Is there a typical day for Toto Wolff team principal when you’re at the factory? Do you know what you’re going to do every day when you go into the office or is it a case of open the door and see what comes in?
No. The way we are structured, the team principal is actually the chief executive officer. My life consists of 280 hotel nights, 1,000 hours of flying per year, so I would wish to be in the factory more, but because of the role I have, also within the Mercedes context, I’m more on the road than in the office. If I am in the office, I try to spend most of the time working on internal matters, with the people, because I don’t get to see them so much because of all the travelling. I spend a lot of time on HR topics, for example, or in management meetings and performance debriefs but even though all my days are full of meetings, I still feel it should be about transparent communication and so I try to still have an open door for everybody who thinks their topic is urgent to just pop in and tell me.
You’re winning everything at the moment but, it can’t last forever because F1 has always proved to be cyclical - the Schumacher years, the McLaren years, the Williams years, so how do you manage people’s expectations for when that day comes? Is there a plan?
As you say, it’s pretty unrealistic to win every race and to win every championship forever. That hasn’t happened in any sport. You have the odd exception like Bayern Munich in Germany winning the league every year. But if you look at them in the Champions League or even in the cup, they are not winning it every year. Hermann Maier didn’t win every ski race that he attended. Eventually, it changes.
For me, success with the team has no finishing line. It is a constant development and improvement of the team. It is a dynamic organ and needs to adapt to new environments, to new regulations, to bring in new people and to develop those people. This is the challenge we enjoy the most.
In terms of expectation management, you just need to do it. This is something we work on proactively with our staff, explaining that one day it could happen. And then there’s the (Mercedes) Board. It’s a very important customer. After all of our people, the board is the second-most-important client, so we’re also talking about it proactively with them.
Not connected with that question, because it implies that you’ll run away, but what does Toto Wolff do next? Because I don’t think you’re an F1 careerist.
From my fundamental set-up, I like challenges and I am not attracted by the glitz and exposure of Formula 1 at all. Probably on the contrary, it complicates my life because there’s the risk that it sucks you in a bit, so I’m fighting that. One day, I will leave the sport and return to what I’ve done before and be a private equity person.
You still run those businesses.
Yes.
If you were given the power to make Formula 1 something completely different, are there one or two things you can pinpoint?
It’s a common question: what would you do differently? As a matter of fact, Bernie has built something that is extremely successful so I think most of the decisions he has taken were the right ones. If you look at the environment today, it’s maybe a bit different. There is the challenge of how to monetise digital revenues and how you tackle the digital competition. Everybody who puts a video on YouTube becomes a competitor so there is no silver bullet.
There’s many little things that one could tackle, always bearing in mind that you wouldn’t want to cut off your income streams because it’s a financially successful company. My answer is we can sit here forever to discuss it and I do this very often with Bernie but if one day, somebody ends up in his shoes, they are going to find out it’s much more difficult to put those changes in place than just talk about it.
Final question. I mentioned at the beginning that sometimes I see you look at your colleagues and think they’re all crazy, but you’ve probably got the craziest man in the paddock under your own roof.
He sits in my office.
Mr Lauda. Just tell me something about what it’s like to work with the legend.
We have found a very good way. At the beginning, we found each other in the situation that both of us were used to making our own decisions and be our own boss and suddenly Daimler decided that it was good for the team that we would do this somehow jointly. We needed half a year, a year, to really find our positioning and now it’s as good as it can get.
Niki says he has no friends but two weeks ago, he said to me, “if there is something like a friend, you probably come close to that now”. I take this as a compliment. We travel together, we speak to each other every day. He’s a very active non-executive chairman, a good sparring partner for me, a good sparring partner for the drivers, a sounding board for people who need answers, and I’m very happy that he’s here.
At this point Niki himself arrives and he and Toto head off for a meeting.
