Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Podbit · Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Susie Wolff (Managing Director of F1 Academy)

Explore episode Jun 24, 2026
Business
Rebuilding F1 Academy from Near-Collapse

Susie Wolff (Managing Director of F1 Academy) · Jun 24, 2026 Business

Susie arrived at her first F1 Academy race at Paul Ricard to find an almost empty paddock and no security guard on the gate. Drivers immediately told her they couldn't raise their required €150,000 in sponsorship. Team managers said they were out. She called the CEO and said it wasn't working — then spent months restructuring the entire model around F1-team partnerships and commercial sponsors.

Where this was said

Retiring from Driving, Formula E, and Finding Identity After the Car

At 1:20:30 · chapter starts 1:19:50

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.

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