Toto Wolff Has A Plan To Bring Back Mercedes' F1 Dynasty

The most powerful team of the modern era is now playing catch-up to Red Bull as the 2023 season gets underway after a run of failed wagers on new regulations.

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Toto Wolff was watching the world's most advanced automobiles race around the palm-lined, sun-drenched Miami Grand Prix circuit last spring when a startling idea struck him like a bucket of ice water traveling 180 mph.

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His Mercedes team, which has won the Formula One constructors' championship eight times in a row and is arguably the greatest dynasty in contemporary sports history, wasn't simply slow. It wasn't even remotely competitive. As the head of the Mercedes team, he had managed to create a run of supremacy that was finally coming to an end. For the first time in his career, seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton would end the year without taking home a single Grand Prix victory.

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"We knew the consecutives would cease one day, but we weren't ready," explains Wolff. And it wasn't just a blip, either.

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It was more like Red Bull Racing, a different team, getting every element correct for its star driver Max Verstappen in 2022, just around the time Mercedes made a huge number of mistakes.

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The shock was caused by a significant revision of F1's technical requirements before the previous season. An whole design manual was discarded, and a brand-new aerodynamic recipe for the sport was introduced. These abrupt adjustments normally occur every ten years or so, and they have the effect of resetting the championship rankings. Teams had over a year to be ready and millions of dollars were spent on research and the creation of the new models.

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There was no reason for Mercedes to anticipate missing.

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But, any error may snowball into a lost season in a sport where victories and losses are determined by the tiniest margins imaginable—thousandths of a second and microscopic changes in air flow. Last year, all it took for Mercedes was one incorrect data point in a wind tunnel test to lead the team's engineers astray. From there, mistakes added up to create a seriously poor vehicle that floundered behind the Red Bulls on fast tracks like Miami.

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Wolff says, "You know, we could portray each other as superheroes, saying we always trusted each other to come back. Yet in reality, you begin to have doubts.

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As a result, Wolff, an urbane 51-year-old Austrian who has been in charge of the team since 2013, finds himself in a unique situation as the 2023 season, which gets underway on March 5 with the Bahrain Grand Prix, approaches. A team that was assembled to support an energy drink is currently the underdog against one of the most successful racing teams in history.

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The specific changes Mercedes made to the vehicle are a well kept secret. Nonetheless, the team's performance near the end of the previous campaign suggested they were finally mastering the new shape of the car.

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Progress was made, but it was too late to save the 2022 campaign. The garage appeared to be falling apart at the seams during the worst of it. In June, a furious Hamilton said that the vehicle was "undriveable" and that the bouncing problem was giving him severe back pain. The seven-time world champion admitted at the time that it had been "a disaster for me." The automobile is deteriorating.

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Wolff, who was forced to admit it himself, called Hamilton on the team radio to apologize for the vehicle being "a bit of a shitbox to drive at the moment."

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Wolff's ambitions to restore Mercedes to the top are driven by this brand of frank Austrianness. Wolff serves in the capacities of team principle, chief executive, and head coach, respectively. He never anticipated that the former IT investor, who initially invested in an F1 team as a trophy asset in 2009, would spend his time traveling across the world fretting about tire pressure and understeer. Wolff's time in the internet industry taught him how swiftly regulatory change, such as modifications to F1 rules, can result in unpredictable performance and significant turmoil.

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The issue, according to Wolff, is that it resembles a share price. It simply "has these awful swings."

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As his life has drastically changed over the past 15 years, he now manages a company with more than 400 million dollars in annual revenue and 1,300 people, with the success on the track serving as his new bottom line. Even still, Wolff is not an engineer while playing all of those roles. In order to ensure that Mercedes starts winning again, it is his responsibility to cut through the weeds and design procedures.

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Why have we misjudged some things from a human position and especially from an engineering standpoint? He states, " "Why have we made technical decisions that have turned out to be incorrect? And how can we keep that from happening again? ”

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He continued, "Once the stopwatch comes up again, that's going to be the actual test, the reality check."

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When Mercedes debuts its new W14 car for the first official laps of the season on Thursday in Bahrain, that will get started in earnest. Wolff anticipates that the team's new ethos, which he imposed over the winter, will start to bear fruit.

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He states that he wants to foster an atmosphere of open communication and ruthless honesty. I call that brutal love. Create an environment where you may hurl things at each other by clearly defining the goal for everyone, encouraging them to buy into it, and doing so.

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Throwing stuff around, though, won't always work to fix problems. Moreover, you can no longer solve a problem by just throwing money at it in modern F1. The 10 teams last season were each restricted to budgets of approximately $140 million due to expenditure limitations that were implemented to prevent them from repeatedly going bankrupt. For this season, that sum should drop to somewhere around $135 million. The need to save so much money has caused the finance department at Mercedes F1 to grow from 15 to 46 employees in only 18 months. Ironically, the cost cap does not apply to spending on finance departments. 

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These limitations require Mercedes, whose first ascent to the top of F1 was supported in part by its unparalleled resources, to develop a new strategy. The team's history, which spanned 14 seasons, had always been one of advancement. Even the contentious 2021 season, which caused Verstappen to get in the wrong on the final lap of the previous race, isn't seen as a failure by Mercedes internally. On the other hand, it most certainly will be in 2022. Wolff must take action to prevent 2023 from being another one.

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"During the first eight years, the main concern was how to expand the organization while maintaining its success. Wolff says, " "How will we handle the situation if we realize that [setbacks] are inevitable? This experiment has been run very much in real time.