The Next Susie Wolff Will Grow Up in a Different Motorsport

As Susie Wolff's book tour has come to an end this month, it feels like an appropriate moment to share a reflection on the story she has spent the past year telling: the story of the sport she grew up in and the motorsport that she helped build.

For anyone who has followed motorsport over the past three decades, it is remarkable how much has changed within the span of one career.

When Susie Wolff first climbed into a kart, there was no roadmap for girls who dreamed of racing professionally. There was no F1 Academy. No Formula 1 teams putting the logos and their cash behind female drivers. No coordinated pathway designed to help young women progress through the junior categories. Success depended almost entirely on a level of individual resilience that demanded far more than being talented.

That reality shaped an entire generation of women in motorsport. We got pioneers. Women who, like Susie, became the first, or among the first, to occupy roles that had rarely been open to women before. Most had no choice but to be that.

I heard some of the stories of this time when Susie opened her book tour for Driven in October of 2025. And while the crowd of women and young girls, many beginning their own paths in motorsport, made it easy to forget how recently that challenge was the norm; it also made it plain to see the future will hold a very different landscape.

Whoever becomes the "next" Susie Wolff is living a very different life. It is a future that many women across the sport have spent decades helping to build.

She can watch an entire championship dedicated to developing female racing talent. She can point to women leading teams, shaping strategy, engineering race cars and running one of the sport's most ambitious development programmes.

That does not mean the work is finished, but we're making progress.

The pathway beyond F1 Academy remains one of motorsport's greatest challenges. Funding continues to define careers. Women remain underrepresented in many technical and leadership roles. Formula 1 has yet to see a woman return to the grid.

Those realities deserve honesty; while in Susie Wolff's career, women in motorsport were treated as exceptions, that's becoming rarer and rarer every day.

The conversation is increasingly focused on how many women can succeed and what support they need to get there, and perhaps that will become Susie Wolff's greatest legacy.

Her achievements as a driver will always be remembered. So will her leadership of F1 Academy. Her most lasting contribution may be helping to build a motorsport where future generations can focus on what they want to achieve, and where the question of whether they deserve an opportunity is beginning to fade into the background.

There is something fitting about reflecting on that now that her book tour has come to an end.

A book naturally looks backwards. It gathers the moments that have shaped a life and binds them together into a story. Motorsport, however, is looking forwards.

Somewhere, a young girl is climbing into a kart for the first time. She may know Susie Wolff as the woman who runs F1 Academy. She may know her as an author. She may not yet appreciate what it took to reach either of those positions. That is exactly as it should be.

Every generation deserves to inherit a world that asks a little less of them before they are allowed to begin. The next Susie Wolff will almost certainly face challenges that today's motorsport has not yet solved or might not

even know about.

But when her day comes, and she starts a new tour for a new book full of new stories, it will be the clearest sign that we're moving in the right direction and every challenge every generation faced was worth it.