Sacked F1 boss reveals shocking phone call with Toto Wolff over poaching Red Bull staff
The Mercedes boss Toto Wolff is one of the most well-known personalities in the world of Formula 1.
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Toto Wolff (via IMAGO)
Before F1’s boom, midfield teams used to struggle owing to their small-scale investments. On the contrary, one team in the form of Force India remained an exception and utilized every single bit of resource that it had. This caused them to become suitable prospects for other team personnel as Otmar Szafnauer revealed a phone call that he had with Mercedes‘ Toto Wolff. The latter was left shocked after he got to know that the Romanian had signed a Red Bull senior member despite being a midfield operation.
Force India (Aston Martin) worked with an annual budget of around $100-110 million when teams were spending upwards of about $400 million. Despite the massive offset, Otmar Szafnauer was able to form a squad that managed to secure the spot of best of the rest multiple times. This earned him and the Indian team a reputation for being a suitable working environment where each person was valued for their skills.
However, towards the end of Force India’s disbandment, Szafnauer paid the salaries of his team from his own pocket. His determination was able to tempt senior members from top teams away from their bases and join the HQ in Silverstone, which even stunned Toto Wolff.
I called Toto [Wolff], and I don’t know what we’re talking about, but I said, Oh yeah, we’ve got this senior aerodynamicist guru coming from Red Bull to join us. And he was like, what? Why is he not coming to Mercedes? He couldn’t believe that a guy from Red Bull at a senior level would actually entertain going to Force India, but that’s because we had a reputation of, go there, it’s a good place to work.
Otmar Szafnauer said on the High Performance podcast
On the other hand, the 60-year-old is no longer heading the Silverstone-based outfit. After leaving the team, his venture at Alpine ended way earlier than expected, and thus, he has given a few one-off appearances ever since.
Otmar Szafnauer revealed Toto Wolff’s obsession with having the best team garage
While F1 teams need to stay below the cost cap or else they would be penalized, there was no such system a few years back. This resulted in some teams spending millions on upgrading their facilities and making their motorhome the best in the paddock.
Subsequently, Szafnauer revealed Wolff’s obsession with having the best garage in the pitlane and explained how observantly the Austrian walked down the pit road every race weekend.
I remember people telling me that Toto would walk around in the pit lane and look to see who had the nicest garage set up. You could see from the pit lane into everybody’s garages. And he would walk and benchmark the best. I think it was Red Bull at the time. And he would say to, you know, his sporting director, Ron Meadows, I want something better than that, which is great. And he did that.
Otmar Szafnauer said on the High Performance podcast
Apart from this, Wolff’s Mercedes has not been performing optimally at race weekends. The German marque’s performance has been switching up every session, which has left the engineers at Brackley scratching their heads. As a consequence of this, Mercedes now looks highly likely to finish fourth in the constructor’s standings as the top three have a massive lead on them.
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Geetansh Pasricha
(772 Articles Published)