Toto Wolff

Team Principal & CEO, Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team

Toto Wolff is Team Principal, CEO and co-owner of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team.

From humble surroundings in Vienna, Austria, his 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, Wolff 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, Wolff 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. Wolff divested his stake in 2015.

By this time, Wolff 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 Wolff to analyze the performance of their Formula One works team. Wolff subsequently acquired a 30% stake in the Brackley based team, alongside co-shareholder Niki Lauda.

With Wolff as Team Principal, the Mercedes F1 team has achieved an unprecedented eight consecutive Constructors’ World Championships and seven Drivers’ titles 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,Wolff continues to invest in startup technology companies.

Sessions

EBACE Opening Keynote Session
Tuesday, 23 May 2023
09:00 – 10:00