Susie Wolff reveals 'terrifying' 2am phone call from 'powerful F1 figure'

Susie Wolff has recently delivered an honest reflection on her life and career, where at one stage she revealed a ‘terrifying’ phone call from a ‘powerful F1 figure’.

The managing director of the F1 Academy has been promoting her new memoir, Driven, and in a recent interview with The Sunday Times she brought to light her experiences as a woman in male-dominated sport.

Alongside constant reminders that she was different, Wolff also shared an excerpt from the book which detailed an experience that left her frightened during her career.

Wolff recounted a Hugo Boss Christmas party in 2007, which she left early to go to bed at the hotel she was staying in. The former racing driver recounted that at 2am her phone rang and it was, as she described, “one of the most powerful men in Formula 1”.

Wolff wrote that he was drunk and she hung up, only for him to call again and ask for her room number.

“I forced a laugh, light, dismissive. No, no, don’t come to my room. I put the phone down,” she wrote.

Wolff then revealed that when the phone rang again she yanked the cord from the wall, but the next moment he was knocking on her hotel room door and trying the handle.

“What am I going to do if that door opens? I couldn’t think of anyone I could call to help me,” she continued in the book.

“I mapped the room. The wardrobe. The door to the stairwell. If he managed to force his way in, I’d slip into the wardrobe, wait, and the second I had an opening I’d run.”

The knocking eventually stopped, but unable to sleep, Wolff waited until the morning before she ‘fled’ the hotel.

Wolff sheds light on being a woman in motorsport

Wolff revealed that the man apologised, but she added to The Sunday Times: “[It was] terrifying because of the huge power the other person had.

“There are situations we find ourselves in as women where a split-second decision can have a huge impact on your life. I would hope that now a woman could turn around and say, ‘This happened to me and it was truly terrifying,’ and that they would be listened to. I do think the sport has come a long way. It doesn’t mean that we’ve not got more work to do.”

Wolff is a trailblazer in motorsport, best known for her work with Williams as a test and development driver and her 2014 Silverstone FP1 appearance, where she became the first woman to take part in an official F1 session since Giovanna Amati in 1992.

Wolff retired from racing in 2015, but turned her attention to Formula E and the Venturi Racing team where she served as their team principal and CEO until 2022.

Since then however, Wolff’s focus has been her role as managing director of the all-female racing series the F1 Academy, which aims to help inspire and develop the next generation of female racers in motorsport.

Wolff reflected on the most recent F1 Academy race in Singapore, where Ferrari’s Maya Weug, Mercedes’ Doriane Pin and McLaren’s Ella Lloyd stood on the podium following the second race on Sunday.

“At a race yesterday night there were three young women on the podium and I thought, God, at 19, to stand on a podium on a Formula 1 race weekend with a Ferrari race suit on,” Wolff said.

“That’s something I could only ever have dreamt of. The fact I helped to create that opportunity just fills me with pride.”

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