JONATHAN McEVOY: Does Toto Wolff have his fingers in too many F1 pies? FIA probe into Mercedes boss linked to political meddling

Toto Wolff has been described by his detractors as akin to Icarus, the figure from Greek mythology with wings of wax that melted from his flying too close to the sun.

Formula One insiders whom Mail Sport spoke to on Wednesday were split in their reactions as they absorbed the news that the Austrian and the other half of Formula One’s golden couple, his British wife Susie, were being investigated by the world governing body, the FIA, over a potential conflict of interests.

She is managing director of the F1-run female series F1 Academy and, it is implied, is therefore privy to information from the sport’s owners that she can pass on to him, the boss of Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes team, about the inner workings of the sport, giving him a head start on his peers.

This is the bloodiest dispute the paddock has seen since the days of Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone and talk of rebel series.

Long before F1 was paraded on Netflix’s Drive to Survive series, the warring overlords of the sport were known as the Piranha Club. And so it remains.

There are those who want to see Wolff plunge, as Icarus did, to the sea. They wish his professional demise. That is because he is seen to have over-reached, to have tried to inveigle himself into every aspect of the sport, to act as its chief manipulator and greatest power.

There are others who think he is being unfairly singled out by the FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem for being a big figure with his own thoughts that run counter to his. This town ain’t big enough for the two of them. And at the end of this process, only one man may be left standing.

Wolff’s allies claim that the stuff about leaked information is a proxy in a wider war. The process will be looked into by the FIA’s compliance department and either referred to the ethics committee, or rejected.

Toto Wolff, 51, an investor by trade, came to head up Mercedes after being granted a share in the Williams team by the late Sir Frank Williams. In 2011, he married Susie, who turned 41 yesterday and is the mother of their young son Jack. A year later she became a development driver at Williams. She is widely liked and has good relations with the F1 teams involved in F1 Academy, including Red Bull.

But, despite her comments on Tuesday on the announcement of the FIA inquiry in which she castigated the action (and by inference Ben Sulayem) as misogynistic, this is not about her. It is about her husband — he is the man the FIA are lining up.

‘He wants to control every b***** thing,’ one senior executive in F1 told Mail Sport. ‘He sticks his finger into every pie. He basically stuck a revolver at Jean Todt’s head and told him that either Michael Masi goes or Lewis Hamilton leaves the sport.’

This was a reference to the race director, Masi, who was held responsible for Hamilton missing out on an eighth world title to Max Verstappen in Abu Dhabi in 2021. Masi was sacked — though Ben Sulayem inherited the problem from his predecessor Todt.

Wolff has since made clear that Masi remains totally unwelcome in the paddock. The insistence of these remarks is believed to have annoyed Ben Sulayem. He has said he would countenance Masi returning. Uproar!

Wolff is in a weakened position given Mercedes’ first winless season in 12 years. He is a one-third shareholder in the company, but his partners, Daimler and Ineos, are said by sources not to be enamoured, naturally, with the barren spell.

One informed observer told Mail Sport that Wolff has been given until the early part of next year to show he can produce a car that will challenge Red Bull.

All the while, he has acted with increasing ill-ease, screaming at Red Bull rival Christian Horner at a meeting last year in Canada and over-reacting to a reasonable question in Las Vegas last month, the showpiece race run by F1’s owners Liberty... to whom Susie is contracted and which he was defending in the middle of the night as practice unfolded in front of empty grandstands.

There is also the immutable fact in F1 that there is a three-way split: Formula One’s owners, now the America conglomerate Liberty Media, and referred to as Formula One Management or Formula One Group; the governing FIA; and the teams.

Talk never goes away about an improbable breakaway series, free from the FIA. Fanciful, impossible. But Wolff is linked to such (unfounded?) conjecture and undoubtedly cosies up to Liberty’s No 1 executive Greg Maffei. They speak and they dine together and that suits Wolff — a businessman of great acumen said by Forbes to be a billionaire — very nicely, thank you.

If anybody is in more than one of the three camps running Formula One it is perilous ground. Which Toto Wolff is now realising.