Niki Lauda’s death has left me feeling like a 'zombie', reveals Toto Wolff in moving eulogy

In a moving eulogy, Toto Wolff, team principal of world champions Mercedes, reflected on Thursday that he felt like a “zombie” in the wake of Niki Lauda’s death, finding himself close to tears every 30 minutes. Although he had postponed a planned media session in Monaco to allow extra time to compose himself, the pain at the passing of his fellow Austrian, his sidekick for five consecutive drivers’ and constructors’ titles, remained raw. “The last 48 hours,” he said, “have been terrible.”

They made an odd couple, the Viennese venture capitalist and the living legend from a distant era of Formula One, known the world over for his courage in the face of appalling injury. But it was a potent combination, with Wolff’s diplomatic skills often the antidote to Lauda’s extreme candour as non-executive chairman. Where Wolff, for example, would sometimes resist tearing strips off his drivers in public, Lauda, as a three-time world champion and survivor of that inferno at the Nurburgring, could be notoriously blunt. At the height of tensions between Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg at Mercedes, he threatened both of them with the sack.

“Every half an hour, I keep looking at pictures of him with tears in my eyes because he is not here any more,” Wolff said. “We knew that it wasn’t going well in the last days and that it would be a matter of time before we received the message. I got a text from Niki’s wife, Birgit, on Monday evening and since then I have not been myself. It feels so surreal to be an F1 paddock with Niki not alive.”

Hamilton is yet to face any journalists since learning that Lauda had died at the age of 70, less than a year after undergoing a double lung transplant. Instead, in a Mercedes car emblazoned with a “Danke, Niki” message, he took to the streets of Monte Carlo yesterday with an air of supreme focus, finishing top of both practice time-sheets. Between sessions, he was greeted in the team garage by Cristiano Ronaldo.

“Maybe Lewis and I are in a similar frame of mind, because we have lost a friend,” Wolff said. “Lewis and Niki are bound together by an additional link, and that is the one of being multiple world champions. Only very few have experienced that, to win over several years against the best.”

Wolff, wearing a black armband and sitting in front of a gallery of Lauda photographs inside Mercedes’ hospitality suite, also talked of his friend’s pride at Mercedes’ unparalleled success so far this season, with five one-two finishes in a row. “The last time I spoke to Niki was on the phone after the fourth race in Baku,” he said. “He told me, ‘Keep going, it doesn’t get any better than this. There is just a huge black cloud over us. We have somebody who was the heart and soul of F1. But Niki, watching on, will be interested to see how this weekend goes on track, and nothing else.”

There will be particular interest here in Monaco in the performance of McLaren, still scalded by the embarrassing failure of Fernando Alonso to qualify for Sunday’s Indianapolis 500. Zak Brown, the team’s chief executive, has refused to ascribe any blame to the Spaniard, instead accepting personal responsibility for the humiliation. “It’s the worst point in my 25 years in motor racing,” the American acknowledged. “Ultimately, it was a people issue, starting with me. We didn’t have all the bases covered. We were unprepared.”

In an extraordinary interview this week, Brown listed the comedy of errors that had led to Alonso not even making the grid at the Brickyard. It is a race that he needs to win to complete the Triple Crown of Motorsport, after his two F1 world titles and triumph for Toyota last summer at Le Mans. A week before the first Indianpolis test, McLaren realised that they did not even have a steering wheel – a lapse that Brown described with the stand-out line: “Zak Brown should not be digging aroud for steering wheels.” Even the car itself was found to be the wrong shade of McLaren orange. “This was,” Brown said, “a very significant low.”