Toto Wolff says the timing of Lewis Hamilton’s decision to move to Ferrari left him unable to react in the driver market.
Hamilton signed with Ferrari at the start of this year, with the seven-time world champion moving to Maranello in 2025. The announcement of the switch was made on February 1, prior to the start of the current season but a matter of weeks after multiple leading drivers had signed contract extensions at their current teams, something Wolff says caught him out.
“I always see an opportunity in change,” Wolff said in the recently-released book ‘Inside Mercedes F1: Life in the Fast Lane’. “For a minute, I was in disbelief at the timing of it. The next we talked about what it meant for the team.
“I like the situation. It helps us because it avoids the moment where we need to tell the sport’s most iconic driver that we went to stop.
“There’s a reason why we only signed a one-plus-one-year contract. We’re in a sport where cognitive sharpness is extremely important, and I believe everyone has a shelf life. So I need to look at the next generation. It’s the same in soccer. Managers like Sir Alex Ferguson or Pep Guardiola. They anticipated it in the performance of their top stars and brought in junior players who drove the team for the next years.
“I absolutely had it on my radar that Lewis would go. I just couldn’t understand why he’d change to another team before we knew if we were going to be competitive. It also didn’t give me any time to react. I had to emergency call our partners, and I possibly missed out on negotiating with other drivers who had signed contracts a few weeks earlier like Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris.”
Wolff was reflecting on the situation nearer the time, and despite it leaving him with a tough decision to make – eventually promoting Andrea Kimi Antonelli – he says it was not damaging to the relationship between himself and Hamilton.
“It put us on the back foot, and that had a commercial impact. But do I take that personally? This was a business decision. We’ve enjoyed such a successful journey together, and now we have our own objectives. This didn’t even move the needle for me. I’m thick-skinned. I’ve had some pretty tough moments in my life, and this doesn’t compare.”
