Toto Wolff doesn’t do cloak-and-dagger. Not anymore, and certainly not when the biggest driver rumour of the year kept dragging his name into it.
As the Verstappen-to-Mercedes chatter kicked back to life before the summer break, George Russell openly admitted those whispers were part of his own contract picture. Then Max Verstappen put a pin in it ahead of Budapest, reconfirming he’ll be in Red Bull colours for 2026. Drama largely defused. But the way Wolff handled it — ears open, cards on the table — said more about Mercedes’ approach to drivers than any press release could.
In a chat with De Telegraaf, Wolff revealed the origin story for that transparency streak. Early in his Mercedes tenure, he grabbed five minutes with Alain Prost on a grid and asked the question everyone’s wanted to ask since the late ’80s: what really went wrong between Prost and Ayrton Senna at McLaren? Prost’s take was blunt — the team, not the drivers, turned a rivalry into a civil war by playing one off against the other.
Wolff took the note to heart. He says he won’t make that mistake. Backed in those formative years by Niki Lauda’s counsel, he’s tried to run Mercedes with the sort of honesty that keeps drivers on-side even when the market’s moving. That’s the lens you need to view this summer’s Verstappen audit through.
It’s no secret Wolff checked on Verstappen’s availability. That’s his job, as he put it — to test the waters with a multiple world champion and understand how he sees the future. Crucially, he says Russell has always known where he stands. And that’s the thread that runs through Mercedes’ driver equation now: look everywhere, tell your drivers everything.
Of course, this isn’t happening in a vacuum. The Verstappen-Wolff relationship was scorched earth in 2021, with both sides dragged into the title fight’s ugliest moments. Time has cooled it. Wolff says they talked it through, and the air’s been cleared with the Verstappens. That removes one practical barrier, but not all of them. Loyalty matters to Wolff, and Mercedes’ own house has promising foundations.
Russell has been the team’s long-game bet since 2022. Alongside him in 2025 sits rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli, a name Wolff was happy to drop into the conversation. The message was subtle but clear: Mercedes believe in their line-up’s ceiling and aren’t in the business of shuffling the deck for headlines. “Give him time” has been the party line on Antonelli from the moment he stepped up — and it doesn’t exactly scream “vacancy.”
So where does that leave Russell’s contract? Moving, but not racing. He says the deal is edging closer without a stopwatch ticking in the background. The team didn’t force a summer-break sprint to signatures; he didn’t want one either. There are race weekends to run, a 2026 reset to prepare for, partner days to tick off — real-world admin that stretches any negotiation. The tone is calm, not cagey.
“It’ll happen when it happens,” is Russell’s stance in essence. Next week, next month, whenever both sides finish working through the finer points. And if that sounds decidedly un-silly for silly season, that’s because Mercedes under Wolff have learned to drain a saga of oxygen by refusing to feed it.
None of this means Mercedes wouldn’t take a proper swing if Verstappen ever really hit the market. Every team would. But with Verstappen reaffirmed at Red Bull for the first year of the new regs and Wolff preaching both transparency and loyalty, there’s little to suggest a dramatic twist is lurking for 2026.
In the meantime, Mercedes have exactly what they wanted this year: a leader in Russell who’s comfortable enough to speak plainly about his own future, and a blue-chip prospect in Antonelli who’s being afforded breathing room to grow. The market checks will keep happening in the background — they always do — but the headline act at Brackley is continuity, not chaos.
And if you’re looking for the moral of the story, it’s probably this: Wolff heard one of the sport’s greatest ever tell him that the quickest way to lose a team is to split it down the middle. More than a decade on, that lesson still drives how Mercedes manage the tensest topic in the paddock. When the music stops, you’d rather your drivers trust you than your rumour mill.
