'I wasn't there to be the top female. I was there to try to be the best'

The F1 Academy head Susie Wolff 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

- Donald McRae

"There 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 motor sport, 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 #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."

Wolff is the managing director of the F1 Academy, the all-female racing championship she has led since 2023. The aim is to offer young women opportunities to develop in competitive racing with the long-term ambition of producing a female F1 driver.

It seems apt that our interview takes place in the middle of a kart test session for her and Toto's eight-year-old son, Jack. The memories rise up and she speaks with even more passion about rocketing female interest in motor sport compared with her own solitary journey through prejudice and inequality. "I can't believe the number of young girls in karting now," she says. "I was always the only one - or there might have been just one other girl."

In her new book, Wolff shines a light on the difficulties she faced. As the boys tried to dismiss or intimidate her "it became clear that being quick wasn't enough. I had to toughen up, find an aggression that didn't come naturally."