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Horner takes dig at Wolff over Monaco tax exile status

Michael Delaney 14/03/2022 at 09:07 14/03/2022 at 12:30

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner has taken aim once again at his Mercedes counterpart Toto Wolff, describing the latter as a tax exile running his team "remotely".

The rivalry on the track last year between Red Bull and Mercedes that reached its controversial conclusion in Abu Dhabi was mirrored all season long by an equally competitive relationship between Horner and Wolff.

The intensity of one of Formula 1's tightest championship battles of all time meant that the pair were at each other's throats in 2021, although the wrangling dissipated somewhat in the latter part of the season.

Both men have vowed to move on from their "brutal" 2021 rivalry, but Horner is showing little intent to reset the relationship.

In an interview with the Daily Mail , the Red Bull chief, who is often derided by F1 fans on social media, offered a rather disparaging but also overblown depiction of Wolff when asked to explain how the two men differ in their approach to managing their F1 outfit.

"We are very different," stated Horner. "If I'm not at the racetrack, I'm in the factory. I'm not living as a tax exile in Monaco, running a team remotely.

"I am hands-on. My diary is full from the moment I arrive to the moment I leave, dealing with issues within the team. I have very much an open-door policy.

"I grew up in the sport. I was a race driver that turned my hand to running a team. I'm a racer at heart.

• Horner: Mercedes pressure on Masi 'tantamount to bullying'

"Toto has come from a very different background. He has a financial background and is very driven by what the balance sheet says. Results dictate that performance.

"Does he share the same passion as a racer? I have no idea. Will he be here in 10 years' time or will he have cashed in and be on his super yacht? I have no idea."

©Instagram/SusieWolff

While taking down Wolff in no uncertain terms, Horner also claims that he holds the Mercedes team boss in high respect given his track record, also insisting that the Austrian isn't "a bad guy".

"My relationship with Toto is… you know, it’s professional," added Horner.

"He’s not the kind of guy I’m going to go and have dinner with or spend private time with, but I have a respect for what he’s done and what he’s achieved.

"Of course, as far as I’m concerned, 2021 is done and dusted. It’s now all about 2022. Will he be the main opponent this year? I have no idea.

"Do I like him? I have no personal issue with Toto. He’s the kind of guy that bites quite easy, so it’s always fun to wind him up a bit. But he’s not a bad guy, that’s for sure."

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Toto Wolff And Nyck De Vries Reunite In Monaco Cafe

Toto Wolff , the mastermind behind Mercedes’ success in Formula 1, was spotted having an intriguing lunch with Nyck de Vries, now a former driver of AlphaTauri. The rendezvous took place in the picturesque city of Monaco, leaving fans and pundits alike buzzing with speculation about the nature of their meeting.

Toto Wolff and Nyck de Vries were seen at a café in Monaco today. ? #F1 pic.twitter.com/aodVcPjgxT — Fastest Pitstop (@FastestPitStop) July 12, 2023

The Meeting in Monaco

As social media buzzed with intrigue, an  image surfaced , capturing the moment Wolff and de Vries sat down for lunch at a charming cafe in Monaco. This unexpected reunion took place shortly after de Vries was released from his contract with AlphaTauri, where he failed to make a lasting impression.

The Spy Speculations

F1 enthusiasts wasted no time in theorizing about the purpose behind this clandestine encounter. On various online platforms, fans exchanged conspiracy theories, suggesting that de Vries might have been acting as a spy for Mercedes during his short stint with Red Bull’s sister team, AlphaTauri. Speculations grew rampant, with some even questioning whether Toto Wolff had devised an intricate plan that had backfired.

Unimpressive Performance and Potential Replacements

De Vries’s departure from AlphaTauri came as no surprise to many, given his lackluster performance during his time with the team. Having failed to secure a single point in ten races, he received a warning from Red Bull’s Helmut Marko, who emphasized the need for improvement. With Daniel Ricciardo, a seasoned F1 driver, now stepping in to replace de Vries at his former team wherein the group hopes to benefit from his experience and eight Grand Prix victories.

Future Prospects

As the F1 community continues to speculate about the mysterious meeting between Wolff and de Vries, the latter’s future remains uncertain. With promising young talents like Liam Lawson and Ayumu Iwasa waiting in the wings, Red Bull has made it clear that driver changes are not off the table. However, the true intentions behind the meeting and its implications for Mercedes and Red Bull are yet to be revealed.

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Toto Wolff signs a new deal at Mercedes – ‘I’m not going anywhere’

Toto Wolff celebrated his 52nd birthday – or “49 plus three”, as he prefers to call it – last Friday, at home in Monaco , with his wife Susie and their six year old son Jack. In the evening, the Wolffs took George Russell and his girlfriend Carmen out for dinner, spending a bit of precious downtime with the couple as well as their friends and neighbours the Farfuses, another Monaco motorsport family. It was a rare moment of calm before Toto heads back to Brackley to oversee final preparations for the new season, which begins in Bahrain in early March.

After successive seasons spent choking on Red Bull’s exhaust fumes , it is fair to say Wolff is a man under pressure. Even eight constructors’ titles in as many seasons from 2014 to 2021, not to mention seven drivers’ championships, cannot shield you from criticism. And towards the end of last year, after the Mercedes team principal lost his cool with reporters in a press conference in Las Vegas , then got caught up in a furious row with governing body the FIA over swiftly-dropped allegations that his wife, who works for Formula One, might have passed confidential material to him, there were some who felt that pressure might be telling.

Did Wolff need the hassle any more? Was he still 100 per cent committed?

There have long been whispers that Wolff, who owns a third of Mercedes F1, might step down as team principal. Hell, the Austrian has admitted to having had those thoughts himself, notably during Covid when he experienced something of an existential crisis. Others maintain Wolff still hankers after the job of Formula One chief executive, a role Wolff briefly discussed with Liberty Media boss Greg Maffei before Stefano Domenicali took over.

Wolff, though, has news for his doubters: He is not going anywhere.

In fact, he says, right at the start of a wide-ranging interview from his home in Monaco, he has just signed a new three-year deal to stay on as team principal and chief executive of Mercedes F1, taking him through to the end of the 2026 season, the first season of the next set of regulations.

Wolff’s reasoning is simple. He still feels he is the best man to lead the team. Just as importantly, he says, so do Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ola Kallenius, representing fellow co-owners Ineos and Mercedes-Benz.

“I think the most important thing between the three of us is that we trust each other,” Wolff says of how talks over his role progressed. “At the end of the day, as a shareholder myself, I want the best return on investment. And the best return on investment is winning. I’m not going to try to hang on to a position that I think somebody is going to do better than me. I make sure that I have people around who can tell me otherwise. In the end the three of us decided: ‘Let’s do it again’.”

‘The risk is more bore-out than burnout’

Wolff sits back. It was a bruising end to last year, no question. The Austrian picks his words carefully when discussing the controversy over the FIA’s aborted probe into a possible conflict of interest in the Wolff household. It is clear he is still livid about it. But he insists he is “in a good place” heading into 2024 and fully focused on getting back to winning ways. There are no performance clauses (“I’ve never had a performance clause. You either trust each other or you don’t. And we are aligned as shareholders.”), and no plans to exit Mercedes, either now or in the future.

“I’m part of this team in various functions,” he says. “I’m a co-shareholder. I’m on the board. These are things which will not change whatever executive, or non-executive, role I have. But I feel good. The risk for me is always more bore-out than burnout. And that’s why I embrace the challenges we have today, even though they sometimes feel very, very difficult to manage.”

Wolff has described the challenge of overhauling Red Bull this year as akin to climbing Mount Everest and even that feels like an understatement. But having got it completely wrong in 2022, doubled down with disastrous consequences in 2023, only to admit midseason that a radical redesign was required, Wolff is at least hopeful that 2024 will see Mercedes become more competitive. When we speak he has just got off the phone to Ant Davidson, the Sky Sports pundit who still acts as one of the team’s simulator drivers. “He was driving Melbourne [in the sim],” Wolff reports. “And he said: ‘The car feels like a car for the first time in two years…’ Wolff pauses, aware that talk is cheap. “Obviously I would love this to correlate to the track but we’ve seen in the last two years that this was not always the case,” he adds hastily.

Still, the hope for Mercedes fans is this could be a better season. Wolff says he is happy with the engineering rejig last year , which saw the “mega” James Allison return as technical director in place of Mike Elliott. He is happy with how Mercedes’ strategy team have adapted post-James Vowles. And he makes a point of saying that he expects his team to be a lot sharper this year in pitstops, having put more resource into areas such as wheel-locking mechanisms and axle materials. “I think the regulations, how they were laid out a few years ago, we interpreted them in a very conservative way,” he explains. “And we’ve seen other teams doing it differently. So watch this space. I think it’s going to be very different.”

Most of all, Wolff says, he is happy with his driver line-up. George Russell had a trickier second season at Brackley, but Wolff insists the 25-year-old has “absolutely met the team’s expectations”. “George is our future,” he insists. “And you know, when I look at all the young men, of the current Formula One drivers, he’s the one I would want to have in a car.”

As for Lewis Hamilton, ask Wolff whether, at 39, he can still win that elusive eighth world title and he does not pause for breath. “The answer is clearly yes in capital letters,” he replies. “There is a reason Lewis is a seven-time world champion, and has broken all the records… his ability is on a different level. If we are able to give him a car that he actually feels, that drives in a way that he can trust, he will be on the level that’s needed to win the championship. 39 is no age.”

The next big change in regulations is not until 2026. And it may be that Hamilton, like Wolff, has to sign another contract, taking him beyond his current two-year deal, if he wants that eighth title. But Wolff is not ruling out doing it sooner than that.

“Always believe it’s possible,” he says of whether Mercedes could actually scale Everest this year. “You cannot start the season with an attitude of ‘This is not going to be possible.’ We saw last year with McLaren, what a huge step they made with a single upgrade. We’ve signed a two year deal with Lewis, and we owe it to him, to George and to all the team to give it our full attention in 2024 and 2025. I think it’s possible.”

Wolff: FIA needs more stability – it is concerning seeing so many people leave

Toto Wolff has raised concerns over the leadership of motorsport’s world governing body, saying the FIA needs more “stability” and to act with greater “transparency”. Wolff also questioned why so many senior FIA employees were suddenly leaving the organisation.

The FIA triggered a huge controversy when it announced last month that it had opened an investigation based on “media speculation” regarding “an allegation of information of a confidential nature being passed to an F1 team principal from a member of FOM personnel”. It did not specify to whom it was referring but certain outlets were seemingly briefed before the FIA’s statement dropped that it referred to Toto and Susie Wolff. The FIA also briefed outlets that more than one team had raised concerns. The probe was dropped after all nine of Mercedes’ rivals issued identically-worded statements denying that they had made any formal complaint.

Mercedes have threatened legal action – which is understood still to be a possibility – but Wolff said the damage was done now. “I think because we have a billion people or more that watch our sport, we are role models,” he stressed. “And we need to be wary of the impact of what we do and what we say. What has been said and the way it was done was very, very damaging.”

Wolff would not comment specifically on any possible action, legal or otherwise. Nor would he criticise FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem directly. But he did question the state of the FIA more generally, saying it was “concerning” to see the departures in recent weeks of sporting director Steve Nielsen, single-seater technical director Tim Goss and the head of the FIA’s commission for women, Deborah Mayer.

“It’s concerning to see so many good people leaving,” Wolff said. “Losing Steve Nielsen is a big blow. I couldn’t think of a more knowledgeable and fair sporting director.

“As a leader, it’s about the culture and environment you create for people to thrive. When people as competent as these leave an organisation there is a vacuum. That’s clear. And you’ve got to ask yourself why is it suddenly that so many people have decided to call it a day?”

Ben Sulayem, who was elected in 2021, has been involved in a number of controversies during his two-year tenure.

Wolff added: “What [the FIA] needs is stability. The FIA is one of three key stakeholders of the sport [along with FOM and the teams]. And as the leadership of these organisations, we need to set the tone for everybody else. We need not only to say that we’re acting transparently, and ethically, but actually to live to that standard every single day.”

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

By Sam Knight

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.

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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:

Paul Bischoff’s “Chiribiri” slithered out of one of the bends with flames shooting from the engine. He flung himself clear just in time. Momberger’s Bugatti lost its left mudguard and steam began to pour from the radiator. Prince zu Leiningen’s Amilcar crashed into a barricade. He was pulled out unconscious, but escaped with a broken leg.

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.

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A day in the life of a Formula 1 driver in Monaco – Inside Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen’s billionaire paradise

• Connor Andrews
• Published : 14:48, 24 May 2023
• Updated : 18:13, 24 May 2023
• Published : Invalid Date,

It doesn’t matter how little you know about Formula 1, everyone who’s ever heard of the sport knows it centres around Monaco.

Ask any driver their biggest aim for the season after winning the world championship and it’s the top step of the podium at the blue riband event in the south of France.

That’s no surprise either, as they all live there. Nearly, if not all, drivers on the grid own property in Monte-Carlo, and that’s been the case for decades.

First run in 1929, the Monaco Grand Prix track has barely changed in almost a century, with only minor tweaks to the city streets which are walking distance from the millionaires who lap them once a year.

There are many reasons to live in the principality, with the headline one being its zero per cent income tax, but there’s plenty more on top of that.

Sunshine all-year round, security guaranteed by the police force, and a ban on paparazzi, it’s the ideal place for a globe-trotting mega star to sit on their balcony and unwind.

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But in a country that’s barely bigger than Hyde Park and somewhat covered in obscurity due to its exclusivity, it’s almost a mystery how the entire F1 paddock can fit in an area you can walk across in an hour.

Well, thanks to PokerStars , who sponsor Oracle Red Bull Racing, talkSPORT was able to lift the lid on the life of F1’s elite, and how they spend their time in what has become a home from home for almost every driver to ever win a race.

Located 20 miles from the closest and only airport in Nice, arriving home in the morning after a race weekend could well be off-putting with a 40 minute taxi ride that can easily become close to two hours in traffic. 

talkSPORT attended the European Poker Tour earlier this month and was able to take the taxi ride of dreams with a helicopter trip that lasts just 10 minutes.

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It may sound extortionate, but so frequent are helicopter trips around the principality that it’s surprisingly affordable at £200, with a car journey not much less, and taking far longer.

Arriving in the morning from the airport, a driver will likely turn to brunch and a quick relax, with Sass Cafe looking out across the French Riviera a popular choice.

A rooftop bar for the day and dark interior for night, the cafe welcomes you to ‘dine, drink and dance all night long’.

Due to its prestige, it’s not just F1 drivers either, with sporting elite such as Cristiano Ronaldo and Michael Jordan attending, while Hollywood megastars Will Smith and Sean Penn are also known to frequent the bar.

The restaurant has a menu with caviar prices that reach £1800, showing dinner isn’t for the faint of heart.

After that, though, it’s time to keep your fitness up, with drivers heading to the same spot - THIRTY NINE Fitness Club - which has already been in use by George Russell, Carlos Sainz, and Alex Albon this week.

Created by Kent-born former Rugby Union player Ross Beattie, the building doesn’t look much from the outside, but inside it’s every athlete’s dream.

Located in Larvotto where many of the drivers live, memberships can cost as much at £5000-per-year, but the quality of the facilities, dining and treatment options show why it’s a Monaco-must.

For a cool down, the Riviera is walking distance for most, with Lewis Hamilton 's Mercedes boss Toto Wolff living in the country’s most exclusive apartment building.

Palais de la Plage has the beach on its doorstep and prices starting at £5.5million.

Wolff recently was named in Forbes’s list of sporting billionaires , showing just how exclusive the property is.

Where his drivers reside doesn’t quite compare, but most still live in the Larvotto area, away from where the Grand Prix is held.

There is an excuse to head to that less-exclusive area of the principality though, with the port by its side, and some of the world’s most expensive private yachts parked up for a day of relaxation - that’s if you don’t like the beach.

Superyachts come and go, but a regular standout is the gigantic Mimtee £100m boat owned by the prime minister of Lebanon, Najib Mikati, and it dwarfs many in the harbour.

In the evening, food options are aplenty, with the world famous Nobu Sushi one of the top attractions located at the Fairmont Hotel - and PokerStars helped talkSPORT get a taste.

Tasting menus cost £125, while premium Japanese wagyu beef steaks cost £130 alone, but with views of the Riviera, the Monaco restaurant is one of the company’s most famous.

For the night, it’s back to another exclusive club - Twiga.

It offers daytime dining, incredible sea views, and night-time parties for the country’s elite.

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It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but inside is promised to be ‘beyond your wildest dreams’ and the Africa-inspired menu and club certainly live up to that reputation, along with some of the world’s most famous DJs.

Then it's time to head home. Because after all, if you're paying for a £5m apartment, you probably want to use it.

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1: Premier League Table

Toto Wolff involved in Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s partial Manchester United takeover?

The head of the Mercedes F1 team is reportedly considering joining the British billionaire’s bid to buy a 25% stake in the Manchester club. 

As has been reported for the past few weeks , Sir Jim Ratcliffe has offered to buy only 25% of the club’s shares from the Glazer family, the equivalent of £1.5 billion (€1.7 billion).

According to the BBC, the offer could be made jointly by Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Toto Wolff, both of whom are Monaco residents. As a reminder, the INEOS boss owns a third of the Mercedes F1 team, which the Austrian has managed since 2013.

The buyout, a long-running saga

As he told Sky Sports during the last Brazilian Grand Prix, Toto Wolff is open to discussion on a contribution to the project. But his investment is far from official at the moment.

As a reminder, after many months of negotiations over the purchase of the Red Devils the chairman of Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB), Sheikh Jassim Ben Hamad al-Thani, has withdrawn his bid. As for the Glazer family, it appears they no longer wish to sell Manchester United completely, but rather a partial stake in the club.

What It Costs To Moor A Superyacht At The Monaco Grand Prix

Forget the F1 – booking a berth is the real race...

Image: Gareth Harford

Monaco. The billionaire’s playground. The kleptomaniac’s kryptonite. The ludomaniac’s lair. Superyacht city. Monaco is known as a fabulous place to spend money like wild (and to strut on a treadmill on the deck of your superyacht , whilst watching the F1).

Speaking of which, you might be interested to know how much it costs to moor a superyacht in Monaco during the Monaco Grand Prix. To answer this burning question, DMARGE spoke to Istanbul-based luxury yacht manager Candaş Balci.

Balci told us just to book a fairly average berth in Monaco “for F1 week” was around 30 thousand euros “for a 35-meter motoryacht for a place which had no view of track but inside the port.”

Balci explained: “There are different parts in the marina which have different rates depending on where the yacht will be.”

“If it sees the track or not, price changes as well,” Bali told us.

“The berths which directly see the track were around 50-100K euro for the week, which is almost their yearly berth fee in a normal marina.” Candas Balci

Browsing through Reddit’s F1 Technical page, one user posts a link to a photo which purports to give a list of Monaco’s pricing for 2019. The prices which appear in the photo seem more or less consistent with the pricing Balci gave DMARGE.

Another Reddit user said: “My old landlord used to work on super yachts and also happened to introduce me to f1 so I can at least give you an anecdotal response. He said to rent the slip during the race week was around 100k and there was usually a 20k ‘offering to the port master’ as a separate transaction. He called it a bribe but I’m not sure it’s fair for me to use his characterization.”

RELATED: Hotel Staff Reveal The Wildest Rich Person Requests They’ve Ever Received

Forbes also wrote about this topic a number of years back. They reported: “To moor in one of the world’s most expensive marinas during high season, a superyacht owner can be expected to pay up to $4,130 per night, and during prime time events such as the Monaco Grand Prix rates can skyrocket to $100,000 or more for a five-day stay in Monaco’s prime berths.”

Monaco’s Port Hercules has 700 berths. Ac cording to 212 Yachts , “During the Monaco Grand Prix, the port is filled to capacity, with berths booked well in advance of the event.”

212 Yachts also says that to get yourelf a berth you need to complete a port application form. This is a highly competetive process.

“For the best chance of a successful application, it is essential to submit this form as early as possible,” 212 Yachts states.

“In order to do this, you must first select your charter yacht as technical details of the vessel must be specified on the form. Those directly associated with the Formula One, the Monaco Grand Prix and the event sponsors are fast tracked in the process, contributing to the extremely competitive nature of this process,” ( 212 Yachts ).

There you have it: you can add knowing how much it costs to moor a superyacht in Monaco to your list of superyacht knowledge (which should also include knowing what it costs to spend a week on a superyacht in the medditeranean and why travelling around Europe on a superyacht is more stressful than you think ).

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Toto Wolff signs new deal with Mercedes

Posted by Jack Brodie, Editor-in-Chief | Jan 17, 2024 | Motorsport

Long-time Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has signed a new deal, extending his stay at the helm of the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team by a further three years, until 2026.

The formidable Austrian has been with Mercedes since January 2013, and has since then won eight constructors’ titles and 115 first place trophies in 225 races.

Our second-longest serving Team Principal in Formula 1, Toto Wolff 🐺 The stats speak for themselves 🤯 #F1 @MercedesAMGF1 pic.twitter.com/dW6RBf3b45 — Formula 1 (@F1) January 16, 2024

“I’m not going to try to hang on to a position that I think somebody is going to do better than me,” Wolff told the Telegraph , adding “I make sure that I have people around who can tell me otherwise. In the end the three of us decided: ‘Let’s do it again’.”

The highly successful Mercedes F1 team is equally owned in three parts by Wolff, Mercedes-Benz and a subsidiary of Ineos owned by Monaco resident Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

Wolff himself is a resident of Monaco, wherein he recently celebrated his 52nd birthday with his wife Susie Wolff and their son.

The 2024 Formula 1 season begins with the Bahrain Grand Prix on Sunday, March 2.

Featured image courtesy of @MercedesAMGF1 on X

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• Nationality : Austrian
• Date of Birth : 12 January 1972
• Place of Birth : Vienna, Austria
• Lives : Monaco
• 8 Formula One Constructors' Championships
• 7 Drivers' Championships
• 2013 Formula One Joined Mercedes

Toto Wolff is Team Principal & CEO of the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team. He is the managing partner of the team alongside wider responsibilities as Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport. 

From humble surroundings in Vienna, Austria, Toto’s first taste of motorsport came when at 17, whilst watching a friend race at the Nürburgring. A short racing career of his own followed, competing in Austrian Formula Ford and scoring a class win at the 1994 Nürburgring 24 Hours. 

Toto called time on his racing career just three years later, transferred his competitive ambitions to the business and investment world. After studying at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Toto founded his own investment company, Marchfifteen, in 1998, followed by Marchsixteen in 2004. 

Initially focusing on internet and technology companies in the ‘tech boom’ era of the 90s, the business developed strategic investments in medium-size industrial companies and listed companies. 

One of these investments included the initial public offering of HWA AG - the company responsible for developing and racing Mercedes-Benz cars for the DTM (German Touring Car Championship), as well as Mercedes-Benz’s successful Formula 3 engine programme. Toto divested his stake in HWA AG in 2015. 

In 2002, Toto started a new venture, co-owning a racing driver management company alongside two-time Formula One World Champion Mika Häkkinen. The same year, Toto returned to racing, winning once on the way to sixth in the FIA GT World Championship. Further success followed in 2006, when Toto claimed top overall honours at the 24 Hours of Bahrain. 

In November 2009, Toto merged his passion for racing and investment by investing in the Williams F1 Team. By July 2012, Toto was Executive Director of the team, playing a key leadership role as Williams scored its first win in eight years at the Spanish Grand Prix that season. 

Less than a year later, after being asked to analyse their Formula One performance by the Daimler AG Board, Toto was appointed Managing Partner of the Mercedes F1 Team and acquired a 30% stake in the Brackley-based team alongside co-shareholder Niki Lauda. At the same time, he assumed the role of Head of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport, with overall responsibility for the company’s works motorsport programmes.  

At the end of the 2020 F1 season, it was announced that Toto had increased his stake in the team, with Toto, INEOS and Daimler AG all holding one-third equal shareholding. Under the new structure, it was confirmed Toto will remain in his role as Team Principal and CEO for a further three years. 

An entrepreneur, an investor and a racer, motorsport runs in Toto Wolff’s blood. Under his leadership, the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team has clinched eight consecutive Formula One Constructors’ Championships (2014-2021) and seven consecutive Drivers’ Championships (2014-2020). 

• Track Guides

F1 News: Toto Wolff Drops Bombshell After Monaco Upgrades - "Still Nasty"

• Author: Alex Harrington

Toto Wolff , the authoritative figure leading Mercedes ' team, recently shared a fascinating revelation about the W14's performance. He mentioned that even after the car received substantial upgrades in Monaco, the vehicle's rear continues to trouble drivers. This comes as a surprising confession, given the high expectations from the improvements introduced in the Principality.

The team's decision to deploy these upgrades in Monaco didn't occur by chance. Mercedes had initially hoped to implement their season's first crucial upgrade at Imola. However, the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix's cancellation due to severe flooding led the team to recalibrate their plans. Consequently, they chose Monaco, a tricky circuit for testing new parts, to introduce their upgrades.

Amid these changes, drivers Lewis Hamilton and George Russell showcased commendable performances. The duo secured the fourth and fifth positions, respectively. Although Russell regretted missing a potential podium spot, Hamilton shared an overall positive sentiment about the upgrades' impact on the W14.

Despite these advancements, the car continues to pose challenges. Wolff expressed his concerns about the car's persisting issues. 

“The car felt together, which is important, but it’s still a bit nasty on the rear – so that’s something which we need to dial out of the car for the next few races,” Wolff admitted to the press at Monaco. “But we have a new baseline and that’s important to say: ‘Okay, this is what we have now.’ We’ve taken questions off the table where we weren’t sure of, be it the front suspension or the extravaganza of our bodywork. So, let’s work from here. “We’re good at grinding away and the work that was done in the factories to bring that update here to Monaco from our team, it was really a big effort.”

The Spanish Grand Prix offers the team an excellent opportunity to evaluate the upgrades' real-world performance. The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, a familiar testing circuit in Formula 1 with a conventional layout, is a more suitable environment to collect valuable data. As the team examines their new parts' performance against factory simulations, they are aware that understanding the new performance level will take more than just one race.

“I think Barcelona is not enough,” Wolff continued. “I think we need to collect data. That’s why we put it also here in Monaco, and to collect further analysis which we will do in Barcelona. The next one, Montreal, is a little bit of an outlier again. “But over the next races hopefully we can really increase the performance of the car. But it’s not going to suddenly be right there. “That’s why I’m actually pleased with the time gap that we had in Monaco. It was always a mediocre track for us, so that’s okay.”

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Wolff claims Mercedes CAN keep pace with Red Bull after W14 upgrades

Toto Wolff has claimed that Mercedes are “pretty close” to Max Verstappen ’s Red Bull over a single lap, but that the W14 falls away over longer distances despite the recent upgrades.

All eyes have been on Mercedes at Monaco as they brought a string of upgrades to their struggling W14.

After FP2, Lewis Hamilton found himself half a second behind Verstappen, with team-mate George Russell even further behind.

Yet Wolff has refused to draw too big a conclusion over the W14’s overall performance given the nature of Monaco’s street circuit.

READ MORE: Hamilton evaluates EXACTLY how Mercedes upgrades affect Red Bull chase

"It's difficult with Monaco, really difficult to judge," Wolff told Autosport . "But at least we haven't seen any behaviour of the car that would have been deemed as really negative."

Russell in particular struggled during the first practice sessions on Friday, leading many to question whether or not the upgrades are giving the drivers the confidence needed to put in a lap time capable of challenging for pole.

Wolff added: "I've never heard a driver saying in Monaco that feels good!

"I think it's always on the knife's edge. You've seen that with [Carlos] Sainz. And therefore not lots of great praise, but definitely going in the right direction."

Regardless of the levels of performance, Wolff was hugely proud of the effort put in by those back at the factory to get the car ready for the weekend.

"Massive," he said. "You see the whole bodywork is different, front suspension, the floor is different.

"A mega job of everybody in Brackley to have delivered that, and now this is our new baseline and we have to work from here."

And Wolff believed that Mercedes were closing in on Verstappen over the course of a single lap, but that over the length of an entire race they would struggle to keep up with the Red Bulls.

"Max was in his own class on the long run,” he added. “I think we're pretty close together on a single lap, at least today, but in the long run you see a car that has performance and has no degradation. They've done a good job."

READ MORE: Hamilton already preparing for 2024 F1 title charge at Mercedes claims Kravitz

F2/F3 Power Rankings - Verstappen Monaco display BEATEN by rising star

• May 30, 2023 10:57

FIVE thing we learned from Monaco - as Mercedes find out their chances of 2023 wins

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Amazing lifestyles of F1’s super rich drivers in Monaco including Lewis Hamilton and recent habitant Lando Norris

• Published : 6:30 ET, Jul 6 2023
• Updated : 10:32 ET, Jul 9 2023
• Published : Invalid Date,

LANDO NORRIS was the most recent F1 drivers to move to Monte Carlo.

The Bristol-born star, 23, revealed he was swapping Woking for tax-haven Monaco after the final Grand Prix of last season.

He said: "I’m moving to Monaco after [the final race in] Abu Dhabi for the reasons you probably expect.

“It’s something that obviously a lot of drivers go to do.

“And especially with how racing is - I think you’ve seen it with a lot of the drivers, how quickly things can also go downhill."

Norris joined the likes of Lewis Hamilton , Max Verstappen, Daniel Ricciardo, Charles Leclerc, and Valtteri Bottas in the Principality.

And they all boast incredible lifestyles that are the envy of sports stars around the globe.

From sailing on the Mediterranean sea to cycling on the streets, these racers have got it made.

LEWIS HAMILTON

The seven-time world champion, who has a reported net worth of around £300million, has homes all across the globe .

But for much of the year, Hamilton snubs his London mansion, New York penthouse and Colorado ranch for a life in Monaco.

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Although not much is known about where his property is, he once shared a snap of his wonderful view.

He captioned a photo on social media: "A place I call home, Monte Carlo. I am so blessed to live in such an incredible place. God is really shining down on me today.

"Sending you light & love for your day. On my way to Spa, let's do this!!!"

It is believed he resides in the exclusive Fontvieille district.

Back in 2007, it was reported he was interested in a 2,000sq ft, four-bedroom duplex with views across the Mediterranean in Fontvieille's Seaside Plaza.

Speaking of the Mediterranean, Hamilton has been seen enjoying watersports during his time away from the circuit.

MAX VERSTAPPEN

Current champ Verstappen's lifestyle in Monaco is more paired down than his rival's.

But that said, it's clear he doesn't skimp either. The Dutch star is said to rent an apartment that's worth around £16million.

His home is believed to be in the same apartment block as Felipe Massa and Daniel Ricciardo, which he was once filmed allegedly entering drunk after a night out.

During the first lockdown, he gave us a glimpse into his home when he shared his workouts from his balcony that overlooks the Mediterranean sea.

It's also where girlfriend, Brazilian model Kelly Piquet lives with him.

Verstappen is said to have a car collection in Monaco to die for, and recently ordered the £2million Aston Martin Valkyrie.

And like his speedy nemesis Hamilton, he likes watersports too - often seen whizzing around on a Red Bull sponsored jet-ski.

Drunk Max Verstappen trying to enter his house in Monaco pic.twitter.com/157QtE6EQw — SportsMoments4All (@SportMoments4Al) December 20, 2020

DANIEL RICCIARDO

Like Hamilton, Ricciardo has other abodes, most notably in Beverly Hills and in Perth.

But, when the former Monaco Grand Prix winner is competing he lives in his comfortable one-bedroom pied-à-terre in the city.

And he absolutely loves living in Monaco, as his Instagram reveals.

He drives a super fast McLaren 720S around time, worth around £215,000.

And when he's not on four wheels, he takes his scooter for a drive around the Monaco Grand Prix circuit.

Of the Grand Prix, the Aussie has revealed how the city changes when it's race weekend.

"It feels like a real racetrack, and I’m not thinking ‘there’s a cafe I eat at’ or ‘there’s a street I ride my Vespa down’ or whatever," he revealed.

"You wake up in your own bed, kick around your apartment and then start the journey to work." 

VALTTERI BOTTAS

The Finnish driver lives with Australian professional cyclist Tiffany Cromwell in the city.

However, they opt for a more private life in Monte Carlo, like they do in his homeland, where he owns a beautiful lakeside holiday home.

He did share his stunning view from his apartment balcony overlooking the harbour once upon a time though, giving fans a glimpse into his lifestyle.

Bottas also has the cycling bug, often competing in races around Monaco in his spare time.

When he's not driving a race car, Bottas is seen driving his £115,000 Mercedes-AMG GT.

To keep fit, Bottas goes running around the Monaco Grand Prix circuit he races on.

CHARLES LECLERC

Leclerc is born and bred in Monaco, so he has absolutely no reason to leave.

He has a luxury apartment, which he lived in with gorgeous girlfriend Charlotte Sine until they split.

Hilariously, when she was locked out of the home, Charlotte had to subscribe to his Twitch channel because he couldn't hear her as he was playing a racing simulator and had a headset on.

"So my girlfriend had to subscribe to my twitch channel to tell me to open the door," he later revealed on Twitter.

Leclerc has a gang of friends he loves spending the summers with.

They hop on board his £1.5million yacht, Monza and cruise around the Mediterannean.

And when he's not on sea, he's on grass on the golf course working on his handicap.

It's a glam life for some living it up in Monte Carlo.

. @Charles_Leclerc : "So my girlfriend had to subscribe to my twitch channel to tell me to open the door." 🤣 (Charlotte forgot her keys at home) https://t.co/Hja90wZ0Rn #F1 #Charles16 pic.twitter.com/dyXYZGNfd1 — Charles Leclerc Fan Page (@LeclercNews) May 16, 2020

• Lewis Hamilton
• Max Verstappen

Toto Wolff to miss Japanese GP amid growing doubts over Mercedes future

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff will be absent from the next Formula One race in Japan, the PA news agency has learned.

It is understood that Wolff’s decision to miss the race in Suzuka on April 7 was taken before the start of the new season and is not connected to the team’s performance in Australia.

Wolff admitted after Sunday’s race at Melbourne’s Albert Park that it is “fair” to question his future following Mercedes’ troubling weekend.

Lewis Hamilton qualified only 11th and the worst start to his 18-season career was confirmed when his engine expired on lap 17, while team-mate George Russell was seventh when he crashed out.

Wolff, who lives in Monaco, will be on the intercom remotely throughout the race weekend in Japan – with his duties at the circuit to be divided between senior members of the Brackley team.

The Austrian also missed last year’s Japanese GP and the ensuing round in Qatar, following knee surgery. On those occasions the team’s driver development director Jerome d’Ambrosio was handed the effective on-site team principal baton.

But it emerged earlier this month that D’Ambrosio would end his association with the team when his contract expires at the end of the season.

Wolff admitted in an interview with the PA news agency last year that he intends to scale back his on-track presence in the coming years.

The 52-year-old, who has been in charge of Mercedes since 2013, recently signed a new three-year deal to remain as chief executive and team principal of the F1 operation he co-owns with Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ola Kallenius.

Mercedes won an unprecedented eight consecutive constructors’ titles between 2014 and 2021 but they have tasted just one victory from their last 48 outings.

Fresh from his harrowing accident in Melbourne , Russell is expected to be at the team’s HQ in Northamptonshire later this week as Mercedes search for solutions to their underwhelming start to the season.

Russell failed to make it to the end of Sunday’s race after hitting the wall on the penultimate lap in his pursuit of Fernando Alonso.

The double world champion was adjudged to have driven dangerously by the stewards and was demoted from sixth to eighth following a post-race 20-second penalty.

However, the 42-year-old protested his innocence in a message posted on social media.

Alonso wrote: “A bit surprised by a penalty at the end of the race regarding how we should approach the corners or how we should drive the race cars. At no point do we want to do anything wrong at these speeds.

“I believe that without gravel on that corner, on any other corner in the world we will never be even investigated.

“In F1, with over 20 years of experience, changing racing lines, sacrificing entry speed to have good exits from corners is part of the art of motorsport.

“We never drive at 100 per cent every race lap and every corner, we save fuel, tyres, brakes, so being responsible for not making every lap the same is a bit surprising. We have to accept it and think about Japan, to have more pace and fight for positions further up the field.”

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What Toto Wolff will give Max Verstappen that Lewis Hamilton never had if he joins Mercedes

Toto Wolff is willing to offer Max Verstappen something he denied Lewis Hamilton to persuade him to join Mercedes, according to a report.

Wolff wants Verstappen to replace Hamilton at the Silver Arrows after the seven-time world champion decided to join Ferrari .

And according to F1 Insider , he’ll propose an incentive not even Hamilton has enjoyed.

Wolff needs to persuade the Dutchman to abandon a Red Bull team who have delivered title-winning cars in the past three seasons.

Last year’s RB19 was the most dominant car in the sport’s history, with Verstappen winning 19 of the 22 Grands Prix.

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He also won the first two races of the current campaign in dominant fashion before a brake issue forced him to retire in Australia last time out.

Verstappen, however, knows that there will be major changes to the F1 regulations for 2026 , which could shake up the running order.

Mercedes stole a march on the field at the beginning of the turbo/hybrid era in 2014, winning the next eight constructors’ titles.

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Verstappen’s ex-trainer thinks he’ll be willing to leave Red Bull if he believes he has a better chance of winning elsewhere.

In a sign that he’s willing to go all-out to capture the 26-year-old, Wolff is also targeting Red Bull’s chief engineer Pierre Wache .

Mercedes could make Max Verstappen an ambassador

Wolff can promise Verstappen a ‘rosier’ sporting picture from 2026 onwards, with Mercedes confident in their new power unit.

The move would initially appear to be a step-down given Red Bull’s dominance and the Silver Arrows’ struggles – they’re currently down in fourth in the standings, more than 70 points behind – but they’ll make a long-term pitch.

On top of that, they’re ready to table an ‘advertising ambassador contract’ that will be ‘lucrative’ for Verstappen even after he retires.

This is something that the 56-time race-winner could find ‘hard to refuse’.

Significantly, the Daily Mail reported last year that Mercedes weren’t willing to agree to Hamilton’s demands for a 10-year, £200m ambassador deal.

The Briton eventually signed a new two-year contract, but the second year was optional, enabling him to jump ship to Ferrari.

What is Max Verstappen’s salary?

Wolff may need to at least match Verstappen’s existing base salary of £35m per year , the second-highest on the grid.

The good news is that Hamilton is the sport’s highest earner at a guaranteed £43.5m, so his exit will theoretically free up the funds.

However, Mercedes may also be forced to buy out Verstappen’s current Red Bull deal, which runs until the end of 2028.

The reigning world champion apparently has an exit clause in his contract if director Helmut Marko leaves, and may have the option to depart if Christian Horner’s team struggle in 2026.

But, by the looks of it, neither of those will apply at this moment in time.

Still, one report has claimed he’s ‘increasingly likely’ to sign for Mercedes in another sensational driver transfer.

Another says he appreciates the charm offensive from the Brackley outfit amid the fractious atmosphere at Red Bull .

More than half of the field are out of contract for 2025, but many drivers will likely wait until Mercedes have confirmed the identity of Hamilton’s replacement before they commit their future elsewhere.

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Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff to miss the Japanese Grand Prix

Toto Wolff will sit out the upcoming Japanese Grand Prix.

Mercedes will be operating without Toto Wolff’s presence in Japan, with the team boss set to miss his first race of the season.

Toto Wolff won’t be in attendance at the Japanese Grand Prix on the first weekend in April, with the Mercedes team boss electing to sit out the race.

Toto Wolff to miss Japanese Grand Prix

Wolff is no stranger to missing occasional Grands Prix and sat out last year’s Japanese and Qatar rounds as he recovered from knee surgery.

The Austrian will not be in attendance at the upcoming Japanese Grand Prix on April 7th, but the decision to not attend was made prior to the start of the season as he decided upon his seasonal schedule, and is not linked to the team’s scoreless performance in Australia.

As has become the norm when Wolff isn’t on the ground at a race weekend, he will be connected remotely to the team from his home in Monaco, and his duties will be divided between senior members who are in attendance at the race track.

Following the departure of James Vowles to Williams at the conclusion of 2022, the point of call for Wolff’s effective on-site replacement was driver development director Jerome D’Ambrosio – but the Belgian is set to leave Mercedes at the conclusion of this season as he made a decision over winter to return home.

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Wolff has previously made it clear that he intends to scale down his in-person involvement at the race track over the coming years.

“The clear aim is to build a structure for the future and that is my sheer responsibility for the team,” Wolff told PA in 2023.

“A stone could fall on my head and how does it look afterwards? That is why I would like to see myself in a few years maybe not going to 24 races, and just to 15.

“But that is many years away. I see myself in this role for a long time. I cannot imagine doing something else.”

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