Head of F1 Academy explains how close she came to a grand prix debut, her quest to produce female drivers and a frightening knock on her hotel room door by a powerful man in the sport
“T
here was a deep loneliness to karting, and then definitely in single-seaters, because no one else was going through the same thing as me,” says Susie Wolff as she remembers her long struggle in motorsport, from racing as a teenager against Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg to her determined, but unfulfilled, quest to become a Formula One driver.
“After the whole #MeToo movement, we forget what it was like before. But the way I heard boys talking about girls in the paddock made me think I never want to be spoken about in that way. I realised I’d have to be whiter than white to get through it unscathed.”
The 42-year-old says: “I couldn’t open up to anyone until I met [her husband] Toto. But I’m definitely happy that the next generation will never have to go through that because there’s a camaraderie in F1 Academy. These young women have other women they can look up to or reach out to and there won’t be that isolation I felt.”
