Chapter Text
Turn 9. It had been just one more corner.
GP sat with his hand on the radio switch and nothing to say into it. He couldn't take 200km/h out of the car from where he was sitting. He couldn't take the wall for him either.
The rear came round and the car just went. Backwards across the gravel, front wheels ploughing, dust and stone thrown up behind it in a long trail. The live mic. Gravel tearing under the floor, on and on, and none of it slowing him down enough.
They hadn't cut the onboard this time, at least. He watched all of it.
Which meant he watched it stop.
Sideways. It was sideways.
"Are you okay?"
A groan came straight back. Then swearing. Then Max, talking, and GP got the breath out of his chest, because last time it had stayed empty for too long.
Max's voice came through breathless with no heat in it, dazed, and still going on about the car, reporting how the rear had felt on the lap like it was any other debrief. GP let him finish.
"Are you okay? That's the main thing."
"Yeah I just knocked my knees I'll be fine."
Same voice. Unconvincing. Max didn't say I'll be fine like that. Max said it like GP was an idiot for asking.
GP didn't push. On the onboard, Max had both hands on the halo, hauling himself up out of the seat.
GP went back to the main broadcast and there was a car coming through Turn 9.
Yellow. Single waved yellow. GP leaned in because that couldn’t be true. Not double. Nowhere near a red, and Max was in the wall, in the car, and GP’s eyes flicked back to the onboard to check — up on the halo now, still getting his breath, marshals crowding around the wreckage. He went back to the broadcast.
Russell came through and kept going. Whatever he'd done on the throttle, the flag covered it, because a single yellow only asks a driver to reduce their speed. It would let him off the hook with the stewards. Fine. GP wasn't the stewards. There was a car in the barrier at a blind corner over a crest and a half a dozen marshals surrounding it, and Russell had looked at that and gone for the lap, and anyone who put a wheel into that dust was going right into the side of —
GP looked down the pitwall. Nothing. Screens, headsets, someone adjusting a mic boom. Only Hannah looked to be swallowing back tears.
He wanted to take the nearest one of them by the collar and hold him there until something crossed his face. Any of them. He'd stopped expecting it a long time ago and it didn't help, because Max was in the barrier again, and had done nothing to be there again, and not one of them had moved.
He didn't get to stay in that, because race control were still showing a single yellow. And under all of it, tearing at him the whole time. I'll be fine, in that voice.
The onboard showed Max out of the car. GP switched over to watch him and got the crash instead. Helicopter view. Then the long shot. Then Russell's onboard. Then a marshal post shot at ground level with the dust blooming across the frame, Sky pouncing on it like they'd been starved for years. Which they had.
Cunts. It was the car. It was always the car.
Not the priority. He needed eyes on Max, and they would not show him Max. They showed Russell climbing out. Russell pumping his fist. Russell being clapped on the back like he'd done something. GP would have walked off already if walking off didn't mean not seeing Max at all. Still Russell. This wasn’t normal.
The medical car appeared at the end of the pit lane and GP had his eyes on the back window before it reached them. A shape. The outline of a helmet, could be the medic’s, tinted glass between them and no way to tell. It came past their pitwall and kept going, and the shape didn't turn its head. He watched it pull into Parc Fermé.
Then Max, on screen. Helmet off, jaw set, stepping up onto the scales. Five seconds of him. Two of those behind a pitwall stand then back to fucking Russell. That was it. That was all he got.
It was still there, the rear coming round and the dust and sideways, sideways, sideways —
He had the radio call. Max talked. Straight away, no delay on the channel, and he'd talked about the car, the rear, where it had let go. A sentence with a subject and a verb in it, seconds after going into a barrier at whatever that speed had been. That mattered. This was not then. GP made himself hold onto that instead of the five fucking minutes of nothingness the broadcast had given him.
***
He left Waché and Mekies on the pitwall. The cameras would swing round in a minute and by then the two of them would have their concerned faces on. GP wasn't going to sit there and watch them find them. He knew both scripts anyway. Waché would say something about how much the rear was being asked to do through there, everyone knowing exactly what he meant. And Mekies would be sorry. Mekies was always so fucking sorry. We are sorry for Max, of course, it is not the afternoon we wanted. We continue to gather more data. We learned more about the current limitations of the car.
Except he was hearing it in Max's voice. Max doing the French accent, some Saturday evening after some other qualifying that had gone disastrously. GP couldn't pinpoint which one. They'd all blurred together by now.
Then his laugh. Pleased with himself, glancing up to check that GP had liked it too.
GP closed his eyes on it. He just needed the telemetry.
The engineering trailer was cold. GP dropped into his seat and pulled up the lap.
Rear ride height. He followed the trace through to the moment the rear had let go, then opened the aero map — he needed to see what the wing had actually been producing at that speed, that steering angle, how the downforce shifted when the active aero transitioned out of straight mode mid-corner.
What loaded was the same stripped-back spreadsheet Waché's department had been handing him for months. He could see a downforce figure for a set condition. He could not model what happened to that figure at Max's actual steering angle through Turn 9, or during SM, or in any of the conditions that had existed in the half-second where the rear gave way. He scrolled through the columns anyway, looking for a parameter he could adjust. The same static grid stared back.
The full map existed. Waché could be looking at it now. A car had put Max into a wall at two hundred kilometres an hour. Sideways. And the people who could tell him why were sitting on it because GP might take it to McLaren in eighteen months. They'd weighed their options and this was the answer they'd got. And the thing they were protecting, the thing worth all this, was the aerodynamics of a car that couldn't hold itself together through a corner. GP wanted to laugh.
But the other thing. He'd built every setup on this car off that file for months. Cross-checking against last year, leaving margin he shouldn't have needed to, running the whole car a little safer than he would have with the real numbers in front of him. He'd made it work, and today it hadn't been enough. If what threw Max off the road had been in the full map the whole time– He hadn't known. He couldn't have known and they’d made sure of it. He'd still been the one who sent Max out.
Max's voice replaying again, and it was never shaken like that, not since then. It had stopped being about pettiness or paranoia. They'd decided. Max was the cheaper thing to lose.
Outside, boots on the pavement, other teams' mechanics packing up what had been just another qualifying session for them. The grid interviews still carrying on across the paddock, none of them deserving to be there. Max should be up there. Instead he was in the media pen, answering questions about a car that could not be saved and GP couldn't even tell him why it had happened. His own team had made sure of that.
***
Wache and Mekies came in around ten minutes later. Wache gave him an irritated look, as if he should be in some other team’s trailer instead of theirs.
GP looked back down at his incomplete data. He wasn't going to spend energy on words that wouldn't be heard before they got to the actual debrief.
The two of them settled into their corner of the trailer and spoke French to each other. Didn't even bother lowering their voices.
Hannah came in and sat next to him, and her presence at least reminded him that they were not completely alone.
***
He left the trailer for the garage when he estimated Max would be done with media. He walked in to find him putting his helmet back on its shelf, his back to the entrance. Gemma was beside him, still holding his water bottle and nodding to whatever Max was saying. She spotted GP first and turned Max around by the arm.
Max's eyes found his and crinkled, giving him a look that said I'm not dead yet, calm down. GP exhaled a laugh, feeling the world righting itself a fraction. He picked his way through the tools and equipment scattered across the garage floor to Max's side. His ears were bright red, helmet lines pressed deep into his skin.
"Knee's fine," Max said, before GP had asked anything. "Bit of a knock. That's it."
GP sighed. "That was a pretty big hit."
“I know. I got lucky.”
“Are you actually alright?” He was aware that this was the third time he was asking today. First time, right after the crash, gauge whether Max was conscious and coherent. Second time once the shock had thinned but his guard was still down, still close enough to get something honest. And now, where nobody could listen in, face to face where GP could watch his expression when he said I'm fine.
Max huffed, but he knew the drill. “I mean it was pretty high speed, it’s not nice when it’s spinning for that long.”
“Are you still dizzy now?”
Max took his cap off and ran a hand through his hair. Put it back on.
“It’s not too bad. It’ll pass.”
GP nodded. He wasn't going to get more than that.
"They didn't show you," GP said, because it had been weighing on him the whole time. "On the broadcast. A whole minute of replays and Russell standing around, and nothing of you actually getting out of that car."
Max shrugged. “Not the stupidest thing they’ve done today.”
The yellow flags. GP almost smiled.
Then Mekies walked in for the debrief and Max's face closed over like a light going out.
***
It was well past midnight when he found the fan videos. He hadn't gone looking, not exactly. He'd been scrolling through nothing in particular, on the end of a hotel bed still in yesterday's shirt. He’d been too wound up for sleep but his mind wouldn’t settle on any one thought long enough to be useful. And then there it was. Some grandstand angle, shaky, zoomed in too far, but showing everything the broadcast hadn't.
Max shifted slowly on the halo. He stood, turned like he wanted to step out from a different angle, then sat back down and swung his legs over with none of the ease he usually had. GP's chest tightened around that.
He walked out of the huddle of marshalls, carried forward by the small uneven slope the gravel had created, and for a second it looked fine, looked like the version of this that ends with a shrug and a debrief and nothing more. The crowd's cheering was loud through someone's phone microphone, and he waved to them with one hand the way he always did, automatic.
Then his hand dropped. He kept walking, but slower, unsure where to put his weight. He moved aimlessly for a moment before a marshall pointed him towards the medical car. Every few steps his head dipped, testing each one to work out how bad it was, whether it had passed the point where he'd have to say something to someone. He kept walking because the whole grandstand was watching and cameras he couldn't see were somewhere and GP thought this looked like then, just white tyres instead of red ones in the walls.
The video ended. He dragged the bar back to the start.
The runoff area was wide. GP had always been grateful for that, was grateful for it today – wide enough to scrub off speed before a car got anywhere near a barrier at full force. He wasn't grateful for it now. Now it just meant Max had to walk every metre of it alone. No medic beside him, gravel loose and shifting under his boots, and no one there to catch him if he needed it. And the medical car was parked at the far edge like it was waiting for him to prove he could make it there unassisted.
GP watched the seconds pile up on the video's timestamp. Fifteen. Twenty. The phone was the only light in the room and it was burning hot against his palm. Max's pace never changed, still that same careful walk, still lifting an arm to acknowledge the crowd a second time somewhere near the halfway point, even now, even like this. The medic was out of the medical car by then. Walking. Matching Max's pace exactly, not closing that distance, and he didn't get a hand on Max's shoulder until Max was already at the door. For fifty metres he’d been all alone.
And maybe GP should be glad of it, because it meant there was no cause for concern. Not like last time.
The G-force reading was low. That's why nobody rushed. That's why the broadcast didn't show him. Low numbers on a screen, so nobody in that truck thought it deserved five extra seconds of airtime. Nobody at the barrier ran.
But it had been sideways. Of every way to hit a wall in one of these cars, sideways was the one they built the least protection for. Everyone knew that. Everyone could recite it.
It had been real for a few of them in the garage. A few more of them had been there, now scattered throughout the paddock. For most people in this fucking garage, it wasn't.
You didn't need to be on the inside to see what it had done to him.