Toto Wolff (Inside Mercedes F1: Life in the Fast Lane) is principal of the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team. Toto joins the Armchair Expert to discuss the tragedy of being a string bean, his parents emigrating to Austria after the war, and crashing at 189 mph attempting a new lap record at the Nordschleife. Toto and Dax talk about the luxury of being a vulnerable man, being no-nonsense Capricorns, and Dax invites Toto to live in his guesthouse. Toto talks about whether mental health and being a champion are mutually exclusive, the biggest drama in all of F1, and finding his niche between business finance and the love for the stopwatch.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What led Toto Wolff to become the CEO of Mercedes F1?
No, I think my father was very successful at a young age. I was born into money, but then he lost all and had brain cancer. You're eight years old. Yeah. And at the beginning it was benign. And then over the next few years, it got really ugly to a degree that it was uncurable. He struggled for so long because he got operated and operated and operated and he changed his personality.
And when a son is in his teenage years, you need your dad. You need your dad to look up to, to love. You need your dad to hate and to fight.
He wasn't present anymore. Yeah, because you were eight when he got diagnosed and then you were 15 when he died. Yeah. Your parents also got divorced when you were eight. It had no relation to the brain cancer diagnosis, did it? No, the divorce was that.
Sorry, that must be a kid or my wife. Let's see which one. Feel free to answer. We also edit.
I'd love to say hi to Susie if she's there. Susie, I'm right in the podcast. Hello, Susie.
I love you.
No, no, I'll pass you over. I'll pass you over. I'll pass you over.
Oh, this is so exciting.
Susie. No, listen to me. This is such a delight. If my wife dies and Toto dies, I'm sprinting to you, okay? I just want to say, what a dynamo. A beautiful race car driver who also runs an academy. What more does someone need? That's pretty cool. All right, I'm going to turn you back to him, but I'm delighted to hear your voice. Here's Toto. Hello. How fun. Okay, sleep well.
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Chapter 2: How does Toto Wolff balance mental health and high-stakes racing?
Chapter 3: What were the challenges Toto faced during his childhood?
They're finishing every single qualifying within a hundredth of a second. There's too many variables. It's impossible. Now you add in through all this dramatic season, there were points taken away. There were laps given back. There was judgment calls. They land at 235.5. It's not possible. The race goes on. Max is not going to win. He is behind three cars that have been lapped.
There's an accident. The race goes under a safety car. So everyone's bunched up. Now, here's my question. As I understand it, and I could be totally wrong, they unlap cars that have been passed. So the person between Max and Lewis, they're number one and two, but there's three cars in there, but they're in spots 18, 19, 20.
So the rules, as I understand them, is that under a safety car, the cars in between are allowed to unlap themselves. So they're allowed to go out in front of the lead car and join the back of the pack where they belong.
Oh, I see. Okay.
But what's really weird is that they don't unlap them right away. That to me is like, this is the problem. It's not like who did what. It's like, they should have been unlapped right away. They weren't. So four laps goes by and then they make a decision with one lap left to let them unlap. Max is on brand new tires. Lewis is on 13 lap old tires.
The safety car pulls up and Max passes him within two turns and he wins the championship. It would have been Lewis's eighth championship, which would have made him surpass Schumacher. The stakes could not have paused. I mean, the drama of it, it'll never get better. Now, my question, and when I've been in arguments with people, I'm like, are you saying that they don't unlap cars?
Are you saying in that situation they shouldn't have unlapped cars?
The strict interpretation of the rules is you need to unlap the cars and make them join at the back. So take one box. We win the championship. It's clear because there's not enough laps left and the race finishes on the safety car. The second version is once you make the cars on lap, you need one more lap before green flag. We win the championship.
The third one was more of an outlier against the rules. What we could understand is give it the last lap. So you have a green flag lap and not behind a safety car. Then Lewis would have won because there was a few cars in between. Well, that's questionable. Three or four cars in between. I mean, Max potentially could have got by them. I don't know. But I was anyway not part of the rules.
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Chapter 4: How did Toto's upbringing influence his leadership style?
Chapter 5: What was the significance of the 2021 F1 season finale?
I think that's it for me. Like as someone who loved someone, even if I wanted them in my life still, I would understand like, yeah, that's what Schumacher did. That's what you do. I want the best for him, even though I'm going to aim to beat him next year.
But I want the best for him also from a personal side.
I had a little fantasy when he left that you were somehow going to get Adrian Newey and Max. Yeah.
You're like, me too.
I also have that fantasy.
So what can I say? You can't say shit. Yeah, I think on the engineering side, I'm really happy where we are. We are not having the success on track that we would want to. We had three race victories this year, two unmarried. But I feel in a really happy space with James Ellison being our technical director. We are reorganizing the team. We've hired, we have let some people go.
And on drivers, yours, Max and I, we always had a correct relationship. It suffered a bit in 2021 because it got dirty from both sides.
Also, it sucks you were on the inside of it, so it's not as pleasurable. On the outside, what a year. What a year, yeah. What a fucking year.
And it's part of a great success we're having today. It was really dramatic. And I remember the topic that nobody wanted to touch on many Christmas tables was Trump, Brexit, and Abu Dhabi 2021. Yeah.
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