SUSIE WOLFF

On 4 July 2014, a Scottish driver named Susie Wolff climbed into a Williams Formula 1 car for a Friday practice session at Silverstone — the first time in twenty-two years that a woman had taken part in an official Formula 1 race weekend. The session ended early with a mechanical failure. The headline ran anyway, around the world.

That single morning is the moment most people remember. It is not, this book argues, the moment that matters most.

Susie Wolff: Breaking Barriers traces the full arc of a career built almost entirely away from the spotlight: a motorcycle shop in Oban, Scotland, where a girl learned to ride before she could be trusted with a bicycle; four consecutive British karting titles won against boys who never once considered her an underdog; a broken ankle in 2005 that, combined with a shortfall in sponsorship money, nearly ended a promising single-seater career before it reached Formula 3; seven unglamorous seasons in Germany's DTM touring car championship, where she built a reputation not for outright speed but for the clarity of her engineering feedback — the skill that would define the second half of her career.

This is a biography with very little luck in it. Every stage of Wolff's rise — Formula Renault, DTM, a Williams development seat, that practice session at Silverstone, and a second, fully completed session at the German Grand Prix a month later that told the truer story — is reconstructed from race records, contemporaneous journalism, and Wolff's own public statements, with an eye for the specific technical and financial realities that shape a motorsport career far more than talent alone.

The book's real subject, though, is what Wolff built after she retired from driving in 2015. Rather than accept a footnote in Formula 1 history, she founded Dare To Be Different, a grassroots programme aimed at the actual bottleneck in women's motorsport: not the top of the sport, but the entry points beneath it. She then ran Venturi Racing in Formula E, taking the team from the back of the grid to a Vice-World Championship finish and rising to CEO — an executive apprenticeship that prepared her, in 2023, for the role she holds today: Managing Director of F1 Academy, the all-female single-seater series now sponsored by every team on the Formula 1 grid.

Readers will also find the parts of the story rarely covered in race reports: a marriage to Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff that has required both partners to maintain strictly separate professional identities inside the same small sport; a son raised in Monaco around two of the most demanding travel schedules in international motorsport; and a leadership philosophy built less on inspiration than on the same diagnostic habits she learned at eight years old in a kart — read the data, find the mistake, fix it, move to the next session.

Susie Wolff: Breaking Barriers is written for readers of motorsport history, for anyone following the growth of women's racing from F1 Academy to the broader Formula 1 paddock, and for readers of leadership and career biography who want a documented, unsentimental account of how someone moves from competitor to institution-builder. It does not treat Wolff's story as finished — F1 Academy is still expanding, and Wolff has said so herself — but it does treat it as instructive: a record of what disciplined preparation, honest self-assessment, and a refusal to treat any single setback as final can build, one season at a time, over more than two decades.

From a coastal Scottish town to the boardrooms of international motorsport, this is the story of a driver who never got the race seat she spent a career chasing — and built something more durable instead.