Just a few days before the Las Vegas Grand Prix, it was announced that team boss Toto Wolff had sold some of his shares in the Mercedes Formula 1 factory team to Crowdstrike boss George Kurtz. Rumors immediately spread that the Austrian was preparing to leave. The Austrian has now vehemently contradicted this.
“I have no plan to sell the team or give up my role,” the 53-year-old made it clear in Sin City at the weekend: “I’m in good shape and enjoy my work. As long as I feel like I’m making a contribution – and others see it that way too – there’s no reason to think in that direction.”
Wolff is selling 15 percent of his holding company – and since he owns a third of Mercedes shares, that corresponds to five percent of the team. The remaining two thirds remain with Mercedes-Benz and INEOS boss Jim Ratcliffe. With his decision to sell the shares in Kurtz, he only wanted to help “to better develop the US market. That was the background – but there is nothing else behind it.”
Formula 1 teams are showing steep growth in value
The new shareholder “brings an exceptionally broad background: he is a racer, a loyal sports ambassador for Mercedes-AMG and an outstanding entrepreneur.” The sale of the Wolff shares is said to have a total value of six billion dollars, which would make Mercedes the most valuable team in Formula 1. A five percent sale would equal $300 million.
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To put it into perspective: Ineos only acquired its third of Mercedes in 2020 for just over $200 million. The value of the team would have increased tenfold in about five years. This astonishes even the Mercedes team boss: “If someone had told us five years ago what ratings the teams have today, no one would have believed it.”
It was only in September that the state fund Mumtalakat from Bahrain and the investment company CYVN Holdings from Abu Dhabi acquired the remaining 30 percent of the shares in McLaren at a valuation of over four billion dollars. The two Middle East investors already owned the rest of the team