Chapter Text

PART ONE

ZANDVOORT

Chapter One

The Thin Line

The first race weekend after the summer break had barely settled back into its rhythm, and I was already being asked to explain why I hadn’t been fast enough. Some things in Formula One never changed.

The FIA press conference room at Zandvoort was overly bright and slightly too cold, the kind of place that seemed designed specifically to remind you that, no matter how hot and loud and chaotic the world outside might be, somebody would always find a way to put you beneath fluorescent lights and ask about two tenths of a second.
Qualifying had finished less than an hour earlier, but the circuit was still very much alive beyond the walls. Every time the door opened, a surge of sound drifted in from the paddock — music, generators, distant engines and tens of thousands of Dutch fans who appeared to have collectively decided that no colour other than orange should exist.

I sat with the rest of the drivers summoned from the top ten, Max a couple of seats away, while the first journalist lifted his microphone. My legs still carried that faint restless energy qualifying always left behind, as though some part of my body hadn’t yet realized I was no longer doing three hundred kilometres an hour.
Being the only woman on the grid had taught me years ago that press conferences could find extra angles when they wanted them, but today the questions were at least about the car, the lap and the race. I preferred it that way.
“Rebecca, P3 today, just under two tenths away from pole. You looked particularly strong through the middle sector, but the final sector seemed to cost you on both of your Q3 runs. Was that something in the balance of the car, or do you feel there was more time there from your side?”
There had been more time, which was precisely why the result irritated me. I shifted slightly in the chair, one hand resting against my thigh while I replayed the final sector for approximately the hundredth time since climbing out of the car.
“There was definitely more time in it from my side. The car wasn’t perfect through the final sector, but I’m not going to blame two tenths entirely on the balance. I didn’t put the lap together when it mattered, simple as that.” I gave a small shrug. “P3 isn’t where I wanted to be, but it’s not exactly a terrible place to start around here either. Race pace looked good on Friday. Whether it’s good enough to beat both of them, we’ll find out tomorrow. Getting past them might be the bigger problem.”

Another journalist picked up the obvious thread and asked how aggressive I could afford to be at the start when tyre degradation might create opportunities later in the race. He almost made it through the question professionally before mentioning my reputation for being optimistic about what constituted an available gap.
Beside me, Max barely moved. “That’s a nice way of saying it,” he cut in without looking over.
A small wave of amusement rippled through the room. I turned my head just enough to look at him, but his attention remained somewhere toward the journalists in front of us, expression completely neutral.
“I think ‘optimistic’ is a bit unfair.” I allowed the pause to sit long enough for him to know exactly what was coming. “Usually there is a gap.”
The reporter continued, asking whether Tarzan on the opening lap represented a realistic opportunity from the second row or whether patience mattered more.
“No, I’m not going to throw away the race at Turn One. If the opportunity is there, I’ll take it. If it isn’t, we have seventy-odd laps and strategy to work with.” I leaned back slightly, folding my arms loosely. “Patience and I aren’t complete strangers.”
I could almost feel Max choosing not to comment on that one.

The next question was about the championship, because everything eventually became about the championship once the summer break was over. Points had tightened enough during the first half of the season that every qualifying result was being examined for some hidden declaration of superiority, as if starting third at Zandvoort could reveal what would happen months from now.
“Of course the championship matters. I’m not going to pretend I forget the points exist as soon as the lights go out,” I said. “But you can’t calculate every move before you make it either. Sometimes you have half a second to decide whether the gap is real or whether you’re about to make a very expensive mistake. I usually find out which one it was afterwards.”
That was probably as good a summary of racing as I had ever managed.

The technical questions were easier. My car was carrying slightly more wing than Max’s because we hadn’t wanted exactly the same balance, which was nothing unusual after more than five years as teammates. Different preferences had stopped requiring much explanation a long time ago.
A journalist tried to extract whether our Friday long-run data meant I was planning an early undercut or a longer opening stint on Sunday, and I pointed at him before he got very far.
“Nice try. I’m definitely not telling you which one we’re planning.” I let my hand drop back into my lap. “The pit wall obviously has information I don’t have in the car, so I’m not going to ignore them just because I feel like it, but it also matters if I’m telling them the tyres are gone or that they’ve got more life in them.”

The questions gradually moved elsewhere. The pole-sitter discussed his final Q3 lap, while I reached for the water bottle beside my chair, and Max explained a small moment that had cost him in the second sector.
Then somebody asked whether he was surprised by the gap to pole. “No.” The journalist waited. So did the rest of us. Max looked back at him, one eyebrow lifting barely enough to count as movement. “That’s the answer.” I dropped my gaze toward my bottle to hide the beginning of a smile.
By the time the moderator finally ended the session, I had explained my car, my tyres, my willingness to attack, my supposed relationship with patience and several different theoretical versions of Turn One.

Twenty-five minutes later, none of those answers mattered anymore. The Red Bull engineering room cared about data. The room was warmer than the press conference area, filled with the low hum of laptops and the occasional scrape of a chair against the floor as engineers shifted between workstations. Race simulations covered the front screens, two different strategy traces winding through the predicted seventy-two laps while the weather radar occupied a smaller display off to one side. One scenario kept both cars relatively conventional; another separated them early enough to give me a possible undercut if I got stuck behind the two cars starting ahead.

Tom stood near the main display and tapped the opening phase of the race with one finger. “If you’re P3 after Lap One and you feel you have more pace than the cars ahead, how long are you prepared to sit there before we start trying to manufacture track position?”
“Not very long.” I leaned forward slightly, following the projected gap traces across the screen. “Give me a few laps to see if I can get it done myself. If I’m clearly faster and I can’t get through, there’s no point sitting there destroying the tyres just to admire their rear wings. Then we make them react to us.”
Tom gave a small nod, already looking back toward the model. “That’s roughly where we are too, but ‘a few’ needs to become an actual number tomorrow.”
“Fine. I’ll try to become a more precise person overnight.” “That would be useful.”
Across the room, Max looked up briefly from his own run sheet. “Unlikely.” I gave him the finger without taking my eyes off the screen.

The strategist moved forward through the model, showing where a clean undercut window might emerge and where traffic would make it pointless. Max’s side of the room was running through its own branches at the same time, voices overlapping occasionally as his engineers discussed whether he should cover a stop ahead or deliberately extend if he remained close enough to the front.
Then the weather appeared. The radar expanded across one of the screens, grey and blue patches sitting offshore where the North Sea looked far too close for anyone’s comfort. A twenty-percent chance of rain during the middle portion of the race was hardly enough to build a strategy around, but Zandvoort was one of those places where a harmless grey patch over the water could become somebody’s ruined Sunday very quickly. Nobody in the room liked weather percentages. They looked precise enough to be useful and then changed the moment you started trusting them.

Before we finished, one of the performance engineers brought up something from qualifying that bothered me more. My front-left tyre. The temperature trace through the banked Turn Three rose sharply halfway through the corner, a spike more pronounced than anything on Max’s car. I watched the coloured line climb across the screen and felt myself replaying the corner again, this time paying attention to something I had almost dismissed while driving.
Tom glanced toward me. “Did you feel anything there today that isn’t showing up clearly in the data?”
“Yeah, actually.” I uncrossed my arms and leaned closer to the screen. “On the second Q3 run it felt like the front-left stopped giving me the same support halfway through Turn Three. Not enough that I thought something was wrong with the car, but enough that I backed out of leaning on it as much. I assumed it was the wind.”
The trace was enlarged. The pressure had been fine. So had the carcass temperature. Whatever had happened appeared to be at the surface rather than something deeper inside the tyre.
Tom studied it for another few seconds before looking back at me. “Tomorrow, first five laps, don’t chase the car if you feel it again. Tell us immediately, especially in traffic.”
“Copy.” I kept looking at the spike anyway. That was the frustrating part about Formula One. A driver could feel something through the steering wheel for half a second, dismiss it as wind or surface variation and discover an hour later that six engineers had turned it into an entire graph.

By the time the meeting ended, the race had already become a collection of contingencies: wind, tyre temperature, rain, track position, an undercut that might exist and a Turn One gap that might not. We spent hours trying to predict every possible version of Sunday, knowing perfectly well that within thirty seconds of the lights going out the race might invent one we had never discussed.
⸻
Sunday morning managed exactly that before I had even reached the grid.
The overnight weather forecast had worsened, not enough for anyone to call it a wet race but enough that every strategist in the paddock seemed incapable of walking past a screen without checking the radar. The newest projection showed a potential shower moving toward the circuit from the west, possibly arriving sometime after Lap Twenty-Five, although the confidence in both its timing and its intensity was poor.

The pre-race briefing remained mostly dry-strategy work until the start simulation appeared on the screen: pole ahead of me and slightly left, P2 alongside him, me directly behind the pole-sitter in third, with Max starting fourth.
I rested my forearms against the table and studied the lines into Tarzan while the strategist looked between both Red Bull sides of the room. “We’re not prescribing positions into Turn One. You both race, but if either of you gets compromised by the cars ahead, we don’t want the other Red Bull getting collected trying to force a gap that disappears.”
Max looked up from his sheet. “Fine. But don’t tell us halfway through the braking zone.”
“No intention of doing that.”
Tom turned toward me. “Anything you want agreed now about how we handle the opening laps if you and Max end up directly together?”
“Nope. Let us race.” I glanced across the table toward Max. “We’ve known each other long enough by now.”
That was an understatement large enough to be useful. Max and I had been racing each other since long before becoming teammates in Formula One.
Tom accepted the answer. “Then normal rules,” he said. “Race hard, leave enough space and don’t make our Sunday unnecessarily expensive.”
Max studied the paper again. “Very inspiring.”
“I can make a PowerPoint if you’d prefer,” Tom offered.
Max looked up immediately. “No.”
That settled the Red Bull rules of engagement. Everything else would have to be decided at speed.
⸻
Race day paddocks always carried a different kind of energy, as if everyone had collectively stopped pretending the weekend was about anything other than Sunday afternoon. Guests crowded the hospitality entrances, television crews recorded live segments between the motorhomes and mechanics were already moving equipment toward the grid while the drivers gathered near the FIA area for the parade. Music carried over from somewhere farther down the paddock, fighting unsuccessfully against the noise already coming from the grandstands.
Lando was staring up at the sky. “I don’t trust that.”
Oscar followed his gaze. “The cloud?”
“Yeah.”
Oscar waited a second. “It hasn’t done anything.”
“That’s exactly what makes it suspicious.”
Carlos, standing nearby, gave him a brief look. “Very scientific.”
I looked up too. Unfortunately, Lando had a point.

An FIA coordinator announced that the parade truck was delayed by five minutes at almost the same time my press officer appeared beside me, phone in one hand and the expression of somebody who already knew I wasn’t going to like whatever came next. “Sky want ninety seconds before the parade.”
“What do I have to do?”
“Walk thirty metres that way, stand in front of a camera and answer two questions without swearing on live television.” She paused. “Ideally.”
I stared at her. “No swearing? That’s gonna be hard.”
“I’m aware. That’s why I mentioned it.”
Behind us, Lando offered, “Just replace every swear word with ‘lovely.’ Works perfectly.”
I gave him the middle finger before turning toward the camera as the producer began counting us in. The red light came on.

The first question was about starting third and whether I intended to attack immediately, which at least had the benefit of being relevant.
“I’ll always look for a gap. There’s no other way, and I will go for it. But I’m also not going to throw my race away just because I’m starting third.” I shrugged, keeping half my attention on the camera and the other half on the activity building behind it. “It’s like walking on a very thin line between optimistic and psychotic.” Somewhere just outside the frame, my press officer made a tiny movement that suggested she was deciding whether psychotic counted as acceptable live television. Apparently it did.
The second question asked whether already having won a championship made the pressure of another title fight easier.
“It still matters. You’ve been in those situations before, so you probably waste less energy on things that don’t matter, but it’s not like winning a championship suddenly makes you immune to pressure.” I shifted my weight onto one leg. “Once the lights go out, I’m not sitting there thinking about the trophy I already have. I’m trying to win another one.”

Ninety seconds later, the camera was off, the parade was beginning and the cloud Lando didn’t trust had become considerably darker. I found him again as everyone started moving toward the truck. “You manifested that.”
He looked offended. “I warned everyone.”
“That’s not better.”

By the time the grid opened, the forecast had changed again. The rain might arrive as early as Lap Twelve, or Lap Twenty-Five, or not properly at all. Very helpful.

The five-minute signal sounded while the mechanics performed the final checks around my car. Beyond them, the grandstands rose in huge banks of orange, smoke drifting over sections of the circuit and flags snapping in the wind.
Sitting this low always changed the world. People became legs moving around the cockpit, voices came from somewhere above the halo and the enormous grandstands were reduced to strips of colour beyond the mechanics leaning over the car. Heat remained trapped low inside the cockpit even with the air moving across the grid, the belts already tight across my shoulders before I had driven a racing lap.
I flexed my fingers once around the steering wheel. Brake temperatures. Clutch bite point. Switch positions. Everything where it should be. Then I looked back toward the grandstands.“Can you tell Max his fans are fucking psychopaths? All that orange makes me sick.”
There was a brief pause before Tom answered in exactly the same tone he would have used to report brake temperatures. “I’ll put it in the post-race debrief under critical performance items.”
Max’s voice appeared on the shared channel before it closed.“You drive for Red Bull.”
I smiled behind the visor. “Red Bull’s navy blue, dipshit. But maybe we could think about pink? Don’t you think Max would look stunning in pink?”
“No.” The answer came so quickly that I laughed.
“Compelling feedback from both drivers,” Tom said. “I’ll forward it to marketing.”
None of us knew it yet, but that stupid conversation would survive much longer than the race.

The one-minute warning sounded. Around me, the grid began clearing with the usual sudden efficiency. Tyre blankets disappeared, cooling equipment was pulled away and the crowd of people surrounding the cars thinned until twenty drivers were left sitting almost alone inside machines that had required hundreds of people to put them there.
Tom’s voice came through my ears. “Radio check. Reminder: tailwind into Turn One, watch the front-left through Three, and give me feedback immediately if you feel that loss of support again.”
“Sir, yes sir. I hear you loud and clear.” I tightened my grip around the wheel and looked toward the lights above the main straight. “Now let me win a race.”
“That’s generally the idea. Have a good one.”
The final mechanic stepped away. For a few seconds there was nothing left to do except sit inside the vibration of the car and wait. Then the formation lap began.