George Russell reveals how he took his career into his own hands at the age of 16 and managed to convince Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff with a single email.
George Russell will continue to drive for Mercedes in the 2026 Formula 1 season, marking his fifth season with the brand with the star logo. Now, the 27-year-old Brit recalls his first meeting with Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff – and how he ended up in the premier class in the first place.
It’s no secret that Russell had already sent an email to Wolff to sound out his chances after winning the British Formula 4 championship in 2014. “At 16, I realized I had to go my own way,” the Briton recounts in a column for The Players’ Tribune.
“My parents told me they no longer had the means to finance my career,” recalls the current Formula 1 driver, who has since even paid his parents back. “At that moment, everything changed in my mind.”
“At 16, two years before you’re officially an adult, you start to feel like a man, right? But at that moment, I realized how far I was from that. I thought to myself, ‘Now it’s up to me to take matters into my own hands and make it happen.’”
His manager urges Russell to take the initiative
“At the time, I had the phone numbers of a few Formula 1 team bosses,” reveals Russell. “So I started calling people, writing emails, talking to anyone who would give me even a few minutes of their time. My manager had gotten Toto’s email address from one of his other drivers.”
“But he said I should take the initiative myself. He believed in me and said, ‘Send him an email right away,’” recalls the 27-year-old, remembering the day more than ten years ago very clearly. “It was the Tuesday after the 2014 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.”
“I wrote something like this: ‘Dear Toto, my name is George Russell. I drive in Formula 4 and won the championship this season. Next year, I’m moving up to Formula 3, and I would be delighted to meet with you and hear your advice on my future career.’”
“I didn’t want to send a long application with a resume saying, ‘Here I am, sign me up, sign me up!’—I don’t know why,” said Russell. “I just wrote, ‘I would like to hear your advice.’ I thought that was the best way to get a personal meeting.”
The email led to a meeting in January 2015
And indeed, the then Formula 4 driver was successful. “He replied within 15 minutes. I had also had good conversations with McLaren and had previously been in contact with Red Bull, but to be honest, Toto was just… different. He seemed so sincere.”
The initial email contact led to a meeting just a few months later. In January 2015, Russell was invited to visit the Mercedes headquarters in Brackley, where he also met the Austrian, who apparently has very different memories of their first encounter.
“Toto always tells the story that I showed up in a suit and with a briefcase… it wasn’t quite that extreme,” laughs Russell. “Let’s get that straight. But I definitely wore my best shoes. Even as a teenager, I always dressed more like an old man.“
”So I was probably wearing a shirt and a V-neck sweater or something like that. For a 16-year-old, I looked pretty smart. Anyway, I walked into the room and there were six other people sitting there, all of them department heads,” recalls the Mercedes driver.
Russell: “Already on Mercedes’ radar”
Basically, “the entire management team” was there, Russell reports, namely “the newly appointed head of the junior program, Gwen Lagrue, the head of the DTM team, a few other members of the F1 team—and, of course, Toto himself.”
“It was basically an introductory meeting where they wanted to find out whether they should take the plunge and try something new—namely, signing a young driver for a program that didn’t even exist at the time.”
“I think I was already on their radar,” believes the Brit. “So I wasn’t just some guy off the street who had written a nice email. It didn’t come completely out of the blue. They had already talked about my potential, Gwen had just been hired to set up the junior program, and everything just fell into place perfectly.”
Mercedes closely followed Russell’s progress over the next two years: he finished sixth overall in European Formula 3, then third. He impressed as a consistent points scorer in his rookie season and as a top driver in his second year, even though he didn’t drive for the dominant Prema team on either occasion.
George Russell still takes Wolff’s advice to heart today
“When I signed with Mercedes, I was their only junior driver for two years,” Russell recalls. “Today, Formula 1 teams often have ten junior drivers at the same time and rely on many options. Mercedes, however, put all their eggs in one basket with me.” In January 2017, the Brit officially joined the Mercedes junior program.
“They made it clear to me: ‘We believe in you. This is no longer a test. We are here to realize your potential.’ They said that word for word—and it was huge.” This was followed by rookie titles in GP3 and Formula 2, paving the way to Formula 1.
“Looking back today, it’s a great privilege that they had so much faith in me,” writes the five-time Grand Prix winner in his latest column. “They put me under pressure to perform, but they made it incredibly easy for me.”
The current Mercedes driver was determined to get into Formula 1. “Toto simply said to me, ‘George, you deliver, and I’ll take care of the rest.’ It was simple, but it stuck with me,” said Russell. “I’ve taken that advice to heart at every stage of my career. And I still do today.”
