Toto Wolff believes the success Formula 1 has enjoyed in recent years has come at a cost to other racing series.
His Mercedes team has been the most successful of the last decade. Eight consecutive constructors' titles won between 2014 and 2021 is the best run ever achieved in the sport's history and, despite a poor 2022 season by their own standards, the Silver Arrows are expected to be in the mix for silverware again next year.
But while the carmaker is committed to its F1 project, it has cut back in other areas. Mercedes quit the German touring cars series DTM at the end of the 2018 season and, this year, withdrew from Formula E despite having won the last two championships in a row.
Asked why those decisions had been taken, Wolff candidly stated that the company was not willing to put up the finances for a comparatively small return, when it could simply use that cash to focus its full resources on its wildly successful F1 team.
"I think that Formula 1 has become so big that everything else has been dwarfed," he told Polish outlet Swiatscigow. "We were really happy, successful in DTM for over 30 years.
"But it has come to a point where the works team, if you wanted to compete, you need 40 or 50 million euros and the return on investment was too small for that. And it's the same in Formula E. The audiences were just not good enough.
"So you have DTM there, and then you have Formula E here, and then you have Formula 1 in the whole room. So, we decided that let's concentrate on doing that properly and put the resources into Formula 1, rather than being distracted and dilutive for the other things."
Asked if he believes F1's growth in recent years has hurt other series, Wolff added: "It is, I think, already. I think we are seeing that we are so big that the audiences...
"I mean, there's great racing in Le Mans, in WEC, in GT3s and DTM, but that is happening offline, you can say. There are race fans and hardcore audiences who follow, but no-one else. So, it is at risk."
