I sit mechanically, every muscle in my legs struggling to cooperate. When he turns his back, I flick the rose petals off like they’re loaded needles.
I choose a slice of saucisson from the charcuterie board to distract myself. ‘What’s after F1? Back to IndyCar?’
‘Maybe.’ He adds some Comté to a cracker. ‘I’m less hungry to win than I used to be, though. There are other things I want to do that I’ve been putting off. Maybe it’s almost time.’
‘Things like what?’
‘I’d like to move back to Aus at some point and buy a ranch. Raise a brood there.’
Damn, there goes my plan of making him the next Martin Brundle. Not that I had much hope for it anyway.
‘Couple of dogs, some horses,’ he goes on. ‘Do a bit of farming like my old man. This whole Monaco thing,’ he gestures around the apartment, ‘it’s not me. I don’t really care much for money and… things.’
How noble of you.
‘So you don’t have nice cars then?’ I say, flicking my hair back.
A wry smile. ‘Now, I never said that. I don’t class them as “things”; they don’t go on a shelf. I race them, I experience them. They’re coming with me to the ranch, don’t you worry.’
I don’t worry since I won’t be there. Do I look like I wrestle wombats? These lips don’t fill themselves.
‘What about you? Will you take pictures on Instagram forever?’ he asks.
Do I detect something disparaging in that? I pretend to be busy chewing a slice of baguette while I formulate an evasive enough answer. He really has no idea what I do. Let’s keep it that way. ‘For as long as they’ll let me.’
The thought of him being a good guy’s gnawing at me. He may not be the biggest fan of content creation, and he thinks brown goes with everything, but that doesn’t make him a beast. I haven’t seen or heard anything genuinely negative since I first entered this world. At worst, he’s a pushover, allowing his team to dictate his every move without question. But an arsehole?Ruthless? Self-obsessed? Deserving of me using him like a voucher code?
It’s not until the salad course that I feel brave enough to broach Ackland. Pleaseat leastlet him have a filthy temper. It wouldn’t give my dating record a boost but it’d make me feel better.
I thread my fingers together over the table. ‘Tell me about your time at Ackland. You were there for, what, five years?’
He pulls a face. ‘Do I have to?’
‘I don’t know anything about F1 or your career,’ just the three months I spent researching it, ‘and I’d really like to know more.’ I flutter my eyelashes for good measure.
He stretches, slowly relenting. ‘I was there for eight years.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
His shoulders crunch and I suppress a disgusted shiver. ‘For the most part.’
‘Why not all?’
He takes a deep breath like he’s considering whether to tell me or not. ‘They brought in someone who should never have been my teammate. We both had world titles and wanted another. We were put in a really tricky position. I think it was on purpose, but who can say now.
‘And then I… left under difficult circumstances.’
He left? That’s not what I heard, I heard he was pushed. ‘Because of your teammate?’
‘Not really. Not directly.’ He takes a maddeningly slow sip of water. Does he not know women like details? ‘It was Round 20 – Mexico – so pretty late in the season. We were head-to-head with Pagari. My team principal took me aside before the race and told me to crash out. It’d trigger a safety car so my teammate could win.’
I can’t stop my jaw falling open. This never came up in any Reddit threads.
‘They knew they’d put me in a difficult position because it was common knowledge we weren’t best mates. It’d look petty internally if I didn’t. I said nothing, I think I was in shock. It goes against the integrity of racing. I’d have rather Pagari won the title – which they ended up doing, by a hairsbreadth – than win it like that. That’s not the team I signed up for.
‘They gave the order on lap 65 and I didn’t do it. After the race, I got out the car and resigned on the spot.’
He rubs his face looking tired all of a sudden. ‘I took the brunt of the fallout. They told the press they fired me, that I abandoned them mid-season, that I was the most difficult driver they’d ever worked with. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to get my race engineer fired. He was just relaying orders, he didn’t have anything to do with it. Besides, it was a million against one. They could think what they liked, I didn’t care.
