JULY 27, 2012

Williams new executive director Toto Wolff revealed very candidly in a Budapest press conference that as well as managing Williams test driver Valtteri Bottas, he is on five per cent of Pastor Maldonado's earnings for the remainder of his F1 career.

Wolff, an investor, first took a minority holding in Williams in 2009 and for the past few months has been assisting Frank Williams in team principal duties before his official announcement as an executive director earlier this week.

It is far from unprecedented for principals to be commercially linked to team drivers, the most high profile recent examples being BAR/Honda boss Craig Pollock and Jacques Villeneuve, Flavio Briatore and Fernando Alonso, not to mention Nicolas Todt and Felipe Massa at a time when father Jean was Ferrari team principal, and there have been many others.

What's not so usual is for them to be so upfront about it. But if the boss manages Bottas, who looked highly impressive again in FP1 in Hungary, and is on a slice of Maldonado, who he says he is a firm believer in, and not just for financial reasons, how uncomfortable must that make Bruno Senna?

"It's what these people don't say that you need to know..." said one experienced paddock hand, "you'll probably find he's on a slice of Bruno as well!"

Whatever, Austian Wolff, 40, and his Scottish wife Susie (nee Stoddart), the team's development driver, currently live in Switzerland, which is renowned for its favourable tax climate, but admits his new responsibilities and British wife look like meaning a lot more time in the UK in future.

"I'm negotiating how many days I have to spend in England," Wolff smiled. "Oxford is a nice place, a student city will keep me young so, yes, that's what I am going to do."