From television the viewer sees only one face, but hardly ever knows what lies behind an expression, an action, a gesture. To understand those of Toto Wolffhe is so skilled at hiding (on and off the track), he needs an opening.
And Wolff opened up. He did it in a nice interview with the British newspaper Timeswhere he told hidden sides of his story that led him to become one of the most powerful men in Formula 1: “I was at the Lycée Francais in Vienna, I was 12 years old. A man walked into the classroom and said ‘Wolff, come with me’. Despite the reminders of the school, my parents they hadn’t paid the taxes mine and my sister’s. The most humiliating part was going back to class to get my books. My father was very ill, my mother had to look after the family and was an anesthetist. She did not speak French and all the school calls were not even recognized. She was very good at many things, but not at being a mother. And the school was very French, authoritarian in its approach. About 15 years ago, my uncle Ivar and I talked to the school and created a fund so that no children would end up in the situation my sister and I had. In the most difficult cases the school came to my uncle and me, and where the taxes were not paid, we drew from the fund to help those children.“.
Wolff, very affected by the episode, found strength to start again, also thanks to the money of his grandparents who fixed the payments with the school. Entering the world of work, he founded a company of venture capital with his childhood friend René Berger and exploited his ability to intuit on the fly what could happen: “We were a team of 27 people. We had offices in Vienna, Berlin, Zurich, Tel Aviv and Warsaw. We have never had a single failure. The reason was that we never paid any of the investments. I arrived without money and said: ‘I will raise money for you, I will make you a business plan and if we are successful, I will become a shareholder‘. If the company was good, we were good“. Accumulating advice and wealth, the Austrian arrived in Formula 1, first with Williams and then with Mercedes. Where he continued his climb, becoming not only team principal but also co-owner of the team. And he who knows when his climb will stop.
#Expulsion #school #money #Wolffs #roots #FormulaPassionit