Photo: Glenn Dunbar/LAT for Williams F1
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff explains how Ayrton Senna’s death stopped his racing career and put him on a path that brought him to his current F1 role.
In a talk on BBC’s ‘Desert Island Discs’, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff explained how his racing career was brought to a stop in 1994, after the death of Ayrton Senna.
“In 1994, when I was at the peak of my junior career, Ayrton Senna died, and two days earlier Roland Ratzenberger,” the Austrian said.
“My sponsor, who in a way was taking care of all of us, said: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’
“And that was the killer for me. I knew that without his financial support, it wouldn’t work.”
Toto explained how he then began a completely different career in the financial world, and started an internship at a bank in Warsaw.
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“It was a hot summer. Friends were on vacation or racing cars, and I was working there, sometimes crying my eyes out in the office restroom during lunch breaks.
“I had to tough it out, and it felt right. I started to educate myself about banking, investment banking, and the markets.
“And the next dream began, which was to be successful as an investment banker,” Wolff concluded.
This career then brought him right back to racing, after he made an investment in the Williams F1 team in 2009, and the rest is, as they say – history.
