Whatever you say to Britain’s fastest female racer, don’t make any women driver gags. “Everybody thinks it’s funny to come up with the same jokes,” says Susie Wolff.
“Like, ‘Can you reverse into your pit garage?’ Or, ‘Is there space in the car for your lipstick?’ But I’ve heard all of those so many times before that it doesn’t bother me any more. You always come up against prejudices as a female in a man’s world.”
In any case, Wolff is pretty sure that women make better drivers than men — despite the stereotypes. “Women are able to multitask very well. Women stay very focused and concentrate for possibly a bit longer than the guys, and I don’t think we have such big egos as guys,” she says.
She’s in a better position than most to make the claim. Earlier this year she became Britain’s most high-profile female racing driver when she was signed by Sir Frank Williams as a development driver for his Williams Formula One team. As the man who first brought stars such as Jenson Button, Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Pablo Montoya to F1 he should know talent when he spots it. The role will give Wolff a chance to test the car, and if all goes according to plan, become the first female F1 driver for 20 years.
It’s a world in which Wolff thrives, despite being brought up in the small Scottish seaside town of Oban — population 8,500. Her father was a motorbike racer who took her to various circuits around the country each weekend, and she tells of pestering him for £5 to buy five minutes on nearby go-kart tracks. Eventually, when she was eight, he bought her and her older brother karts, and Wolff’s career took off.
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By 2000 she was the top female kart driver in the world. She moved on to racing in the Formula Renault series where she competed against her former karting rival, a young Lewis Hamilton — “It was clear he was something special,” she says.
In 2003 and 2004 she was a finalist for the McLaren Autosport BRDC (British Racing Drivers’ Club) young driver of the year award. After a brief stint in the British F3 International series during 2005 she moved on to DTM, the German touring car championship, the following year. She will be racing in the series this afternoon in a Mercedes C-class coupé painted pink, the colour of her sponsor’s branding.
Not that being a woman in a man’s world is easy. “Even my teammates don’t like being beaten by a female,” she says. “That’s very clear for me still.”
And things can’t have been made any easier when F1’s ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone, on hearing of her appointment to Williams, noted: “If Susie is as quick in a car as she looks good out of a car then she will be a massive asset to any team.”
But if Wolff was disappointed by the comment, she’s smart at disguising it. “I think the quote did what it was supposed to,” she says. “It created a lot of attention. He wants to see women in F1, but from the other respect, he’s from a generation where women weren’t into cars.”
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She is also relaxed about some of the other 1970s-style touches that remain part of motor sport’s image. The scantily clad grid girls who stand in front of cars before each DTM race are tolerated with a shrug, although she pointedly rejected a ‘‘grid guy’’ when offered one by German race officials. “I don’t want to be looking at that on the grid,” she says. As a petite blonde herself with a gleaming white smile and a professed love of handbags, Wolff is used to being underestimated. “People just can’t believe you’re a racing driver. When people have a vision of a female racing driver, they think it’s a butch lesbian that’s going to look like a monster and many of them can’t quite believe that I can be on the track quite fast and racing.”
Her glamorous looks and celebrity status in Europe can come in handy, though, especially if stopped by the police in Switzerland or Germany. “They see my name on my driver’s licence and say, ‘Ah, okay, we understand.’ Normally I can get away with giving a little autograph and getting on my way.”
Now living in Switzerland, the 29-year-old has a life that is unrecognisable from just over a decade ago when she was learning to drive in her parents’ Volkswagen Sharan people carrier. They later bought her a VW Golf, but by her early twenties she was already being showered with sponsorship cars (she currently drives a Mercedes C 63 AMG), meaning she has never actually bought a car herself.
Wolff was known as Susie Stoddart until she married her Austrian husband Toto last year. He is a former racing driver, and a non-executive director of Williams. The connection raised questions when Wolff was hired by the team in April, but she says that Frank Williams spotted her racing in DTM two years ago and was behind the decision to hire her.
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“You will only get into F1 if you are successful enough,” says Wolff. “It’s a cut-throat business.” It’s one of the reasons, she says, why she will only stop racing if she becomes a mother: “I don’t think the racing instinct would be the same afterwards.”
If she succeeds in getting a seat in F1 and makes the grid, she will be the first female to start a race since Maria ‘‘Lella’’ Lombardi, the sole woman to score any F1 world championship points — and that was back in 1975.
But she is not alone among modern women racers. The American Danica Patrick last year missed out on winning the Indy 500 after running low on fuel, and the Spaniard Maria de Villota was named as a test driver for the Marussia F1 team a month before Wolff was picked by Williams.
For now, though, Wolff says she is living the dream. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself.”
Which leaves just one question: who does the driving away from the track? “My husband drives, because he’s not a good passenger and is constantly complaining that I’m either going too fast, too slow — ‘Did you see this car?’, ‘Watch out for this’,” she says.
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“If men think they are better at something, just let them do it and soon enough they will find out that possibly they are not better.”
My stuff ...
On my iPod Felix da Housecat’s remix of Sinnerman by Nina Simone
On my DVD player The Count of Monte Cristo
I would never throw away My electric face-cleansing brush