“We Want to Win Today, But We Have to Think About the Day After Tomorrow”
Toto Wolff on the problem with winning, the human chaos behind Formula 1’s engineering obsession, and why the most valuable brands need to survive their own success.
Eight consecutive Constructors’ Championships. Seven consecutive Drivers’ titles. A period of dominance that turned Mercedes into the team everyone else was desperate to beat.
Then came the harder bit: remaining Mercedes when winning was no longer guaranteed.
For Toto Wolff, Team Principal, CEO and co-owner of the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team, the problem with success is that everyone gets used to it. The trophies become an expectation. The stopwatch becomes a public performance review. And the brand you've spent years building can suddenly look uncomfortably dependent on what happens next Sunday.
At Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Wolff joined Qualcomm CMO Don McGuire for a conversation about speed, storytelling and what actually gives a brand staying power. Moderated by Newsweek's Jennifer Cunningham, it brought together two businesses that sell cutting-edge technology but need people to care about more than the specifications.
The timing made the discussion particularly revealing. Mercedes' eight-year Constructors' Championship streak ended in 2022. Its sporting legacy was secure. Its competitive advantage wasn't. Which raises a question that applies to every successful team, company and individual:
If winning made people love you, what happens when you stop?
The Lowdown
Winning is a terrible long-term business plan on its own. Results bring attention. A brand needs to give people reasons to stay when the results disappear.
The stopwatch doesn't care about your marketing. Wolff's approach starts with measurable performance, not stories designed to disguise its absence.
Technology needs a human face. Qualcomm can manufacture extraordinary processors. Getting someone to care about the person using one is a different challenge.
Engineers and drivers inhabit different realities. One sees data. The other feels the car. Building a winning organisation means making both understand each other.
Leadership requires two time zones. You have to solve today's problems while making sure they aren't destroying tomorrow's business.
Taking yourself too seriously has a commercial cost. Humour, personality and a little imperfection can make a technically obsessed brand easier to connect with.
Editorial note: No full session transcript was supplied. Quotations below are drawn from published reporting of the event and translated from Portuguese where indicated. They should not be treated as verified verbatim English transcript excerpts.
“We Want to Win Today, But We Have to Think About the Day After Tomorrow”
Formula 1 is not especially forgiving of long-term thinking.
Every weekend brings a fresh verdict. Someone wins. Someone loses. Someone spends Monday explaining why the upgrades didn't work. The internet has already decided who needs replacing.
Wolff's job is to care about all of that without letting it determine everything.
The Portuguese broadcaster Renascença reported his insistence on remaining faithful to a long-term vision, with his responsibility extending beyond results to protecting the Mercedes brand and its values.
It's a particularly awkward balance for a team that spent eight seasons making winning look almost routine. When success becomes normal, second place starts to resemble failure. That's dangerous for any organisation. The standards that made a team exceptional can also make it impatient, reactive and unwilling to admit when something isn't working.
And in Formula 1, the decisions that eventually win championships often happen years before anyone gets to spray the champagne.
Recruitment. Engineering investment. A technical direction that may or may not pay off. Keeping talented people together when a rival is offering them a fresh opportunity.
None of those decisions looks particularly heroic on a Monday morning.
But they are the difference between having a great season and building something that lasts.
“Our Sport Is About the Stopwatch, and It Never Lies”
There are plenty of businesses in which a convincing presentation can make an average product look exceptional. Formula 1 isn't one of them.
A lap time is brutally difficult to spin. You either find the speed or you don't. Your competitor's car is right there, making the comparison embarrassingly public.
According to Brazilian publication Central do Varejo's coverage of the session, Wolff placed speed at the centre of Mercedes' identity, including the way the team communicates. That creates an unusual constraint for its marketing department.
The story has to survive contact with reality.
A beautifully produced film about innovation looks considerably less convincing if the car is consistently slower than its rivals. Equally, the fastest machine on the grid doesn't automatically give people a reason to care about the people building it.
The commercial opportunity sits somewhere between the two.
Mercedes can make engineering excellence part of its identity because there is a sporting record behind it. But past performance isn't a lifetime exemption from scrutiny.
A brand can live off a reputation for a while. It cannot keep withdrawing from it forever.
“There’s Still a Human Being in There”
Formula 1 is an engineering industry with a rather inconvenient variable: the driver.
Renascença reported Wolff's dry description of the sport as an engineering business complicated by having a human being in the car, much to the engineers' frustration. It's funny because anyone who has worked in a technically obsessed organisation recognises the problem.
You can measure almost everything. You can build extraordinary models. You can spend months refining a machine around the smallest possible differences.
And then you need someone to get into it, drive at the limit and tell you something doesn't feel right. An engineer wants evidence. A driver needs confidence. Those aren't always the same thing.
It's a useful way to understand leadership in a high-performance environment.
The difficult bit isn't hiring intelligent people. It's managing the friction between intelligent people who experience the same problem differently.
The analyst trusts the model. The person doing the job trusts their instincts. Both can be right. Both can be stubborn.
And both can waste an extraordinary amount of time proving the other wrong.
In the end, the car doesn't care whose argument was better.
“I’m Not an Engineer. I’m a Classic Marketer.”
Qualcomm faces a different version of the same problem.
Its technology lives inside products millions of people use, but the experience is often more recognisable than the component making it possible.
Nobody falls in love with a processor specification over dinner.
They remember the photograph that caught an otherwise forgettable moment, the music they listened to on the way home or a device that didn't give up when they needed it.
McGuire's challenge is to connect the technology with the experience.
As reported by Central do Varejo, he described his role as translating what Qualcomm's processors do into something people understand and feel. Photography, music, sport and art become ways of making complex engineering relevant. It's also what makes Formula 1 such an attractive commercial partner.
The sport gives technology stakes. Performance becomes visible, the results are immediate, and the people responsible are under constant scrutiny.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon brand gets to associate itself with speed and performance. Mercedes gets a technology partner with a story to tell beyond the traditional sponsor logo.
But there's a catch.
The audience has to believe the partnership belongs there.
If the technology contributes something tangible, the association makes sense. If not, it risks becoming another corporate logo on an already crowded racing suit.
“We Don’t Tell Fairy Tales”
It's a rather good line for an industry surrounded by polished brand campaigns.
Central do Varejo reported Wolff emphasising that Mercedes tells stories grounded in how innovation improves performance, rather than inventing narratives to make partnerships more appealing. That sounds obvious until you look at the sponsorship industry.
Brands spend enormous sums borrowing the reputation of athletes, teams and cultural figures. Sometimes there's a credible connection between the two. Sometimes the explanation takes longer than the advertisement.
Qualcomm's work with Mercedes junior driver Doriane Pin offers a more tangible example.
In October 2025, Qualcomm released Snapdragon Unplugged: Doriane + Mollie, following photographer Mollie Hosmer as she photographed Pin while using a Snapdragon-powered Lenovo laptop to plan, process and refine the shoot.
Rather than simply announcing that a processor is fast, the project gives that performance a job.
It's a story about a racing driver, a photographer and the technology connecting their work.
The more uncomfortable question is whether a commercial partnership can stay that credible over years rather than one campaign.
That's where Wolff's resistance to fairy tales matters.
If you promise authenticity, people eventually expect to see the evidence.
“The Dance Floor and the Balcony”
Most people in a demanding job know the feeling of being so busy solving problems that they never get around to asking why the problems keep happening.
Wolff used a metaphor of the dance floor and the balcony, according to Central do Varejo's account of the discussion.
The dance floor is the daily chaos. Decisions, deadlines, competing priorities, immediate results.
The balcony is where you go to see the whole room.
In Formula 1, the dance floor is relentless. You're developing the car, racing it, managing the drivers and reacting to your competitors. There's always another tenth of a second to find.
But a team that never gets onto the balcony can become exceptionally efficient at going in the wrong direction.
The same problem exists in most workplaces.
The manager spends the week dealing with an overloaded employee but never fixes the system creating the workload. The company celebrates record sales without noticing customers are leaving. The team keeps working harder because admitting the strategy is wrong would be worse for everyone's ego.
Being busy feels productive. Changing direction feels uncomfortable.
Leadership requires the judgement to know when to stop dancing.
And enough authority to persuade everyone else that stopping isn't the same as giving up.
“If a Brand Can’t Laugh at Itself, It Loses Its Humanity”
Formula 1 can take itself painfully seriously.
That's understandable when hundreds of people work for months on a car that can lose a race by fractions of a second.
But it can also produce brands that feel immaculate, expensive and oddly difficult to like.
McGuire offered a different perspective. Central do Varejo reported his argument that a brand needs enough humility to laugh at itself, with the session ending around a light-hearted Mercedes video featuring George Russell.
Central do Varejo
The contradiction is useful.
Mercedes sells discipline, perfection and engineering precision. Yet some of the people keeping an eye on the sport aren't especially interested in the aerodynamics.
They're interested in the personalities, the rivalries, the awkward exchanges, the absurd pressure and the occasional moment when someone forgets there's a camera nearby.
Humour doesn't undermine competitive seriousness. It can make that seriousness more believable.
You can recognise the same difference in a dressing room.
The person constantly reminding everyone how important they are often has less authority than the one who can survive a joke at their own expense.
A brand that insists on looking perfect all the time can end up looking like it has something to hide.
