Meet the F1 concierge making the wealthy’s wildest dreams come true

When I ask Emma Gwyther if she’s ever arranged a last-minute helicopter transfer into a Formula 1 track for one of her ultra-high-net-worth clients, she describes the task the way one might describe running a quick errand at the store. 

“Oh yes, we’ve done that before,” Gwyther, founder and CEO of Interluxe Group tells me. “We all know what the traffic is like getting in and out of COTA (the Circuit of the Americas in Austin) and I’ve personally made sure that someone got on a helicopter to the airport to make their flight. We’ve pulled off things like that in 30 or 40 minutes.”

The British-born founder, who specializes in curating luxury automotive experiences, has spent the past 16 years building a network of top-tier suppliers, vendors and partners around the country who she can call upon at any moment to make what seems like the near impossible, happen. Crucially, they’re willing to “jump through hoops” to help her and her 38-person team cater to the 1% of the 1%.

“You’re constantly asking for the unachievable, the unexpected, the unreasonable, but I think if you do it with a certain level of politeness and grace, you’re more likely to be successful,” she explains.

Gwyther entered the automotive industry as a college student by way of the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where she helped the marketing agency running Mercedes’ experiential activations. “I decided over the course of that week that that was absolutely 100% what I wanted to do,” she says, noting that she persistently wrote 17 letters to the head of the agency until she was hired. Over the next decade, she worked her way up to running their Mercedes and Volkswagen Group accounts.

She relocated to the US in 2008, seeing an opportunity for growth in the American motorsport space long before Liberty Media came knocking on F1’s door. “When I moved here and I told people that I was a young woman working in motorsports, they assumed that I had something to do with NASCAR. Not many people knew about Formula 1, and even when they introduced the sport to Austin [in 2012], it never really took off in the way that I think the American marketplace had wanted it to,” she says. But Miami’s addition to the 2022 calendar, followed by Vegas in 2023, has transformed the landscape.

“We don’t just have automotive clients [wanting to activate at F1 races] … I had an aviation client recently tell…