16/01/2024
NEWS STORY
Whilst seeking an explanation for the abandoned investigation into he and his wife, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff questions the numerous high-profile departures at the sport's governing body.
Barely into the new year and with a new contract in his pocket, Toto Wolff has picked up where he left off in December, questioning Mohammed ben Sulayem's management of the FIA.
The sport's governing body has seen its Sporting Director, Steve Nielsen, quit just one year into the role, and Technical Director Tim Goss leaving just weeks later.
The departures suggest that all is not well within an organisation that has seen its president at loggerheads with the sport's owners and the majority of teams over a number of issues, not least expanding the grid to eleven teams with Andretti.
Speaking to Gazzetta dello Sport, Wolff stirs the pot as he questions the departures, though stops short of suggesting his explanation as to why they have happened.
"The FIA has many important tasks as an institution," he said, "the first of which is to govern with ethics, transparency and integrity. In the end, we all have to share the same goal: to make F1 even bigger in the world. For that to happen you need stability.
"It is not a good thing when people of experience and quality leave," he added. "Steve Nielsen, who knows the sport from every angle, left, and that's a bad blow. Then Tim Goss left, and in this way, Nicolas Tombazis loses a very good lieutenant. And still others have resigned.
"As teams, we cannot do anything about it," it is not up to us to decide how people manage their staff and their structure. But when all of a sudden such good people leave an organisation you create a vacuum, it's clear. You have to ask yourself why so many have left and have done so now. This includes how you run the sport together with F1 and the teams, but also how the rules are set and controlled."
The Austrian also took the opportunity to refer to the story that dominated the headlines for much of December, when the FIA announced an investigation into he and his wife following an unsubstantiated report in a magazine known to have an agenda.
As all ten teams united to condemn the move the investigation was dropped as quickly as it had begun, leaving the Wolffs, and just about everyone else, baffled as to why it went ahead if the first place.
"We have millions of people watching us, we have to be examples for what we say and do," he said. "The investigation, which opened and closed in two days, has done a lot of damage, and it's not what you expect from the F1 world in general.
"If we want to make the sport more and more professional, we have to try to bring transparency where there is none and set standards of the highest possible level.
"My position is this," he added. "I can't speak for Susie but she is a fighter, she has a steely determination. This is not the first time she has faced difficulties, and she will go all the way in every court of law. If someone types Susie Wolff on the web today, the investigation comes up as the first news item, the bullet went out of the gun and cannot come back in."