Samantha Cohen, former aide and personal assistant to Queen Elizabeth, has opened up about what the former royal chauffeur was like.

In a recent interview with the Saturday, October 12 issue of The Sunday Times, Samantha Cohen, who worked with Queen Elizabeth for 18 years and at one time served as her assistant private secretary, described Queen Elizabeth as a “gutsy” driver who liked to go “fast.”

“She had guts,” Cohen told the magazine at the time. She used to drive her car fast around Balmoral.”

Queen Elizabeth, who passed away on September 8, 2022, at the age of 96, was known as an accomplished driver and at one time even scared then-Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with her obvious lust for speed, The Washington Post previously reported.

“The royal Land Rover was parked in front of the castle,” wrote Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a British diplomat who documented the occasion in his 2012 memoirs, when the former prince visited Balmoral for lunch.

According to the diplomat, to the prince's “surprise,” the queen “got into the right-hand driver's seat, turned the ignition and began to drive them away.”

The Queen, then 72, drove Prince Abdullah around the Balmoral estate, and at one point “began speeding the Land Rover up a narrow mountain road in the Scottish Highlands, talking the whole way.”

According to the Washington Post, “Through an interpreter ... Abdullah, who was very nervous, pleaded with the queen to slow down and focus on the road ahead."

The Washington Post reported that ”the Land Rover was in a state of shock.

A few months later, when Prince Abdullah met with Cowper-Coles, then ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, another Saudi royal, Prince Saud, said, “Ambassador, Her Majesty the Queen is probably steering the ship of state more steadily than she drives a Land Rover.”

In the same Sunday Times interview, Cohen described the former queen as a “shy person” who values privacy.

“In the world of celebrity, all kinds of celebrities come to the palace, and I always thought the queen was the opposite of a celebrity,” she explained. [She was a master. She understood that this was her role. She took it very seriously and did it perfectly,” the former aide added. But she knew it was someone else than herself. She was never intoxicated by glamour, never flaunted, never tempted to show off. Because she had no ego.