Toto Wolff has revealed he did not try to persuade Lewis Hamilton to remain at Mercedes instead of switching to Ferrari and says he was concerned about the F1 driver’s “shelf life”.
At the start of the year, Hamilton told Wolff he wanted to cut short his contract with Mercedes in order to join the Scuderia for 2025.
The news ripped through F1 while Wolff has claimed that he had suspicions that Hamilton was thinking about quitting after a phone call with Carlos Sainz’s father, who revealed his son was being ditched to make way for Hamilton in the Ferrari squad.
Hamilton – who will be 40 when he joins Ferrari in January- and Wolff have always spoken of a mutual friendship.
And Wolff says Hamilton’s decision to defect to another team is actually as positive as it means he does not need an awkward discussion with the seven time world champion where he tells him he is no longer needed.
Wolff cites examples of former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, and current Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola, showing the door to older players as they rebuild their squads with the next generation of talent.
Wolff made the comments in a new book titled Inside Mercedes F1: Life in the Fast Lane.
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes-AMG F1 Team
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images
“I absolutely had it on my radar that Lewis would go,” says Wolff. “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.
“[But] 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 want to stop.”
Mercedes is replacing Hamilton with 18-year-old Andrea Kimi Antonelli.
“There’s a reason why we only signed a one-plus-one-year contract,” adds Wolff in relation to the deal they signed with Hamilton in 2023.
“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 football. Managers like Sir Alex Ferguson or Pep Guardiola. They anticipated it in the performance of their top stars and brought in junior players that drove the team for the next years.”
Meanwhile, Wolff has conceded he still thinks about how Hamilton was denied a record eighth world championship at the hands of former FIA race director Michael Masi and his handling of the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix where Hamilton lost his crown to Max Verstappen.
Speaking on the High Performance podcast where he was interviewed about the book, Wolff said: “There’s a moment every week where I think about it [Abu Dhabi 2021], but I mainly think about it because Lewis should have deserved to be the greatest of all time with eight world championship titles.
“You can argue all along about that year. I think Max and Lewis were deserving champions. There were instances during the year where Max lost some points that he shouldn’t have lost. You look at Silverstone. You look at the crash in Monza both of them had. So, both deserving champions. But on that particular afternoon in Abu Dhabi, it was unfair.”