‘I won’t have an incident.’
With each retort, we get in each other’s faces just a bit more, and as I shoot back, ‘Anyone can have an incident,’ I find myself having to look up to Darien, mere inches from me now.
He stays there, an almost amused look on his face as his dark eyes glint with an unspoken response I can’t identify. I refuse to lose this one. I’m not about to have the whole team see me as a pushover.
‘Okay.’ Darien sighs with a doctored smile that looks more infuriated than anything else, running a hand through his curls. ‘We’ll do things your way.’
I nod. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re a menace to society, you know that?’ he quips, one last attempt to get a hit in.
‘That’s what I’m being paid to be.’ I throw him a smirk. ‘I’m glad it’s working.’
We get the entire bunch of us on the track, beginning at the starting line. I give my team tee a little shake to dispel the sweat that seems to be following me around in this place, either because of heat, nerves or both. This is my first time watching any kind of motorsport track session so closely. I’ve already exceeded my quota of dumb questions for the day, so I’m praying I’ll be able to understand whatever foreign motorsport language they throw around as we walk the Ring.
Being our primary drivers, it’s Darien and Miguel who are up at the front of the pack when we start the tour. They start to exchange talk about things like corners and torque and drag with their trainers and engineers, Henri and his team echoing the sentiments I’m hearing. Team principal Demir is not here today, but Jack loops me in plenty since Henri, likeme, requires a bit of extra explanation, having just entered Formula 1.
‘Straights are, obviously, portions of the track that go straight like that,’ says Jack, gesturing to the main grid area that we’ve just walked down. ‘Turns can come in a few varieties. Single corners, there’s only one apex, or point of the turn, to hit. F1 cars don’t aim to go around the turn, they go through. Like someone’s drawn a line tangent to the curve. Chicanes, you get a series of those turns, so you’ve almost got to try your best to draw a line that touches the apex of every turn, with a modicum of yanking around. So Turn One, that’s just your first corner, right-handed corner. Goes into a curve, and then up ahead,’ he points towards a section of track just beyond us that wiggles like a child’s unsteady attempt at a line, ‘that’s the chicane. Then past that, there’s a sharp corner, I’m guessing Turn Four. And further down, maybe a couple of easier curves. Those are still considered turns.’
‘So what happens to the driver on those turns? To the car?’ I down the last of my long-held coffee.
‘The harder the turn, the worse the Gs,’ a new voice joins us. I realize it’s Darien, grinning cheekily as he falls back to give us his unsolicited input. ‘Entry and exit of any corner, it’s basically this heavy decel that presses your whole body, pulls at your head so hard you think it’s gonna leave your neck. Every corner is different. Just depends on how the car responds.’
‘And, of course, on human error,’ Celina pipes up, shooting me a wink when Darien harrumphs at the mere notion. I grin, because anyone who can get Darien to squirm is automatically at the top of my list of allies here.
‘Not if you practise well enough!’ he insists, although we all know it’s in vain since everyone in our group is chuckling at this point, including Darien himself. I find it astonishing howeasily he drops the grudge to let out a laugh. There’s something so straightforward about it. I wonder if the man has asingleenemy in the world.
For a moment, his eyes catch mine watching him, and my stomach instantly drops. I look away as fast as I can, sucking in a sharp breath, training my eyes on Miguel’s back in front of me instead.
Chapter Eleven
Darien
‘Take a look at this data.’
I’ve seen my data a million and one times before, but I let Celina, Afonso – my engineer for the past three years – and Shantal walk me through it all again. She looks slightly less unhappy with me than she did yesterday, at track walk. I spin idly in my chair at the counter of the Ring’s pit wall. Shantal had requested our most recent testing stats to make a start on calibrating all the training tech and regimens, which, for me and Miguel, meant our Pirelli tyre tests from December in Barcelona, and for Henri, the free practice he’d done for Heidelberg last season at Abu Dhabi.
Afonso pulls up a graph of speeds on turns, peaks and troughs, indicating measured speeds for each turn number at Barcelona. He zooms in on the Turn Fourteen section, the toughest one on the Spanish track, a ridiculously fast right-hand that sends the best of drivers for a toss. There’s a yellow and green zigzag on the graph, and though the yellow arcs overthe green, both represent the same value: turn speed over the course of the corner, averaged from the total practice laps.
‘Green is the averages we calculated for Miguel’s Turn Fourteen,’ Afonso explains, turning to Celina. ‘And yellow—’
‘That’s you,’ finishes Celina, tracing the line on the screen with an index finger. ‘Your turn speeds are outrageous, as I’ve heard. But seeing the numbers … you’re tens of kilometres – miles, sorry, American boy – ahead of your teammate.’
‘There’s more than turns,’ adds Shantal. She locks eyes with me, an eyebrow raised. ‘You have a pretty odd driving style. You speed right through corners. You weave faster than the clips I watched of the others. We looked at your race tapes, too. You overtake mostly by forcing opponents wide and utilizing that gap quite aggressively. Your defence is immaculate.’
‘Watched my race tapes. High praise,’ I remark, and shoot her a mischievous smile that sends her gaze far from mine, turning her cheeks pink.
She clears her throat. ‘Well. Where did you learn to drive like that?’
‘Here.’
Shantal blinks. ‘Sorry?’
‘I learned here. In the street.’
She appears to be processing this information very slowly and deliberately. Then, ‘Sure, okay. But I would, respectfully, like to see how. Because, Darien, if we can implement that into the programming in the simulator, if I can figure out exactlywhatyou learned and use those exercises on a simulated track …’ She shakes her head. ‘All three of you would be absolutely deadly for this season. And I can tell you the Ring has the resources to make that possible, if I can just crack exactly how.’
‘That’ll be a challenge,’ Celina chuckles, echoing mythoughts exactly. ‘You don’t know how he got his start, Shantal? It’s an urban motorsport legend.’
