F1 team owners ‘considering selling up’ as Toto Wolff ‘could make £3billion’
Mercedes’ Toto Wolff may be among the F1 chiefs set to profit off a potential money-spinning firesale.
F1 team owners like Mercedes’ Toto Wolff are reportedly considering “selling up” after seeing their assets rise in value parallel to the sport’s explosion in popularity over the last few years. The demand for F1 is at an all-time high off the back of Netflix’s uber-popular “Driver to Survive” series.
Nowhere has this been more prevalent than in the United States. In 2022, the average US audience size on ESPN and ABC rose by 28%, from 949,000 viewers in 2021 to 1.21 million the following year.
Last year’s Miami Grand Prix pulled in a remarkable 2.6m alone while numbers rose by a further 5.8% during the first half of the 2023 season to 1.26m. Multiple interested parties from around the world are knocking on the door to get involved with the booming enterprise and Sky Sports’ Craig Slater understands that some F1 teams are considering whether to sell their stakes for monstrous profit margins.
“One or two well-placed insiders have told me that maybe some ownership within Formula 1 have looked at the value of their team has increased and have asked the question: has the sport peaked?” Slater said on the Sky F1 podcast. “Might this be not a bad time to sell out?
“If you’re talking about Williams being sold for about 140 million and now being worth towards maybe even a billion pounds – never mind dollars – nowadays.
“It’s interesting that Andretti have tried to get in, maybe would be put off by the price tag of buying a team. Are they good value to buy right now an F1 team? Why are the big sovereign wealth funds…and I suppose people are talking about [the rumours of] Aramco buying Aston Martin from Lawrence Stroll and paying top dollar for that.
If you were Dorilton or Toto Wolff or Lawrence Stroll, who bought it via liquidation, yes, he paid off a lot of the creditors, but you’ve maybe paid a couple hundred million, or I think Toto paid 50 million euros for his stake, it’s now worth three billion or whatever.
Does that have its own incentive to sell, when in a few years you’ve made such a big gain, which is why I question. It must be quite tempting for some of these owners to maybe think about offloading it in the present climate, which is certainly benign compared to where it was a few years ago.”
