'We want to open up F1 it's no longer a man's world'

Susie Wolff speaks to Kieran Jackson about the major Netflix series on F1 Academy, the all-female racing series she heads, and her ultimate hope to have a woman on the F1 grid again

- Kieran Jackson

From a coastal upbringing in the remote Scottish town of Oban and first racing in a go-kart at the age of eight, Susie Wolff has, at 42, just about seen it all in motorsport. A racing CV that includes stints in Formula Renault, Formula Three, the sports car series DTM and a trailblazing F1 test drive at Williams have been bookended post-retirement with executive roles at Mercedes and the Formula E team Venturi.

But her latest venture is her true passion; some might say her life’s work. Wolff is now managing director at the all-female racing series F1 Academy, a competition tasked with finding the next generation of top-quality female racers. Ultimately, the target, by the end of the decade, is for a woman to land a fulltime seat in F1. By next year, a woman will have not started an F1 race for half a century, with the last instance being Lella Lombardi’s appearance at the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix.

When first launching F1 Academy, which now has the backing of all 10 teams and will race on the cards of seven different grands prix this year, Wolff said a woman on the grid was eight to 10 years away. Two years on, ahead of F1: The Academy launching on Netflix, she has not changed her forecast.

“I think about how much we’ve achieved in a short space of time,” Wolff tells The Independent, in Netflix’s plush London offices. “The amount of young girls I see at karting tracks, the level we see in F1 Academy. It fills me with a lot of hope for the future. I know how tough Formula One is, it’s 20 spots on the grid regardless of gender. It’s tough. But you’ve got to hope that with the amount of female talent we’re promoting, there has to be one girl that’s good enough to be given the opportunity.”