The Backstory – Wolff and the Either/Or Shock of a Team Member: “Too Much Pressure”

The Mercedes difficulties

After a couple of objectively complex seasons, the Mercedes in these last races of 2024 it seemed to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. The current positive streak speaks of three wins out of four Grand Prixwith the smile that is starting to appear again among all the team members. In a very interesting interview given to the Hungarians of formula.hu, Toto Wolff he made mea culpa for some attitudes he had that further put his men in difficulty.

The backstory

“There was a moment, at the end of 2023, when, due to the pressure, I almost lost a very important person in my team”underlined the Austrian manager, who told the background story: “He’s a person I respect and appreciate a lot, who took me aside and said, ‘Listen, you can keep doing what you’re doing, but I personally can’t stand this pressure anymore’”

At that point Wolff clearly saw a fork in the road ahead: “I thought, ‘Let’s stop for a moment. I don’t want to lose this person.so either I continue to do what I have always done all my life as a manager and entrepreneur, or I have to change. What happened was a real shock that changed a lot of things in me. Niki Lauda and I were very similar in that, we believed in constant pressure. But in this situation it didn’t work, and so I became much more understanding.”

And so Wolff became more thoughtful: “There was a risk that the team would collapse due to the pressure and I changed, becoming pragmatic.. I looked deeper and gave people another chance, instead of being too brutal and direct. And impatience doesn’t make a machine faster. I had to become a different person, more patient and less impulsive, more long-term oriented.”. And he concluded with a joke: “Being a shareholder of the team I can also think in terms of decades…”