Hers is still far from being a safe sport, however. Just last year, Maria de
Villota – a close friend of Wolff’s – died tragically as a result of the
head injury the Spaniard sustained in a practice session crash 15 months
earlier. “That shook me, without a doubt,” Wolff says quietly. “But if you
analyse how it happened, it was such a freak accident. For her to come
through that and then die from the causes of it…” She falls silent. “It
affected me in such a way that I thought, ‘Actually, you just don’t know
what life is going to throw at you, so do what you love doing.’
“Similarly when Schumacher had his ski accident it showed me that you never
know what’s around the corner. I mean that guy is a seven-time world
champion. He has risked more than so many people and yet a stupid skiing
accident…”
One thing Wolff is sure she does want in the not too distant future is a
family. Having married Toto Wolff, the Austrian Mercedes motorsport chief
executive, in 2011 and moved to Switzerland, she is unequivocal that her
career as a racing driver will end when they start a family. “I will never
race again once that happens. I want to have kids and I know that when I do
have them I have to have finished with this. Because I could never put
myself at risk knowing that there is a child at home relying on me. I think
that as women,” she says, her expression softening, “we have a mothering
nature in us. At the moment I love my life but I think that there will come
a point where the need for a child will be greater than my need to race, so
I’m just waiting for that moment.”
It’s only looking back now that Wolff is fully able to appreciate what her
parents – who have owned a motorbike shop in her birthplace of Oban for the
past 35 years – did for her. “My brother, David, was 18 months older so
anything he could do, I wanted to do – and there was never any
differentiation between us. My parents never said: ‘David can go racing and
you can stay at home and play with Barbie.’ Although actually,” she grins,
“I was really into Barbie.”
She had her first ride on a motorbike at two and was in a go-kart at eight.
“That first time, I remember that all these little boys kept hitting me. I
came into the pits and I said to my dad: ‘I don’t like it. It’s awful.’ And
he said that was fine, that we could either go home or I could get back out
there and hit them back twice as fast.” Wolff did just that. Her
persecutors’ gender didn’t matter; just winning. It wasn’t until much later,
she insists, at age 14, that she realised “that there weren’t many girls
doing what I was doing”.
“It didn’t make any difference,” she shrugs. “I still wanted to go for it.
When I reached an international level, the fact that I was a girl started
getting more and more attention, but I was too far along by that stage.”
So much has been written about the difficulties Wolff has and might endure,
breaking out in what is still very much a man’s world, that a sexist
narrative almost seems to be being propagated. And yet the sportswoman
herself has rarely complained about discrimination. “I’m a great believer
that if you put yourself out there you’ve got to be able to take the good
and the bad,” she says. “It’s my choice to do what I do. And I’m open to the
fact that not everybody is going to be for me.” She wasn’t always this
sanguine, she concedes. “There was a moment in my career where I didn’t know
whether to use my femininity or try to show that I was hard and tough. But
my husband helped me a lot. He said: ‘You are a woman and you should be
proud of being a woman. If you feel weak in a situation, don’t be scared to
show that.’”
Her looks have been a help and a hindrance. She’s been patronisingly called “a
blonde dreaming of being a Formula One driver” and “a deliberate marketing
ploy by Williams to drum up publicity” – and F1 mogul Bernie Ecclestone once
quipped: “If Susie’s as quick in a car as she looks good out of a car,
she’ll be a huge asset.” Wolff deals with these slights in much the same way
as she does boy racers. “I’m going to use every advantage I’ve got to get me
to the top,” she maintains. “So if it helps being female then I’m not going
to hide away from that fact. It’s a tough line to manoeuvre – and I don’t
think you’re ever going to stop people saying, ‘Oh well, she’s only here
because she’s a woman’, so I just ignore all that. And let’s face it,” she
grins. “Jenson [Button] does Hugo Boss campaigns and Lewis [Hamilton] is
taking his shirt off in ads and nobody bats an eyelid.”
Wolff will play the game in so far as she has to, but draws the line at
gimmickry. When DTM – the German Touring Car series for which she used to
compete – gave her a pink car, she found the cliché tiresome. Just as she
did when they offered her a “pit guy” instead of a “pit girl”. “It’s
motorsport: they shouldn’t be changing it for me. I’d much rather people
were looking at beautiful girls than some guy in tight white trousers and a
tight white T-shirt. Plus,” she chuckles, “I don’t want to sound nasty, but
he wasn’t exactly buff.” Wolff gets on well with the pit girls. “People say
that I’m brave, but could I get into a bikini, walk onto the starting grid
and have hundreds of men analysing every body part? Never in a million
years. They’re the brave ones, not me.”
Her training regime may be as ferocious as a man’s (she lifts weight five days
a week to cope with a G-force that can feel as heavy as 40 kilos against her
head and neck) but in every other respect she’s a typical thirty-something
woman. “I don’t feel right if I don’t have a manicure. I love handbags and I
love shopping. My girlfriends are normal girls. I may not go shopping with
them on a race weekend but I always love to see what they’ve bought.”
And, of course, I’m guessing that her female friends don’t stand in the
forecourts of Esso stations breathing in the smell of petrol. “That smell,”
she groans. “I think it gets you a little high or something. I’ll smell it
even in my dreams.” Suddenly, her smile fades. “You know what I’ll miss?
Sitting there with the engines revving to hell, just waiting for the lights
to turn. There’s nothing like it: it’s the best feeling in the world.”