How Did Toto Wolff Buy Into the Mercedes Team?

Toto Wolff says Mercedes asked him to run the team because a corporate structure was not winning, then helped him buy a stake he could not afford on his own.

The company had bought the small team that won the championship in 2009, the first Mercedes Grand Prix squad with its own engines and its own chassis. It underperformed. Until 2013 it had won a single race. Wolff was running Williams with the founder, and Williams had won a race too. A board member asked how a private little team could win when Mercedes could not. Wolff looked at the numbers. Mercedes wanted world championships. He said one of them was wrong: he thought the budgets matched, and he was aiming at the top six. They said Mercedes spent 100 million more. He said the extra money went to Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg, while his pay driver from Venezuela had won a race. They disliked the comparison, and he went back to Williams.

They later said a corporate Formula 1 team does not function and needs someone who can decide on the spot. He turned down head of Mercedes Motorsport because he owned part of Williams and had always been an entrepreneur. Mercedes had bought back a 40 percent stake from an Abu Dhabi sovereign fund. He would put in only a conservative sum, because he had been through financial hardship and did not want to return to it. They financed the rest.