Motorsport’s quick thinker

Ask Jean Todt’s aides about the secrets of his managerial success, and they mention an odd aptitude: the Frenchman is a whizz at mental arithmetic. Ferrari’s boss during its great years in Formula One, now president of the International Automobile Federation (FIA), nods in agreement: “24 times 24 is 576,” Todt says, but adds modestly: “I have no merit in this matter. It’s a gift. When I was six, my mother showed me the multiplication tables. That evening I could count better than anyone else at home. I counted faster than the teacher, faster than the calculating machine.”

He considers the gift a concrete expression of his intellectual powers. “Sometimes I think that I think quicker than others — to have an idea, a vision, a solution, the speed with which I assimilate a document.”

Todt, 69, is sitting in his majestic office at the FIA’s headquarters overlooking Paris’s Place de la Concorde. He is immaculately dressed and munching a pink macaroon — his lunch. The doctor’s son who dreamt aged 10 of becoming an all-conquering driver has ended up at the top of the motorsport industry, but as an all-conquering manager.

The FIA is motorsport’s world governing body. An umbrella organisation for drivers’ clubs worldwide, it oversees auto racing including Formula One, the sport’s most glamorous and lucrative competition. (The F1 company is in talks with a US-Qatari consortium about a deal valuing it at $8.5bn.) The FIA has no say over F1’s commercial side. However, the body’s power extends far beyond racing: the FIA is responsible for global motoring issues in general, especially road safety.

His father did not like his driving intentions, and perhaps Todt lacked the gift. Instead, in 1966 he became a co-driver, or navigator, in rallies. “I had a reputation of being the best-paid co-driver on the market. I helped make it a profession. Before me, people were co-drivers and did other things, they didn’t really earn a living from it.” Gradually, he formulated his next goal — “to become boss of a racing team”. Aged 35, he got his chance at Peugeot.

One Thursday in October 1981, Todt recalls with characteristic precision, he finished his last rally as a co-driver. The next morning he started at Peugeot. He touches his wooden conference table: “I haven’t missed a day’s work since.”

His Peugeot teams dominated rally driving. Todt recites the honours list like a human quiz machine. However, he says, Peugeot would not let him rise within the group, so in 1993 he jumped to Ferrari.

“An old Ferrari is like a painting,” he says. But when he moved to the legendary Maranello factory, the French dri­ver Alain Prost told him: “You won’t last more than a year, a year-and-a-half.” Ferrari was struggling. It had not won F1’s driver’s championship since 1979. Appointing its first non-Italian boss caused controversy. At his first press conference, “I added ‘o’, ‘a’ or ‘i’ to French words thinking it was Italian,” he says. “The only way to succeed was to surround myself with good people.” This is his life-long mantra, but he says many bosses do not share it. “Some think that will endanger their own job.”

Above all, he needed a great driver. “The first great pilote I talked to about joining Ferrari was [Ayrton] Senna, in September 1993, in my hotel room at Villa d’Este on Lake Como. He wanted to join, but only in 1994.” That was too early for Todt, who still had other drivers under contract. The three-times world champion joined Williams, and in 1994 crashed and died at Imola.

Todt hired reigning world champion Michael Schumacher, who would become a dear friend. “How did we convince Schumacher?” says Todt. “The attraction was the challenge. He had won championships with a lesser automobile brand [Benetton]. We persuad­ed him that if he succeeded with Ferrari, he would have a different dimension.”

But Schumacher took years to succeed with Ferrari. That left “il Francese” — “the Frenchman” — under attack in Italy. Being a foreigner helped Todt ignore Italian controversies. Anoth­er of his gifts helped too: he had mastered Italian in six months. He learnt it as he had German and English: not in school but rapidly in practice.

From 2000 to 2004 Schumacher won five straight world driver’s titles. Ferrari ruled F1, yet Todt and Schumacher continued to doubt themselves. Todt says of his friend, incap­acitated after a near-fatal skiing accident in 2013: “He was, he is, very reserv­ed, shy, loyal. Michael had five world titles, but every January or February he would want to do solo trials to see if he was still a good driver. It’s very important to be able to doubt yourself. People who are too sure of themselves — it’s not very interesting.”

Off the grid, Schumacher helped Todt woo his partner, Malaysian film star Michelle Yeoh. Todt specifies that he met her “in Shanghai in June 2005. I wanted to start communicating with her. I didn’t know how to write text messages. Michael taught me.”

In 2009 he resigned from Ferrari. One reason, he says, was “this pressure of results, which was eating me up. I have in my head an image from 2004. Michael had become world champion practically in midseason. Two races later at Monza [track] I went to the starting grid anguished as if I had never won a Grand Prix. I told myself, ‘We’ve been world champion for two races. What can this change?’”

After Ferrari, he was elected president of the FIA — an unpaid role — by the federation’s assembly of automobile and touring clubs and national sporting authorities from around the world.

He is the UN’s special envoy for road safety, and is keen that F1 should be greener, which sometimes causes friction in the industry. The new, quieter hybrid engines leave many fans longing for old-fashioned vroom-vroom. But Todt makes no apologies.

Carping from Bernie Ecclestone, octogenarian boss of F1, does not bother him either. Ecclestone, he recalls fondly, helped get him into Ferrari.

“In June, July 1992 he phoned me and said, ‘Luca di Montezemolo [Ferrari’s then president] will call you.’ Bernie thought I had qualities that could help Ferrari,” he says. “Now, if it amuses him to say something about me that could be considered negative, it’s not a problem. I don’t have that ego. I care about the objective. I’m a detail maniac.”

He does lots of charity work, especially for the ICM, the Paris-based Brain and Spinal Cord Institute. Todt help­ed create it, in part as a tribute to his father, a family doctor who was still marching up the stairs on house calls aged 80. However, the institute has become terribly appropriate given Schumacher’s accident. Todt visits his friend, but will not discuss his condition.

Todt also sits on corporate boards.

“These roles are paid, but very poorly,” he says. “Everything I make as a board member, I give to our charities.”

Todt pursues his objectives without a computer. He brandishes his old-fashioned mobile: “It’s connected 24 hours out of 24. I don’t know how not to reply to a call. So I protect myself from computers. It’s one less dependency.” He displays his folder of email printouts. Late at night, when his assistant stops printing them out, he stops replying.

Very few Frenchmen his age still work, but Todt seems unstoppable. “What troubles me [is that] next year I will have been 50 years in motorsport. Not wanting to think about that is maybe why I keep looking ahead.”

Gérard Saillant, orthopaedic surgeon, president and founder of Paris’s ICM, the Brain and Spine Institute, and a longtime friend says: “He is absolutely loyal but, if you disappoint him, it’s over. He is extremely demanding of himself and others. I think he likes difficult work. But although he appears very sure of himself, he is characterised by disquiet and doubt. If he wasn’t, he would feel unsettled. He says, ‘I should stop, I should enjoy life’, but he is addicted to his work.”