Toto Wolff

From humble surroundings in Vienna, Austria, Toto’s first taste of motorsport came at the age of 17, when he watched a friend compete at the Nürburgring in Germany. As well as a short single-seater racing career in his early 20s, Toto has competed successfully in national rallying, touring cars, and world championship GT racing.

After dropping out of the Vienna University Economics and Business, he founded one of the earliest tech-focused venture capital firms in Europe making a string of high-profile deals in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Among these investments, Toto and company founder Hans-Werner Aufrecht co-owned HWA AG – the engineering expertise behind 10 DTM titles for Mercedes-Benz, over 450 Formula 3 race wins and one of the world’s most successful GT customer racing programmes. Toto divested his stake in 2015.

By this time, Toto had also created a racing driver management company with F1 world champion Mika Häkkinen, and in 2009 he entered Formula One by acquiring a stake in the Williams F1 Team. He became Executive Director of the team in 2012, when it took its last race victory to date at the Spanish Grand Prix.

Less than a year later, the board of Daimler AG asked Toto to analyse the performance of their Formula One works team. Toto subsequently acquired a 30% stake in the Brackley based team, alongside co-shareholder Niki Lauda.

With Toto as Team Principal, the Mercedes F1 team has achieved an unprecedented seven consecutive World Championship doubles to become the most successful team in F1 history and most successful sports team in the world based on consecutive world championships.

Beyond Formula One, Toto is also a partner with Mercedes in the Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team and continues to invest in start-up technology companies.