“I Was Fighting To Prove That Talent Mattered More Than Gender.”: Susie Wolff’s ‘Driven’
- therookiereporters
- 13 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Men in Formula One have held a century-long dominance over the grid. For decades, men occupied the pit lanes as team principals, mechanics and race strategists, while women were reduced to holding drivers’ drink bottles in crop tops strategically designed for the male gaze.
But in our era, it all began with Susie Wolff. Her recent memoir, ‘Driven’, reflects on an over twenty-year career. Wolff’s inspirational story reveals she was driven not just by her ambition to compete, but by a fierce desire to reshape the entire landscape of motorsport.
Wolff dreamt of track layouts and placing a helmet over her head. She dreamt of something surreal – she needed to drive herself to a Formula One seat. In her early chapters, she explores the main question that hurts the most as a young girl progressing through life: Why can’t I be treated the same? Wolff answers this by taking readers back to her childhood karting memories, demonstrating her need to “prove that talent mattered more than gender.” Strikingly, she reflects on learning to embrace her femininity rather than denying it, viewing her pink DTM race car as “a reason” for young girls to view motorsport as thrilling – even as she faced criticism from a community that viewed the colour pink as a symbol of inferiority. To the boys around her, losing was one thing, but the ultimate insult was losing to a girl.
The Reality of Exclusion
Apart from the attitude woven from a man’s insecurity, Wolff’s experience of misogyny was embedded within motorsport’s design and identity. She exposes the structural inequalities that went beyond psychological torment, extending into the molds of her own safety gear. In mentioning this, Wolff sheds light on how standard ribcage protection equipment was engineered around male anatomy, leaving female drivers like herself compromised.
Furthermore, the physical expectations were viewed through a deeply hypocritical lens. While male drivers were normalised for training their muscular necks and shoulders to withstand G-forces, a woman’s identical physical training was met with scrutiny. Wolff’s insecurity emerged within her “traps,” constantly wearing her hair down during events. In recollection of her nomination of Autosport’s British Young Driver of the Year Award, Wolff recalls the attempted shaming from a chief engineer “puffing out his cheeks” in demonstration of her weight the year before. Even for building a body required to survive a corner at nearly 200mph, Wolff proves mockery will prevail over logic.
This toxic culture bled into her media duties. Even when Wolff earned her place on track, the media found it difficult to perceive her as a serious athlete. Magazine shoots routinely pushed Wolff into a “new sense” of herself - an objectifying fantasy the media constructed based on revealing clothing and heavy makeup - of what a female racing driver should actually look like.
Beyond Racing
After hanging up her helmet, Wolff’s impact influenced generations. Driven transitions into her life as a woman away from racing, yet surrounding herself within the world of motorsport. As a Formula E team principal and CEO at Venturi Racing, and now currently being the managing director of F1 Academy, Wolff faced a new iteration of bias, proving that a woman could command a boardroom just as she effectively did as a racer. She proved that women belong at every single level of the paddock, encouraging the involvement of future generations of female engineers, leaders and strategists.
Ultimately, Driven is beyond a chronological retelling of a racing career, it is a declaration for change. Susie Wolff’s journey proves that the greatest obstacle for women in motorsport was not a lack of speed, but an ocean of prejudice. By embracing her femininity, surviving the isolation of a male-dominated environment, and permanently altering the blueprint of what motorsport should look like, Wolff built a track for every young girl waiting in the pit lane to follow her footsteps.
Article written by Isabella Carrozza
