Parked outside the Maybourne Riviera Hotel in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin overlooking the principality of Monaco is a beautiful silver Mercedes Benz 300 SL Gullwing. Sitting inside that lovely car is Susie Wolff. She arrived in it, it’s not just a prop. She and her husband, Toto, have a collection of classic cars, although she won’t tell me how many (“quite a few”), and know the history of each one. Cars are a huge part of their lives.

Susie is a former racing driver, and now the managing director of F1 Academy, the all-female racing championship. Toto Wolff is the team principal and part owner of Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, which is leading this year’s F1 Constructors’ Championship, and the two Mercedes drivers, Kimi Antonelli and Britain’s George Russell, are currently coming first and second in the driver’s championship.

We are actually just inside France here, but neighbouring Monaco, where Susie lives, is also all about cars. More than half the current Formula One line-up live there, as do many former drivers – unsurprising, given the zero level of personal income tax. There are other advantages, exemplified by the view from the balcony of this clifftop hotel: a coastline of unadulterated beauty.

Wolff is upbeat, glamorous and composed as she folds herself neatly on to a sofa. We are chatting about… well, cars. (It’s a passion we share.) “In Monaco, there are a lot of supercars, and I always like to buck the trend. So my daily car is a 1972 Pagoda.” Which is a Mercedes, obviously. “We love that car.” Who drives? “I often drive but Toto is not a great passenger. He complains about my driving but he complains about everyone’s driving. Even when he was being driven by Lewis [Hamilton] he complained, so I don’t take it personally.”

Wolff’s life is dictated by motorsport. As well as most of their weekends being taken up by Formula One GPs (Toto) and F1 Academy races (Susie), their 9-year-old son, Jack, is now karting, and recently won the Under 10 IAME series championship in Italy, in what is only his first year of racing. This means that their previously hectic life is even more manic, and if they want to accompany him to races, it’s a lot of juggling. For Susie, who grew up in a motorsport-loving family in Oban, on the west coast of Scotland, and started karting at the age of 8, it’s like reliving her childhood, she says. “I see how much he loves it, like I did, and I enjoy watching him on the track; it’s intense but good fun. He’s very competitive, and determined – like me.” Is that genetic quality, do you think?

“It’s a good question and one we often discuss. Nature or nurture? He’s had that character from a young age, though I think nurture must have played a role too. He gets to go to some Formula One races, and he understands that world. I love that he’s found something he really enjoys, that he has focus.”

At home they speak English and German (Toto is Austrian); their son spends time racing in Italy, and his mechanic is Italian, while at school in Monaco he speaks French. “So he’s bombarded with quite a few different languages. And just last night he was talking in his sleep in German, which is a first! But he’s essentially trilingual, which is a benefit of living in this part of the world.”

She regrets that Jack doesn’t have a Scottish accent, even though he spends a lot of time with her parents, who often look after him. “I don’t have a nanny but my parents help a lot, and we just manage as best we can. I’m pretty disciplined about how I work, and I always spend the hour after he comes back from school with him. I’m known in the family as the logistics manager, because there’s so many spinning plates. I’m not scared to push myself, and I’m meticulous – it sometimes exhausts me how meticulous I am. But I know when I’m at my limit and need to take a few days off.”

F1 Academy is now in its fourth year. It’s for female drivers, aged 16 to 25, who race in the equivalent of Formula Four cars – single-seaters that all use the same chassis, engine, and tyre setup to ensure a level playing field. It is one of the very few championships in the world almost to fully fund their drivers, which in such an expensive sport is very appealing.

Wolff’s own path in motor racing gave her an understanding of the challenges of competing in motorsport, especially for women, so the idea was to create a series that would allow female talent to flourish. “Early on I was worried we wouldn’t see enough drivers, but there’s been a big shift in the last two years, and a growing female fan base. More and more young women are entering the sport because there is a pathway to succeed.” F1 Academy’s talent-development officer selects drivers from applicants from all over the world for 18 places, which are 80 per cent funded. All of the established F1 teams support a driver, and have their liveries displayed on the cars. And securing spots to race at grand prix weekends has brought them a guaranteed audience.

Under Wolff’s stewardship, F1 Academy’s profile has risen enormously: its commercial partners are prominent global brands: in 2024 Charlotte Tilbury came on board; the following year Tag Heuer joined as official timekeeper and partner; and in March this year Sephora became an official partner. Last year the Netflix series F1: The Academy, made by Hello Sunshine (the production company founded by Reese Witherspoon), followed several competitors throughout the season. It ran for a year, highlighting the paths of certain drivers, with behind-the-scenes footage and a curated story. Each driver stays for one or two years, depending on results, and so far it’s been very successful. In fact, 2024’s championship winner, 23-year-old Abbi Pulling, became the first ever female to win a GB3 race (the next level up) after she left F1A, and last year’s champion, Doriane Pin, is now a development driver for the Mercedes F1.

In Wolff’s memoir, Driven (just out in paperback), she recalls something she was told by a Williams F1 team engineer. He and his young daughter were watching a racing session on television that Susie had participated in. When Susie pulled off her helmet, his daughter said, “That’s a girl? Girls aren’t allowed to drive in F1!”

“It was a stark reminder of how deeply ingrained these perceptions were,” Susie writes. “I knew that if things were ever going to change, I had to drive that change. I wanted to make sure that I passed the baton to the next generation – to open up the sport and show that success was possible for women, both on track and off.”

A Formula One car is the fastest racing car in the world, and the most technically advanced. As an avid F1 fan myself, I have often been asked why there aren’t any women in the class. And I must admit that I had tended to believe what a former F1 driver had once told me, that the sheer neck strength needed to withstand the G-forces of taking a corner at up to 150mph made it physically impossible – or at least incredibly challenging – for women. (Despite Verstappen’s complaints that today’s cars are too easy to drive because of the new technology, the physical challenge remains. Drivers experience extreme G-forces under heavy braking.)

I mention this to Susie, who test-drove F1 cars for Williams in 2012, but never competed in a Grand Prix. “I’m the first to admit it is physically challenging, but the neck is a series of small muscles which you can build up. My neck was huge when I competed because I had a special machine to train it. I absolutely believe there’s no physical reason why a woman can’t compete in Formula One. Do you need to be incredibly fit? Yes. Do you need to build up the right muscles in order to compete at the highest level? Yes. But it’s possible, and I proved it.”

It’s not really comparable to sports such as tennis, where it is accepted that women play three-set matches and men five sets, or athletics. It’s a fact that young women have 30 per cent less muscle than men. But, says Wolff, there are three sports where women compete with men on the same level: “sailing, which involves a big boat; horse riding – a big animal – and motorsport, which involves a racing car. In F1 it doesn’t come down to sheer force. If you look at the physicality of the drivers – Kimi, Lando, Lewis – they’re not tall, and they can’t get too heavy, because weight is a huge factor for drivers; the smaller you are, the more advantageous it is.

“In our sport it’s not about pure power, it’s about talent – different skill sets that allow you to compete on the highest level on the track.” The idea that women can’t race is more down to the outdated perception that motorsports are for men, she says. “And what we’re trying to do is to break down this ancient stereotype.”

Susie’s father, John Stoddart, raced bikes competitively and had a motorcycle dealership; he met her mother, Sally, when she bought a motorbike from him. Sally Stoddart also part-owned a dress shop. They were an active family, who went quad biking, swimming and water skiing, and Susie and her older brother, David, were involved in bike racing from an early age. She was given her first motorbike at three, a “mini wheeler” with a 50cc engine, and by the time she was nine she was go-karting competitively. She was often the only girl.

It was seeing her first Formula 3 race that changed everything, when she realised that racing could be a job, not just a hobby, and she was determined to make it to Formula One. She moved up through the levels, and in 2003, aged 20, she came third in a Formula Renault race, behind Lewis Hamilton, who won. On the podium he had to help her open the champagne. She was one of six finalists for Young British Driver of the Year, and in 2005 she was offered a place in the coveted Formula 3 team, but on an errand for her grandmother she slipped on ice and broke her ankle badly.

She lost her place in the team and endured a long and painful recovery. “I think resilience is a muscle,” she says now. “The more you can cope in those situations the better you get at coping further down the line in your career, but sometimes you have to dig really deep.” A year later she was back in a car, this time with Mercedes Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters (DTM), where she stayed for seven years.

It was at Mercedes that she met her future husband, Toto Wolff. A dry and laconic Austrian, Wolff is a former racing driver who came from a difficult background and became a billionaire through initiative and investment; they were married in Capri in 2011. Over the course of her career, as well as punishing fitness regimes (which she embraced, often beating the men), Susie had to endure prejudice, slurs and patronising comments, and face hesitation from potential sponsors because of her sex; on one occasion, one of the most powerful men in F1 tried to get into her hotel room after a sponsor’s party in Germany.

But in July 2014, Susie Wolff became the first woman in 22 years to take part in a Formula One race weekend. Roland Mouret designed her race helmet. She had driven an F1 car before – the previous year Williams had made her its test driver – but this was one of the most significant moments of her career. Characteristically, “Don’t be s---” were Toto’s supportive words.

It was an anticlimax: on her first lap, the engine failed. Two weeks later she proved herself in a free practice session at the German Grand Prix; it was one of her proudest moments. Yet when an opportunity came up to get the actual driver position, she missed out due to her perceived lack of experience, although they wanted to keep her on as a test driver. In 2015 she retired from Formula One. She was 33 and felt she had gone as far as she could.

Now, she says: “I’m in a situation where I’m massively grateful for what I have, first and foremost in my marriage and my family. Would I have loved to compete in a Formula One race? Absolutely, but I hold no bitterness that it didn’t happen. I gave it my best shot. I say to all the young drivers I come across, put the preparation in and be the best version of yourself.”

The hardest part of establishing the academy was at the beginning, persuading backers. “But now we’ve found our place in the sport, and it’s got its audience, and we have great partners on board. Tag Heuer came into Formula One as the official timekeeper in 2025, and they have such a heritage in the sport. You know, those old images of Ayrton Senna and Niki Lauda wearing Tag watches? And in this day and age when everything is very fast-moving and superficial, it’s wonderful to have that history, and that storytelling. Tag are with F1 Academy and it’s brilliant to see them support a female driver. And I think Béatrice [Goasglas] becoming the first ever female CEO of the company is a testament to where their vision is in the future.”

Women are now a large part of F1 fandom – an estimated 40 per cent of race fans are female, probably in large part due to the incredibly successful Netflix series Drive to Survive. (In her book Susie recounts arriving at the Miami Grand Prix with Toto, a star of the series, to hear young female fans shouting, “I love your husband!”)

When Susie was driving in DTM, she was told she would be racing in a pink car, as dictated by the sponsors. She was initially sceptical of the cliché – a blonde woman in a pink car – until she started seeing how many little girls it attracted, and how they would watch captivated, all because of the pink car.

So yes, you can like driving fast cars and like wearing make-up and bright colours; you don’t have to be in that hackneyed old category, a tomboy. Which was something Susie always knew, as a fierce, determined little girl who loved cars and dolls, and wore her Barbie-pink wetsuit to waterski in.