#but then someone asks why she still has the hijab (albeit looking back _ they way it was said kinda leaves a bitter taste in my mouth)

[formulatrash]

It’s so cool you can paint pictures of drivers on a human level!! Who is the coolest female driver you’ve met? And have you ever spent time with the queen that is Susie Wolff?

I know Susie quite well cus she’s a Formula E team boss (and has been for two seasons pretty much, now)

She’s really cool. Clever, sharp, able to ignore the sniping (and it is constant) that any failings in the team’s delivery are because of her gender. Not from other people in Formula E, but the media (not particularly English language media but that’s by no means universal) and the usual armchair commentators from Twitter to YouTube to the third circle of hell that is Facebook group comments of course spout sewage constantly.

Oh, she got the job because of her husband (she didn’t), she isn’t serious about motorsport, she had no proven record as a team boss previously.... I mean, neither did Allan McNish but that curiously doesn’t come up as to why he’s in charge of Audi, despite absolute shitting the bed in Season 4.

(I love Allan but: it would be disingenuous to call the start of S4 anything other than a clown show at Audi, albeit mostly related to finding their feet as a factory outfit - and it was fair not to put that on him; imagine if he’d been Alanis, though...)

Susie has led Venturi to the most success they’ve ever had as a team but still gets called mediocre by geniuses from the comfort of their couches. She wants more, of course - she’s an ambitious and fiercely driven person. She’s also super friendly and funny and I really like her; she has huge amounts of time for people and particularly young people and women starting out in their careers. I’ve done a few bits with her and D2BD and like, you don’t start a thing like that because you don't give a shit, you know?

Here’s something I don’t think I’ve ever published? It’s an interview I did with Susie in Riyadh back at a showcase before the start of Season 5. We were nervous. It was weird.

Diriyah, Riyadh, 2018 There are sometimes moments around interviews where technically your recorder is running but it’s not per se the start of formal questions yet. In a side room of a Riyadh conference centre, sitting down with Venturi Formula E team principal Susie Wolff, I had one of those this week.

It would be fair to describe the Riyadh Eprix as ‘controversial’ - putting a Formula E race in a country known for being the home of oil is one, admirably punk thing. But Saudi Arabia is - or has been - a very closed kingdom, with extremely strict rules and social systems that seem obviously out-of-joint with the western twenty-first century.

Beyond that, I have an international relations degree and used to work for human rights organisations. You can use google to pick out the contexts in which I was previously aware of Saudi Arabia. I am fearless to the point of total disregard for my personal safety but my heart fluttered as I went to Heathrow, as I boarded the plane, as we landed. Everything I knew said I shouldn’t do it.

But you know how it is when someone tells you that, even if it’s you.

I don’t know much about Saudi Arabia and I can’t pretend that 24 hours there has illuminated the country to me more than watching the chasing, blinking lights of Riyadh’s enormous, luminescent sprawl did while I was sitting at my hotel window typing notes.

Launch events are launch events. The fact I was wearing an abaya and hijab (although it’s not obligatory for non-Muslim women my hair is a bit avante-garde to risk it) didn’t really change the fact that they’re just awkward promotional chat, albeit with Arabic-to-English headset.

And then it was straight on to interviewing Saudi princes - who are just politicians, the sports ministry fairly far removed from anything that isn’t, uh, sports. But nonetheless “interviewing Saudi princes” rates quite highly on my *record scratch* *freeze frame* ‘Yep, you’re probably wondering how I got here?’ scale. How the hell did I get here?

Anyway, after that I spoke to Susie Wolff, the new head of Venturi Formula E team. It was a strange, semi-breathless moment; interviewing one of my heroes in motorsport, in the absolute least likely circumstances. A female ex-race driver being interviewed by a female journalist, in a country that women were banned from attending let alone participating in motorsport.

As she sat down, Susie looked me dead in the eye and said “Look, you of all people can’t have a go at me about this.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Should we be there? I don’t know, maybe not. If we weren’t, what dead-behind-the-eyes man would be and where would we be getting new jobs?

I didn’t notice it at the time but when I heard the audio back, we both sound nervous - breathy, almost on the verge of panic. I didn’t become a motorsport journalist to interview Saudi princes or worry about this shit - except maybe I did, really because Formula E has to be an obnoxious upstart, it has to be confrontational even and especially with the scariest potential opponents.

It was before last season, then and so the first thing I had to ask Susie was what she could expect from the season, coming in as Venturi team principle. It’s the most nervous we both sound on the whole recording.

“I absolutely don't underestimate the challenge ahead of me. I've been a great believer, my whole life, that you've got to push yourself out of your comfort zone.

“You've got to do things that do slightly scare you because that's when you develop as a person and when I took on this challenge I absolutely realised the work that lay ahead of me.”

It would be fair to say that, a few years ago when I decided to do this. I did not. I myself cannot claim to have any bold vision in the way I stumbled my way into Formula E and really hoped it was going to come up with something to save my life because I’d run out of my own options.

Susie clearly had a different approach, a full long-game more than a messy explosion of want/need/hope. But sitting there in this weird exhibition centre in a city I’d never been to before, she put it very well.

I had to ask her about the “women’s test” - the option for teams to run a second car at an in-season test in Riyadh, provided it was driven by a woman of sufficiently high driving standard:

“I started Dare To Be Different because everybody talks about the fact that there's not enough diversity in motorsport. But very few people do something about it and I think it's about being proactive - if you want to see change, be part of that change, don't sit and talk about it but actually try and help make it happen.

“And what I appreciate so much since joining Formula E - and I can very much say joining the Formula E family - is that they're very, very supportive, more than any other championship we approached. Because they realise that it's a problem. And it's something that they want to be proactive on.”

Everyone said it was a stunt. And yes, of course it was a stunt. So are rookie tests that get Mick Schumacher into a Ferrari, so is anything where there’s a constraint that conducts the order of the event. So is sport. But it wasn’t a badly-thought-through one and with my brain already trying to stop bending back on itself with the news I actually might quite like??? Saudi Arabia??? I didn’t quite notice how much.

Susie obviously had more detail on it -

“I think the concept that they came up with regarding the test day, within the first race weekend, is really good. I was quite vocal in how the concept should be transported and run properly because for me, rather than just creating an opportunity which creates a lot of attention but actually doesn't have any fundamental credibility or any long-lasting impact is not going to be positive change for the long run.

“So we had quite some discussions at our team principals meeting that actually teams will run a female driver if they find one that they want to run, that's of the right level. There will be no different sessions for different levels, there will be no women just put in the car out of completely out of the depth.

“I lost a very good friend of mine who should never have been in the situation that she was and I think when this happens it has to be done the right way and those inputs were all taken on board and I'm very confident that we have now created an opportunity that is going to a) have an very positive impact and b) show not just the Saudi community but the wider world what's possible. I think you can't underestimate the impact of seeing women on track, that's something visible that women can identify with and that's role models to which they can aspire.

“I will be announcing in November a full-time test driver within my team who is a female, I've taken her because of her abilities not just because she's a female [it was Simona de Silvestro, who tested for Venturi that December and is now part of Porsche] but I absolutely believe in in - and I think, you also because you're one of very few within what you do, you're a fantastic role model and that can inspire so many people - and that's why it's up to us to have a positive impact and have a positive change but it has to be done in a credible way.

“Because I'm not just flying a flag saying 'let's do something for the sake of it,' I very much think we have to do something but in the right way, in a credible way that's going to create long-lasting impact because I'm pretty sure you'd also love to see, in ten years, more young women doing what you do and to be able to turn around and say 'wow, I helped people to understand there was a possibility within this sport.' And the sport does have so many possibilities it's just that what people see is a male dominated world but there's no reason why it has to be. Not just focussing on the on-track activities, I very much believe that we have to look at the whole sport, from your industry in journalism to the engineering, the whole sport just needs to be more accessible to women and they have to come in at grass-roots level and be able to rise to the top of the pack.

“If they're of the right level. And I think that is one of the problems right now, internationally and I think that's where the Women in Motorsport commission was great that they did this assessment because people were able to see it. In one of our first meetings in New York when this idea had just come up many people were saying 'oh where will we get anyone from' and I was like 'well wait a second, in Audi there's Ashley Freiburg, at BMW there's Beitske Visser and obviously Jaguar there's Katherine Legge there are enough available, it's not ok to say you don't have the numbers when there are enough good women right now it's just a case of being open to that change. Certainly, it's one thing that I very much appreciate about Formula E - they're supporting us massively and we've got some exciting news coming out toward the end of October with regards to Dare to be Different and more events around Formula E and that's something that I'm very grateful for the opportunity to work on.”

(I apparently gave up properly writing the article at this point, I guess no one commissioned it - but hey, lil Tumblr exclusive)

#fe asks