© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Throughout 2020 Toto Wolff indicated he was thinking about hanging it up as a team principal of Mercedes. Ultimately, he decided to stay for at least three more years.
Wolff’s future was made clear last December when Mercedes announced that the team’s ownership would be split three ways between Daimler, INEOS and Wolff himself. In addition, they announced Wolff would remain the team’s principal for another three years. The Austrian explains his decision to stay.
“I’m still at heart a financial investor,” Wolff told The Race.
“I like the variety of people that you deal with and the variety of business cases that are interesting to develop.
“Formula 1 was more like a project, and the plan was that by the end of 2020 I would sell my shares, sell the shares back to Daimler or to a third party and conclude my activity.
“And I spent a year thinking about it. I decided that I love the connection to the people.
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“I enjoy developing the organisation further, staying successful in Formula 1, not taking anything for granted and having any kind of self-entitlement, building our engineering arm Mercedes Benz Applied Science, and in an environment where the cost cap has caused us much pain to downsize, utilise the opportunity to make this a financially successful organisation, like the American sports teams have shown us when they introduced the salary caps.
“And over a year I came to the conclusion that this is what I want to do. I decided that I’m not going to sell out.”
Race.com suggests that Wolff seemed to make up his mind about staying with Mercedes around autumn of last year.
“You’re spot on. You kind of got the moment where I took the decision. And it was non-committal [before] because I didn’t know.
“I didn’t know whether I wanted to continue or not, and then came the shift in the autumn. I thought, ‘I want this’.
“But it was so many hours thinking about it,” concluded Wolff.
