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They said you only needed two things to make it as a driver: the ability to drive and a lot of money.
Charles could not quite agree. A driver who was exceptionally talented and who played their political cards right could get away with not having bucketloads of cash. A driver who was not especially talented could buy themselves a seat on a top team, even today.
The one thing that was absolutely non-negotiable to be a success was the ability to speak English.
Charles was fast and talented. He knew this. He had been winning almost ever since he could remember. His family also had not struggled particularly hard to pay for him to race - it was a sacrifice, but one that was within their means.
Where he had always fallen down was his English.
It hadn’t seemed to be a big problem at first - or at least, it had seemed much too far in the future to worry about as a child. He had known he wanted to be an F1 driver since he was a small child, watching them drive round the Monaco street circuit so fast he could barely see them, sat where he had been atop his father’s shoulders. He knew that with so many people from so many countries, they had to just pick a language and work with it, and he knew that like most of the world, they spoke English. But Charles as a child watched the broadcasts in French. He raced cars in French. He studied English in school, but he did not have a natural affinity for languages. It was slow and frustrating and boring, and after all, he still had time.
By the time Charles realised he was rapidly approaching his teen years and still had learned little more than “hello, how are you?” he began to get a little stressed. His driving was better than ever, but no F3 team was going to hire a driver that didn’t understand when to pit their car, let alone an F1 team. He elected to buckle down and get serious - luckily, his father was quite good at English and very happy to help. His mother, who had not studied English since school, even joined in on their lessons in a show of moral support.
The additional effort helped, and Charles reached a point that he could comfortably order food in a restaurant when the family went on holiday to London, and he could mostly understand the videos Dad brought home from England of old F1 races with English commentary, which they had not been able to get in Monaco. Charles began to finally score better in English at school, even if he didn’t think he would ever grasp the difference between past continuous and past perfect, and even in all his English assignments that allowed the student to pick a theme were about cars, or racing, or the history of the Grand Prix de Monaco.
Charles reached Formula 3 finally feeling somewhat confident. He was able to understand his team and talk with the other drivers - not just the French or Italian speaking drivers. He knew all the more technical terms for the parts of the car in English - he was getting to be such an expert that there were technical words he probably didn’t even know in French at all.
“Okay, Charles, you qualified first with one minute fifty-one point one four eight; Russell was exactly three tenths behind you at one-fifty-one point four four eight, so that’s good - good job!”
Charles had blinked, almost shaking his head as the numbers swam almost before his eyes. He knew all those numbers, but his engineer had repeated them so fast that he had had no time to properly translate them in his head, and he was already forgetting what the figures had been. “Uh,” he said, frowning slightly. “Can I see the full qualifying results? Written down?”
His engineer nodded enthusiastically, clearly just happy Charles had gotten pole. A couple of clicks of the mouse later and Charles could see the results of every driver on the grid, written in a way that made sense to him.
1:51.148. Une minute et cinquante et une secondes virgule un quatre huit.
“Thank you,” Charles had said to his engineer, suddenly realising he really, really needed to learn the numbers in English properly if he was going to ever be successful at this. It seemed an impossible task when the English wrote their numbers the exact same way, and Charles was always just going to naturally read them in French.
It was the first major shake to his confidence in the more “linguistic” part of his racing career in quite a while, but it would not be the last.
Charles had phoned his father and explained the problem with numbers.
“Oui, je me souviens que cela m'est arrivé,” Papa had said, a note of understanding in his voice. “C’est bon. Je peux pratiquer avec toi.”
Charles had smiled. His father had supported him throughout all his racing woes - he should have known that the first thing he would offer to do was to help him practice. “Ça sonne bien,” Charles replied with a smile. “Merci, Papa.”
His father had indeed helped him, and suddenly, it was as though Charles was back in fourth grade, his father drilling him with basic math problems - only this time, the math problems were in English. He started off with the times tables, which Charles already knew, but to stop him from taking too long to think and therefore translate the numbers into French in his head, Papa used a metronome and they had to stay on the beat.
“Seven fours?” Papa asked, his voice timed with the metronome.
“Twenty-eight,” Charles repeated, his own face screwed up in concentration.
“Twelve threes?”
“Twenty - no, thirty-six.”
For more complicated math problems, Papa would write something down on a piece of paper, but it was for his own reference, not Charles’s. He would read the problem off the paper out loud, and Charles would write down the numbers on his own sheet, solve the problem, and repeat the answer back in English. It would have been easy for him to do the math on paper while the numbers swam around his head in French, but he did not allow that to happen. It made him slower on the math, but the math was not the point. The point was to get his brain to recognise English numbers as though he were a native. The point was to understand his race engineer without needing a translation within his own head.
Papa died not two years later. Charles, promoted to Formula 2 and watched on by the Formula 1 teams he had admired so long, threw all his pain and love into his drive.
“Charles, you’ve qualified P1,” his engineer said. “Well done.”
There was a strange sort of numbness in Charles’s chest. His fingers felt cold, even though they had been warm just a few seconds ago. “What was my time?” he asked.
“That was one-fifty-two point one two nine. Over half a second quicker than Matsushita.”
Charles blinked, his throat suddenly feeling like he had swallowed a golf ball. “One fifty two point one?” he repeated numbly. “That’s good… good…”
He had driven for Papa. And Papa had given him the words to understand his drive.
****
Charles made it to Formula 1 and then to Ferrari without his father there to hear the news. He had known the drive would be trickier in F1, but he was confident in his abilities to adapt and cope, and his confidence had been rewarded by not only a Ferrari seat, but the longest contract in Ferrari history. He had known, too, that the scrutiny would be more mentally taxing.
He had not quite prepared for the sudden realisation that just like with numbers, he had reached another hill to climb with his English.
Formula 2 had been a fairly even field, but when Charles properly counted it out, he was rather surprised to realise that with three British drivers (four if you included Albon, who was English even if he raced under a Thai flag), a Canadian, and an Australian, more than a quarter of the grid in 2019 were native English speakers. To make things worse, the stereotypes of Germans appeared to hold true, and Sebastian seemed to speak English almost more fluently than some of the natives.
The media team had them do little videos together - stupid challenges like playing Guess Who with the other drivers or trivia games. They were meant to humanise the drivers, and they were fun, in a way, but Sebastian soundly defeated Charles each and every time. Charles would find the questions confusing, or would be too slow, and Sebastian, with his talent for wordplay in what seemed like every language on earth, would win easily.
Charles felt a little like he was swimming upstream. He ended many days with a headache he hadn’t had since he had been drilling numbers - that headache that said he had been spending too long trying to talk in a language he really had not mastered. After studying it so many years, it was starting to feel as though he never would.
Pierre invited him out one night with some of the other drivers, and against his better judgment, he found himself in a crowded pub one night in Barcelona with Pierre, Lando, Max, Daniel, and George. The loud atmosphere made it difficult to hear, but the topic of conversation was making it impossible.
“I think she’s making eyes at you, George,” Lando was saying.
“No way,” said George, shaking his head. “She’s not looking here… think she might be out of my league.”
“Yeah?” Daniel asked. “Ask Max for some tips then; he’s punching well above his weight.”
Charles sighed and leaned forward, trying to take another sip from his beer as Max punched Daniel hard in the upper arm. When no liquid dripped out, he idly tipped it upside down as though hoping to check for more down the bottom. He vaguely understood that the others were talking about some girl George should try to talk to, but he was no good with idioms, and he had nothing he could add to the conversation without risking sounding like an idiot. What was worse was that he could feel himself growing more sober by the minute.
Abruptly, he stood up. “I’m going to get another drink,” he announced. “Would anyone else like one?”
George ignored him entirely, instead standing up and heading over to the girl who may or may not have been “making eyes” at him.
“No, thank you,” said Pierre, who had not wanted to get drunk tonight.
“Yes, please!” said Max, nodding enthusiastically.
“Cheers!” said Lando, grinning.
“Yeah, nah, reckon I’m set, thanks,” said Daniel.
Charles stayed still for a moment, eyes flitting between Lando, who had said neither no nor yes, and Daniel, who had said both no and yes. The meaning had apparently been perfectly clear to everyone else, because Daniel had turned to start teasing Lando about something that Charles didn’t quite grasp, and Max was staring at Daniel with that weird, glittering look in his eye and wide smile he only really got when he was with his former teammate. Even Pierre was laughing along, not noticing when Charles had turned back to him, almost as though to ask for help.
Charles turned, feeling slightly dejected, and headed towards the bar.
It was fast becoming extremely frustrating. Charles was good on the track. He was good working with the team on their car and their racecraft. He wasn’t good at this. He wasn’t good at puzzling out idioms or reading the cues when other drivers talked in ways he didn’t understand. He heard a loud laugh from behind him that he recognised as Daniel’s, and he felt a surge of bitterness - Daniel and Lando and George (and Lewis, Alex, and Lance) had never had to learn a second language to be successful at their dream. They knew it was hard, but they didn’t bother to find out how hard it was - oh well, doesn’t matter, everyone speaks English anyway.
Charles had already given his order to the bartender before he remembered that the bartender herself was Spanish, but it seemed even bartenders had to learn English, because she handed Charles a tray with four beers, just as he had asked.
Charles wondered what Daniel would do if he turned around and started only speaking to him in Italian. He knew he was from an Italian background and had just never bothered to learn the language to fluency - too hard. Or if he turned around and only spoke French to Lando, who had citizenship in a French speaking country but who didn’t speak a lick of it.
He was feeling very bitter by the time he returned to the table, almost slamming beers in front of everyone but Pierre. The brief look of confusion on Daniel’s face and the rather hesitant “thank you” told Charles he had guessed wrong there, and that just made him feel worse. He nearly threw himself into his seat next to Pierre, his own beer in a death grip.
“C’est le dernier,” muttered Pierre.
“Quoi?” asked Charles, at the same time as Daniel, who apparently did not want to be left out, asked “What?”
Pierre cleared his throat, looking a bit surprised that Charles wasn’t the only one to hear him. “I was just saying,” he said, switching to English for the benefit of the others at the table, “it’s the last one. When you say no and yes, it’s the last one that is the one you mean.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Daniel.
“Well, why do you not just say what you mean?” Charles snapped, his frustrations bubbling over. He slammed his mouth shut so hard his teeth clacked together, and then took a long drag on his beer. It was embarrassing enough he hadn’t understood a simple drink order - he didn’t want to bring more attention to it or get into a fight with Daniel.
“It’s annoying, isn’t it?” said Max lightly. “You wait until he starts abbreviating everything.”
“Yeah, why do you do that?” Lando added, grinning.
Daniel shrugged, and said something that sounded vaguely like “speaking strain,” which caused Max to roll his eyes. “Sorry, Charles, I’ll be clearer next time, yeah?” He took a sip of the beer he had apparently claimed he had not wanted.
Charles relaxed slightly at the fact that he hadn’t actually hurt Daniel’s feelings, but it didn’t quite help the feelings of inadequacy that he only experienced when it came to language in Formula 1.
****
If pub nights with other drivers were tough, it was nothing on the stresses from doing the press when his English was less than perfect.
“So if I were to ask you, ‘Charles, how are you feeling about starting towards the back of the grid in your home race?’ what would you say?” Silvia, Ferrari’s head of communications, asked him during a routine press practice session.
“Well, I would say that I am extremely upset,” said Charles, who was indeed extremely upset at being knocked out in Q3 in his home Grand Prix, in front of all his friends and family. It was embarrassing and unnecessary, and had been the fault of the strategists and not due to any driving failure by Charles himself.
“Try to avoid words like ‘extremely’ and ‘upset’; they suggest that you are having trouble controlling your emotions,” said Silvia, either not noticing or not caring that perhaps that description fit Charles right then. “You could say something like, ‘obviously it is disappointing, but I am completely focused on the goal ahead, which is the race for Sunday. I know we have a good car and I am excited to show what I can do with it.’ See how that’s more positive?”
Charles glowered at her.
Sebastian apparently sensed his mood and decided to pipe in with a joke. “You could always say you decided to start at the back deliberately,” he said. “You always liked the red car doing the overtakes when you were a child, and now you wanted to give other children the opportunity to see as many overtakes as possible?”
Charles grinned, and his grin broadened when he realised Silvia was interjecting to tell him he should not say that. He knew logically that she was right, and that he needed to play the political long game before he had as much experience, respect, and hopefully championships as Seb, but it was still tempting to throw all the diplomacy lessons he had learned over the past few years out the window and just say what he was really thinking.
It was hard enough to say what he was really thinking in English - let alone this new double-speak political nonsense designed deliberately to hide what he was really thinking from journalists who were employed to get it out of him.
Over the next few weeks, Charles scored more podiums, and began to prove his worth to the Tifosi. His followers on Instagram and Twitter grew, and with it, his political responsibilities. Ferrari provided him with a junior marketing consultant just to help him with crafting better posts. Amelia was from London, was not much older than Charles himself, and was peppy and annoying and wanted to rewrite just about everything he said.
Eventually it got to the point where Charles just stopped caring. Ferrari had hired him to drive, and drive he had. He was going well, better than anyone had expected, and that should be enough. He won two races in a row - one at the team’s home race - and he did it after just having lost a friend. Ferrari had wanted a driver, one who could drive even when everything else was crashing around him, and they had gotten one.
They had others - people who weren’t Charles - to be their PR consultants.
His relationship with Sebastian had also started to go downhill. His normally lighthearted teammate had been having a bad year, and was clearly jealous of Charles’s success. Charles did not allow himself to waste too much energy feeling sorry for Sebastian. Pity was useless; charity was a killer in this sport, and Charles had earned his victories. He was no longer the rookie second driver. He had earned the trust and the strategies of the team.
When Sebastian refused to let him by in Sochi, Charles began to feel extremely frustrated, and even though he knew he should not argue his case while feeling frustrated, he couldn’t resist it. He was being treated unfairly by his team, who should know by now that Charles was their best chance for victory, and maybe they just needed to understand where he was coming from.
Sebastian’s MGU-K failed not long afterwards, and instead of the Ferrari 1-2 they should have had (with Charles in P1) Charles wound up alone on the podium in P3, behind Lewis and Valtteri.
That night, Charles made the mistake of opening Twitter.
Idk who Leclerc thinks he is. He’s had a couple of good races but it’s not appropriate to bitch and moan like that. He sounds like a fucking child.
Omg did you hear Leclerc on the radio today! “It’s not faaaaiiiirrr Daddy! Make Sebastian drive slower!!!”
Anyone else get the impression that Ferrari is blatantly favouring Charles now? Sebastian was robbed. Really disappointing.
Sharl Eclair sounds like my sixteen year old daughter when I tell her she can’t invite her boyfriend for a sleepover :’D
Wish Charles would learn he’s not entitled to win every single week. Everyone gets bad team orders now and then. He needs to learn to deal with it like an adult.
Charles almost slammed his thumb down on the power button on his phone. The horrible messages disappeared and he was left with only his own dim reflection staring back at him, the long face and sad eyes telling as much a story as the words on the screen had.
Charles swallowed back against a lump in his throat. Had he really come across that badly? He had been pissed - and justifiably so in his opinion - but he had tried to make his case as best as he could. Did he speak incorrectly? What should he have said instead?
Nothing, a tiny, unwelcome voice whispered in the back of his mind. This wasn’t about your language. You should have said nothing.
He put his phone down on the bad next to him, his other hand coming up and pinching the bridge of his nose. That uncomfortable voice was right, if he was being honest with himself. One could not have a nuanced conversation about fairness over a public radio broadcast while driving at two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. But what was the alternative - to suck up being treated like a second rate driver after having achieved more for Ferrari than his teammate?
Play the long game, Silvia would have said. Make yourself out to be a team player.
Sebastian was getting older, and Charles had the longest contract in Ferrari history. Maybe waiting it out, showing Ferrari with his actions that he deserved the best strategies, was the best way to be firmly established as the team’s number one driver and fixture in the paddock once Sebastian inevitably retired.
Waiting, however, was no Formula 1 driver’s strong suit, and so Charles forced that thought to the back of his mind. He slept fitfully, and then, before even taking breakfast, he headed down to the paddock, which was still being disassembled from yesterday’s race.
He walked in on Sebastian speaking to Mattia Binotto in the Ferrari garage, and he stopped short, the jealous, angry part of his brain telling him to listen in case Sebastian was saying something negative about Charles. He quickly realised that was not the case - they were talking about the front wing development - but it wasn’t the topic of conversation that had Charles standing there, frowning at Sebastian in confusion.
They were speaking in Italian.
Sebastian’s Italian seemed nowhere near as good as his English (as far as Charles, whose Italian was much better than his English, could tell). He spoke slowly and haltingly, with a strange accent that sounded a mix between English and German. But he didn’t switch to English, even though that would have been easier for him. He kept on speaking in Italian, and even if the words he chose were perhaps more simple than the words Charles himself would have chosen, the conversation was still detailed enough.
Sebastian eventually noticed him, giving him a small smile and a wave which Charles didn’t immediately return. Sebastian made his excuses to Mattia, and soon he was heading over to Charles.
“You speak Italian?” Charles said, by way of greeting.
Seb rubbed a hand across the back of his hair, grinning wryly. “Well, I don’t know that you could classify it as that,” he said. “I try, though.”
“But you’re German,” said Charles. “Germans don’t speak Italian.”
“No, we don’t,” said Sebastian. “But I drive for an Italian team. It wouldn’t be very polite if I didn’t bother to learn Italian.”
Charles frowned, his mind immediately going to the many other drivers who would happily take a Ferrari seat without bothering to learn. “But you already speak English,” Charles said again. Charles found it tough enough learning one foreign language to compete in F1. He didn’t think he could ever have handled learning a second one, especially not from scratch, as it sounded like Sebastian might have done.
Seb shrugged, as though it were no big deal. “Language is important to me,” he said, as though that completely solved the matter. “If you do not learn to talk to another man in their language, do you ever really know him?”
Charles, whose mind had unfrozen from the shock of seeing his German teammate speak a language he had no business knowing, just shook his head and laughed. “You are crazy,” he said. “I find it hard enough trying to talk to everybody in English. You should tell the English speakers to try it for once.”
Sebastian shrugged again, his grin broadening, and Charles could tell he was about to hear another dry humour joke from his teammate. “You cannot teach the English speakers,” he said simply. “Their brains are too small to learn properly. Too much American television as children… it rots their brains.”
Charles laughed, feeling somehow lighter than he had felt in weeks.
Sebastian’s grin disappeared suddenly. “I know you find it hard,” he said bluntly. “I think you are better than you think you are, but I know you find English hard.”
Charles swallowed, suddenly finding that he could not meet Sebastian’s eyes. “How did you learn to be so good?” he mumbled, rubbing his jeans only for something to do with his hands.
Sebastian shrugged. “Over a decade of strict German education,” he said simply. “That or having two Australian teammates, if you can call that English.” His lips twitched upwards briefly before he continued. “When I joined Ferrari I asked them for an Italian tutor,” he said. “As you can see I’m still not very good, but I am much better than I used to be. Perhaps you should ask for an English tutor. I don’t think your English is bad, but if it is upsetting you then improving might help.”
Charles nodded, although privately he doubted he would do as Sebastian had suggested. He wasn’t sure he could take the shame of other people knowing he was so poor at the language.
He did, however, look back into Sebastian’s eyes. His teammate was looking at him kindly, without - for now at least - any jealousy or anger about what had happened the day before. An apology made it to the tip of Charles’s tongue - he was sorry he had gotten angry with him, he was sorry Sebastian was having a bad year, he was sorry things were awkward now - but he left it.
“Thank you,” he said instead, his gut clenching with all the things he perhaps should have said.
Sebastian nodded and smiled at him again. “Are you heading out soon?” he asked. “It’s going to be a long flight; I hope I can sleep.”
Sebastian turned towards the door, and Charles, taking the question as an invitation to join him, walked out with him. “Oui,” he said, the comfort of his native language enveloping him and helping to dispel some of the awkwardness he had been feeling. “Et l'année dernière, j’ai eu jetlag au Japon…”
Sebastian chuckled. “Ouais,” he said easily, not at all bothered by the shift. “Je le reçois chaque année, au Japon et en Australie, principalement… C’est terrible, non, conduire quand tu es fatigué?”
Charles laughed too, nodding.
He may have had his issues with Sebastian on track, but here, in the quiet moments between races, he suddenly realised how valuable it truly was to have a teammate who believed it was so important to speak to another in their own language. Not all the drivers would appreciate the struggle Charles went to, and not all would return the favour, but Sebastian, at least, did both.
And for that reason, if for no other, Charles was lucky to have him.