Charlotte Sinclair meets Formula One’s only female driver, Susie Wolff, to find out she became the fastest woman in the world. © Jason Bell

When you're the world's speediest woman, you need courage,

attitude and industrial-strength nail varnish. Susie Wolff spoke to

Charlotte Sinclair for the June 2013 issue of Vogue.

You hear a Formula One racetrack before you see it. First comes a single, steadily amplifying note of acceleration, the sound of giant wasps in a death spin, of machines under duress, 700kg of low-slung carbon composite racing up a ladder of gears to infinity. Just when you think you can't stand it any longer - something needs to break or stop or just happen - the engine roars into full power and there's an ear-shattering blast of pure speed, a screaming declaration of velocity. And then it starts all over again.

There is no confusion as to what Formula One is about: driving as fast as humanly possible. Humanly, yes - but mostly the "manly" part of that word. This is the very apex of masculinity, a male dominion almost entirely impenetrable to women, equivalent to pit-mining in its gendered monotone. The kind of world, in fact, in which its major-domo, Bernie Ecclestone, utters such charming remarks as: "Women should wear white, like a domestic appliance."

Which is not to say you don't encounter women at Formula One championships: "grid girls" in hot pants hold up the position boards. What you certainly haven't seen - or at least not since 1976 - is a woman behind the wheel of one of those £150-million cars. Female Formula One drivers are as rare and precious a creature as snow leopards. Until, perhaps, now.

"Do you know anything about F1?" asks Susie Wolff, a tiny, blonde, 30-year-old Scot in J Brand skinny jeans and ballet flats, standing under a denim-blue sky at Barcelona's Circuit de Catalunya. Wolff is currently the only female driver in Formula One; there are others racing up motorsport's junior ranks, including another Brit, 20-year-old Alice Powell, but for the moment Wolff is alone here. In other words, she's the fastest woman in the world. A development driver for Williams, one of the most storied teams in motorsport, the team Ayrton Senna once drove for (and died representing), Wolff joined Williams last year, graduating from seven years of racing German touring cars for Mercedes, and a career in motorsport that began when she was just eight years old, karting in world championships against Lewis Hamilton.

Last October, Wolff left the simulator at Williams HQ in Oxford - where, as a reserve driver, she puts the team car through its paces on virtual circuits, from Monaco to New Delhi - to make her Formula One test. It was her first time driving a real F1 car, at speed, with g-forces to match. "People were really unsure how that day would go," Wolff says in a Scots accent flattened by German vowels, the result of her bilingual years with Mercedes. "Was I going to be able to cope with it? Was I going to put it in the gravel? There was a lot riding on that day."

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At Silverstone, Wolff was given 10 laps to achieve a 52-second lap time. She made it on her very last turn, clocking 52.34 seconds. "Somehow I knew I could do it," she says. You don't doubt her: on The Fastest Woman in the World, a documentary made about Susie by her older brother David Stoddart, we watch the test in action. Susie removes her engagement ring, slips her manicured nails into her driving gloves, and proceeds to hammer lap after lap at speeds of 310kph (192mph). "I could feel my body being pushed, my neck straining from the g-force. I'm thinking: use all the track, brake late, apex, power, power, power."

In Barcelona, it's pre-season test day. In the paddock - a car park blockaded with lorries and tents, each bearing a team insignia, McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull - Wolff stops to smile for fan photographs before leading me into the belly of the beast: the pit garage. It is surgically spotless. A row of men are hooked up to computers, analysing lap results while, beyond, a group of mechanics in Williams's regulation navy blue are drilling tyre bolts into place on the team's F1 car at such exquisite volume that I clutch my ears (Susie doesn't even blink).

The mechanics worry about the vehicle like pilot fish off a whale. Or something smaller: the car istiny, flimsy as a Frisbee, all aerodynamic planes and strange, moulded adjuncts. (Such is the level of paranoid secrecy surrounding each team's design - at stake, potential revenues of £500 million - screens are pulled across the garage doors to thwart prying eyes. "There have been incidences of other teams putting photographers out on the pit wall," smiles Wolff.) "What people underestimate is how much you have to learn even to get out of the garage," she says. And she should know - Wolff was the first to test this car before the current Grand Prix season, in front of the engineers and technicians who built it.

"I was always an adrenaline junkie, always competitive, always a speed freak," Wolff says over a glass of squash in the Williams tent. She is charming: all smiles and easiness, and utterly unaware of her singularity. (Or, at least, utterly unspoilt by it, since there's no way she can escape the fact that she's the only girl in race uniform.) "Racing's in my blood. My mum met my dad when she went to buy her first motorbike in his shop. While my dad was racing bikes, my brother and I used to go and play on the go-karts."

Her parents soon sold the motorbikes to buy Susie her first kart. "When you're eight, you're not thinking about the future. But karting was always the big passion, the big love." The family spent the next 10 years driving around Europe, competing in championships. "I ended up sitting one of my Highers in a van near a racetrack because I couldn't get back to school in time for the exam," she says.

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Aged 13, Wolff saw a young Jenson Button win a Formula Three race (the junior category of Formula One). "That was when I decided I wanted to drive, that that was what I wanted to do with my life." At 14, she shared a podium with Lewis Hamilton (he came first, she third). "Susie was massively fast that weekend," says Hamilton, "but she had never been to the podium before. I had to help her open her bottle of champagne."

It was not without sacrifice. "My mum worried that I missed out on the whole drinking, partying, getting-crazy teenage stage." Yet a certain steely determination runs in the family: few parents would pursue their daughter's passions so doggedly, nor in a sport with such a high level of danger. "We are quite a strong family," agrees Wolff's mother, Sally Stoddart. "We started our children skiing at two years old, and we used to go out in all conditions. I remember telling Susie, 'It was amazing, you never grumbled.' And her saying, 'Mum, I never knew I could say no!'"

After a year at university ("I spent my student loan on racing"), Wolff quit to move down to Silverstone. "I lived in a house with six other drivers, all men, all of us chasing the same dream of F1," she says. "There was never any romance; I decided very early on that I would never date a racing driver. You can'tbe one anddate one," she laughs.

But even at rookie levels, motorsport is exorbitant, requiring heavy cash injections. (Niki Lauda took out massive bank loans to fund his early Formula One career, and Wolff's Venezuelan teammate Pastor Maldonado reportedly received $46 million from a Venezuelan oil and gas company to guarantee his seat.) Despite being nominated, twice, for Young Driver of the Year, and winning backing from BT, Wolff couldn't meet the £100,000 annual costs of competing. Then, while out running, she broke her ankle: "It was the lowest point in my career," she says with feeling.

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Mercedes offered a lifeline in Germany. "I flew to Stuttgart with only my helmet, got in that car and just went for it." On a one-year contract, she raced for the team for seven years. While doing so, she met her husband, Toto Wolff, a major F1 investor who also sat on the Williams board. "He would always come back from meetings saying, 'They can't believe I have a wife racing.'" Curious to see Susie for himself, Frank Williams, the founder and manager of team Williams, came to the track to watch her. "Afterwards he said to me, 'I want to see what you could do in a Formula One car.'"

Toto (who embodies the phrase "tall, dark and handsome") now works for rival team Mercedes and the pair live in Switzerland, where Toto refuses to drive with his wife. "He's such a bad passenger," she grins. "Many people assumed that I only got in the team because of my husband," she continues. "But when the decision came to the board, he left the room. Of course, the team could see there was a marketing advantage to having a female driver." The couple share a sly humour. He comes to check up on her: "Everything OK?" "Yes," Susie replies, adding, "you're lookingfasttoday." Driving in Formula One and having children appear to be mutually exclusive activities. She nods: "I'm in no rush. But when I have a family, I won't be racing."

Wolff has always been treated as a trophy as much as a driver. In Germany, her sponsors made her drive a pink car. "I hated it, it was such a cliché. It made me a target." No one wanted to be bested by a girl, least of all her teammates. "It's hard for a young boy of 20, who thinks he's the next Schumacher, with a girl as his teammate and he's struggling to beat her. But the team would catch on to the back of that and use it to motivate him. And I would be like, 'Why are you making my life harder?'" The memory still smarts. "There were definitely moments when I thought, 'Can I do this?' I remember locking myself in the toilets at a racetrack and bursting into tears. I felt so alone. It took all my strength to go back out there and face all those guys."

The pressure to continually prove herself must be exhausting. Especially when Bernie Ecclestone deals her such praise as: "If Susie is as quick in a car as she looks good out of a car, she will be a massive asset to any team." Wolff says, "There are times when you're working with new people and you can see they have doubt in their eyes. But then you do well and they say, 'You did a fantastic job.' I always reply, 'I'm only here because I can do a fantastic job.'"

Lesser women would give up. Or, at least, butch up. "I like being feminine, it's my way of not conforming to the stereotype that if you're a racing driver you don't care how you look," she says. "In a race, I don't care, it's all about the car and the performance. But I also like fashion, I like taking care of myself." She wears Roland Mouret to events, and Emilia Wickstead has her measurements on file - "so I can call up and ask for a pair of navy trousers" - and she's straight on the phone after her Vogue shoot to buy the floral Phillip Lim biker jacket she wore. Wolff's is a pared-back, unembellished style: she looks clean, focused, built for speed. Her teeth are uniformly straight and white. Her nails are a manicured inky blue. "Shellac. It doesn't chip when I'm racing." She even had her diamond earrings altered so that the backs no longer press into her neck when she's wearing her helmet.

And Formula One does wonders for the body. Susie's is tiny and toned, weighing in at 52kg without her race kit. "It's not a bulk sport," she says, "it's not about muscle mass. I'm 20 kilos lighter than the guys so the engineers can replace the extra weight with mechanics to help the safety of the car." She trains for two hours every day and eats a protein-rich, healthy diet, but "couldn't live without Creme Eggs". The only thing big about her, in fact, is her neck. "All racing drivers need big necks to counter the g-force. The only time I notice is when I'm buying halterneck dresses." She cares, but not that much. "My neck is going to be big as long as I'm racing."

Until a few months ago there was another female reserve driver in F1, María de Villota. Last year, while on a routine drive, she crashed horrifically, sustaining near-fatal injuries, and losing an eye. Wolff dedicated her F1 test to her. Yet mortal danger is a very real part of racing. "You press one wrong button and it's…" says Wolff, throwing her hands into the air. "After María's accident I went to the engineers and said, 'Tell me every eventuality that could happen in that car.'" She's crashed twice, both times while driving for Mercedes, but brushes off the experience. "I'm never scared," she says (I believe her). "As soon as I am, it's time to stop."

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If anything, Wolff is tougher than her male counterparts. "We did a race in China and it was a very bumpy track, and there was a very fast, blind corner. I remember bumping around it, thinking, 'Wow, this is scary.' But by the end of the run I thought, 'Right, all the boys are going to do this flat out, I've got to do it flat out.' So I came to the corner, put my foot down and just sciffed the wall. Afterwards, all the guys were like, 'Are you crazy?' Mika Häkkinen said, 'I can't comprehend that it's you, this little blonde thing, in the car doing whatI'mstruggling to do.'"

In the meantime, Wolff edges ever closer to the starting grid. (And ever further from the days when her Mercedes teammates would ask her, "How do you cope with your breasts when you go over the bumps?") Later this year she'll apply for her super licence, an essential criteria for racing in Formula One.

"Susie has definitely got the capability," says Lewis Hamilton. "She's in good shape, very intelligent and has the ability to compete against the tough guys. At some stage there will be somebody who comes along and breaks down the barriers for a whole generation." Her achievements are already significant. Though, Susie argues, she doesn't want those achievements to signify anything other than extraordinary ability. "I don't see it as racing with all those men, I see it as racing." After all, she says, "I'm a racing driver. I just want to go as fast as I can."