Toto Wolff

We chatted

to Toto Wolff in the F1 TV post-race show, and he made a comment that I thought was pretty interesting because we know that Kimi's been part of the Mercedes program for a long time.

But Toto went into a little bit more detail about the level of involvement from a very young age that the team really had.

This wasn't, yeah, they threw him a couple bucks through his karting career and paid for his F4 season, and he worked with the trainer and got some sim time.

Molly, for you, what's made him so special, our new world champion?

Well, Toto Wolff actually told me last week that he's been studying drivers' brains, as you do, as a team principal.

He's worked with so many great drivers over the years.

He said for 30 years, he's been trying to figure out, you know, kind of what makes a driver tick.

You know, the seat that he vacated when he decided to join Ferrari.

And, you know, Toto was sort of making a point afterwards, you know, when people were trying to speak to him as they're going towards the celebrations, saying, you know, everyone doubted us.

Like, who's Kimi Antonelli? This is Kimi Antonelli.

And what has achieved this season? He's taken three full years off the record for the youngest world champion ever.

And then he had to

go and see his teammates, who I'm sure he's on good terms with, but he had to go and see his teammate become F1 drivers champion when he probably thought to himself, that should have been me.

Yeah, Toto Wolff was saying that he was pretty distraught after the race and very, very upset.

And you would be, because, I mean, again, even just looking at the day in general, he had a really horrible day.

I won't go into years, but you could probably work out my birthday from that.

But anyway, I think Toto Wolff summed it up best in many ways when he said that, yeah, you've got a driver who still goes to the water park with his friends to celebrate his birthday.

And here he is.

An F1 world champion.

For me, the penalty was fair.

And the big question now is, What's next for George? How does he bounce back from this? Didn't do his media duties after the race.

Toto Wolff said he was distraught and understandably so in Toto's words.

But yeah, where does George go? We're about to see what George Russell is made of, not from the point of being a racing driver, but I guess more as a person.

Yeah, he is.

We spoke with Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal after the race, and he said to him, Kimi is still a kid.

Like he said, he still looks like a kid.

He still acts like a kid a lot of the time.

Lewis Hamilton won his first title in his second season.

Max Verstappen was a precocious, very good young driver very early on.

And yeah, Kimi does it the same, but it's something that Toto Wolff also highlighted post-race.

He doesn't race dirty.

nostalgic.

I also want to give an honorable mention, but not Supernova, maybe Driver of the Day, to Toto Wolff.

Yeah.

Thank you for bringing Kimmy into our lives.

Like often...

I don't know, there's all this focus on the driver, but you just have to really think about what Toto Wolff saw in this kid, right? All those years ago.

Yeah, I totally agree.

And the amount of faith that they put in him.

all thanks to yet again another energy deployment problem which was not all that dissimilar to what happened in spa that is on the team again but then russell does have to answer for the fact that he did collide with hajar and sent him off and the stewards issued him a ten second penalty which meant that he finished sixth overall Being understandably furious about yet another Mercedes cock-up, the team excused George from media duties afterwards, and absorbed the fine.

Toto Wolff saying he was distraught, but had congratulated Antonelli, so let's not claim that George refused to acknowledge his teammate's achievement, he did.

All this is going to do is yet add more fuel to the fire than Mercedes are doing something with this car, because, yes, Kimi has had his fair share of reliability quibbles, but not nearly as much when it comes to Russell, and because he lost even more points this weekend thanks to a really buggy energy deployment system.

A fast but fragile car, but it seems to be more fragile with Russell and faster with Kimi.

Look again, they're gone.

but as you say even at the conference there can be crazy things because I think a lot of our moments you know you've got some moments from outside the conference and the evenings and stuff but occasionally there's something that goes on I mean my first year Toto Wolff was was on stage and I was really big into F1 at the time so that was really cool

I have interviewed Gilberto Silva at the conference who won the World Cup with Brazil, was one of the Arsenal Invincibles.

That was a pretty kind of cool moment.