the mechanics deftly hoisted the W13s onto a low trolley, called a skateboard, and wheeled them into the garage to add fuel, change the tires, and make tiny adjustments. “This circuit is awfully bumpy as you go down to turn eight,” Russell said, when he came in. Hamilton asked for his front wing to be lowered. Lap times during practice don’t count, but everyone keeps an eye on them anyway. The Mercedes cars were running half a second slower than their rivals. “We’re getting pretty much destroyed by Red Bull, as you can imagine,” Riccardo Musconi, Russell’s race engineer, said.
Russell was the more vocal of the drivers. The rear of his car was sliding in the apex of his turns. He noted an odd brake migration in turn four. When the cars left the garage, mechanics patrolled the shiny gray floor and fussed at marks with cloths. The air was tangy with metallic smells. Sometimes an engine cover was removed and I glimpsed the bones and the gills of the impossible machine. Hamilton seemed subdued. A race penalty, caused by his crash in Belgium, meant that he would be starting toward the back of the grid. At the end of the day, he was a second off the pace. He asked if his car had been damaged. “It felt like something was broken,” he said. “It was so slow.”
The question of Hamilton’s future hangs over the team. This season, he is sixth in the world-championship standings, two places behind Russell. He has driven Formula 1 cars powered by Mercedes for his entire career. His contract expires at the end of 2023, by which time he will be thirty-eight. No driver older than forty has won the world championship since Jack Brabham, in 1966. “He is still the greatest,” Wolff told me. Hamilton is friends with other age-defying stars: Serena Williams, Tom Brady, Tom Cruise. “He has a few years,” Wolff said. “We just need to make a fast car for him.”
The two have not always been close. “It took some time to get to know him well,” Hamilton has said, of Wolff. During the 2016 season, Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, the two Mercedes drivers, were fierce rivals for the world championship. They stopped speaking and crashed into each other twice in three months. At the end of the season, Rosberg quit the sport and Wolff summoned Hamilton to his house in Oxford. They sat in the kitchen. “We are not taking this fight overnight,” Wolff said. “You are the best driver, and I would like to have you in the car.” The men spoke for several hours.
“That was the beginning of the real relationship between us,” Wolff said. “Something annoys us. Boom. We pick up the phone.” Hamilton didn’t identify the conversation as a single turning point. “I think perhaps for him he was, like, Wow, this is the most open you’ve probably been,” he said. “It’s not easy for some people to be open about their feelings and what they’re going through. But I think after that then we definitely continued to grow.”
Hamilton has more celebrity than all the other drivers in Formula 1 put together. He has sidelines in music, fashion, and charitable foundations. In 2018, he worked on a fall collection with Tommy Hilfiger. He took part in a runway show in Shanghai, partied in New York, and arrived in Singapore two days later to take pole position and ended up winning the race. “Toto has been told, ‘Hey, look, this is not what drivers do. Look what Lewis is doing. He shouldn’t be doing that,’ ” Hamilton said. “And instead of blocking me, instead of restricting me and stunting my growth, and saying, ‘No, you can’t,’ we will have discussions about it.” Earlier this year, Hamilton performed ten skydives a week before the Australian Grand Prix. “As long as the performance is right, he can do anything,” Wolff said.
Hamilton is also the only Black driver in Formula 1. At a testing event in Barcelona, in 2008, he was taunted by fans in blackface. In the spring of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, he went to Wolff. “I was, at the time, one of the few people of color within the team, and naturally it hit home for me,” Hamilton told me. “I just remember him being, like, ‘What can I do? How can we support you?’ ” Mercedes painted its silver cars black, to stand against racism, and kept them that way for the following season. Hamilton and Mercedes have established an initiative to improve racial diversity in motorsport—six per cent of the Mercedes team workforce is from a nonwhite background—but he continues to suffer discrimination. Last November, on a podcast, Nelson Piquet, a former world champion and the father of Verstappen’s girlfriend, used a racial slur to refer to Hamilton. Earlier this year, Hamilton, who has ear studs and a nose piercing, was threatened with punishment after the F.I.A. decided to enforce a long-standing ban on wearing jewelry while racing. Wolff has stood by him each time. “He’s conscious about the state of the world,” Hamilton said.
Wolff reveres his star: “How is a human being capable of achieving what he has achieved?” But the paddock is a merciless place. “You cannot win trust. You can only be given enough time to be trusted,” Wolff said, of his relationship with Hamilton. “We’re all very ambitious, highly skeptical—‘paranoid’ is too much of a word—animals. I don’t think you will ever have anyone in that environment saying, ‘I one hundred per cent trust you.’ Because I don’t think that exists.”
A few hours after practice, Wolff and I took a walk on the track. Night was falling. “Italy has this dolce vita,” he said. Sometimes Wolff speaks in clichés, which are nonetheless sincere. “Nothing is too serious. It doesn’t feel like anybody is living in a pressure cooker.” He paused to study the road. “What do you see? Tarmac? It’s not only tarmac—what we look at is the stones. Which stones? Are they polished? Are they rough?” Before each race, the teams carry out surface scans, to figure out how abrasive the track will be. “I love the science,” Wolff said.
We made our way to the course’s old Parabolica turn, which fell out of use in the sixties, after one crash too many. Drivers used to take the concrete bank, which has a maximum steepness of thirty-eight degrees, at speeds approaching a hundred and eighty m.p.h. Wolff took off his loafers and headed for the top but became stranded halfway up, hanging on to a piece of guardrail. He challenged me to climb the bank, and I found myself scrambling up. He is the kind of person you want to please. On the way back, we talked about Wolff’s recent fame, from the Netflix series, which he enjoys. At last year’s U.S. Grand Prix, a young woman threw herself through the open window of his car, to get her picture taken. Wolff had recently read an article about selfies. “It is like fishing,” he said. “You put it on social media, it is like showing your fish. It is nothing to do with the fish.” Less than a minute later, a couple of Germans spotted Wolff and begged him for a picture. “Mein Gott! Mein Gott! ” one called out, crouching low in disbelief. Wolff flashed a smile in the dark.
The Mercedes cars started the Italian Grand Prix at opposite ends of the grid. Hamilton was in nineteenth position, and Russell, who benefitted from penalties applied to other drivers, was in second. Because the W13 was slower than the Red Bull and the Ferrari cars, the race simulations did not see any way for the team to win. Russell was predicted to slip from second to third, and Hamilton, at best, could finish fourth. Even though Verstappen was starting from seventh on the grid, he appeared unstoppable. “He’s either going to crash . . . or he’s going to win the race. That’s the reality,” Russell said during the pre-race strategy call.
Russell was skeptical about starting on soft tires, which he feared would degrade in the heat. “My gut’s telling me that the deg today is going to be worse,” he said. Vowles, the team’s chief strategist, reminded him that every tire permutation had been modelled overnight. “Everything you’re debating, George . . . it’s done about a hundred thousand times in a simulation,” he said. Afterward, Wolff showed me that he had been texting Russell during the meeting, encouraging him to push the engineers. “It’s tough love,” he said. “The driver challenges the engineer, and the other way around.” He wanted Russell to feel invested in the plan. “The psychological aspect is something that the engineers are not calibrated to think of. And they shouldn’t,” Wolff said. “That is my part.”
The Frecce Tricolori—the aerobatic display team of the Italian Air Force—thundered over the starting grid, trailing green, red, and white smoke, with an Airbus 350 thrown in for good measure. If anything, the race in Monza followed the computer modelling even closer than it had in Zandvoort. Verstappen hit the front on lap twelve and never looked back. Russell managed to keep the W13 in touch with the faster cars of Red Bull and Ferrari. “Clever driving,” Wolff murmured. Hamilton picked off the slower cars in the field with ease. Afterward, he said the race reminded him of go-karting as a child. He finished fifth. With six laps to go, Daniel Ricciardo’s McLaren broke down with an oil leak, bringing out the safety car. The race officials followed standard procedure, unlike in Abu Dhabi, and the Grand Prix finished in an orderly, undramatic fashion. Russell came in third. Verstappen moved a hundred and sixteen points clear in the world-championship standings. He secured the title two races later, in Japan.
When the cars crossed the line, Wolff stayed at his desk. Charles Leclerc, a young Monégasque driver for Ferrari, finished second, which prompted the tifosi—Ferrari’s hard-core fans—to run onto the track. The Mercedes garage emptied, as mechanics went to stand in the ticker tape and celebrate with Russell, who was on the podium for the second week in a row. But Wolff seemed reluctant to move. At the end of the 2019 season, he had considered stepping down as team principal. Mercedes had won a sixth consecutive title—matching the previous record. “It was always meant to be a project,” he told me. “It’s like my investments. You buy and you sell. The exit is the reason why I’m doing all that.” He gave himself a year to decide. The pandemic intervened. Wolff was torn. He called Aufrecht. “He was really, really upset. He was saying, ‘What shall I do? And what the hell am I doing and why?’ ” the older man recalled. “I told him, ‘Toto, that’s your life. You have to do it.’ ”
When he decided to continue, Wolff gave up an option to sell his shares. The sense of commitment was novel, and unnerving. “It wasn’t a project anymore,” he said. “We said, ‘We want to keep this,’ Mercedes and I.” He took the risk of staying, and losing. He yielded a measure of control. While the celebrations continued in Monza, Wolff remained in his chair. The finishing positions of the Mercedes drivers glowed in a column of figures on his screen. “It just cements we are third on the road at the moment,” Wolff said. “I would just like us to be back in the front.” I asked Wolff if he could imagine ever being happy with third, or even fifth. “No,” he said. “Sport is very honest and sometimes maybe things don’t turn as quickly as you want.” There was no disaster. There was next year’s car. Mercedes, and he, would win again. “We’re not wobbling, you know,” Hamilton said. “We’re not.” But this waiting was death. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated Charles Leclerc’s nationality and incorrectly described the starting lights of a Grand Prix race.
