Chapter Text
Mercedes-Benz Group Headquarters, Stuttgart-Untertürkheim, Germany
February 7th, 2013
Phoebe (or Bee, as she liked to be called) Stallard considered herself to be a collection of oddities when she was 15. (What 15-year-old girl doesn’t?) First of all, she was an American living in Germany.
Second, while most girls her age spent weekends hanging out with their friends, she spent her weekends on a racetrack. She’d grown up watching racing on television with her dad. They went to a few races in-person, and Bee decided that’s what she wanted to do. Her dad bought her a go-kart kit when her family moved to Germany when she was five. He was an engineer, so he was her mechanic. Her mom helped her refine her technique. She wasn’t as much into racing as her dad, but she was also an engineer and liked to analyze data, so she would look at lap times, sectors, and splits, and tell Bee where she could improve.
Bee was old enough now that she was about to make the step up into actual single-seater race cars, hoping to race in Formula Renault in the next season. She got a lot of grief as a kid for being a girl that liked to race, but it was okay, because she was usually faster than a lot of the boys anyway.
She knew she was good at it, because she was starting to get offers for sponsorships to move up and out of karting. It was a good thing, too. Racing was expensive, and her parents had been able to support her to this point. But her dad, John, told her she had to find sponsors if she wanted to continue. She was lucky, though - she’d already gotten an offer from Red Bull’s junior driver academy, and her dad, who was an engineer at Mercedes, managed to somehow get a meeting with the man that had just taken over the Mercedes racing team and was going to be launching their own junior driver program, which is why she wasn’t in school on that particular Tuesday morning. Instead, she was in the main building of the Mercedes headquarters. It wasn’t the building her dad worked in, it was a fancier one. She was sitting in some waiting area with her father, nervously jiggling her foot. She didn’t really know what to expect. It wasn’t the first time she’d been at the Mercedes headquarters, but it was the first time she’d been anywhere other than the engineering floors. She’d certainly never been to the executive floors of anywhere that she could remember.
In some respects, though, she wasn’t really sure she wanted to be here, talking to someone from Mercedes. The Red Bull program was better-established, it had been running for a few years already. The Mercedes F1 team had recently gone through an ownership change and had to build their program from the ground up. Plus, Sebastian Vettel had come up through Red Bull’s academy program, and Sebastian Vettel was Bee’s absolute favorite driver, because, of course, she followed Formula 1 religiously. She’d even managed to meet him at a race once. She wanted to race in Formula 1 someday. She wanted to skip this meeting altogether, but felt bad about that - her dad did go through the effort of setting up a meeting with the new owner and team principal, after all.
“Remember, there’s no harm in keeping your options open. Just see what he has to say.” John had told her.
The entire office looked less like office buildings she’d seen on TV and more like it was in the middle of an expensive shopping mall. Everything was clean, straight lines, stainless steel cladding, and soft, recessed white lighting. Every office and conference room she could see was partitioned by floor-to-ceiling glass panels. There was a giant Mercedes logo on the glossy black wall behind the receptionist that greeted Bee and her father, but it was formed of the same soft white backlights and had an ethereal, otherworldly quality to iShe was expecting something more utilitarian, like her dad’s office area was. It was just mostly rows of cubicles and a few offices here and there. But this reception area was dazzling, never mind what the actual offices that she could see on this floor looked like. It was a lot to take in.
A phone rang behind the desk, and the receptionist answered. “Hello? Okay, yes, I’ll bring them in. ” She hung up her phone, and Bee watched her nervously.
“Mr. Stallard? Mr. Wolff is ready for you and Phoebe.”
Her father nodded to the receptionist, stood up, and waited for Bee to slide out of the chair she was sitting in, and straightened the skirt of the dress her mom had insisted she wear instead of the slacks and sweater she wanted to wear (“I just think it makes you look more… ladylike! That sweater makes you look like a school librarian!”). Her mom had lost the battle of shoe selection though, Bee opting to wear a pair of ballet flats instead of anything with heels. She also took a moment to make sure her long dark hair, arranged in two French braided pigtails, wasn’t off-kilter.
Bee and her father followed the receptionist through the labyrinthine arrangement of glass-walled offices, coming to stop at the door of a small conference room. There was a man sitting at the long table inside, with neat stacks of paper in front of him.
He wasn’t wearing a tie or a jacket like Bee had seen with other men that were generally in charge of things, but just a solid-color dress shirt with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He looked up when the receptionist opened the door to the conference room, showing his face. It was long, and thin, but not gaunt. He had a strong jawline and dark, serious eyes. A nose that was large and shapely but not out of proportion with the rest of his features. He had dark hair that was a little bit out of place on the top. When Bee and her father approached, he stood up and extended his hand to the two of them, his serious expression changing to a smile. He was probably the tallest person Bee had ever seen, and she had to tip her head almost all the way back to look him in the eyes as she reached out to shake his hand when her father introduced her.
“Thank you for taking the time to meet with us, Mr. Wolff. My name is John Stallard, and this is my daughter, Phoebe.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you both. You can call me Toto, though. And please, have a seat anywhere you’d like.”
“Toto?” Phoebe said, raising her eyebrows. “Like from the Wizard of Oz?”
Toto laughed, while Bee’s father gently touched her arm (as a warning) as they seated themselves next to each other, quietly chiding her . “I’m sorry for that”, John said .
“No, it’s okay, I get that quite a bit. My real name is 'Torger', but everyone calls me Toto.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, I usually go by ‘Bee’ and not ‘Phoebe’” Bee said.
Toto looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, before turning back to her father. “Speaking of German, would you be more comfortable with continuing this conversation in German, or English? I am fine either way.”
John spoke up. “English is… preferable, if that’s okay with you, Mr. Wol - uh, Toto.”
“His German isn’t as good as mine is,” Bee said, with a mischievous smile.
“Phoebe!” John chided, and Toto laughed. “I’m so sorry, again.”
“It’s okay,” Toto said, switching seamlessly into English. He spoke with an accent that reminded Bee of some actor that she couldn’t remember the name of, but she’d seen him in American movies. In any case, didn’t have any German accent that Bee had ever heard. Maybe it was Austrian?
“I have a son that is around her age, I know how it can be. It’s nice to meet you both, though. Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself, Bee? How did you come to Germany, and how did you come to start racing?”
“Well, we’re from the US. Dad worked for Chrysler and we moved here when I was… what, five?” Phoebe said, looking at John for confirmation. John nodded. “And dad and I always watched racing on TV together when I was a kid. So, he built me a go-kart and took me to the track to try it out, and I really liked it. When I was eight, I joined a karting club and started racing on the weekends in ADAC kartmasters races. And pretty soon, I was winning. And I kept winning against boys who told me I couldn’t beat them. One of them cried once because I beat him. And from then on, it’s all I have really wanted to do.”
“She was pretty good at it, and it was always something we could do together as a family”, John added. “I’m lucky that I could build the karts myself and be her mechanic - I worked on my university’s Formula race team at Michigan State when I was working on my masters, and I’ve always loved racing. My wife is an engineer as well - not automotive, she’s a materials engineer. She was never much into racing herself, at least on television, but she liked being able to analyze the data from Bee’s races, so it’s kind of been a family thing for the past few years. I was never much for the driving part, but I just liked to take things apart and see how they worked.”
Toto nodded, writing some notes on the papers he had stacked in front of him, while John continued.
“When Daimler sold Chrysler off, I had the option to go back to Michigan and stay with Chrysler, Mercedes offered me a job that would let me stay here in Germany, because Phoebe really liked karting and it’s not that big in the US. Plus, my wife, Josephine, had gotten a job here by that time. Since racing was something Bee loved doing, and it’s easier to climb the ladder here in Europe, we just decided it was an obvious choice to stay.”
Toto smiled and leafed through some papers on his desk. “And you’re in the… Oh, safety systems division. So you work out in Sindelfingen? That’s very important work, lots of very smart guys out there.”
John and Toto chatted for a moment about John’s job, and Bee let her eyes wander and around the conference room, letting her attention fade out, until Toto said,
“So… Phoebe, or, Bee… I understand you’re interested in joining us as a junior driver. I should be honest and let you know that you would actually be one of the first. As you may know, Mercedes bought the team three years ago, and we’re just now getting to the point where we are able to sponsor and develop young drivers. However, I do know that you also have an offer from Red Bull’s academy already. We are willing to extend an offer to you as well, and you do not need to decide today - I will give you some things to look over, and you can let me know.”
Bee considered the Mercedes offer carefully over the next week. The sponsorship terms weren’t all that dissimilar - the money was about the same, but Bee ended up going with Red Bull. The idea of being the first scared her, as exciting as it sounded. But with Red Bull, it would be easier to join a program that had long been established, and produced her idol. That fact alone made Red Bull hard to beat.
But ultimately, what swayed her was a fateful incident at a karting race the weekend after her meeting with Toto Wolff. She was talking with another driver and his parents about aging out of karting next year, and trying to find a team to drive for in Formula Renault.
“Of course, I’d like to, and I already have two offers from sponsors.” She honestly didn’t mean to brag, she was genuinely proud of herself. “Red Bull and Mercedes.”
“Doesn’t your dad work for Mercedes?” the boy’s mother said, her voice dripping with disdain. “No wonder."
It stung. Never mind that she felt she’d earned both sponsorships in her own right - her dad didn’t work for Red Bull and they still made her an offer. But if that’s how people would see her being associated with Mercedes, she didn’t want that. Even so, it was a harder decision than she’d anticipated - she liked meeting Toto. She thought he was nicer than the coordinator of Red Bull’s program, a man named Helmut Marko. For that reason alone, she was genuinely sad about giving him a call to decline Mercedes’ offer.
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” Toto said. “I think you would have done well, even though we're sort of a pilot program.”
“But,” he said, “If you are interested, this is something I was thinking about - I would like you to meet my wife, Susie. I don’t know if you know this, but she’s currently a development driver for the Williams F1 team, and she’s been a professional racing driver for a few years. She has been racing since she was a kid, like you have. I told her that I’d had a meeting with a young female driver, and she mentioned that she would like to meet you. I think it means a lot to her to meet another young woman rising in the sport. We will be back in Stuttgart next month, if you and your mother want to have lunch with her.”
“Of course, I’d love that.”
In her years of karting, Bee had only met one other girl, and she’d never met one that had gone beyond karting. The idea of a woman driving for a Formula 1 team… that was Bee’s dream someday.
“Well, I’ll give you her number, and then just have one of your parents give her a call. She’ll be expecting you.”