An Evening With Susie Wolff
F1 POLECAT EVENT REVIEW:
“A dream without a plan is just a wish "
SUNDAY 26TH OCTOBER 2025
So Sunday 26th October 2025, there was quite a lot going on for motorsport fans, and as your intrepid Chief Reporter at F1 Polecat, I always do my my best to be everywhere to report back to my fellow Gen Z race fans .
I spent the day at a rainy Brands Hatch following the Formula Ford Festival, then got home for a quick change into my heels so my Dad and I could drive up to London to see Susie Wolff live on stage for her book tour. The irony of this is that I completely missed the Mexican Grand Prix where Lando snuck in front of Oscar by 1 point in the Championship. But it was worth it (and of course it meant I could catch up on Sky+ when I got home at midnight! : )
So was it worth me dragging my Dad around London on a rainy night in October to see Susie live on stage…?
Yes of course it flipping was!! Cards on the table, this isn’t going to be a completely unbiased review as anyone that knows me will know I love F1 Academy and Susie Wolf is therefore not only an absolute ledge, but also my idol.
So to set the scene, An Audience With Susie Wolff took place at the Royal Geographic Society in one of the posh parts of London (right near Harrods!) I’m not sure how many seats the auditorium is, but I booked early to get a seat on the 2nd row. Susie appeared out of a side door to an enthusiastic round of applause and looked supercool in a Reservoir Dogs style white blouse & black tie combo.
And she’s tiny. I knew she wasn’t super-tall from seeing her on TV and obviously Toto dwarfs everyone, but she is petite, however is also totally classy, stylish, focused and together.
Susie started off talking us through her introduction to Karting (she told us she first got into a car at 3 years old) and recounted how much support she got from her parents who drove her round the country to race meets. Susie’s brother was in the audience, so it was really sweet to see her referring to shared memories she had with him, and of course the audience all turned around to see his reaction each time he was mentioned which was fun.
Susie still has her distinct Scottish accent, which I particularly love because it reminds me of my Grandma, who died last year, who was from Alloa in Scotland.
The most interesting part for me was Susie explaining how she went about setting up F1 Academy to make it commercially viable. She told us how at one of the early race events (I think it was at Emilia Romagna circuit) that there was no spectators, no decent TV coverage, no sponsorship and all the drivers were complaining they couldn’t afford to fund their own drives much longer.
As a result Susie went back to the drawing board and took advice from all sorts of people in the motorsport industry and formulated a new plan. Critical to her relaunch was having access to the F1 branding. She also had to negotiate with all of the F1 teams in order to get them onboard and unified in their support of F1 Academy (a first in F1 history) to use their team names, expertise and financial support, which in turn led to wider interest in commercial sponsorship.
The first global company to back Susie was Charlotte Tilbury, who emblazoned their car with lipstick symbols, which really helped push the “Here come the Girls” vibe in motorsport at the time (and still does!). And this was important to Susie as she was keen to explain that girls don’t have to be tomboys to be into cars or motorsport - its perfectly fine to be a girly girl, to wear pink or to be feminine and wear kitten heels but also love racing. It’s not one or the other.
What may also surprise some people is how magnanimous Susie is about her role is setting up F1 Academy and the support she’s had from men.
She told a story about a smarmy journalist who was trying to catch her out with a question a few years ago, when he said “do you think you would have got where you did in motorsport without the help of your relationship with Toto Wolff?”. This was meant to undermine her somewhat and suggest that women must surely need men to be able to achieve anything significant. However Susie’s response was disarmingly honest. “Yes. I absolutely had an advantage from knowing Toto. And Frank Williams. And Stefano Domenicali. And every other male who’s supported me along the way.” Far from being undermined, her point was that progress needs collaboration. Going into battle is all well and good, but in business the skills she relied on were diplomacy, negotiation and persuasion.
The tour was in support of Susie’s newly released autobiography ‘Driven’ which is available in all good bookshops. As I write this, I haven’t yet read it so don’t want to pre-empt what’s in it, but I will be doing my own review on it once completed (its currently sitting on my mum’s coffee table in photo ready to go!).
If there was a disappointing thing, it would be that there was no opportunity to actually meet Susie, get a photo or get her to sign my book. I did get my Dad to write to the organisers Fane beforehand, to see if there was a chance we could pay for a meet-and-greet or something. Just the chance to meet my idol would have been amazing.
At the interval we got to submit our own questions to Susie via Slido (an app where you type questions in, and they select which ones to answer). My Dad’s question got read out in the 2nd half, which was;
“I’m sitting here with my 15-year old daughter Sydney. What would you say to your 15-year old self if you could go back to inspire her?”
Obviously, I felt like Susie was talking directly to me as she answered this, ultimately advising teenagers that the most important quality was tenacity. Keep trying, keep picking yourself up, never give up on your dreams. But she followed up on this with a quote that will stick with me for the rest of my life; “A dream without a plan is just a wish”.
So what’s my own dream? Well I know I’m not destined to be a driver or an engineer. But I am absolutely going to be working in the media team at F1 Academy or one of the teams. What’s my plan to get there? Tenacity, of course. Watch this space!
Overall, Susie didn’t disappoint. I found her inspiring, focused and funny. A defo 5 Stars from F1Polecat! Love her.
-Sydney Calvert, Chief Polecat
