Internal team emails from a championship-winning Formula 1 outfit almost never reach outside the factory. This one did. Mercedes deputy team principal Bradley Lord posted the full text of Toto Wolff’s note to staff on LinkedIn the morning after Kimi Antonelli clinched the 2026 drivers’ title at the Mexico City Grand Prix.
The email is a long reflection by Wolff on the decision that defined Mercedes’ season, and the first move in it is to refuse the credit.
“Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan. That’s how the saying goes. But as I reflect on Kimi becoming World Champion, I feel that I have been given far too much credit for a story that belongs to so many people,” Wolff wrote in the message published by Lord and relayed by Planet F1.
Why Lord made the email public
Lord prefaced the screenshot on LinkedIn by acknowledging that circulating internal correspondence is not something Mercedes normally does. He wrote that he is not a frequent LinkedIn poster, but that staff across the team’s bases had woken up to the message and he wanted outsiders to see what the Brackley operation sounds like from the top.
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“This morning, whether in Brackley, Brixworth or Brazil, each one of us woke up to this email from the boss. The reason for sharing is to show you what we mean when we say the culture of our team starts from the top, with Toto,” Lord wrote in the LinkedIn post, as quoted by GPFans.
The gamble that replaced Hamilton
Wolff spends much of the email on the decision itself. He told staff that handing Antonelli the seat vacated by Lewis Hamilton was never going to be received gently.
“Replacing Lewis Hamilton, the most successful driver in F1 history and arguably its most culturally significant figure, with a teenager was never going to be an easy decision,” Wolff wrote, as reported by Yahoo Sports.
He is explicit about how loud the doubts became during Antonelli’s rookie year, when the Italian went through a stretch of non-scoring finishes.
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“There was plenty of criticism, both from within the sport and outside it, about putting an 18-year-old into a Mercedes. And when Kimi went through a difficult period, with several races without scoring points, those doubts understandably grew louder,” Wolff told staff in the email published by Lord.
Who Wolff actually thanked
The team boss revealed he first met Antonelli when the Italian was 11, and followed his karting career for years before the Mercedes deal. The thank-you list in the email is long and specific. According to GPFans, Wolff named Antonelli’s parents Marco and Veronica, early mentors including Dino Chiesa and Gwen Lagrue, technical director James Allison, race engineer Peter “Bono” Bonnington, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin, communications leads Clare Robertson and Rosa Herrero Venegas, Mercedes board partner Ola Källenius, Antonelli’s teammate George Russell, and his own wife Susie.
Wolff closes the email with a line that sets the tone for the whole message.
“Yes, I believed in him. And yes, at a certain point I had to make a decision and stand by it. But believing in someone is much easier when so many good people have already given you every reason to believe. This is not my success story. It is ours,” he wrote, as quoted by Yahoo Sports.
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Antonelli sealed the championship with a third-place finish at the Mexico City Grand Prix on Sunday 1 November, becoming F1’s youngest world champion at 20 years and 68 days and breaking Sebastian Vettel’s 2010 record.
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