Toto Wolff has spent more than a decade managing the pressure of a Formula 1 team principal’s job without his heart rate becoming public knowledge. Then his nine year old son started karting, and he found out exactly what his pulse does when it isn’t his own car on the circuit.
“When he is starting a race, my heartbeat is 155, and here it is 90, so it is totally different when you see your kid driving in a race car,” Wolff told RacingNews365 in an exclusive interview ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix.
A Family That Has Done This Before, Just Never Like This
Jack Wolff isn’t a child stumbling into a sport his parents happen to work in. His mother, Susie Wolff, started karting at eight years old, was named Woman Kart Racing Driver of the Year in 1996, raced against a young Lewis Hamilton on the way up, and went on to become Williams’ development and test driver before making history in 2014 as the first woman in more than two decades to take part in an F1 race weekend. His father built Mercedes into the most dominant constructor of the turbo hybrid era. There was almost no version of Jack Wolff’s childhood that wasn’t going to involve an engine of some kind.
What has caught Toto off guard is not that his son wants to race. It’s how completely the sport has taken over Jack’s attention after his first competitive win, an overall victory in the X30 U10 category of the IAME Series in Italy earlier this year.
“There is nothing else that interests him, it is all about driving, driving a simulator, driving the go-kart,” Wolff said. “If there are four days that he is not driving, he asks, when can I drive again, when can I drive again.”
Why He Won’t Predict What Comes Next
For a man who runs one of Formula 1’s most closely scrutinized operations, Wolff has been unusually disciplined about not projecting his son’s career forward. Jack is currently leading his karting championship and outperforming his father’s own expectations for a first competitive season, results that would normally invite speculation about a future in Formula 3 or Formula 2. Wolff has resisted that entirely.
“I really try to compartmentalise that because he is nine, it is his first racing season, and he is doing better than my expectations were,” Wolff said. “He likes it, but he might not like it next year anymore, or in two years, or he might struggle when he gets into juniors. He might struggle when he gets into cars, he may not, and I think judging a nine year old’s possible career trajectory is not too early.”
That restraint runs directly against the instincts of a man whose day job involves analyzing every variable available to extract a competitive edge. Wolff has been candid that the disconnect between his professional mindset and his role as a parent has been one of the more difficult adjustments of Jack’s early racing career.
“I have an understanding of what the driver needs to do and how he needs to drive, but as a dad, I’m much more irrational and too emotional,” Wolff said.
What Racing Is Teaching Him About Himself
Wolff has described his son’s karting weekends as something closer to therapy than a hobby he tolerates. He and Susie have built their family life around race weekends and motorhome travel, a choice Wolff describes as preferable to the alternative childhood their position and location could otherwise afford Jack.
“We like to go to the races, for him it is a way of growing up, rather than to be a spoiled Monaco international school kid,” Wolff said. “He needs to go out on a car track and put his elbows out to win, it is good.”
The bigger admission, though, is what watching Jack race has done to Wolff’s own temperament. He has spent years in Formula 1 known for visible, sometimes explosive reactions on the pit wall, arguing with stewards, clashing with rival teams and wearing his emotions in a way few of his fellow principals do. Watching his son compete, he says, has forced him to practice the opposite.
“It is also good for me to learn how to be stable emotionally, I’m always someone who has gotten too emotional at times, too angry and too quickly,” Wolff said.
Even Red Bull Has Noticed
Jack’s early results haven’t stayed inside Mercedes’ own paddock gossip. Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko, a man not known for handing out compliments to rival team principals, brought up Jack unprompted while discussing Kimi Antonelli’s development earlier this year.
“Toto Wolff has another ace up his sleeve,” Marko said. “His son is a real speed demon in karting, much like Johan, Gerhard Berger’s son.” The comparison to Berger’s son, another karting prospect with a famous F1 surname, is the kind of shorthand the paddock uses long before anyone commits to calling a nine year old a future Formula 1 driver. Wolff’s own reluctance to entertain that shorthand is precisely the point. Marko’s comment travels around the paddock as gossip. Wolff’s response, in his own words to RacingNews365, is to actively resist letting it shape how he talks about his son at home.
The comparison also lands differently coming from Marko specifically, given Red Bull’s own history of fast tracking young talent through its junior program, sometimes to a driver’s benefit and sometimes not. Wolff has watched that model up close from the opposite side of the garage wall for over a decade, and that is likely part of why he’s so deliberate about not replicating its pressures on his own son this early.
A Different Kind Of Pressure Test
The timing of the interview, delivered days before Verstappen’s own farewell weekend at Zandvoort and Mercedes’ continued search for its first championship of the turbo hybrid era’s second act, underlines just how much separation Wolff has had to build between his two roles. On a Sunday when Kimi Antonelli is defending a championship lead and George Russell is chasing his own results, Wolff’s highest heart rate of the week reportedly still belongs to a kart race in Italy involving a nine year old with his last name.
It is a small, almost private admission from a man rarely associated with vulnerability in public, but it captures something true about how differently the sport looks from the other side of the fence, watching rather than managing. Wolff has spent his career teaching Mercedes drivers how to separate emotion from performance under pressure. His son’s early laps are teaching him the same lesson in reverse.
Where It Goes From Here
Wolff has not ruled anything in or out for Jack’s racing future, and has been explicit that he doesn’t intend to start. What he has committed to is treating his son’s early results as just that, early results, rather than the first chapter of a predetermined Formula 1 story. Given his own history of building young drivers through Mercedes’ junior program, including Antonelli’s rapid rise to the senior team, Wolff understands better than most how easily a promising nine year old’s story can be rewritten by the time they’re old enough to test an F1 car.
He has also seen, firsthand, what it costs a family when that story gets rewritten too fast. Mercedes’ junior program has carried more than one prospect whose early promise didn’t survive the jump to cars, and Wolff has been the executive on the other end of those calls, deciding who gets another season and who doesn’t. That perspective, more than any parenting instinct, is likely why he keeps steering conversations about Jack away from Formula 1 altogether and back toward something smaller and more manageable: a kid who wants to drive every single day, and a father learning, lap by lap, how to watch instead of manage. For now, he says, the goal is simpler. Let Jack enjoy driving as long as it still means asking, four days in a row, when he gets to do it again.
