Toto Wolff: What Happens When the Data and the Driver Disagree

Toto Wolff calls Formula 1 the only sport that puts a machine this heavily instrumented in the hands of a human, and the two don’t always agree. The strategy model says box. The driver says stay out. In a race decided by fractions of a second, someone has to make the call, and make it now.

At the U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman spoke with Toto Wolff, Team Principal and CEO of the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team, and Antonio Neri, President and CEO of HPE. Nearly 10 years into the partnership, they got into how the team actually uses data analysis, filtering, and AI to make race decisions, and what happens when the model and human instinct point in opposite directions.

Wolff says his strategy team pairs mathematicians with people who have raced, and that group’s view wins 99% of the time. Neri describes a similar balance at HPE: culture and empowered teams make most of the calls, and leaders still inspect what matters.

Key Takeaways:

🔹 The driver is still part of the stack. HPE helps with the data analysis, filtering, and AI underneath, but the driver’s judgment is part of every call.

🔹 Same pressures, different track. Neri says F1 is a compressed version of what every enterprise is dealing with: time, cost, productivity, and whether the right insight reaches the right engineer fast enough to matter.

🔹 When the model and instinct disagree, the strategy team wins. Wolff’s strategists work alongside people who have raced. When the model says box and instinct says stay out, that group gets the call 99% of the time. Wolff says his own role is to offer the pilot’s perspective.

🔹 The next step change is in aero. The cost cap means the team can’t put AI everywhere it wants to. The projects Wolff is watching change how aerodynamic data gets analyzed and push more work through CFD and modeling.

The data gets Mercedes to the decision faster. Wolff’s strategy team and the driver still make it.

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Patrick Moorhead:

The Six Five is On The Road here in Austin, Texas, home of the Austin Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas. Been a great week so far, and it's amazing. I've been involved, gosh, in F1 and technology even back in the prior days, probably 25 years ago, and the technology is amazing. And what we're looking at right now are not just tenths of a second, but a hundredths of a second, pretty much the highest order of technology out there today. You have agents, you have AI, you have wind tunnel simulation and CFD and everything in the middle. And that technology is not just applicable on the race course, but also in everybody's enterprise as well. And I can't imagine to have two better guests than Toto Wolff with Mercedes F1 team and Antonio Neri from HPE. Great to see you both again. On The Six Five, welcome to the show. And Toto, what a season you have had. Congratulations so far. And by the way, you've had a great season too. If we're looking at things like stock price and all that great stuff too.

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Daniel Newman: 

I mean, everything's taken over. Yeah, I see you smiling a lot more. When I'm watching on Apple TV, I see you; you've got a big grin. And I saw you last year, it was less smiling. Miserable. You know, that's the right way to think.

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Toto Wolff: 

We can all laugh about it now. Exactly. No, but you know, it's still a constant fight. We haven't won the championship yet.

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Daniel Newman: 

It could be this weekend. Oh, for Kimi.

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Toto Wolff: 

For Kimi, yeah, but I think it's a long shot in terms of the points. But you have to finish the job, you know. It's motor racing. Cars can fail. Crashes can happen. Others can outperform us. So I always trust the whole thing when it's done.

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Daniel Newman:

You've got to get better each and every week. You see the cars this season, they come up. So just quick out of the spirit of the partnership, you two sitting here together, we talk about milliseconds, determining winners, and everything that goes in, all the data, the high-performance computing, the engineers, the nerds, I think is what you called them in our little aside. I can't say.

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Toto Wolff: 

I mean, I know the engineers like this also openly.

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Daniel Newman: 

I'd do the same. But where does a partnership like this get a few milliseconds that is driving these kinds of outcomes?

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Toto Wolff: 

Well, we are a data-driven sport. It's basically the only sport out there that has this high-tech machine driven by a human. And that kind of interaction is so interesting, and we touched it before. Sometimes the data says one thing, and then the human says another thing. So who do you trust? And obviously, Antonio and his team help us on that one very side when it comes to the data analysis, the filtering, all of the new technologies around AI. But it still doesn't solve the problem with the irrational individual in the car.

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Daniel Newman: 

Yeah, but you must be learning from this, because the pace that enterprises are trying to move, Antonio, this is sort of the pace I know that we think we can move in the era of AI, no?

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Antonio Neri: 

Yeah. First of all, we are super proud to partner with Toton, the team, and believe it or not, it's going to come soon to 10 years since we started. And to me, it's one of the environments where you're really dealing with very complex and extreme problems, right? Because we're talking about time, we talk about performance, we talk about cost. And when you think about general enterprises, they're dealing with the same problem, right? So time is an essence, cost needs to go down, and you need to improve productivity. In their case, productivity is all about getting the right insight from the data to the engineers as quickly as possible so they can make decisions as quickly as possible, because ultimately, You can make a one wrong decision and that's winning or losing the race. So that's why, for us, it's a unique environment to really push us, the bar, to the limits.

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Patrick Moorhead: 

So Toto, when the model says box, but your gut says stay out, which one wins?

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Toto Wolff: 

Well, that is a constant issue when being live in the race. We have a fantastic team of engineers that are doing strategy and obviously they have the models in the background that show outcomes and probabilities. And also the team is led by individuals that are racers, so they kind of see where this is going. So I'm in a perfect position because I'm not only having a mathematician on the other side, but I'm having someone that actually understands motor racing. But what I'm trying to contribute is a little bit the pilot's perspective in some of the discussion. And fundamentally, I need to trust the pilot to fly the plane. They are the competent ones. And overall, the opinion of the group of strategists is going to win in 99% of the cases. I tend to believe that I can, at times, provide helpful input. At times, I'm only a distraction. But so far, it has gone okay.

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Patrick Moorhead: 

Antonio, same thing in the enterprise. How has that worked? Does the machine win inside of HPE?

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Antonio Neri: 

No. No, not always. I think, you know, it starts with culture. It starts with empowering people to make decisions. But ultimately, sometimes you have to make the decision on behalf of the company. And I trust our management team to make the right call. But once in a while, you have to inspect because you get only You don't get what you expect only when you inspect certain things to make sure everything stays tight. But in the case of Toto, it's very different. In the end, there is a driver, and he is the one on the track. He's the one feeling the car. And obviously, Toto being a driver himself, he understands the psychology of that. It's not just the data.

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Daniel Newman: 

So rapid fire, because we've got to get you guys on your way. These weeks are crazy. I know you're going thing to thing to thing. AI in your world, what is one thing that AI has sort of made possible for your org that you wouldn't have thought a year ago?

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Toto Wolff: 

Yeah, so we have this limitation of the cost cap, so we can't deploy AI in the way we would all want to, and kind of steamroll over our tools that exist today. But we're having projects in aerodynamics, for example, where we're optimizing certain ways of analyzing data. that go very well and will be a step change in the future. Running more services through CFD, running more services through the various modeling things. So that's an area where I believe there's lots of potential.

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Daniel Newman: 

And Antonio, I think both Pat and I really want to know the answer to this, but we're going to wait and hit you up on the next quarterly call. Get everybody on their way. But Toto, Antonio, thank you so much. We know these weeks are chaotic. We wish you the best of luck on the track. up in the paddock watching you, cheering you on.

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Toto Wolff: 

No pressure.

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Daniel Newman: 

Not for me. And thank you, everybody, for being part of this Six Five. We're on the road here at the U.S. Grand Prix in our hometown, Austin, Texas. Thank you so much for being part of this episode. Tune in, subscribe, be part of our community. We'll see you all later. Bye bye.