Toto Wolff demands salary cap to be LOWERED than what £40m-a-year F1 stars Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen get
MERCEDES boss Toto Wolff says F1’s plans to impose a salary cap on drivers should be LOWER than what top earns Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen currently get paid.
The sport’s bosses are keen to reduce drivers’ wages as part of their push to reduce costs.
Hamilton and Verstappen earn around £40million a year, with their contracts running until the end of 2023 and 2028, respectively.
Drivers reacted angrily to the proposal in Baku last year but Wolff, who is a three-way owner of the Mercedes team, says he is in favour of the cap.
He said: “It certainly has come up as a controversial topic. We can see that we are facing a very difficult situation in F1 overall.
“The sport is booming and F1 is earning more money and that trickles down to the teams.
“But we have a cost cap. We have $140million for 1,000 people. With inflation, we haven’t been able to even pay the inflation.
“The talk about $30 or $40m salary allowance is inadequate when you take that perspective.
“Clearly the drivers will have an opinion on that. Maybe as a driver I would say the same thing, but the US American leagues that are the most successful in the world have introduced salary caps 15 years ago. It works pretty well over there.
“We need to find a way of how we can act sustainably and become independent from sovereign funds or state-owned teams.
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“Therefore it is certainly clear that this is going to be one of the main areas because you can’t simply have a salary bill in some of the top teams that is 30, 40, 50m when the rest of the team needs to be divided in 140m.
“But having said that, they are tremendous superstars, they deserve to be among the top earners in the sport.
“In terms of direct salaries they already are and then we need to find a way of unlocking the capability of doing endorsement deals which is two-thirds if not more for US American sports teams.
“But certainly, direct salaries, F1 drivers are paid the most.”