How Toto Wolff built the most valuable team in F1

章节 1：识别赛车天赋与速度的本质

📝 本节摘要：

本章讨论如何识别赛车手潜力：早期卡丁车表现能显示苗头，但成绩之外，还要看抗压能力、团队协作、技术理解和社会能力。托托以汉密尔顿对赛车转向特性的感知为例，说明顶尖车手与赛车之间的感知连接。随后他回顾自己从18岁开始赛车、最终成为职业车手的经历，以及起步较晚带来的局限。

[原文] [John Collison]: You guys should have a pub here all the time.

[译文] [John Collison]: 你们这儿应该一直开着一家酒吧。

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: Yeah. Maybe it's a bit dangerous with all the valuable cars. You don't want anyone stumbling and falling over. As a continental European, I never got the tradition of standing at the bar and having a pint or two or three and then having a conversation. What do you talk about? Cheers.

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 是啊。不过这里有这么多值钱的车，可能有点危险。可不能让人绊倒摔着了。我是欧洲大陆人，一直不太理解那种站在吧台边喝上一两杯、甚至三杯，然后聊天的传统。你们都聊些什么？干杯。

[原文] [John Collison]: Cheers. Many people across many jobs are in the talent spotting business, but you're especially in the talent spotting business. How do you actually spot a Kimi?

[译文] [John Collison]: 干杯。很多行业都需要发掘人才，而你尤其擅长识人。你具体是怎么发现基米这样的车手的？

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: How do I spot a Kimi?

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 我怎么发现基米这样的车手？

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: I think when it comes to spotting racing drivers, we can judge pretty early on in a kid's karting performance whether that kid has the potential to be a professional racing driver. Even with the tiny ones, you can identify the ones that are doing better than their peers, either because they are younger. If someone that's 8 years old beats the ones that are 10 in that group, you can have those very early signs of whether that kid has the potential. You can see when someone is comfortable in the kart, going at 100 kilometers an hour in the rain, and that kid does his first lap and comes across the corner sideways...

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 我觉得，发掘赛车手时，从孩子早期的卡丁车表现里，我们就能相当早地判断他有没有成为职业车手的潜力。哪怕是很小的孩子，也能看出谁比同龄人出色，或者年龄更小却表现更好。比如，一个八岁的孩子赢过同组十岁的孩子，这些都是他有潜力的早期迹象。你也能看出，有些孩子坐在卡丁车里很自在；雨天以每小时100公里的速度行驶时，他第一次跑完一圈，过弯时车已经横着滑过去了……

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: Okay, there are the ingredients for being good at it.

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 好，这些就是擅长这项运动的基本要素。

[原文] [John Collison]: How quantitative is it? In certain sports... In cycling, there's a metric called threshold power, and Tadej Pogačar, the best in the world, is very clearly just the best in the world on this single metric of how much power, for your weight, can you produce. Or is there some number that Kimi and George Russell would stand out on compared to other racers?

[译文] [John Collison]: 这个判断有多量化？有些运动里……比如自行车，有个指标叫阈值功率。世界顶尖车手塔代伊·波加查在一个指标上明显领先：以体重为基准，他能输出多少功率。基米和乔治·拉塞尔有没有什么数字指标，能让他们比其他车手更突出？

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: This is what makes our sport so unique. There isn't any. With Tadej Pogačar, you can see that that threshold, watt per kilogram or VO2 max, these are things that are measurable.

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 这正是我们这项运动独特的地方：没有这样的指标。像塔代伊·波加查的阈值功率、每公斤瓦数或最大摄氧量，这些都是可以测量的。

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: But I don't know what Tadej's metrics were when he was 12. Maybe that was not best-in-class. Maybe that came later. The ingredients of success that you can't measure: personality. How resilient are you to pressure? How much can you play the team game? When it comes to racing drivers, there are obviously similar KPIs: the stopwatch. The stopwatch never lies. But put them in the same car, the stopwatch is going to decide whether you're being judged good or not. But underneath the stopwatch, there needs to be technical ability to set your car up in the right way, interact with the engineers, have some kind of social competence of making sure you have sponsors, treat them well.

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 不过，我不知道塔代伊十二岁时的数据是什么样。也许那时他还不是同龄人里的佼佼者，也许是后来才成长起来的。成功还取决于一些无法量化的要素，比如性格、承受压力的韧性，以及团队协作能力。赛车手当然也有类似的关键指标：秒表。秒表不会说谎。把两名车手放进同一辆车里，成绩就会决定他们表现的好坏。但成绩背后还需要技术能力：把赛车调校到合适状态、与工程师沟通，也要有一定的社交能力，比如争取赞助商并善待他们。

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: There have been extremely talented kids that never went anywhere because they were just simply bad people or not intelligent enough. Then there is the overwhelming part, and that is what we call speed. What is speed? All of your cognitive abilities and neurosensors, the sheer billions of sensors that a human has, that give you an ability that not many have. It's actually to feel what the car does underneath of you. You can see with the extraordinary drivers, they feel much more. They feel more connected to the car on the road than anybody else.

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 有些孩子天赋极高，却始终没能走远，因为他们人品不好，或者不够聪明。还有最关键的一部分，我们称之为速度。速度是什么？它来自你的认知能力和神经感受器——人体拥有的数十亿个感受器，赋予少数人才具备的能力：真正感受到身下的赛车在做什么。你会发现，杰出的车手感受力强得多，他们比其他人更能感知赛车在赛道上的状态。

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: One example is an old friend and driver of mine, Lewis Hamilton. You have two axles—a front axle, a rear axle—and you have the chassis in between. When you call a car understeer, it means when you turn the wheel and it goes straight. That happens over the tires and the front axle. It's pretty normal. But Lewis once said something when talking about the car: “The car understeers from the front axle to where I sit.” That's the middle of the car. How can that understeer? The engineers couldn't really identify what he meant, but that is what his body told him or his brain told him the car is doing.

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 举个例子，我的一位老朋友、也是我的车手刘易斯·汉密尔顿。赛车有两根车轴——前轴和后轴——中间是底盘。所谓转向不足，就是你打方向盘，车却还是直着走。这通常发生在轮胎和前轴的位置，很正常。但刘易斯有一次谈到赛车时说：“从前轴到我坐的位置，这辆车都在转向不足。”那可是车身中部，怎么会转向不足呢？工程师没能确切弄明白他的意思，但他的身体或大脑就是告诉他，赛车正在发生这种情况。

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: If a driver is able to have that underlying layer of ability, then that becomes unbeatable. But that is genetics. The great drivers strap the car onto themselves. They don't sit in the car and there's a connectedness.

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 如果车手具备这种底层能力，那他就会变得不可战胜。但这也和基因有关。顶尖车手就像把赛车绑在自己身上，他们和赛车之间有一种连接。

[原文] [John Collison]: Absolutely. Connectedness is the right word. It's actually being one with the car and with the road. How did you decide that you weren't good enough to be a professional driver, on this topic of talent identification?

[译文] [John Collison]: 完全同意。“连接”这个词很贴切。实际上就是和赛车、和赛道融为一体。说到识别天赋，你是怎么判断自己不够格成为职业车手的？

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: That's one decision. Talking about humiliation and trauma as ingredients for later success. When I was a child or a teenager, there wasn't really anything differentiating me or outstanding, be it academically or in sports or socially.

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 那是一个决定。说到屈辱和创伤如何成为日后成功的因素，我小时候或青少年时期，无论学业、运动还是社交，都没有什么特别出众或与众不同的地方。

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: When I was 18, by sheer coincidence, I ended up with a friend on a racetrack watching an F3 race, which is a junior formula. When I stepped into this paddock, it's like I've gotten my identity. This is what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a racing driver, someone that is able to tame this machine. This is when I started... Basically my career as a driver, but I came too late to the party. I didn't have all of this karting background that teaches you the fundamentals of the physics of how to position your car in the race.

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 我十八岁时，纯属偶然，和一位朋友去了赛道看F3比赛，那是初级方程式赛事。走进维修区围场的那一刻，我仿佛找到了自己的身份认同。我想成为的就是这样的人：一名能够驾驭这台机器的赛车手。我的车手生涯基本上就是从那时开始的……但我入行太晚，缺少卡丁车训练的基础，而那种训练会教你比赛时如何摆放赛车，以及其中的基本物理原理。

[原文] [Toto Wolff]: But I became a pro. I went through the various stages of junior Formula Racing into what we call GT cars, touring cars or sports cars with a certain amount of success. It is like you do about your business, I guess. What I'm doing today is I... Woke up with that desire and I went to bed with that desire. That lasted for quite a few years. The other, maybe less talked about part, obviously, there's a huge amount of fixation on driver selection and who will get the next seat and everything like that.

[译文] [Toto Wolff]: 不过，我还是成了职业车手。我经历了初级方程式的各个阶段，之后转向我们所说的GT赛车、房车或跑车赛事，也取得了一定成绩。我想，这有点像你经营自己的事业。至于我现在做的事，我每天醒来时心里想着它，睡觉时也想着它。这种状态持续了很多年。另一个可能没那么常被谈起的方面是，大家显然特别关注车手选拔、谁会得到下一个席位之类的事。