Speaker
Susie Wolff
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Susie Wolff got her first proper dirt bike — a Yamaha PW50 — at around age 5, having already ridden a three-wheeler Yamaha before that.
Susie and her brother David each received a secondhand go-kart around their 8th birthday, marking the start of her competitive racing career.
Susie's maternal grandfather, a former BSA works motocross rider, became paralysed from the waist down after surfacing too quickly from a commercial dive off the west coast of Scotland.
F1 Academy provides over 80% of each driver's race budget — approximately €500,000 per driver per season — making it the only race series in the world to do so.
When F1 Academy launched, each driver was expected to find €150,000 of their own sponsorship — a requirement that proved immediately unworkable and nearly collapsed the series.
During her racing career, Susie Wolff's medical tests revealed unusually high testosterone levels, prompting doctors to want to study her as a case study for female racing drivers.
After retiring from driving in 2015, Susie became team principal and then CEO of the Venturi Formula E team, helping it nearly win the world championship. When her business partner sold the team to build an electric Mars rover, she was about to join that project — until Stefano Domenicali called about F1 Academy. She had to exit the space venture to take it, letting Gildo de Pastor down in the process.
Her Silverstone FP1 debut ended after one lap when the engine blew — one of the great anticlimax stories in motorsport. But the anger became rocket fuel at Hockenheim, where she pushed to the limit on every corner except one and finished within 0.2 seconds of Williams race driver Felipe Massa. 'The feeling of driving an F1 car on the edge — there's nothing else that comes close.'
Susie's maternal grandfather was a works BSA motocross rider in the 1950s who reinvented himself as a commercial diver — then got the bends and became paralysed from the waist down. He responded by taking up paragliding from a wheelchair, breaking his ankle in a crash landing. The Wolff family's relationship with risk wasn't recklessness; it was a tradition of fearless adaptation.
Susie's first karting race was a shock: instead of her brother, there were 100 other kids. She came into the pits scared and told her dad she hated it. His response: go back out, go faster, and when they hit you, hit them back twice as hard. She went back out. Racing became all-consuming.
At around age 9, Susie first encountered Lewis Hamilton at her first British karting race — described as 'the little boy with the yellow helmet who was outstanding.' They would race in the same class by age 14. Later, on a podium, a more experienced Hamilton grabbed the champagne bottle she couldn't open and handed it back to her.
Finishing 15th at the World Karting Championship was solid — there were over 130 competitors. Then the tannoy called her name. She was brought on stage to receive an award for 'top female in the world.' She hadn't even noticed there were other girls in the race. The team's jokes afterwards crystallised something: they now saw her as different.
Media coverage brought sponsors, but it also brought photoshoots where they wanted her in leather posing against cars rather than talking about driving. She was constantly asked about being a woman, never just about racing. She knew complaining wasn't an option — results were the only weapon that worked.
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.
Driving a Formula 1 car at race distance means 72 laps of sustained neck-load at 4.5 G under braking. Lewis Hamilton told Susie to use a white neck pad so it wouldn't be visible — the same tip he used at the start of seasons before his neck muscles built up. She used the machine Michael Schumacher had built specifically for neck conditioning.
Susie first noticed Toto at a team dinner, but was told he was dating Miss Austria. The opening came when he had an accident at the Nürburgring and she was the one 'volunteered' to call him. They spoke for an hour. Months later, at a fuel station while driving back to Switzerland, she drafted a text message ten times and sent it: 'If it had to be someone from Mercedes, it would only ever be you.' He bought a ring six weeks later.
F1 Academy originally split costs three ways: driver, team, Liberty Media. The driver third was €150,000 nobody could raise. Susie scrapped the model, brought all 10 F1 teams on board (including going to Christian Horner, Toto's rival, who came in quickly), got Sephora, American Express, LEGO and Pepsi as sponsors, and created the only race series in the world that funds over 80% of its drivers' costs.
Dax brought his 13-year-old daughter Lincoln to meet Kimi Antonelli — 19-year-old Mercedes driver and Kimi's favourite — at a pre-event hotel gathering. Antonelli immediately sat down with Lincoln and showed her photos on his phone. Meanwhile, Toto Wolff filmed the whole thing secretly and whispered to the room that he'd use the video at their wedding. Dax was already mentally planning the arrangement.
At speeds where downforce equals 2,000 kg, the counterintuitive truth of F1 is that more speed means more grip. Taking a flat-out corner at 190 mph in 7th gear is a leap of faith that everything you've learned in other cars is wrong. And once you're on the limit, there isn't a single stray thought about anything else. It's a hyperfocus state unlike any other.
Susie grew up in a small Scottish ferry town where her father ran a motorcycle dealership and had once raced the Isle of Man TT — the most dangerous motorsport event in the world. Every birthday involved ATVs in the mud. The life instilled a love of speed that felt completely normal because it was.
As a teenager, Susie suppressed her femininity because she felt it made her look weak in a male environment. Then Mercedes put her in a pink car because the sponsor's logo was pink. Suddenly little girls were appearing at the fence in pink outfits asking if it was the 'Hello Kitty car.' She realised: if pink gets girls to the trackside, she could drive a pink car. Getting married and no longer being 'on her own anymore' completed the shift.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Sports 50%
- Society & Culture 42%
- Business 8%
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