There have been few more impressive winning machines in 21st century sport than the Mercedes AMG F1 team, who won eight consecutive Constructors' Championship titles between 2014 and 2021. However, the team have now suffered a drop-off in performance and currently sit third in the Constructors' standings at the mid-point of the season.
Their team principal, Toto Wolff, has now revealed that he has taken learnings from Manchester United's era of dominance under Sir Alex Ferguson in order to understand how success could be sustained even after temporary decline. Mercedes have suffered difficulties this year with the new regulations which have been enforced, with Red Bull and Ferrari overtaking the team in terms of car performance
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This appears to have inspired Wolff, who is responsible for over 1,000 employees in a fiercely competitive sport, with all of them working towards one goal which is to regain their position at the top of the sport. The Austrian explained that he is aware of the cost of complacency in elite sport in an interview with the Financial Times.
He explained in an extract from the interview: “I studied why great teams were not able to repeat great title [runs],” he says, name-checking Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United. “No sports team in any sport has ever won eight consecutive World Championship titles and there are many reasons for that, and what is at the core is the human. The human gets complacent. You are not energised in the same way you were before. You are maybe not as ambitious.”
Ferguson was renowned for his ability to rejuvenate a team once it had reached the end of its cycle, revealing in an interview with Harvard Business School his views on a team's life-cycle, saying: "I believe that the cycle of a successful team lasts maybe four years and then some change is needed. So we tried to visualise the team three or four years ahead and make decisions accordingly.".
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