Dax opens by noting the wordplay: 'We got a fox in today, but her name is Wolf.' He and Monica gush about Susie's coolness, calling her 'the coolest person on Earth' and 'a blessing on planet Earth.' Dax sets the scene for new listeners: Susie is one of the only women ever to drive an F1 car during a race weekend, her husband is Toto Wolff, and she is reliably half a second faster than him no matter what cheating he attempts. Her memoir 'Driven' is flagged as essential listening. Two sponsor segments follow: American Beverage promotes Good2Know, a transparent database of over 140 beverage ingredients, and Quince promotes its European linen shirts and essentials at 50–80% below comparable brand prices.

Susie reveals that Toto is devoted to sparkling water because he believes it reduces how often he wakes to use the bathroom — a theory she is openly sceptical of. She notes he is 'still up' at night regardless. The conversation drifts to Susie's son Jack, who apparently calls his grandmother's phone to ask whether he really needs a bath tonight, and the group agrees that smelly boys are a universal problem. Dax becomes briefly paranoid he smelled when he hugged Susie on arrival. The easy rapport sets up what follows as a conversation between equals who clearly enjoy each other's company.

Dax asks about the vibe of growing up in Scotland in the '80s. Susie describes her father loading 9 or 10 kids onto a trailer behind an ATV and driving them through mud on a hill behind the house — everyone hosed down at the end. It was, she reflects, a 'wholesome' and 'outdoorsy' life free from the pressures of city expectations. The town of Arran served as a ferry hub for the Outer Hebrides islands. On the question of boys, Susie says she was completely uninterested — partly because of a throwaway comment a local pub owner called Mario made to her at around 13: 'You'll be pregnant by the time you're 16 and working in your dad's shop.' Rather than crushing her, it became rocket fuel. She decided: absolutely not.

Dax wants to worship Susie's grandfather, and she obliges with the remarkable story. He was a sponsored BSA works motocross rider in his prime, ran a motorcycle shop in England, and refused to adopt Japanese bikes when they flooded the market. He relocated to Scotland to become a commercial diver, collecting fallen propellers from ships on the west coast. Then he went diving while unwell, ascended too quickly, and suffered decompression sickness. He describes lying in his bunk and noticing he couldn't lift his leg back to the bed — the moment he knew something was catastrophically wrong. Susie has only ever known him in a wheelchair. Yet he took up paragliding, broke his ankle in a crash, and opened a caravan park. His wife cared for him entirely without outside help — something Susie now recognises, as a wife and mother herself, as 'incredible.'

Susie's uncle took after his father and nearly won the Scottish Six Days Trials. But when the grandfather's accident shattered the family dynamic, Susie's mother lost several teenage years to the upheaval. At 16, her grandfather told her to go get a bike — and she met Susie's father John at the shop where he worked, in a classic small-town love story (she was technically dating one of his friends at the time). Susie is emphatic: her mother raced bikes, ran her own business, and modelled an equal partnership. 'I wouldn't be who I am today without my mum,' she says. 'She had as much get up and go as my dad. It absolutely shaped who I am.'

Dax, himself an avid rider, establishes the technical timeline: Yamaha three-wheeler, then PW50, then PW80. He and Susie compare notes on clutches and gearboxes with the enthusiasm of two people who could talk about this for hours. The key detail is her father's 40th birthday gift to himself — a bike and a return to racing — which meant the family spent weekends at Knockhill. The kart track there offered 15 minutes for £5. Susie and her brother David hounded their parents for fiver after fiver until their mother finally said: 'This is all about you. I think it's time the kids did something.' The go-karts — a secondhand Swiss Huttli for each of them, rusty and peeling — arrived around their eighth birthdays.

The first race was a shock: instead of her brother, there were roughly 100 children, and the track was full of what she diplomatically calls 'aggressive little boys.' She came in after her first laps and told her father she really didn't like it. He gave her the binary: put the cart in the truck and go home, or go back out and fight. She went back out. She never looked back. Dax notes the parallel with his own daughter's experience — hating the kart track the first time, returning eight months later totally converted. Susie immediately connects it to F1 Academy's mission: if that little girl at 8 had seen another girl on track, her whole first experience might have been different. The conversation turns briefly to the three sports where men and women compete together at elite level: horse jumping, sailing and driving.

Dax plays devil's advocate for a sceptical audience: doesn't testosterone give male drivers an inherent edge in aggression? Susie doesn't dismiss biology but argues it comes down to individuals. Then she drops the disclosure: during her career, a routine medical found she had unusually high testosterone levels. Doctors wanted to use her results as a study template for female racing drivers. She thought about it overnight and said no — she didn't want to be singled out, and she felt her results should simply define what a competitive female driver looks like. Dax adds the feedback loop argument: higher-risk behaviour raises testosterone, which drives more risk-taking. Susie's counterpoint is the clincher — 'red mist and over-aggression is a real negative' in racing. She cites Max Verstappen as the exception that proves the rule.

At 13, Susie attended a Formula 3 race at Donington and saw Jenson Button — then a young hotshot who would become a world champion — racing. That was the moment the penny dropped: she could do this professionally. Back in the karting world, she progressed from Scottish to British level, where she first encountered Lewis Hamilton at around age 9 — 'the little boy with the yellow helmet who was outstanding.' They raced in the same class by age 14, and she describes a later podium moment where she couldn't open the champagne and Hamilton, far more accustomed to winning, grabbed the bottle and opened it for her. At the World Championships, finishing 15th out of over 130 was solid work. Then the tannoy called her name. She was brought on stage for 'top female in the world.' She hadn't even noticed there were other girls. Her whole team made jokes. It was the moment she understood: they see me as different.

Dax references Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History episode 'The Token' to frame what Susie experienced. She confirms it: there were real periods of loneliness, though she notes she can only compare her own experience. She overheard the way male drivers spoke about women and decided she never wanted to be spoken about that way — but also couldn't always be the one calling it out without losing her place in the environment. She decided to detach, protect her love of the sport, and let results do the talking. The media trade-off was real: more coverage meant more sponsorship opportunities, but it also meant photoshoot demands for leather-clad poses rather than discussions of driving. And other female drivers were invariably positioned as rivals rather than potential allies.

Dax references Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History episode 'The Token' to frame what Susie experienced. She confirms it: there were real periods of loneliness, though she notes she can only compare her own experience. She overheard the way male drivers spoke about women and decided she never wanted to be spoken about that way — but also couldn't always be the one calling it out without losing her place in the environment. She decided to detach, protect her love of the sport, and let results do the talking. The media trade-off was real: more coverage meant more sponsorship opportunities, but it also meant photoshoot demands for leather-clad poses rather than discussions of driving. And other female drivers were invariably positioned as rivals rather than potential allies.

Susie's 2005 season was built around Formula 3 with British Telecom as her main sponsor, when they were just launching something called broadband. Then she slipped outside a newsagent while visiting her grandmother and broke her ankle. She lost her licence, her seat and her sponsor simultaneously — 'dark months' at age 22. After a year at Edinburgh University (which she found alienating — she was training on weekends while everyone else was getting drunk) she'd moved near Silverstone and was marshalling for income. She clawed back to testing World Series cars under a sponsorship arrangement, but was called into a meeting six weeks before the first race and told to find £250,000 she didn't have. Sitting in her Golf TDI, she took an incoming call from a thick German accent: Gerhard Unger of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport, asking what she thought of German touring cars.

The DTM test in Barcelona was everything. Mercedes were direct: arrive, get your seat fitted, do a warm-up. Susie asked for a lap of the track to familiarise herself. Gerhard Unger called over Mika Häkkinen — two-time F1 world champion — who showed her the racing lines in a hire car. She gave the test everything, waited 10 days, was summoned to Stuttgart and offered a contract. She stayed for seven years before leaving on her own terms. Dax and Monica's sidebar about Monica's Mercedes C43 — gifted by Dax because he was embarrassed by her old Prius — leads to Susie's observation that she drives a 1972 Mercedes Pagoda in Monaco to buck the trend of everyone trying to outdo each other.

Susie describes boxing away her femininity in her teens because it felt like a sign of weakness in a macho environment. Then Mercedes put her in a pink car because the sponsor's logo was pink. She was older by that point and more confident — and suddenly small girls were turning up to races dressed in pink. 'Is it the Hello Kitty car?' they asked. She realised: if pink gets girls to the trackside, she could drive a pink car. Getting married to Toto and taking his name was the other turning point. Mercedes' comms team told her she couldn't change her name. She told them she absolutely was. She wasn't on her own anymore.

The love story is told in full cinematic detail. Susie clocks Toto at a team dinner; Matthias Lauda watches her eyes and says 'you've got no chance, he's dating Miss Austria.' When Toto crashes at the Nürburgring, team manager Hans-Jürgen Mattes suggests someone should call him — and Gary Paffett volunteers Susie. They speak for an hour. She counts down to a big championship dinner in Düsseldorf; she gets her hair done, picks an outfit, goes down to breakfast in her race suit when he fails to show for dinner. Then at lunch the next day, someone jokes she should date a Mercedes person. Toto says, publicly: 'What about me?' She drives back to Switzerland, pulls into a fuel station, drafts the text ten times, and sends it. His reply comes hours later: 'I'm getting in a plane, I'll call you.' He bought the ring six weeks later.

Dax raises the Scottish-Austrian cultural chasm with genuine curiosity. Susie illustrates it perfectly: when she's ill, Toto asks once if she needs anything, accepts 'no,' and disappears for six hours. 'Are you better yet?' is his check-in. When he's ill, the world stops. His pre-wedding preparation included a written pros and cons list — 'there are more positives than negatives,' he told her. She was unmoved: 'I don't care what's on that list, we're getting married.' On stepchildren, Susie is honest about the difficulty of being a 'selfish racer' suddenly required to mother on certain weekends. She navigated it carefully, not wanting to pretend to be a second mother but feeling genuine affection. Marriage made it easier by defining the unit clearly.

Dax frames ServiceNow through his own experience: even dream jobs have non-dreamy parts, and ServiceNow's AI specialists do the busywork so you don't have to. The BetterHelp segment references a survey of 2,000 Americans, finding a stark gap between therapy's perceived wisdom and society's discouragement of it. Monica admits she judges people who haven't sought therapy when struggling. BetterHelp offers licensed therapist matching across 30,000 practitioners with 12 years of experience. Arm Hammer Toothpaste and Pacific Life insurance reads also appear in this window.

Susie doesn't shy away from the fact that being Toto's wife put her on the radar. Frank Williams was of a generation where women were behind the scenes, not on the track. But he was fascinated by Susie — asking about her racing career, bonding over their shared Scotland connections (he hated it at boarding school; she loved it). In one of those conversations she told him her dream was to drive an F1 car. At the end of the weekend, he called over CEO Adam Parr and told her they would give her 25 laps. That was supposed to be the end of it. It wasn't.

This chapter is a mini-masterclass in F1 physics for the uninitiated. Dax breaks down why an F1 car is a 'reverse airplane': it uses aerodynamics to push the car into the ground rather than lift it off. At Silverstone, a driver can take a sharp right-hander in 7th gear at 190 mph and stay glued to the tarmac because more speed equals more downforce equals more grip. The counterintuitive leap of faith this requires — going faster into a corner to go faster out — is what separates F1 from other motorsport. Susie adds the emotional dimension: when you're truly on the limit in an F1 car, there is not a single stray thought about anything else. It's hyperfocus unlike any other state. Some drivers prefer qualifying to races because of this.

Susie credits Williams' preparation: simulator work, straight-line testing, everything to get her ready. She ended up using a neck-conditioning machine that Michael Schumacher had built at the end of his career. She notes that neck muscles build quickly and shrink quickly — within months of stopping racing, her neck shrank noticeably. The test was 72 laps at Barcelona — race distance. Lewis Hamilton told her to use a white neck pad so it wouldn't be visible on camera, adding that he used one himself early in seasons before his neck was fully conditioned. The pad meant she could lean into the long right-hander at Barcelona rather than fight to hold her head straight against 4.5 G of sustained lateral force.

The morning of the Silverstone FP1 involved checking weather, thinking about Valtteri Bottas's race weekend (any damage would affect his whole race), and the golden rule: no crashing that car. She got out of the garage cleanly — her father's first words were 'thank God you didn't stall' — and then on her second flying lap, the Mercedes engine blew. Anticlimax of the highest order. The team and media had massively underestimated the interest the session would generate; they scrambled to capitalise. A second FP1 opportunity at Hockenheim followed. Arriving there 'pissed off' rather than nervous, Susie pushed to the absolute limit on every corner except one (where gravel threatened). She finished within 0.2 seconds of Massa. 'The feeling of driving an F1 car on the edge,' she says, 'there's nothing else that comes close.'

Susie is candid: stopping racing produced an identity crisis. She had fallen in love with motherhood but realised almost immediately it couldn't be her only identity. The Formula E opportunity came as she was searching. She was a sceptic of electric racing — 'that wasn't my era' — until the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal made electrification a serious proposition. Business partner Gildo de Pastor offered her the team principal role and she took the leap. With a great engineer and a one-year-at-a-time mentality, she turned Venturi from a money-losing backmarker to nearly winning the Formula E World Championship. She became CEO. When de Pastor sold the team to build an electric rover for Mars, she was set to join that project — until Stefano Domenicali called.

Dax admits he only got into Formula 1 because of Drive to Survive, which reframed the sport from boring to a 'science fair with drama.' The female fan demographic had shifted massively. Liberty and Stefano Domenicali recognised the opportunity: create a funded pathway for female talent. Susie is clear that F1 Academy is the only race series in the world where over 80% of driver costs are covered — roughly €500,000 per driver per season. She also notes the philosophical complexity: does an all-female series represent progress or a step backwards? She distinguishes F1 Academy from the failed W Series by pointing to its backing: F1 teams, Liberty Media investment, and a sustainable commercial model.

The near-collapse story is vivid: Paul Ricard, no cars in sight, not even a security guard on the gate. She thought she had the wrong date. Drivers met her with bad news: no sponsors. Team managers were threatening to walk. She called Domenicali from the paddock: 'This is not working.' His response: 'What do we need to do?' Her answer: race with F1, get the teams on board, bring commercial partnerships in-house. She had to approach every F1 team principal, including Toto's great rival Christian Horner, who she notes was 'great and quick to commit.' The commercial partnerships — Charlotte Tilbury, now Sephora, American Express, Pepsi with Gatorade, LEGO — were strategically chosen to make young girls feel the sport was for them. She didn't lock teams into long-term commitments; within a year they were asking to sign up permanently.

Asked to distil thirty-plus years of navigating a male environment, Susie talks about the cultural sea change she has witnessed. Old behaviours don't get a free pass anymore. She credits Lewis Hamilton — 'the GOAT' — as someone who chose the harder path: using his unassailable stature to bring issues of race and culture into the paddock's consciousness. She observes a specific tell in important meetings: within ten minutes she can identify whether the man opposite her has a daughter, because having one fundamentally shifts perspective. Decision-makers with daughters understand why the sport must be more welcoming — and they now want it to be.

The parallel with Dax's daughter Lincoln is natural: Jack Wolff has been passionate about karting from a young age, but Toto feared the pressure of the Wolff name. Susie advocated for giving him the chance — she was given chances, and she feels that obligation to pass them on. Now Jack's name makes him a target on the kart track, which Susie says will toughen him up for life regardless of whether he makes it in racing. As for Susie's own driving: she doesn't have capacity for track days — every spare weekend is Jack's. If she and Toto ever had a free weekend and got on track together, it would most likely end in silence because neither can resist the urge to beat the other.

Dax says the book's greatest achievement is helping readers understand what it actually feels like to be strapped in — a unique perspective applicable far beyond motorsport: anyone who has aimed at one thing for years and then arrived at that moment will recognise it. Susie recorded the audiobook herself in two days (her publisher said it would take five). The emotional peak of writing it was the letter to her younger self. She took five attempts. 'I look at that little girl,' she says, 'and I want to give her a hug and say, you did okay.' Dax's read: Susie had been talking so mean to herself for so long that being kind to little Susie was almost unbearable.

Dax says he adores Susie and the book is 'so applicable to any situation' beyond racing. They make plans: Isle of Man TT first, then a few laps of the Nürburgring in their 70s. Susie volunteers the story of her first Nürburgring lap — a young Scottish girl in DTM testing, no idea what the track was, Bernd Schneider inviting her to 'come and do a lap' in a C63. She got in, the barrier went up, and then the never-ending track just kept going: forests, cement bowls, cobblestones, asphalt, the full 12.8-mile assault. It is the perfect note to end on.

Monica runs through the episode's factual claims in the show's signature fact-check format. Topo Chico: confirmed — Coca-Cola suspended production at its Monterrey well for stabilisation work, with shortages expected to last through late 2026. CNN called it 'America's running out of Topo Chico.' Toto's sparkling-water-as-sleep-aid theory: debunked — carbonated water's acidity may increase urinary urgency rather than reduce it. The F1 weight minimum: 768 kg for car and driver combined (excluding fuel) in 2026, down 32 kg from 800 kg in 2025. Maximum fuel load: 110 kg, enough for approximately 300 km without mid-race refuelling. Dax adds the mind-bending qualifier: Kimi Antonelli and Max Verstappen recently qualified at Monaco separated by 0.003 seconds.

Monica's friend Elizabeth (and her husband Andy) are moving to Bordeaux for a year. Elizabeth came to say goodbye, arrived announcing she'd skipped mascara because she knew she'd cry, and at one point directly told Monica 'you better cry.' Monica didn't. Not even a well-up. She feels this is consistent with her pattern: she cries from anger, frustration or embarrassment — not from sadness. Dax connects with this precisely: the moment you become self-conscious about not crying is the moment crying becomes impossible. Acting teachers say the trick is to try not to cry. The conversation expands into Dax's own emotional regulation: going to the garage to process, resisting the 'what about me' impulse, and his therapist's definition of masculine strength as restraint rather than aggression.

Dax is enthusiastic about Widow's Bay — 'can't recommend it enough' — noting a standout performance from Nancy Lenihan (previously in Bless This Mess) as a museum guide who describes witch-burning as 'a great source of pride.' The show features Matthew Rhys, a past Armchair Expert guest. Monica and Dax then attempt — with mixed technical success — to play a Zarna Garg comedy video on the studio TV. In the clip, comedian Zarna Garg interviews Malala Yousafzai in her 'almost therapist' character, dismissing Malala's experience of being shot by the Taliban and only making it to Oxford as evidence that 'you complain a lot.' The accent and delivery are judged very pleasing.

Dax's Father's Day falls alongside his birthday. Last year he hosted a tournament day — volleyball, pickleball, sideline shoulder massages — and wants to repeat it. Monica's idealised image of a father is hers, sitting on a makeshift seat outside store after store at the outlet mall, buying nothing, simply waiting. He never says 'let's go.' Dax finds this almost monk-like. They connect this to a broader point about masculinity: Dax's therapist told him that real strength is never saying 'what about me,' holding no resentments, and going to the garage when you need a minute. The episode wraps on the image of Monica's dad sitting in the sun outside TJ Maxx, perfectly content.

The story is pure joy: Lincoln, Dax's 13-year-old, is obsessed with F1 and chose Kimi Antonelli as her favourite driver. Susie arranged access to a pre-event hotel gathering. Lincoln was so nervous she almost backed out, then agreed on condition they didn't carry their motorcycle helmets in. Antonelli — 19, Italian, currently dominating the 2026 season for Mercedes — immediately sat down with her and showed her photos on his phone. Toto filmed the whole thing secretly and told the room he'd use the footage at their wedding. Dax admits he was mentally sold on the arrangement. They left before Brad Pitt arrived at the main event. The final Allstate roadside assistance spot closes the episode.