Mercedes

Wolff confident Mercedes has 'strength in depth'

Toto Wolff is confident that Mercedes now has enough depth in terms of technical expertise to protect itself from staff turnover in the future.

In the past, Formula 1 teams have struggled to maintain their form when senior staff have been poached by rivals. Mercedes itself lost executive technical director Paddy Lowe to McLaren before the 2017 season.

But Wolff is confident that won't be the case at the four-time world championship squad. He said the team could survive departures even at the most senior level, such as chassis chief James Allison or engine boss Andy Cowell.

"This organisation is not dependent on a single individual," Wolff told Motorsport.com. "Not Paddy, not James, not Andy, not myself, nobody.

"My personal challenge is if I call it a day one day I would want to know that this team can do better without me.

"The team needs to be as strong afterwards in a really different way," he stated. "You will not replace a James or an Andy or a Mark Ellis or an Aldo Costa.

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"When a highly senior person leaves the team or there is a change in the senior personnel, it will not affect the organisation because the base is so strong."

Wolff said that developing in-house talent and expertise was key to the team's continued success.

"You will see this organisation develop and younger engineers and mechanics and management coming up," he pledged. "We have a strong base of individuals that do a tremendous job.

"The next generations are going to come up with their own set of skills, with their own personality," he insisted. "[They] will be able to develop the team from strength-to-strength.

"You can't freeze an organisation because it is successful," he said. "You need to look after the next generation of leaders, you need to adapt to new challenges.

He added that a Formula 1 team was "not a static structure, it is dynamic."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.