Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter I.
The Pinnacle of Motorsport.
The 2006 GP2 Asia was the first championship in the series, imagined as an Asian focused counterpart to the European dominated GP2 Series which began itself in 2005. Six rounds, two races each, first at the Shanghai International Circuit in China, then the Sentul International Circuit in Indonesia followed by Sepang in Malaysia. The series then headed to the middle east for rounds at Losail in Qatar, Sakhir in Bahrain, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Each team was expected to run at least one driver from Asia, so as to promote the development of motorsport in the continent. This feature of the series, along with sponsorship from Kazakhoil, the state-owned oil company, followed me to get the second seat at DAMS for the inaugural season. I was racing alongside Bernard Audinet, a Frenchman. The expectation was that Bernard would score the majority of the points, maybe even wins if the team were lucky enough, whereas I would hopefully get the chance to showcase myself as a good second driver. The team figured I would be good for marketing though: a female driver at a pretty high level of motorsport, and one that brought her own sponsorship. They didn't seem to expect much of me at first, but, as it turns out, I would prove them wrong.
The sprint race at Sepang, the feature race at Bahrain, and the feature at Dubai. Three wins, three different tracks, two of which were used in Formula One, that all combined to make me the first GP2 Asian Series champion. Bahrain even served as a support race for the 2006 F1 season opener. I was there in the paddock next to the real drivers - the very same drivers I would freak out about when I saw them on the streets of Monaco - and some of them even congratulated me for a good performance in the race. I was ecstatic. I felt like I was close to becoming part of something that weekend in Bahrain, and something interesting happened that weekend. A rookie Williams driver, Tommy Koskinen - son of 1982 Formula One World Champion Johannes Koskinen - scored points on debut, finishing sixth. Little did I know that, a year later, Tommy Koskinen would be my teammate. That's right, after my success in GP2 Asia, Williams offered me two big test sessions: one in Silverstone, the other at the Paul Ricard High Speed Test Track. These test sessions, conducted with the Cosworth-powered 2006 Williams FW28, gave me mileage in a current Formula One car, gave Williams data they put towards their 2006 campaign, and, ultimately, would convince Williams to sign me for the 2007 season.
So, here I was, standing in a trailer in the paddock of the Circuito de Jerez, looking at myself in the dark blue Williams overalls for the first time. They were dark blue, sponsor text mostly in white, with cyan trim courtesy of my sponsor, Kazakhoil. The team was also sponsored by Lenovo, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Philips, Reuters, and Saudia, as well as our technical partners: Bridgestone, Toyota, and Petrobras. Apparently, the team saw no issue in being sponsored by both Petrobras and Kazakhoil, with the dark blue text on cyan of Kazakhoil appearing on the front and rear wings, while Petrobras appeared as white text on the side of the blue-painted cockpit. Fly Saudia appeared on the sides of the rear wing, their name in white text below their golden palm tree and scimitars logo. The same Fly Saudia logo also appeared on each of the bargeboards, just below the Petrobras sticker. Lenovo took the sidepods and the front wing end-fences, RBS took the engine cover and had two secondary stickers just above the sidepod inlets. Reuters, Philips, and Bridgestone all had their stickers on the nose, whereas Toyota's F1 logo appeared on the nose while their name appeared in white text on the lower engine cover, just below and slightly to the right of the RBS sticker, just high enough not to be blocked by the flare-up aero pieces in front of the rear tyres. All of this combined to form a car that was mostly dark blue and white with cyan trim and a little bit of gold courtesy of Fly Saudia. Naturally, all of these logos were represented on my overalls, but there was something else on the overalls too. Right on my left hip was the Kazakh flag followed by my last name: Shchegolyayeva. On the opposite hip, in white text, there was the number 17. This was it: I was really a Formula One driver now.
To make it feel even more real, I grabbed my helmet. The sides were pretty normal, two dark blue stripes divided by a white one, with sponsorship stickers from Lenovo on the upper blue stripes, Philips and Reuters on the lower blue stripe. Then the visor was topped with a cyan band with dark blue text on it: Kazakhoil in the center, then RBS on either side. The most unique part of my helmet was on the top though, because, after a thin white band to separate this design from the dark blue stripes, I had a cyan circle going around a golden sun with thirty-two rays. This represented Kazakhstan. I was born there, they granted me a racing license, and they are financially supporting my racing career, it made sense to return the favor to them. That didn't change the fact that it felt slightly disingenuous though: my family were ethnic Russians, not only that, but we only ever ended up in Kazakhstan because of Soviet resettlement policies, furthermore, in 1991 when the Union collapsed, my father moved us over to Monaco. I've lived in Monaco my whole life, I speak French, English, and Italian as well as I speak Russian, yet here I am having to represent Kazakhstan. I'm the first Kazakh driver in Formula One period, let alone the first Kazakh woman. I have to represent a country in Formula One for the first time, and I don't even know if it really is my country. Tommy is in the same place though: he was raised in Monaco too, but born in Germany to a German mother and a Finnish father. Theoretically, Tommy could represent any one of these nations, but he has chosen to fly the same flag as his father. I can imagine Koskinen is feeling some of the same pressures I am when he looks at his name and sees a blue Nordic cross on a white field next to it: the burden of representing a country you barely know.
I grabbed the helmet and held it under my arm, just like I was supposed to for the photoshoot, put some sunglasses on, and left my trailer. I emerged inside a Formula One paddock, surrounded by other trailers in the various team colors: the dark blue and white of Williams, the silver of McLaren, and, of course, the red of Ferrari. The most unique trucks, however, went to Honda - they started off normally enough, white trucks with a red Honda logo and a handful of other sponsors towards the front, but then, almost the entire rear of the truck was covered in a blue and green globe - this was the Earth Dreams initiative. Honda decided to promote how green they were this season, despite, you know, running a 2.4L V8 at 19,000 revs across the world. I am told this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Honda's former title sponsor, British American Tobacco, is now practically banned from advertising anywhere. No, it couldn't possibly be about covering up a car without any sponsors. Honda was looking rather silly as they unveiled their Earth car, but they were fast in 2006, and they might be a threat in 2007 as well. It was easy to mock the livery now, but we'll have to see if there is anything to mock once the cars get rolling. In any case, I had my own car to unveil.
The whole team was gathering around the two cars covered in blue tarps, filling the background in their blue and white team kits. I smiled and nodded over to Tommy Koskinen who stood by the other car, the one that would be the #16. Between us, in the background, gathered the key personnel of the team: Sir Frank Williams in his wheelchair, one of the elder statesmen of Formula One and the last of the privateers. Sir Frank runs his team the right way and has pride in keeping this a family business, so much so that, a few years ago, he scared off BMW so bad they went and bought Sauber instead. Say whatever you want about Frank Williams, but he deserves to have a team named after him, and i am honored to have the chance to drive for him. Then there was his daughter, Claire, who effectively functioned as Deputy Team Principal to her father, as well as two men who really have come to the top of Williams since the 2004 restructuring plan: Michael Coronet and Thomas FitzPatrick. Thomas FitzPatrick has been the head designer of our team ever since Patrick Head moved to Williams Advanced Engineering, while Michael Coronet, under the title of Sporting Director, did a lot of the day to day managing of the team for Frank. Sir Frank had the ultimate decision on everything, including drivers, but my understanding is that Coronet is going to be my usual boss and he was the key figure behind me getting signed to begin with.
"Alright, we're ready. Show the cars!" Michael called out after a few moments talking with Frank and Claire. With that, Tommy and I each grabbed our individual tarps and pulled them off the cars, revealing the cars we'll be driving for the season. All the while the press started taking pictures of the cars: the front wings, the bridge elements, the cooling chimneys on the sidepods, all of these features would lead to the press deeming these the "spaceship cars" of F1. I could certainly see why they would say that: in terms of top side aerodynamics, these were some of the most advanced cars ever made, and I was going to have the honor of driving one of them. Tommy and I both sat down on the wheels of our individual cars, holding our respective helmets for the main pictures with the cars. Then I walked over to his car, and we took a picture focused on the #16 car itself with me and Tommy standing next to each other, one arm around the other and the other arm holding our race helmets. Finally, for the last picture, we handed off our helmets to some team members before taking a final picture: the two of us flanking Sir Frank Williams with the Williams FW29 in front of us. The press had plenty of pictures for their articles on the new Williams, now they just wanted some quotes.
"Katherine Symmons, BBC Sports, question for you Tamara," the English redhead reporter began as I did my first on-camera interview for British television. Behind me, the team were wheeling the two cars back into the garages while Super Aguri - Honda's second team - prepared for their unveil behind us. It was the day before winter testing was about to begin so a lot of teams, particularly the smaller teams, were doing their reveals today. In any case, my attention was on the reporter today "You're one of several rookie drivers that are going to be making their debut in Australia in two months' time, you're also on track to be the first woman to get an official F1 start since Lella Lombardi in 1976, and, on top of all of that, you're the first F1 driver of any kind from Kazakhstan. What can you tell us about all that?"
"Well...first of all, I want to thank Sir Frank Williams, Michael Coronet, and the whole Williams team for the opportunity to do all of this. I'm eighteen years old and coming from GP2 Asia so they are taking a bit of a chance with me. I can only hope I can repay them for this chance and get some good results. As for the first woman in many years, well, again, I'm going to try as hard as I can to do the best I can and, with any luck, I'll be a positive force for women in motorsport. The same for Kazakhstan you know, lots of people only know the country for the uh, the jokes so hopefully we can try and give the country a better image internationally." I answered, rambling a bit and not quite comfortable on camera, but I think I did a good thing at the end there. I laughed a little bit and referenced that movie everyone thinks about whenever you hear about Kazakhstan. It was a joke, and Katherine laughed at it too, but there is an element of truth to it. Regardless of my relationship to Kazakhstan, I do hope that I can at least do a better job representing the country than Sacha Baron Cohen.
"Being all these firsts, does it add pressure to perform?" Katherine asked. I'm sure it's the kind of question that does well in articles, on the internet, and with the British TV audience, but it's not an easy question for a driver to answer. It is difficult to convey in a short soundbite answer how, when driving 200 miles per hour in a race car, you need to both ignore the extreme pressure of the situation while being aware of it. If you stop and think about what we do on a daily basis, obviously anyone in our position would panic, at the same time, we can't ignore it completely because we have expectations we need to live up to and, as competitive individuals, we aren't just going to ignore the stakes around all of this. It's this interesting mixture that you can only really understand when you're in a race car racing against other people, just as good as you are if not better.
"Well, I think there is always pressure. Tommy feels pressure, I feel pressure, Felipe Alvarez feels pressure. It's part of Formula One and you need to be able to deal with it to race at this level. So yes, I feel pressure for being a woman and being from my country, just like I feel pressure for representing Williams and a team with all this history. I want to do well, and I want to do well for all the people like me and all the people that love and support Williams." I tried to explain, revealing how the pressure comes from every source and how you need to be able to cope with it to get to this level to begin with. I just hoped I wasn't coming across as rude or anything like that, it most certainly was not my intention. I was a bit awkward, sure, I'm not used to doing this type of thing: there were some interviews in GP2 Asia, some cameras and TV coverage even, but all of that pales in comparison to the amount of attention on even winter testing in Formula One.
"Alright, one last question Tamara. You've driven the 2006 Williams in test sessions before and you're about to drive the 2007 car for the first time. What do you think we can expect for the 2007 season, both at Williams and beyond?" Katherine asked, thankfully transitioning away from myself and onto the team and the season we were about to be getting into. Now, obviously I cannot make predictions that are too accurate, I haven't actually driven the FW29 quite yet, but I know enough that I can give the British media some stuff to talk about. Besides, as I mentioned, I was just happy that the subject was off of me.
"Well, for Williams I think we are all excited to see what we can do with the Toyota engines. We also put a lot of effort into working on the components, making sure the car is very reliable and that we can consistently push at our best. I think all of us want to see a better 2007 than 2006 for the team. As for the championship as a whole, well...I think that McLaren is going to be an excited team to watch. Felipe is the reigning champion and he's going to a new team, then we have Anthony Harrison in that team as well, he's a rookie and he's from America so I think that will be interesting to watch. Ferrari and Renault, obviously, had strong seasons last year too so I think you have to think about them too. Yeah, I think there is a lot of cool things going on this year." I answered, finding it easier to talk about the sport when it wasn't about me specifically. I think that boils down to the fact that I'm speaking as a fan as well as a driver. Anthony Harrison, who won the main GP2 series last year, is a super quick driver and he's from a country that has a ton of untapped potential in F1. Alvarez, meanwhile, is a two-time world champion, and the guy who finally stopped Wilhelm Ziegler's period of dominance, so he can't be counted out either. This is especially the case since McLaren will want to bounce back from an awful 2006 season.
"Thank you very much Tamara. Tamara Shchegolyayeva, new F1 driver from Kazakhstan about to make her debut with Williams Grand Prix Engineering. This is Katherine Symmons, bringing you all the F1 testing news straight from Jerez. We're taking a short break, but we'll be back with Super Aguri as the Japanese minnows lay out their plan for their second ever season in Formula One." Katherine signed off, bringing my first interrogation by the British press to an end. I'm sure it was just the first of many though, this is the price that comes with racing for one of Britain's oldest and most prestigious Formula One teams I suppose. Hopefully I'll have something more positive to talk about after I spend some actual time in the car for testing.
Tommy Koskinen was in the car for the first day of testing. We were both pretty young drivers - Koskinen was the first GP2 champion ever in 2005 before making his F1 debut the very next year - but Koskinen had that extra bit of experience with the team under his belt, so they wanted him to set the gauntlet that the team could work off of. I technically didn't need to be there that first day, but I sat in the garage wearing the cyan Kazakhoil colored Williams F1 polo, seeing the data and trying to mesh with the team. I wanted to be prepared for tomorrow when I'll be in the car, and I'll be the one making impressions. I also had the privilege of meeting Wilhelm Ziegler in the paddock, finally getting to see him as a fellow driver, and I got my picture taken with the retired seven-time world champion. Ziegler made his F1 debut in 1991 when I was just two years old, and he has been the defining F1 driver for my entire life, given he just retired last year. Even now, his presence looms large over F1, because his young teammate, Brazilian Henrique de Matteo and his former rival, Finn Matias Hamalainen, are now vying over who will fill his legacy at Ferrari. Really, I should have mentioned that in the interview, because the storylines developing at Ferrari are just as interesting as what's going on at McLaren.
The good news is that Koskinen was setting really good times on the first day. Of course, we couldn't be sure how accurate those times were, considering that we didn't know what exactly the other teams were testing today or how hard they were running relative to us, but it was encouraging. What did it me for me? Well, it was both a relief and a bit of a curse, a relief because it meant that the car seemed good and we might have a chance to get some good results this year, but also a curse because that meant that the standards I had to match were now higher. Of course, I had to expect that. Tommy Koskinen is a good driver, and his father was a Formula One World Champion, that means that talent is in his blood. Tommy is going to be a hard driver to beat, but that also means he's a good driver to test myself against. I suppose it's similar to my situation in GP2 Asia in that respect: my teammate is expected to do better than me and my job is to do as good of a job as possible for the team and be there to capitalize if Tommy ever falters. As a race car driver, it's only natural that I'll want more, but I have to keep in mind that nobody is expecting me to win the championship right out the gate at the first attempt. Expectations around me aren't that high, and while I want to beat Tommy, the team isn't going to immediately reject me if I fail to beat him right away. I am a rookie after all, and I suppose the fact that I bring money to the team makes my situation somewhat more secure.
So, I was meeting verifiable F1 legends, I was wearing the overalls, and I was representing Williams F1, but it still didn't really feel like I was an F1 driver. That would change the next day when I donned the overalls again, tied my dark brown hair into a bun before I slipped the fireproof white balaclava on over my head. Next, I put the HANS device around my neck and down my shoulders - the Head And Neck Support device held hold the head and neck in place during catastrophic accidents - before finally donning my helmet for the first time in F1. I had worn similar helmets in the junior categories, the 2004 Italian Formula Three Championship, the 2005 Formula Three Euro Series, and, of course, the inaugural GP2 Asia series with DAMS, but this was the first real Formula One helmet I had worn. Not only that, but I was going to drive a Williams F1 car, the team of so many legends, from the late 1970s all the way up to the BMW era in the early 2000s, Williams were either winning constructors' and drivers' titles or, at very least, fighting for them. Now, after a difficult handful of years with Cosworth engines, Williams had a new partner in the form of Toyota, they had the son of a former champion in the form of Tommy Koskinen, and they had generous funding from Kazakhoil thanks to the sponsorship I brought. Williams wanted this season to be the beginning of their rebuilding project, and I wanted to defy expectations and become a part of it.
The car was redone with my stickers. The #17 was on the nose and, on the side of the car just behind the cockpit, I saw a Kazakh flag followed by the name "Shchegolyayeva." This was all real. Furthermore, the car was already fitted with the seat they made for me - I was 5'5 and 110 pounds, compared to Tommy who was 5'10 and maybe 160 pounds, our seats, pedals, and cockpit settings were, dimensionally, very different - meaning that the cockpit was perfectly molded to me. I stepped into the car and lowered myself down, bringing my legs up over the hump so that they were, essentially, pointed down the nose of the car to wear the pedal box was, basically just behind the suspension setup. My butt, meanwhile, was basically on the floor of the car, then the seat supported my back and sides up to the point where the back of my helmet was against the back of the cockpit, just below the roll hoop and main air intake. I was, essentially, laying down in a 200 mile per hour racing machine. It's the kind of thing that only makes sense if you've been a race car driver for awhile, somebody fresh off the street isn't going to be used to sitting like this. I settled into the car and then my race engineer, Peter Malmedy handed me the steering wheel to plug into the shaft. Peter then headed back over to his computer and started the radio check.
"Check, check - Tamara, it's Peter, confirm you hear." my race engineer spoke through the radio, the sound entering the headphones I was wearing beneath my balaclava and helmet. Peter was an Englishman and he's worked for Williams for a long time, having been the race engineer for drivers like Roland Ziegler - Wilhelm's brother and a race winner for both Jordan and Williams in his own right - as well as Martin Weaver, who moved to Red Bull for the current season. Peter Malmedy had a ton of experience with drivers across multiple different levels of experience, that's why Williams felt he would be a good fit for me: Malmedy would help me get used to differences between GP2 Asia - which really, is a second tier series at best, more of a third tier - and F1, which is the pinnacle of motorsport, the top tier of the top tier.
"Confirm, I hear you loud and - loud and clear!" Peter laughed as the team surprised me by hitting the starter motor while I was responding, meaning I had to talk over a 2.4L V8. I understood why they did this though, because, jokes aside, when I'm on the radio button, I'll need to be talking over the engine behind me. The Mecachrome V8 I had in the back of my DAMS in GP2 Asia wasn't quite this loud or high-revving, but it also had about two-hundred horsepower less than these F1 V8s, so I suppose there's a reason for all that sound. In any case, I adjusted my cyan racing gloves, got a good hold of the steering wheel, and clutched in as the team lowered the car to the ground, the jack man got out of the way and a member of the time walked out backwards into the pitlane, finding an opening before letting me go. I popped the car into first gear and applied the power gently, moving the car out of the garage and turning down pitlane. I activated the pitlane speed limiter and pushed the throttle a bit more, coming up to the 100kph pitlane speed, I reached the slight kink at the end of the pitlane and that effectively turned me onto the circuit, coming out on the outside of turn one. Jerez had a pretty long pitlane, starting on the inside of the final hairpin and continuing all the way into turn one. On this lap, I focused on how everything ran and also on getting the car up to temperature - I needed to get as much grip as possible out of these relatively thin, grooved Bridgestone tyres. There was also the matter of the carbon ceramic brakes of an F1 car, brakes that are effectively useless until they're warmed up.
I spent the warm-up lap getting the car ready, getting a feel for the circuit, and mentally preparing myself for what was about to come. I drove the Cosworth-engined Williams FW28 for hundreds of laps in the lead up to this season, now I was about to drive the Toyota-powered Williams FW29 for the first time. I rounded the final hairpin at turn 13, the Curva Lorenzo, and began my first lap of 2007. I climbed through all seven gears down the start-finish straight before slamming back down the gears as I trail-braked down into turn one, gently slowing the car down to avoid a lock-up while preserving speed and letting the air wash over the front wing and the other aerodynamic devices of the car, then, once I was confident there was enough grip, I let off the brakes and turned right, slowly putting pressure on the throttle with my right foot to accelerate out of the corner and into turn 2: the Curva Michelin. This was a slower corner and required more aggressive braking, shooting down the gears before turning the wheel far to the right, going through the hairpin like corner. I then put the throttle down and headed through turns three and four, with just a slightly lift through four as the car really got up to speed. Then we got to what I consider the best corner of the track: Curva Sito Pons.
I hit the brakes and sent the car towards the inside kerb, letting the front right tyre ride on the red and white painted track border before slipping back onto the tarmac in time for me to put the power back down again for some speed, but not too much speed, since, soon enough, I downshifted again and tapped the brakes as I turned in for the second apex of the corner, finally coming out and getting a moment to put the power down here on the back straight. The Toyota engine roared behind me as I let the car breath, guiding it through the slight kink in the straight and preparing myself for the Curva Dry Sac at turn six. It was somewhat of a hairpin, but a bit wider and a bit faster than the ones earlier this lap. Still though, at the speed I was going, this required some heavy braking: I put my left foot down and guided the car down the gears, careful to avoid a lockup on the front tyres, then I put myself through another right turn. So far, turns 3 and 4 were the only lefts on the circuit, but another one was coming up as I turned out of Dry Sac and put the power down, heading for turn seven. I encountered a Toro Rosso on a slow lap - probably just coming out of the pits - into seven and gave it a wide berth while keeping the speeds up, passing the slow car and throwing it into seven with the slightest bit of a lift, then letting the car coast out onto the kerb before gathering it back together and putting the throttle down, just in time for turn eight.
Turn eight was a pretty long, fairly fast corner, not too dissimilar from Pouhon at Spa, though not quite as legendary. I slowed the car down a little bit and threw the car at the first apex, nicking the kerb and putting the throttle down as I steered the car to the second apex of this long left-hander, positioning the car well for the next two turns at nine and ten. Nine and ten both required braking, first slowing the car down through turn nine then speeding up for the short shoot to turn ten, where I had to hit the brakes and let the air wash over the car before hitting the throttle again and throwing the car through Curva Peluqui. This put me on a short straight heading for the Senna chicane at turn eleven. This used to just be one sweeping corner, but as the cars got faster and the sport turned its attention to safety, the fast turn eleven was replaced with the Senna chicane, forcing me to brake and guide the car through a right-left sequence of turns before rejoining the track with a slight kink. It was all power for a little bit while from here though, because turn 12, Curva Ferrari, was little more than a high-speed kink on the way to the final hairpin. I passed the pit entry and took that as my first marker to begin preparing for the hairpin before turning my attention to the white marker boards on the outside of the track. Finally, when the time was right, I hit the brakes hard and then turned the car over to the left, coming around the final corner and depositing myself back onto the start finish straight again. I let the V8 roar once again while contacting Malmedy on the team radio.
"Everything is working great! I'm ready for whatever tests you have!" I reported on the radio, the installation lap was complete, now it was just a matter of what the team wanted to do today: long runs, short runs, qualifying runs, set-up work, testing components, or even just putting down mileage to collect data. There was plenty the teams could do during winter testing and, really, this time was for the engineers more than the drivers. The teams needed to figure out what concepts worked as well as which didn't, in addition to learning the characteristics of the car and the circuit it was driving on. The engineers needed to figure out what needed fixing, what might prove to be a weakness, and what we could use to our advantage, and they wanted to have as much time between now and the first race at Australia to figure out how they were going to apply all of this information. Nevertheless, I was very appreciative of the seat time, and I loved the fact that I got to get used to the car and how it drives before the start of the season when things really do begin to matter. Furthermore, the difference between this and the in-season testing I did last year is that now I'm going to be driving this car full time: I'm not making decisions for Tommy and Martin, I'm making decisions for me. I didn't have to be timid, if I saw something I didn't like or wanted to try and influence the direction of this car's development, this was my chance. The car wasn't just being built for Tommy Koskinen, it was being built for me to, and that already made the difference between test driver and race driver abundantly clear.
"Alright Tamara, we're going to run down the tyres and the fuel, treat it like a race and don't push too hard, but try and post competitive lap times. We're going to see how the car feels after a stint." Peter explained, basically challenging me to do an impromptu race stint to see where I am with the car. I obliged, lapping around Jerez and encountering a handful of cars as other teams started their individual programs for the day. Ferrari, McLaren, BMW Sauber, Renault, Red Bull, Toro Rosso, Honda, Super Aguri, Toyota, Spyker, and, of course, Williams. The eleven teams of Formula One, ranging from the highly successful and historic juggernauts of the sport to plucky young underdogs trying to get their first chance in Formula One. Williams sort of has one foot in both camps, having been one of the most successful F1 teams of all time in the 1980s and 1990s, but, since the mid-2000s when the BMW deal collapsed, Williams has been somewhat of an underachiever. Again, we hope to use the new Toyota deal and the funding from Kazakhoil to begin a resurgence and get back to the level we're supposed to be at, but it's undeniable that Williams has gone from being a giant to being a bit of a minnow in the past few years. I don't want to demean myself or anything, but I get the impression that the Williams of old would never have signed me - they wouldn't need to take a chance on a rookie, especially not someone who is, essentially, a pay driver from GP2 Asia. I was out to prove that I deserved to be here, that it wasn't just about the money, but, it is what it is: my presence here is a result of Williams' struggles.
A little over twenty laps later the team called me into the pits as the fuel tank ran dry. The Bridgestone tyres definitely had some wear on them and were getting a bit slippery, but they probably could've done a couple more laps. if I was on the softer option tyres, they probably would've been done by now, but the team had me on the harder prime tyres to start with. I stopped in the pitlane, the car went up on the jacks, and they rolled me into the garage. Peter walked over to talk to two members of my car's team to review some of the information from my first shakedown stint. At the same time, I unplugged the steering wheel and slipped off the cyan gloves, lifting my visor to make myself a bit more comfortable as I waited for Malmedy to come over here and talk to me about the results. Michael Coronet sat in the back of the garage, overseeing the team, while Frank was present somewhere in the paddock, present at preseason testing and here to oversee the team that bears his name. I heard that Sir Frank was hoping for a strong showing at winter testing because he already had some meetings arrangement with various prospective sponsors - some former sponsors, some entirely new ones - hoping to bring them into the team in time for the season start proper. Williams brought in Kazakhoil, obviously, but they also brought Fly Saudia back to F1, the sponsor of Johannes Koskinen's 1982 championship winning campaign coming back to sponsor his son in his second season of F1.
"Alright, good work Tamara. Here's what we want you to do now. We were testing some parts with Tommy yesterday, and we want you go out with those parts as well. Do another race stint, collect data for our sensors, and let us know how it feels in comparison to the first stint. Think about smoothness, speed, aero sensitivity, grip, and anything else you notice. We're looking to see what direction we're going to do with the aero setup for this season so don't be afraid to tell us what you think, okay?" Peter asked and I nodded. The team got to work changing the car to the new spec and I prepared myself for another stint. This wasn't so bad, it reminded me a lot of the work we did last season when I was the test driver. Even having other cars on track isn't something I'm experiencing for the first time, as teams have shown up to test at Silverstone on the same day before - most F1 teams are concentrated in England - so I've had to deal with other cars going slowly or potentially even hotlapping behind me. This was stuff I could do, so, as we went through the rest of the testing program on that day and through the next two weeks, I was a lot less nervous. We were setting pretty good times too, not far off the BMW Saubers and seemingly ahead of our partners at Toyota.
It was Thursday, March 15th, and the F1 circus arrived in Australia for the first race weekend of the 2007 F1 season. FedEx Williams unveiled our updated livery featuring new title sponsor FedEx, as well as additional sponsors Scania and Denim. Kazakhoil moved to the front wing mainplane, giving room for FedEx to put their logo in white on the blue front wing upper elements. FedEx also featured on a white banner on the upper side of the rear wing, just above the Fly Saudia palm trees. The final place for our new title sponsor was on the engine cover, just above the roll hoop. Meanwhile, Fly Saudia moved off the bargeboards to just above them, their logo going on the side of the cockpit just behind the Petrobras logo on the side of the car. This cleared the bargeboards for the red lion logo of Scania trucks, who also produced a fleet of trucks for us to use to transport our cars and team equipment between the European races. Denim, an Italian aftershave company - no, I don't know why they're called denim either - reappeared on the Williams cars for the first time since the 1980s. Kazakhoil also announced that, during six races of this year, their stickers will change to Kazakhgaz, their natural gas brand, making sure that the state-owned fossil fuel initiatives were well represented in F1. In terms of sponsors, this is the healthiest Williams has been in years, perhaps even healthier than the BMW era when FedEx last sponsored Williams.
There would be the big "class of 2007" picture later this weekend, but, right now, FOM - Formula One Management, basically the entertainment side of F1 - asked all the rookies of the 2007 grid to gather together for a special picture. That included me, but it also included the real star of the picture, Anthony Harrison. Harrison was one of the most significant drivers on the grid for a number of reasons - he was American, he was mixed-race, and he was about to race alongside Felipe Alvarez at McLaren - he just got to F1 and he's already in a team expecting to fight for the title. Then there was Jyri Kaasalainen, the third Finn on the 2007 F1 grid and Felipe's replacement at Renault, New Zealand's Max Marcus of Scuderia Toro Rosso, and Spyker's Lorenzo Barbaro. The Uruguayan Barbaro was actually Anthony's teammate in the 2005 Formula 3 Euro series, racing at ART Grand Prix. The two of them finished 1-2 in that series, with Harrison being particularly dominant. I was down in seventh in what was turning out to be a very star-studded 2005 F3 field. Fifth place Maximilian Renner is also likely to get his chance in F1 soon, as he's the test and reserve driver for BMW Sauber. Test drivers don't make the cut though, so, for now, the four of us are the rookies of 2007. We range from the back of the grid to the front, from Spykers to McLarens and everywhere in between. This is also one of the most diverse rookie classes, as, in addition to the obvious facts of Anthony being half black and me being a woman, the five of us are from five different continents: North America, Europe, Oceania, South America, and Asia, respectively. The four of us posed for our picture, myself at the left end, Marcus on the right, and Harrison in the middle between Barbaro and Kaasalainen.
"Alright guys, good luck. Let's have the best season we can!" Anthony encouraged us, the young American excited for his own chances with McLaren but also making sure to encourage us and wish us the best with our individual seasons. I had to expect that Harrison would spend the first few race weekends adjusting to the McLaren and getting up to speed, but, by the end of the season, I fully expect him to be fighting for podiums and even wins. Meanwhile, the rest of us were probably going to be fighting for scraps at the back of the field. Well, maybe that's not fair: I would expect that Jyri would be in a similar position with Renault. Sure, the team lost their Spanish star driver Alvarez to McLaren, but Renault is still the team that dethroned Ziegler and Ferrari, winning two championships in a row. I would imagine Ferrari and McLaren are going to be the teams to watch this season, but I would be surprised if Renault isn't at least capable of fighting for podiums or wins. In fact, I think that it's more likely that Renault will be competitive with their relatively young line-up of Kaasalainen and Italian Umberto Petronelli than it is for Renault to be within our grasp. Stranger things have happened, of course, but I don't think Alvarez was wholly responsible for Renault's success either. There is a good team over there at Enstone and I don't think you can quite count them out for the 2007 season. So, after a 2005 where McLaren chased Renault and a 2006 duel between Ferrari and Renault, 2007 is shaping up to be the year where all three teams face off for the one and only title of Formula One World Champion.
"Thank you, good luck with your season. Make that McLaren seat yours!" I responded, encouraging Anthony Harrison in return. Formula One in America took a massive hit in 2005 with the tyre fiasco at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, took the extent where the future of the USGP beyond this year is very much in question. Formula One needs an American driver in a top team to try and turn this momentum around. I just hope it isn't too late to reinvigorate the United States Grand Prix, because I think racing at a venue as old and prestigious as Indianapolis is great for Formula One, and I think Anthony has the potential to be the first really successful American F1 driver since Mario Andretti himself. It would be a tragedy for the USGP to go away the same year an American finally makes it to F1, especially if Harrison never gets the chance to win on home soil. Winning on home soil is something that is unlikely to ever happen for me - the best I can hope for is to win at Monaco, where I've lived for the majority of my life - and I don't wish that fate on any driver. Everyone deserves to enjoy a home field advantage at least once.
In any case, I'm sure I'll hear more about Anthony Harrison, McLaren, and the 2007 F1 championship battle as time goes on, for now, I had a PR woman to meet and some more media engagements to handle. For better or worse, F1 is a sport that's all about the cameras and all about the spotlight, that means press encounters like the one I had with Katherine at Jerez are only going to become more common. I walked through through a gap in the pitlane wall and across the actual lane, seeing Anthony go back to his team and shake hands with some McLaren people, Kaasalainen heading to the back of the Renault garage to change, while Max Marcus and Lorenzo Barbaro walked all the way down pitlane to the garages of Toro Rosso and Spyker, respectively. I cut through the Williams garage, nodding at two of the mechanics at my team - Daniel and Terrence - before heading to my changing room in the back of the garage. A few minutes later, I was wearing a black Williams polo with white trim - the main team shirts were in dark blue, a secondary version in white, but there was also a Kazakhoil version in teal and a black variant of the shirt - some jean shorts, and a pair of black and white converse. A blue and white FedEx Williams cap and some black sunglasses completed the look as I walked out of the garage and into the paddock of the Albert Park circuit here in Melbourne. It was fairly quiet as it was still Thursday, the press day of the F1 weekend, but there were already some fans gathered in the paddock. They blew an air horn - the trademark noise making tool of the F1 fan, I suppose - and I waved as I kept walking towards the Williams paddock. I hoped they didn't think I was being rude or anything, but I was literally going to meet my press handler, I don't think the team would want me to speak to the fans right before.
I did make a special request to Michael when it came to my press handler - I asked for someone who could speak Russian. It wasn't a language thing, I was fluent in English, but I wanted someone that could maybe understand me better on a cultural level. I spent most of my childhood in Monaco, yes, but I was from an ethnically Russian family that came out of Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union, all of that comes together to have a certain cultural effect on me. If someone is going to be attached to me whenever I'm outside of the car and essentially acting as my handler, I would want someone who can understand me at least on some level. Fortunately enough, the team said that they found someone that met their standards as well as my requests. I was eager to meet her.
"Tamara!" I entered the team center just to see a dirty blonde woman about my height, wearing a white Williams shirt and pale blue jeans. She spoke fluent English, but she had a bit of an eastern European accent, which I actually found rather pleasant. She was a pretty young girl, between 18-20 I think, and pretty good looking as well. F1 teams tended to find fairly attractive women to be press officers, and I guess this was no exception, but still, I found myself being surprised to see someone so young and good-looking in this context. F1 isn't really a space for women, I mean, I'm the first woman to even attempt to be a part of an F1 weekend since the early 1990s, and now I'm one out of twenty-two drivers. Women aren't common in this sport and, looking at stereotypical gender roles, women aren't really drawn to F1. Are there women involved in F1? Absolutely. Are some of those women attractive? Absolutely. That doesn't necessarily mean I expect it to happen though. I guess it's not that important though, she's good looking so she's good looking, it's as simple as that. In any case, she continued "My name is Mariana Petrova, I'll be your personal assistant and press officer for the season. I'll help you through your interactions with the media and I'll be there to support you in the paddock. Now, the team also wants me to make sure you don't have to deal with any questions that the team doesn't want you answering, so just be aware of that and maybe shoot me a look if you think a question might be borderline. I'll step in and deal with it in a way that shouldn't hurt your image at all."
"So, the team makes you take the fall?" I asked with a smile, getting down to the heart of the issue. F1 teams were big businesses and they had to deal with a wide variety of sponsors - I mean, look at the work that the Williams family and Michael Coronet have been up to win over new sponsors, there's so many different people and sensitivities to account for - that obviously meant that there were things that drivers could and couldn't say. The obvious example is that you can't talk bad about your team or their suppliers, as the great Alain Prost figured out during his time at Ferrari. All of that is to say that, obviously, there are questions F1 drivers have to dodge, and there are various ways of dealing with that. Matti Hamalainen tends to be blunt and monosyllabic with the media, and that seems to work for him, but most other drivers have a harder time dealing with difficult questions. That's one of the responsibilities that these press girls have, to try and shield drivers from those potentially compromising situations. Obviously, they can't be there for us every time, especially when we're just coming out of the car, but they helped with these things, especially in the paddock questions after the race. It was part of their job, sure, but it was also, effectively, falling on a sword for us.
"Don't worry, I can handle the pressure." Mariana asserted, smirk on her face. I think I'm going to like this woman. A few minutes later we were back at that group of fans I waved to earlier, Mariana handed me a sharpie and I was signing hats and pictures, as well as taking light questions. This was all the standard sort of stuff that drivers did during the early part of the weekend, Thursdays and Fridays in particular. Fan engagement was a great thing and I think it's especially important in countries like Australia where there's a history with F1 - Adelaide was the site of a number of title deciders and now Melbourne has been the home of eventful season openers for just over a decade - and the fans are super passionate about the sport. So, these were the people around me as I entered my first race in Formula One: Mariana was my press officer, Peter Malmedy was my race engineer, Michael Coronet was my direct boss, and Sir Frank Williams was the team owner and principal. I had a strong team behind me on Thursday, now it was up to me to make a strong showing on Friday, Saturday, and, especially, on Sunday.
Changeable conditions hit during Friday practice. This allowed me to run as high as sixth in the Free Practice 2, ahead of drivers like Felipe Alvarez in teams as impressive as McLaren and Renault. This pace didn't hold up as we got into Saturday practice though, because, while it did rain a little bit during the beginning of FP3, with the top slots going, unsurprisingly, to the Ferraris, McLarens, and Renaults yet again. That drying practice session set the stage for a dry qualifying session, my first in Formula One. Now, given that the format of Formula One qualifying has changed quite a bit in the last few years, I should explain the system being used for the 2007 season. In short, it's the same one that was introduced in 2006, at length, the format goes as follows: there are three sessions, at the end of both Q1 and Q2, the slowest six cars are knocked out while the rest advance into the next session. Finally, in Q3 - by which point the grid of 22 was whittled down to just the fastest 10 - the remaining drivers load up on fuel and race tyres to decide the order in which they'll start the race. This means that the times in Q3 are actually slower than the times in Q1 and Q2, and it also means that, potentially, a driver could run more fuel and prime tyres, sacrificing speed for a longer first stint in the race. Alternatively, a driver could go with faster tyres and a lower fuel load in order to get better track position in qualifying, but then have to pit earlier in the race. It actually provided a rather interesting element of strategy to the whole weekend in that respect. We here at Williams didn't have anything too fancy planned though, we would be happy enough if we could make it to Q3 to begin with. We had lofty goals, but none of us were quite so confident as to see us achieving them so soon. We would take what we could get.
I came through the final corner to start my final lap for Q1 - free choice of tyres and minimal fuel for this session - blasting down the final straight and towards the first two corners. I hit the brakes and shifted down, heading through the iconic first corner of the Formula One season, then speeding up through turn two, trying to maximize the exit as I headed down to the second straight. The slightest bit of a kink positioned the car for turn 3, braking hard into what was an almost hairpin like corner, stopping hard and turning right past the Shell logo and then heading through a fast left-hander, riding as much kerb as I could get away with. This brought me to the fast right hander at the end of sector one. A slight lift and a downshift, then I sent the car through turn five, riding out on the kerb and accelerating again as I managed to keep the car from sliding through the potentially slippery turn. The short straight following finished sector one, and I started sector two with the hard braking zone at turn six, accelerating past the gravel trap. I lifted slightly through the left-hand kink at turn seven but held it flat through turn eight as we went back left at the top of the lake, heading for what was my favorite section of the track.
I brake for the chicane at turns nine and ten, then I sped down the lake section. In practice, it was a straight, F1 cars didn't lift through here, but it was curved around the top of the lake, swinging out until I could see the fast chicane at turns eleven and twelve, a section of track I couldn't even see from turn ten. I braked through turn eleven, turned left, then sent it into turn twelve, lifting slightly and riding out on the kerbs as I sped down the back straight. I sent the car though the numberless, flat-out kink - there were a couple of these at Albert Park - in the middle of the straight and then braked through the deceptively tight turn thirteen, riding the kerb just a little bit as I brought the car back up to speed down another short straight. Turn 14, called Stewart, was surprisingly fast, but also punishing, with a deep gravel trap just beyond the kerb, the gravel didn't trouble me on this lap though, and now I was on my way to the penultimate corner. Turn fifteen was a proper hairpin with grass straight ahead if I messed it up, but I kept the car between the white lines and I kept the speed up, now onto the final corner. A tricky corner, keeping as much speed here as possible was essential for a good lap, but the walls were close by and the grass was even closer - there was a bit of a kerb on the exit, but it ended abruptly with a patch of grass that could pull a car right into the barrier - but, with a little bit of braking, a couple of downshifts, and a little bit of luck, I shot back onto the main straight, letting the V8 engine breath as I unleashed that Toyota power. All of this was good enough for 13th in Q1, not the best lap, but safe to progress through. Tommy Koskinen would get though with a little bit less of a buffer down in 15th. Unfortunately for me, as we went into Q3, thirteen wasn't very lucky for me.
I improved my time going into Q2, which I thought was a pretty respectful effort on my end. Peter seemed to think so too, and with Henrique de Matteo not setting a time due to an engine change for the race, there was one less threat to worry about. We thought we were safe and didn't think the track was going to improve dramatically, but, as Tommy went out for his second run, so did a lot of other drivers, and, suddenly, I went from having a competitive time to being four tenths off progressing into Q3. Koskinen had a better lap than I did, but he still wasn't able to progress into the top ten. Tommy qualified twelfth on the grid and I qualified down in 15th, the two of us left to wonder what went wrong as Haruki Tanaka of all people in the Super Aguri qualified tenth. The Toyotas were 8th and 9th, making our disappointment that much deeper, but, considering that rookie driver Jyri Kaasalainen was down in thirteenth, Renault had plenty to be upset about as well. Umberto Petronelli did somewhat better for ING Renault, qualifying up in sixth, but, considering Petronelli won the race in 2005 and Felipe Alvarez won in 2006, this was a big drop off for Renault. Alvarez himself could be pretty happy though, slotting his McLaren on the front row next to pole sitter Matti Hamalainen, then the BMW Sauber of Victor Hartmann splitting the McLarens in third, Anthony Harrison fourth in his first qualifying session in F1. The second BMW Sauber of Piotr Kaminski in fifth, lining up next to Petronelli. Former Williams driver Martin Weaver put his Red Bull in seventh for his first home race with his new team, then Ivan Tripoli put his lead Toyota in 8th, the final points paying position. These were the drivers we were going to need to fight if we wanted to score points from this race. We were definitely going to try though.
"Here is the class of '07 picture." Mariana handed me over a printed out copy of the picture of the 2007 grid. Tommy and I were placed at the top right corner of the picture, standing on the risers, with a row standing on the ground in front of us, and the front row sitting down. The Renaults, Ferraris, McLarens, and Hondas took the front row, which I suppose makes sense given that Ferrari and Renault fought for the championship, McLaren is where the current champion is, and Honda actually performed rather well in 2006, even taking their first F1 win in the modern era courtesy of Englishman James Buxton. Williams, meanwhile, was in the back row thanks to the Cosworth engines really limiting our performance, though we were still ahead of the Spykers, Super Aguris, and Toro Rossos. We want to be closer to fighting the likes of Red Bull and Toyota though, if not further ahead. In any case, I handed the picture back to Mariana as the team prepared itself on the grid. Celebrities, athletes, and F1 media people alike were all over the place as we were about half an hour away from the start of the 2007 Formula One World Championship.
"Can you get that framed for me? I'll put it up in my apartment." I asked. I was part of an F1 grid now, that picture had me alongside champions, race winners, and future prospects alike, of course I wanted to have a nice version of it up on the wall of my Monaco apartment. I don't know if my F1 career will go well or not, maybe it won't even last a season, but at least with this picture, I'll forever know that it was part of me and what I did. Mariana, bless her soul, accepted and handed me a water bottle before heading off to put the picture someplace safe during the race. We also had a water bottle in the car, fed through a tube going through a little gap in the helmet, but that was more about keeping fluids up while throwing a car through 4G corners just ahead of a V8 revving to 19,000 rpm. I didn't want to drink too much otherwise I'd piss myself in my own car, and while some drivers have no problem doing that, it's hardly something I want to do. Still, it's the Australian summer and I still have some time before the race, nobody is going to get harmed if I take a drink of water now.
"Real quick Tamara, it's your Formula One debut, you've qualified in the middle of the pack, what do you think you can do from this position?" Katherine Symmons appeared, shoving a mic in my face and asking me a question. I took a look around, but, obviously, Mariana just left, doing something else for me, meaning the only team personnel near me were the mechanics on my car. I looked over towards Terrence, wondering what I should do, but the English mechanic only offered a shrug, I wasn't going to get an answer from the team, but the question seemed innocent enough, I think I can handle it. So, I stopped stalling and got around with producing an answer.
"Well, we're a bit further back than we were hoping but we still think we have a good car and we're going to try and get a result here." I answered, staying on the positive side and, effectively, saying that the situation wasn't so bad. It wasn't just being optimistic of my chances in the race, it was also about protecting the team's reputation and ensuring our fans and sponsors knew that we were still fighting for position and weren't quite satisfied with where we were at the moment. We were going to do better than this and we were going to try and recover from this position as well. There is one slight problem though, mainly that Henrique de Matteo is starting at the back of the grid, so sooner rather than later, a Ferrari is going to speed past me and disrupt my own forward momentum. Now, with any luck, Henrique will pass me on strategy rather than on track, or, alternatively, he'll pass me in such a way that I'll be able to get a tow off his car and follow him up the grid. Beyond that, I'm starting in a Honda sandwich, with James Buxton ahead of me and former Ferrari driver Rudolfo Goncalves behind me. The Hondas do not seem as strong this year, and their Earth livery is making it hard to see them as a serious threat - especially with Super Aguri outqualifying them - but I'd rather get out of that situation on the start.
"Thank you, Tamara, we look forward to seeing your debut." Katherine Symmons finished off before she headed further up the grid for the rest of her interviews, her camera crew following her. Mariana would come back and ask me about the interview, I'd head over to join the rest of the drivers as we listened to the Australian national anthem at the start of the race, then I put up my radio headphones, balaclava, helmet, gloves, and HANS device before climbing into the car and doing some last-minute checks with Peter Malmedy. Peter refreshed me on how to do the start sequence with the traction control - one of the few driver aids still available in Formula One - and, a few moments later, I was bringing the car up to temperature on the formation lap. I suppose the one good thing about starting further back is that I won't have to wait quite as long as others while the grid forms up, meaning my tyres won't lose quite as much heat or the brakes for that matter, though usually, the difference tends to not be big enough to make that big of a difference. Some race car drivers will swear up and down that they've lost pole thanks to sitting on the grid for a long time, but it usually tends to just be an excuse for a poor start.
I rounded the final corner, following Buxton, and did a burnout on my way to my grid slot, lighting up the tyres and putting some extra heat into them, the TC kicking in to keep the car from spinning out on the grooved tyres. Buxton lined up to my right in the second slot of row 7, while I took the first slot of row 8, directly behind the ING sponsored Renault of Jyri Kaasalainen. The first red light came on, then the second, third, fourth, and fifth. All five red lights were on, the tensest moment of a race weekend in my opinion, every fiber in your being wants to start but nobody wants to be the one to ruin their race before it even begins by jumping the start. At the same time, nobody wants to mess up the start either, everybody wants to hit the start the second the lights go out, but nobody's reaction time is quite that quick, so what really matters is just being faster than the people around you. The lights went out and my car shot forward, the TC holding the wheelspin in check as I tried to get the jump on both Hondas, but the second Super Aguri, driven by Louis Sanderson, stalled on the grid. Not the best start for his first full season in F1, but the real problem was the chaos it caused around him, as half the grid had to effectively go around the Honda powered car. I'm not sure what my start could have been without that, but the way it was, the best I could do was take a look inside Buxton but have to tuck in behind when it became clear he had the better drive out of the corner. Sanderson managed to get going, so a safety car was avoided, and that meant that I had another chance going into turn three.
I tuck into the slipstream of the Honda ahead, the Earth Dreams website sponsorship on the rear wing filling my view as I hinted towards the outside, getting James to cover the outside by drifting towards the left, that gave me a chance to send it on the inside to the right going into the corner. I hit the brakes and managed to slow the car down, while Buxton had nowhere to go, forced into a wide line by my car. This gave me the opportunity to seize the position going into the left-hander at turn five. Jyri was now the only car between me and Tommy, not a bad start after all I suppose. At the same time, with the cars getting up to speed and the dirty air of the cars ahead beginning to affect the aerodynamics, it became a game of trying to stay close to the car while avoiding understeering through the turbulent air of the car ahead. I wasn't quite able to get close enough to go in for the kill and overtake, but I was fast enough to follow and stay in this train of cars leading up to the first set of stops. A few cars had already pit, meaning Tommy, Jyri, and I had cycled up a few positions, but we also knew that we were going to get called in soon enough as well. It was just a question of who the team was going to call in first.
"Fast lap this lap, come in next lap Tamara, we're doing a two-stop strategy!" Peter called through the radio, encouraging me to up the pace this lap into next lap before pitting at the end of the second lap in order to get me through this traffic. Tommy, meanwhile, pit this lap and that seemed to catch Renault out, because Jyri stayed out, and now that he wasn't getting a tow from my teammate, I lined him up down the start-finish straight. Jyri knew this and tried to cover the inside, forcing me to take the outside, but, braking on the left and riding out onto the kerb, I managed to position myself going onto the second straight, pushing Kaasalainen out in the process, forcing the white, yellow, and orange Renault to take a deeper line through turn two, giving me the advantage. This was exactly what I needed on my in-lap. I came into the pitlane, slowing down to avoid embarrassing myself and hitting the wall, then speeding up again before braking for the pitlane speed limit line, taking as much speed as I could into the pits but also being careful not to speed on the line and get a penalty. Now that that was done, I rode down the pitlane, watching as the white and dark blue overall wearing Williams pit crew came out with my tyres and fuel hose, ready for me.
I stopped on my marks and the team got to work. The car went up on the jacks, the team used pneumatic guns to undo the single lugs holding the tyres on while the fuel nose went in, Derrick holding down the fuel hose as it dumped Petrobras gasoline into the fuel tank at an alarmingly fast rate. Meanwhile, Daniel, Terrence, Mark, and Josef replaced the tyres with new ones, bolting four fresh Bridgestones on and slamming them on with the new lugs. The jacks came off and I brought the revs up, waiting for the signal from the lollipop man that the car was fueled up, then, once Derrick pulled the fuel hose off - no fire thankfully - the lollipop raised his stick, I slammed the throttle and got up to speed, driving down the pitlane as Peter told me how the situation was looking.
"Matteo is through...he's on a three-stop strategy but he's fast, so be aware. Ziegler is through, Tripoli, so is Koskinen...okay, we'll be coming out close to Tanaka, you'll be fighting him on pit exit. Be aware!" Peter told me about the cars coming down the pitlane as I came out. Henrique de Matteo was through on the Ferrari - he got close to us earlier but then pit in earlier, though apparently his fast three-stop strategy had him past us already, then the Toyotas came in with Tommy Koskinen chasing them, then the remaining Super Aguri of Haruki Tanaka was neck and neck with me. I tried to brake late in turn one and block Tanaka off, but I was on cold tyres and he was going quickly, so he took to the kerb and avoided me. I gathered the car back together, avoiding a snap of oversteer, then headed off hunting the Super Aguri, knowing I wasn't far off the points, nor was I far off my teammate. As my position shook out on the computer screens, Malmedy radioed back in with some more information, knowing more about where I was relative to the other cars "Jyri has yet to pit, and MacGowan in the Red Bull is about to come in. We think it'll be close."
"Understood." I responded. Jyri Kaasalainen was struggling on my in-lap but maybe he was conserving because he was extending his stint to come back at me later in the race, now I had to be aware of him as he prepared for his stop. Meanwhile, former Williams driver Daniel MacGowan was in the Red Bull and the Scotsman could potentially come out close to me once he stopped. I was making progress forward, but the race was far from over - there is no telling where exactly we'll shake out relative to the Toyotas and Red Bulls especially, but the Renaults, Super Aguris and Hondas were also relatively close to us - the midfield was tight this season, and that meant that it could be very difficult to score points this year. The top eight positions were the only ones that gave points, assuming nothing went wrong, then half of the points paying positions would be divided amongst the McLarens and the Ferraris. The BMW Saubers also seemed like they were going to be a consistent threat for the points, that meant that 7th and 8th were the only dependable points paying position for a team like us, and we had to fight at least five other teams to get there. Not to mention that Toro Rosso or Spyker could also occasionally be a threat, even though they were usually the backmarkers. All of this was shaping up to make the 2007 season a great one for the fans, but it also meant it was going to be a hard one for us drivers, since we had more and more teams to fight.
For now, I tucked in behind Haruki Tanaka and tried to keep as fast as possible, as my fight was more with the Red Bulls and Toyotas, maybe even the Renaults, than it was with the Super Aguris. Last year, the Japanese team was a backmarker, well behind their partners at Honda, but this year they seem an awful lot closer to Honda - the question then is, is that more down to Honda's decline or Super Aguri's improvement? Either way, while I think they had the opportunity to occasionally spoil our race, our fight was mostly going to be the battle for fifth with Red Bull and Toyota, sometimes we'd fight the Hondas and Super Aguris behind us, sometimes we'd fight the Renaults ahead, but our main focus was going to be on the energy drink company and on our engine partners. I wasn't too worried about Haruki, at least not for right now, so I wasn't going to burn out my tyres or fuel load quite yet, I would save that for when the opportunity came to fight the Toyotas ahead, or if MacGowan caught up to me via his pit strategy. Fortunately, Haruki was surprisingly quick, so we were both actually closing in on the Toyotas.
"Where is Henrique?" I asked about the Brazilian in the Ferrari, knowing that he was on a quick strategy and probably had multiple stops planned, so Matteo might still impact my race on track despite having already passed me on pit strategy. I came off the radio button and listened to my headphones as I threw the car into turns eleven and twelve, following the Super Aguri through the fast chicane. I rode onto the kerbs just a bit, taking a peek into the clean air and letting the car breath for a minute before turning back onto the road and tucking behind Tanaka to get the slipstream heading down into turn thirteen. This was the strategy for this part of the race, follow the Super Aguri, don't waste the car's speed on someone we're not really fighting, and try to end the stint closer to Tommy and the Toyotas than I started out with. At the same time, while I didn't want to waste the car trying to overtake a car I wasn't really supposed to be fighting, I also didn't want to suffer in the turbulent air, so, every once in awhile, I would take a different line to cool the car down or to get out of the understeer-causing, dirty air.
"Matteo is well ahead, he's pulled two seconds on the Toyotas already. Focus on your race now. Keep with Tanaka, we're expecting MacGowan in soon. Jyri is in this lap. I'll update you in a moment." Peter reported as I made my way through sector three, going through turns fourteen, fifteen, and finally sixteen, following Tanaka down the straight. The Super Aguri had a slight wobble through turn fifteen and I closed up to him leading to the straight, getting a good exit through sixteen and getting a chance for a clean overtake. Haruki covered the inside, heading towards the pit wall and hoping to break the slipstream, but I followed him, Toyota power versus Honda power as the sounds of two V8 engines competed with the air horns of over a hundred thousand passionate Australian fans. I went to the outside, breaking out of the slipstream and then braking late, taking the deep line and riding the inside kerb to pass the Super Aguri and shoot down the second straight towards turn three. At the same time, Malmedy came through the radio again "Okay, good move, keep up the pace if you can. Jyri had a stuck wheel nut and lost time in the pitlane, you've gained a position on the Renault, now let's try and chase down the Toyotas ahead."
"Copy that." I responded. Peter didn't necessarily seem to expect me to get a chance to overtake Haruki so easily, but he was happy that the opportunity presented itself and I took it, now we effectively gained two positions considering Jyri's trouble in the pitlane. I spent the rest of the stint hunting down the cars ahead before Peter called me into the pitlane again, for what was my last scheduled pitstop. I hit the pitlane speed limiter near perfectly, I stopped right in the box and the team lifted the car up immediately, and the team executed the pitstop perfectly, I headed down the pitlane and was released onto track. At this point, I was expecting that I made some progress on the Toyotas and my teammate ahead, so I would be able to pursue the cars ahead, but first I needed to bring the tyres up to temperature. That was easier said than done because Haruki and Daniel MacGowan had pitted the lap earlier, hoping to undercut me. So, while I had indeed made progress towards the cars ahead, the cars behind me had made some progress towards me as well. It was good that Peter had called me in when he did, because if I stayed out any longer, I might have fallen behind the Super Aguri and the Red Bull. Haruki was still going to try and take advantage of my cold tyres, so, this time, I was the one defending from an overtake. I tried to cover the inside, knowing that it was very difficult to overtake on the outside of turn three - that's the whole reason my move on Buxton earlier in the race worked - but I needed to brake earlier because of the temperature of these tyres. I remembered that, ultimately, our fight was not with Super Aguri so I gave him room and let Tanaka finish the move and then tried to tuck in behind him, hoping I'd once again be able to use his pace to close in on the Toyotas.
"I can't keep Tanaka behind; I'm going to try and get a slipstream off of him to at least stop the Red Bull." I reported through the radio, making sure Malmedy and the rest of the team understood why I was doing this. I managed to keep ahead of MacGowan into turn six and, by then, my tyres were warm enough that I could stop thinking about defending myself at all costs and think more about the cars ahead. I closed back up to Haruki through the fast chicane and into sector three, positioning myself well for the main straight yet again. I slipped out of the tow and took a look into turn fifteen - an unlikely overtaking zone - but that managed to phase out Tanaka enough to upset his line going into the final corner, while I was able to return to the racing line, once again giving me the chance to attack the Super Aguri ahead on the start-finish straight. This time, I feigned towards the outside yet again, getting Haruki to cover it, but then dived into the inside, just barely avoiding the grass on the inside of turn one as I took as straight of a line as possible through the first chicane, taking a good amount of speed through the first chicane. At the same time, the way I did the move seemed to compromise Tanaka's line, and the Red Bull closed right up to the Super Aguri going down the longest straight on the track.
I braked through turn three and turned right, heading through the corner, but, when I looked in my mirror, the result was shocking. I watched as MacGowan got pushed onto the grass, lost control of the car under braking, hit Tanaka's rear tyre and launched over the car. One moment I saw Haruki's helmet then the next I saw the Red Bull going over the Super Aguri's nose and into the gravel trap. Both cars slipped out into the gravel trap, and I had to turn my attention away at this point because I needed to go through turn four. I just saw a bad accident, I don't know what happened to Tanaka, but I had to keep going because I was doing my own race and chasing after the Toyotas. I needed to move on and get on with my race, but all the while, two horrifying thoughts were going through my head: did I just watch a driver die? Also, had I not made that overtake in turn two, that could have been me.
"Safety car! Safety car! Are you okay Tamara?" Peter Malmedy called through the radio. I immediately took a sigh of relief and slowed down, the yellow flags and SC boards came up and the racetrack calmed right down. The grid would be brought together behind the safety car while the pitlane would be closed for refueling until the grid bunched together. I recently stopped though, so it wasn't a concern for me, in fact, this gave me the chance to run the fuel lean and potentially have more fuel to fight with at the end of the race as I chase the Toyotas and, hopefully, finish not far off of Tommy. I turned the car through turn five and then I got on the radio button and responded to my race engineer's questions.
"I'm fine, the whole accident was behind me. What happened to Haruki?" I asked, hoping that the Japanese driver was okay. That Red Bull was very close to his helmet at best, and that's terrifying for a driver, especially with diffusers and strakes going down from the floor, all of which could make an accident even uglier.
"One moment...we're not seeing anything yet...okay. Haruki is getting out of the car on his own power, he's fine. Close up to the grid and get ready, we'll have less than ten laps left when the race restarts." Peter told me. So, the remaining cars of the F1 grid - there were a few retirements and smaller crashes before the safety car as well - bunched up together for another few laps before we were released for the end of the race. The safety car came at a bad time for the Toyotas and compromised their pit strategy, so, at the end of the race, Tommy Koskinen crossed the line seventh and I followed through in eighth, the Toyotas of Roland Ziegler and Ivan Tripoli were behind in ninth and tenth, left with no points, and Jyri's Renault was down in tenth. So, at the end of the 2007 Australian Grand Prix, the points paying results went as follows:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
2: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
4: Victor Hartman - Germany - BMW Sauber.
5: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Renault.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
7: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota.
8: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota.
Points on debut for me and a double-points finish for the team ensured we were in fifth place in the constructors' championship, just one point behind Renault. Not a bad start to the season at all.
Notes:
Alright, this has been the first chapter, let me know what you thought! I already started work on chapter two and it should be posted two weeks from now - so Sunday, January 30th, 2022. If you're reading this in the future, well, hello future person!
Chapter 2: The Flyaway Races
Notes:
Hello everyone! I hope everyone enjoyed the first chapter, now we're on the second one. So, as I said, this is inspired by the 2007 F1 season, the drivers I've created may line-up with real drivers, but they should not be seen as a direct interpretation, they may vary in career path, personality, results, etc, etc. The differences between real life and the story will only get bigger as we get further into it. One final note, as you started to see in chapter one and you'll continue to see here, some races and events will get more attention than others. This includes the non-racing side of the story, which starts getting some attention here.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter II.
The Flyaway Races.
"Alright Tamara, down to mix three and cool the car down. We're P9, P9. Excellent recovery drive. Tripoli is P7 but we're still ahead of Toyota in the constructors' championship, still P5. We'll come back stronger in Bahrain." Peter Malmedy told me over the radio as I crossed the line at the Malaysian Grand Prix, finishing what's been a comparatively disastrous weekend for Williams. I suppose I knew even in Australia that not every weekend was going to be like that, but it still hurts for the next weekend to immediately go like this. First of all, I qualified all the way down in 20th - elevated up to 19th thanks to Rudolfo Goncalves needing an engine change and thus getting a penalty - thanks to gearbox issues in qualifying. Second of all, Tommy retired within twenty laps of the finish thanks to a water leak of all things and third of all, as Peter mentioned, Toyota went and scored points. They now had 2 points to our 3. Not only that, but considering where they were in Australia and where they are now, Toyota has been the more consistent team. It's only two races in to a seventeen-race season, but we need to be aware of what is going on with the teams close to us. Martin Weaver was about four seconds behind me in the Red Bull, so, once again, they were close to us as well. Maybe Peter's right though, maybe we will be better in Bahrain, for now though, I'll have to be content with my solitary point from Australia.
The 2007 Petronas Malaysian Grand Prix points-paying results go as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
4: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
5: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
6: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Renault.
7: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota.
8: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault.
So, not only is Toyota now on two points, just behind us, but Renault took a double-points finish and has somewhat broken away from us, securing their hold on P4 in the constructors' championship so far. Felipe Alvarez now leads the championship on 18 points - a very good title defense for someone who has changed teams from Renault to McLaren - ahead of Matti Hamalainen, who is on 16 points. Two consecutive podium finishes have Anthony Harrison third with 14 points in what is an excellent start to the season for the American driver. Similarly, two consecutive fourth places finishes have Victor Hartmann in fourth on 10 points. Finally, Umberto Petronelli is on 7 points in fifth, thanks to having scored points twice in a row. As for the constructors' championship, McLaren is on top followed by Ferrari, BMW Sauber, Renault, then us on three points just ahead of Toyota with two points. A very competitive start to the season, though not an ideal one for Williams. We could still be proud of our results from Malaysia, and, while I didn't score any points this weekend, I climbed from nineteenth to ninth in the race, while Tommy had been running in sixth before he had to retire the car, so that all still suggests that we have pretty good pace at Sepang, even if we've failed to convert that pace into good results today.
I pulled the car into pitlane and got out of the car. I had pumped my first, cheered, and hugged the team after the Australian Grand Prix, but the situation today wasn't quite as jubilant. I got out of the car, put the steering wheel back into the car to avoid any issue, and climbed out of the car. I went over for the routine weigh-in at the end of the race then I headed over to the team. I patted Peter and the crew on their backs, thanking them for a good strategy, then I headed to the back of the garage to get changed into something more comfortable before attending to my various media commitments. A few moments later, Mariana and I were walking into the media pen, I was now dressed in a white Williams polo, a blue cap with the Kazakhoil logo on it, and a pair of blue jean shorts. Mariana held a Williams-branded umbrella over me to block the sun as I walked over to a male reporter. I adjusted my sunglasses, took a sip of water, and then accepted the interview.
"George Tarantano, Speed Channel USA. Tamara, you climbed ten places in just your second race in Formula One. Excellent race and excellent show of skill to follow up a points finish. What can you tell us about the race form your perspective?" an American reporter asked me, having a more positive view of my race than I did, and, you know, maybe he had a bit of a point. Like I said earlier, we can't expect points from every race and our pace was pretty good in the race, even if it didn't materialize into anything quite yet. What was I going to say about that though? Well, I thought for a moment before giving it a shot.
"Well, I really like this circuit and I had success when I raced here in GP2 Asia as well. So, I wish that we could have converted that into a points finish but, between both cars, there were definitely positive moments in the race, and we, as a team, can be proud of our pace. I hope that we can build off of this and get into the points before too long. Yeah, good race but, unfortunately, it just didn't translate into a points finish." I responded, trying to be positive for both myself and my team, while also making it clear that our ambitions were higher than this. I didn't mean that in an arrogant way, merely that we were Williams and we had justifiably high standards. We were a championship winning team, both the constructors' and the drivers', we didn't want to be fighting to get into the points, we wanted to be fighting for podiums and wins. Conveying that requires a bit of nuance and I hope that came through. I glanced over at Mariana Petrova, but my press officer didn't seem angry or anything, so maybe this was coming through the way I intended, or maybe it was tolerated criticism even if it was taken more harshly than I intended.
"What do you think you could've accomplished if you didn't have gearbox issues in quali?" Tarantano asked, the Italian-American pitlane reporter trying to build off of some of the implications left by my last statement. Now, this was entering into dangerous territory, because I would potentially be questioning the team's reliability and their ability to produce F1 machinery. This gets slightly more complicated and slightly more political given the nature of the Williams gearbox: Williams Grand Prix Engineering produces the same gearbox for both Williams and Toyota, meaning that the Williams gearbox is intertwined with the Toyota engine, and if a Williams driver was questioning the Williams gearbox, then what does that say about Toyota that partnered with us and took our gearboxes as part of the project? Saying the wrong thing could potentially lead to Toyota and Williams both being upset with me, and that's more than I wanted to deal with. Of course, it is much more likely that the consequences would be a lot less severe, a reprimand from Peter Malmedy at worst, but I have to keep in mind that these things are intertwined, and, whenever I'm criticizing - or even just commenting on - something in the media, I am commenting on my team, on our technical partners, and even our sponsors. The President of Marketing at FedEx doesn't want to pick up a motorsport magazine and read about all the technical problems with the team he just agreed to be a title sponsor for. Thus, protecting the team in the media was no longer just about maintaining good character, it was now institutionalized.
"I mean, it's difficult to say. Maybe I would have qualified better, maybe I would have struggled. Maybe even I would have put myself in a grid slot further up that would've gotten me into a first corner collision and ended my race in turn one. I understand that speculation can be a lot of fun for the team and the fans, but I don't really know what could have or should have happened or any of that. All I know is that the team worked hard for me, replaced the gearbox, and got the car ready for the race. The team gets as much credit as I do for my recovery drive, if not more so." I responded, weaseling out of the question with the classic 'who knows what might have happened?' and then making sure I made my appreciation for the team clear. Peter, Terrence, Daniel, Derrick, all the guys and even Mariana here in the media pen with me, all these people contribute to a Grand Prix weekend and whatever result I get. That could be something as major as nailing a tyre change during the pitstop, or it could be something as minor as handling my media schedule for me, regardless of what it is, it all came together to get the result. That result could be something as positive as finishing eighth on debut and ensuring Williams had a double-points finish to start the 2007 season, or it could be somewhat more bittersweet like this, where I had such a fast, aggressive car and only came ninth due to starting way back down the order.
"Thank you, Tamara. Good luck in Bahrain." George concluded the interview. So, I've had interviews with Katherine Symmons from the BBC, representing the English side of the Anglophone F1 media, now this interview with Speed Channel represented the American side of the Anglophone media. I just needed an interview with Fox Sports Australia, and I'd have spoken for every major English-language broadcaster of Formula One. There were various magazines and foreign sources, some of which I've already had an interview for, but the United Kingdom is one of F1's biggest markets and I drive for a British F1 team, what's being said about me in the Anglophone press is somewhat more consequential than whatever the Spanish or French press think about me, at least for now. The Italian press' opinion always matters, because of their strong connection and strong influence for Ferrari, but that's a story for a different day, and I can't imagine that I'll have anything to do with Ferrari any time soon. I'm an eighteen - going on nineteen - year old girl two races into her F1 career, driving for a Williams team that, at the moment, is midfield at best. I don't even have the right to think about Ferrari right now, let alone consider what my reputation with the Italian press might be and how that may affect my relationship with Ferrari. No, I had to sit down, shut up, and be proud to be a Williams driver, claiming their legacy rather than the record-setting legacy of Ferrari.
"I think that went well, you confronted some difficult questions and held your own." Mariana Petrova spoke once we walked away from the reporters, deciding that I did a pretty good job with Tarantano's questions. Mariana probably understood that, with the teams and figures involved on my side, it was hard to talk about some of these issues honestly without causing some sort of controversy, but it seems I managed it, managed it well enough anyway. I have to admit, even in GP2 Asia, the media was not my favorite part of the sport, not by a long shot. I love racing, I love battling with other cars, I even love coming out of the pits on Friday morning for the first time to start a long series of practice sessions to set the car up for the bigger events ahead. I don't necessarily love all the attention, the spotlight, and the questions. Obviously, glory is part of the F1 dream, but not every part of glory and attention is desirable. In any case, a few more interviews later with television, print, and radio broadcasters alike, and I was finally let go. So, what does an F1 driver do after a race like that? Well, it depends on the individual. Some would like to go celebrate, some go to meet with the team and meticulously plan out development, others like to simply go back to their hotel rooms and recover from the race. Perhaps it is unsurprising, considering everything I just said about the media, that I am in the third camp. There was just one last commitment I had to go through: the team debrief.
There was a table with nine computers on it - four down each side and then one at the head of the table - I sat on one side, Tommy on the other. Peter Malmedy was with me, sitting opposite of Tommy's race engineer. Then we each had a senior member of each of our technical staffs as well, in my case, that was Derrick, my fuel rig guy. Then, sitting on my side of the table, there was our team strategist, Andrew Conners, while on Tommy's side, there was Katsuo Hisakawa, a representative from our engine partners over at Toyota, though one unaffiliated with the Toyota factory team - we didn't want our rivals to have a man inside our confidential technical meetings and debriefs, but we also needed to talk with Toyota when it comes to our engine. Finally, Michael Coronet sat at the head of the table, the de facto team principal, though not daring to take that title away from Sir Frank Williams. Speaking of Sir Frank, that brings us to the other two people in this room: Claire Williams, sitting in on the debrief on behalf of her father who couldn't be here, and our test driver, Hideki Kitagawa. Hideki was another product of Toyota's influence over the team, the Japanese manufacturer offering us a discount on the engines in exchange for having Kitagawa as a test driver and running him in a few test sessions across the season. There was an in-season test just before the Malaysian Grand Prix which I did not partake in, giving up the car in exchange for Hideki getting seat time. I decided that was alright since I had experience at Sepang anyway, and also because I decided that I would rather miss the test than miss the Friday practice of the race weekend.
"So, obviously we had two failures this weekend, one on each car. Tamara had a gear selection issue in qualifying and Tommy had to retire from the race due to a water leak. We have undertaken initial inspection of the parts, and we believe that both can be salvaged. We're going to do a more detailed inspection back at Grove and, if we're right, we'll add these parts to the end of the pool, keeping them an option for if we wear through our parts later in the season." Michael began the meeting, a clear difference between what the team was willing to talk about in private compared to how we were in front of the media. I guess that's just part of Formula One, because there was also that rumor that seven-time World Champion Wilhelm Ziegler, who retired at the end of the last season, would never insult the team in public but was an unbearable and uncompromising hard-ass behind closed doors, demanding the team do better. I don't know if that's true, I've only run into Wilhelm a handful of times as he now sits on Ferrari's pitwall during the Grand Prix weekend, but I could definitely believe it. A driver at that level, perhaps the greatest of all time, knows that he must protect the team's reputation in public, but, in private, will not stand for anything less than perfection.
"How are the engines?" Katsuo asked, wondering if Tommy's problem was on Toyota's end or Williams' end. As for my problem, I think it was pretty clear that it was an issue with the Williams gearbox, which is paired up to the Toyota engine, but my engine was fine, considering I ran the same unit during the race and was obviously going pretty quickly and aggressively for the whole duration. I sat back for a few minutes as Michael, Katsuo, and Tommy's people discussed his engine and ultimately determined that the engine was fine, and that the problem was not necessarily Toyota's. The conversation then turned to my gearbox, where Peter started out with asking if he himself could take a look at the gearbox once they returned to Grove, which Michael obliged. I then had the chance to speak. I didn't want to push too hard here, I recognized I was a young driver and new to the team, so I didn't want to start making unjustified demands, but I did want to be here for a long time, and I did want to be a part of the direction this team was going in, so I did make it clear what i wanted, just not in a demanding way.
"I think the car was very good these last two weekends and we are looking competitive with the Red Bulls and the Toyotas, but we need to be aware of reliability. The rules are asking for parts to last more and more races, I believe that next year, gearboxes are supposed to last four races, and changing earlier than that will result in a penalty. There is an exception for cars that don't finish the race, but a DNF is worse. I think we have an excellent car, a competitive car, and a great team to field it, but we need to make sure we have the reliability to capitalize on that." I said my piece, not feeling too comfortable being the center of attention in this room, but feeling I had to say my piece because of the reliability issues we've had already in the second race of the season. I don't want to chastise the team, they've given me an excellent opportunity and put a lot of trust in a young driver from a country without any history in F1, from a pretty new series as well. I don't have to be here, I am here because the team decided to trust me and the money I bring is a big part of that, so I can't afford to be arrogant. I did want to see this team succeed and I wanted to be a part of this team's future though, so I outlined what I wanted from the team and hoped the reaction wouldn't be too harsh. I felt myself sinking into the seat as my little speech was followed by a moment of silence in the debriefing room, making me think I overstepped a boundary.
"Tamara's right. I was running in the points when I had my issue and she had excellent pace this weekend, we could have had a really good weekend and built-up a buffer to the teams behind, maybe even closed up towards Renault if we had a really good race." Tommy eventually spoke up, taking my side and pointing out the opportunity we squandered here. Koskinen was a pretty young driver himself, he only debuted last year - hell, I watched his debut race from the paddock at Sakhir - but he was the lead driver of the team and the son of a world champion, so he had more respect and leverage with the team that I did. I felt a lot safer about what I said now that the Finnish driver came out in support of my comments. The funny, reductive answer is that they couldn't fire the both of us, but the more real answer is that, as I said, Tommy is the driver Williams have bet their future on, their lead driver connected to one of their very first F1 champions. I'm sure that, on some level, Frank Williams dreams of Tommy one day winning the championship with Williams and mirroring his father's success, so what he says is going to carry more weight than whatever nonsense is coming out of the mouth of their teenage female paydriver. I didn't want to be thought of that way, but I needed to be aware of what the perception of me was at this time.
"Alright, we'll keep that in mind. I'll talk to the boys back in Grove and we'll do everything in our power to make sure this doesn't happen again." Michael Coronet accepted. Now, I'm sure that the team was already working hard to make sure we had reliability as well as performance, Williams understood what was needed to win a championship more than most teams, but I hope these comments go some way towards making sure the team does everything we can to avoid another failure. There will always be reliability issues in Formula One, some of that is unavoidable - an engine or gearbox will only ever be able to do so many miles at such a high level of performance - but we need to minimize it so as to prioritize consistency. We covered a few more topics, more positive ones actually, as we went over my positive race pace, and I made sure to put as much energy into saying what was good about the car as I did into asking for improvements. The last thing that I want to happen is for the team to think I'm being ungrateful or spoiled or anything like that. I scored points in Australia, I had a very good drive here in Malaysia even if I've failed to convert that into points, and I have to thank the team and my technical staff for putting me in these positions. Once that was done, the team covered the positive from Tommy's partial race, and then we were allowed to go while the team focused on packing up our equipment, ready to fly it all back to our base in England for a few weeks before flying back out again to the next race in Bahrain. As for me, I would be heading back to Monaco, to spend the time at home and prepare for the next race.
I came out of the bathroom of my hotel room in a tank top and shorts, having just showered after the race, and I laid down on the couch and put on the race, rewatching it to see what happened to everybody else. I was planning on going to sleep after this and then taking a flight back to Europe in the mourning. A lot of drivers were leaving tonight already, flying back on private jets or with the team or whatever, but I wanted to sleep in an actual bed after the race. I laid my head down on a pillow and was about to watch the start when my cell phone rang. I groaned, hoping I was going to be able to relax tonight, but knew I had to check who it was - it could be someone from the team, maybe even Michael or God forbid Sir Frank himself - so I had to get up and check. I reached over to the coffee table in front of me, pulled the phone over to me, and actually cheered up when I saw who was calling me: Natasha.
"Ms. Tsirinskaya," I greeted with a smirk, sitting up on the couch as I talked to my cousin over the phone. Well, maybe cousin is a bit of an oversimplification, Natasha Tsirinskaya was an ethnic Russian from central Asia like me, born in what is both Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan in 1990. The seventeen year old's family moved to Nice, France after the fall of the Union, not far from Monaco. That's how Natasha and I got to know each other, especially once she expressed an interesting in racing as well. Since then, she's been like my little sister and her family moved into Monaco itself. I consider her parents my aunt and uncle, and she feels the same way about my father, that makes us family, even if there really is no blood relation between us. Tsirinskaya started out racing in Italian Formula Three last weekend, finishing 5th and 10th across the two races at Adria. I hoped that this was the beginning of a fruitful junior career for her which would eventually culminate in Formula One, but it was becoming clear that she wouldn't end up in F1 at as young of an age as I did, because she still had a lot of ground from a national F3 series. When I was seventeen, I had already made it to European Formula Three and also competed in the Macau Grand Prix. Admittedly, I also had the bonus of a very strong sponsor in the form of Kazakhoil, but the point remains, my ascension to F1 was very quick and very abnormal. I can't imagine that the same thing will be true of my cousin.
"Ms. Shchegolyayeva," she greeted in turn, both of us amused by the stupid little inside joke. Anyway, Natasha asked me about the race once things got serious "I watched the race, you were really quick! You were on camera a lot more than you were in Australia too, I got to see you moving up the field."
"That's good, but at least I scored a point in Australia. It's all that effort, going from nineteenth to nine, a top ten finish, and I'm just outside of the points. I almost would prefer if I was like eleventh or something, but as it is, I felt like I was getting teased with points." I vented to my friend, someone who had no authority over my place in F1 or politics attached to them. I didn't have to watch my speech or worry about what a media comment could result in, I could just speak my mind to her. This has been the first time since the race where I can talk about how I really feel about the race without any fear of repercussions. I'm sure Wilhelm Ziegler could be honest about how his race when in the confidential team debriefs, but I don't get that luxury, I'm not a seven-time world champion, I'm not an integral part of Scuderia Ferrari, I'm a second driver whose ascension to Formula One was greatly accelerated by sponsorship money. I don't get to be completely honest and unfiltered with the team, at least not until I proved myself and maybe got a contract extension with the team, but not for right now.
Speaking of my contractual situation, it's a bit complicated. Basically, the relevant elements are that Kazakhoil - and the Kazakhgaz division as well - have a two-year deal with Williams, I have what we're going to call a one plus one deal, and Williams has the right to review my performance after my first season. The more complicated fact of the matter is that I am guaranteed for one year, Kazakhoil pushed for both years, so the compromise was that I had this one-year deal with an optional one-year contract extension. The option was on the team's part, and I was contractually obligated to let them make a decision before I so much as approach another team. The team will exercise this option or not via a performance review at the end of my one season: the team will evaluate my performance under a number of criteria: overall, compared to my teammate Tommy, and compared to the progress our third driver, Hideki Kitagawa has made. This means that, even if I perform well, I might still be dropped if the team decides that Hideki has shown more promise as our third driver. As I have mentioned, Hideki has already spent time in the car at the Malaysia test before the race, and he'll continue spending time in the car throughout the season. Kitagawa is also a Toyota junior and he's obviously their preference as a driver. So, I'll need to do well in my own right, I'll need to match up well to Tommy Koskinen, and I'll need to make sure I look better than Kitagawa. It should be noted, the last time the two of us shared a car - in the 2005 Macau Grand Prix - I beat him, finishing fourth in the race, but Hideki finished just behind me in fifth, so the gap wasn't all that big, and Hideki may have improved as a driver since then. I think I have improved as a driver as well, but the point remains, my point of reference for Hideki is very much out of date. I can't say for sure where I am relative to him now, I can only hope I'm still faster. The point is, if everything goes well, my contract allows me to stay at Williams until the end of the 2008 season, but, if something goes wrong, I could be out of a drive for 2008 and not even have the chance to negotiate with any other team.
Realistically, every worthwhile F1 seat for the 2008 season is going to be negotiated before the end of the 2007 season. Maybe, if there is some unexpected change, the talks could spill over into the off-season, but by the beginning of the new year, the only seats I could expect to be free are maybe a seat at Spyker or Super Aguri or something, nothing particularly desirable or all that competitive. Now, Williams doesn't particularly feel like rushing because they have me under contract with that first negotiation clause - a compromise I needed to make in order to have a chance at a two-year deal - and, if they don't go with me, they also have Hideki Kitagawa under contract. Williams could be making this decision in March 2008 for all they care, but, if they choose Hideki, I'm not going to have a chance to negotiate for a seat, let alone get one. Now, my job is to make sure it doesn't come to that by performing well enough that the team has no choice but to choose me, making sure I'm safe through the 2008 season. The good side of all that is that, if the team chooses to keep me through 2008, presumably they'll be likely to keep me on for 2009 as well. So long as I can keep this level of performance up, why wouldn't I still be good enough in 2009? There is room for shock circumstances, such as a dip in performance on my part or a high-level driver suddenly becoming available and showing interest, but, in general, I believe that if I can survive that post-season performance review, I can be relatively secure in Formula One and in Williams, at least for a time. It's too early to speculate though, for now, I have a phone call to focus on.
"Oh, come on, don't be like that. You did well, you gained ten places, enjoy yourself!" Natasha responded, pointed out all the progress I made in the race. I suppose I did gain places, mostly on pit strategy but I was quick on track, and I made actual overtakes as well. It was an impressive drive, even if it didn't amount to much. I guess it would be worse if I hadn't scored points a race before, because if I was trying to gain my first points of the season, did all that, and still ended up just outside of the points, I would feel rather upset with myself. Instead, now I followed up by 8th place points paying position with a 9th place, establishing a pattern of consistency that should put me at the edge of the points for the rest of my season. I guess that, if I could keep this up, it was probably better to have an average finishing position of ninth than occasionally having a glorious drive but, usually, ending the race in the middle of nowhere. An average of ninth, meanwhile, means I'll finish eighth fairly often, sometimes higher, retire a handful of times but not enough to really pull down the average, and altogether have a rather good rookie season. I have to want more because I'm a competitive racing driver, but I also can't be upset with what is still finishing in the top ten of a grid of twenty-two.
"Maybe you're right." I admitted, sighing and laying back down to the couch, still lazily using one hand to hold my cell phone against my ear. I was still half-paying attention to the race as I continued to talk to my cousin. I was getting tired now, my neck ached, and my arms felt limp - the adrenaline was gone and, now that I was basically accepting the result, my energy was fading. The effect of pushing the car through the fifteen corners of the Sepang International Circuit fifty-six times was catching up with me. I might need to finish the race tomorrow, because, at the rate I was going, I might go to sleep as soon as this phone call was over. I did want to hear about one thing though "How's dad?"
"He's good. I think he watched the race live, he seemed pretty satisfied when I saw him." Natasha answered, speaking about my father, her effective uncle. My father was with me in Australia, but he had his own business ventures and investments - the very things that allowed him to finance my racing career before I partnered with my Kazakhoil sponsors - so he's too busy to attend every race in person. I do know that he promised to at least try and watch every race he could, and he also acts as my agent, so he was certainly involved in my F1 career, even if he couldn't be present for all of it. I'll probably call him in the morning to let him know how the race went and that I was flying back home.
"That's good. I think I'm going to go to bed though, the race is catching up with me." I sighed, closing my eyes for a moment, but not letting them stay closed - the last think my neck needed right now was to sleep on the couch when a perfectly good bed was available about ten feet away from me. I'm sure Natasha would've kept talking to me on the phone if she could, but I'm also sure that she knows what I must be feeling like right now. The great thing about Natasha is that she understands me on a level that nobody else really does - she has almost the same background, she's almost the same age, and she's a racing driver in her own right - she knows why I'm upset, and she knows why I'm getting really tired rather suddenly. The reductive mockery of racing is that it's just driving in circles, but the people that say that don't understand what it's like to hold a car flat-out through a 5G corner as five times the force of gravity pushes against your arms, your body, and your neck, or the feeling of having to catch the car through snap oversteer and the reaction times involved in that, or even just the forces your body takes in a 120 mile per hour crash.
"Alright, love you." she finished off the call from all the way in Monaco.
"Love you too Nat." I responded from a hotel somewhere near Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia.
"Ciao Tamara!" a Ferrari mechanic walking with another member of his team waved as we were both exiting the hotel the next morning. I was well rested and refreshed, wearing a pair of comfortable cotton shorts for the flight and a comfy zip-up jacket over my tank top. The jacket was light enough that it didn't really bother me, not even in the muggy heat of a Kuala Lumpur morning, but also warm enough that I wouldn't be cold during the air-conditioned flight home. I was also wearing sunglasses and a simple cap - nothing team related though, that made it too easy to get recognized at the airport, and I was hoping to get through there as quickly as I could. I waved back at the Ferrari mechanics - I guess they didn't mind wearing team gear, though knowing Ferrari, they're probably heading to their own plane anyway - and then hopped into the car the team sent to pick me up from the hotel. I had a number of options on how I could've returned home: most of the team left yesterday on a charted flight to the UK, which takes a few countries out of my way. I could've left yesterday on Johannes Koskinen's private jet with Tommy, but I would've felt awkward doing that, I don't know Tommy all that well and it would have felt like imposing if I asked to fly with him, especially because it's his father's plane. Maybe if Tommy asked me directly if I wanted to fly with them, it would be a different story, but I feel like it would be presumptuous for me to ask. That leaves me with the third option, the one I've taken: first class on a commercial flight. This is the one I'm most used to from the GP2 days, and it's also the one that allowed me to sleep in before flying out this morning, finally, it's not exactly super rare for F1 drivers to fly commercial from a flyaway race. A private jet all the way from Malaysia to Europe isn't cheap.
So, here I was, preparing for the 22-hour flight home. Maybe sleeping on the plane wasn't that bad of an idea after all, but I guess it is what it is. The flight from Australia was actually a bit longer than this, so I guess it's just the consequences of racing across the world: not every place is close to Monaco. Oh well, Bahrain is quite a bit closer and then, after that, I get a few races in Europe, a brief detour to North America, then the rest of the European season before finishing off the calendar with flyaway races at Fuji in Japan, Shanghai in China, and Sao Paulo in Brazil. The season was getting more and more international, with plans to increase the number of F1 races in Asia in the near future, as well as occasional rumblings about various countries wishing to host F1 for the first time. If they were going to ask me though, two events are sorely missing on the F1 calendar: a Grand Prix of South Africa and an Argentine Grand Prix. South Africa had a long history with F1 at Kyalami but there hasn't been a race in South Africa - or on that continent at all really - since 1993, and that's just not right. As for Argentina, it's the home of the five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio, and it too hosted a Grand Prix up until 1998. The way I see it, if North America has two Grand Prix, then South America deserves two as well. These are just the examples I view as most likely, but really, I would be in favor of any attempts to finally introduce a race in Africa or a second Grand Prix in South America. Formule One is a world championship: it has races in Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and just one in South America, it can do better. Arguably, it should do better. Of course, that would mean more flying for me and the other people involved in Formula One, but I think we could tolerate it so long as we got to bring this beautiful sport to more people.
For now though, I'll have to be content with F1's Asian expansion: there are plans for a new race in Singapore as early as next year, while South Korea is envisioning a Grand Prix city built around a circuit in time for the 2010 season. There are also various attempts to start an Indian Grand Prix, potentially as early as 2009, but I'm not sure if the plan is quite developed enough to launch in just two years. Right now, it's not even entirely clear if the Indian Grand Prix would be held at a street circuit or a permanent racing venue. This is a bit more on the European side of things, but there are also rumblings of a Russian Grand Prix in a similar state to the Indian Grand Prix: various sites in Moscow and Saint Petersburg have been floated going all the way back to 2001, but nothing has come to fruition quite yet. Of course, for all I know, the Indian Grand Prix will come together and be ready in time for 2009 and this Russian Grand Prix project will get off the ground. I wondered what I thought about a Russian Grand Prix as I made my way through airport security: on one hand, I would love to race in a country that speaks my language, in the country that my ancestors are from, in a country that I could have represented in F1 if I chose to, but, on the other hand, Russia's current regime is...imperfect. I suppose I can't really judge though: the Kazakh regime is a dictatorship in all but name, and here I am taking money from that regime despite not having set foot in that country since I was three years old. Kazakhoil was throwing millions of dollars at Formula One while people in Kazakhstan live in poverty. I didn't feel great about it, but what was I going to do?
I can't just say no to Kazakhoil, my seat in Formula One is down to their money. I have spent my entire life, since I was five years old and first drove a go-kart, trying to get to Formula One. I faced adversity, more often than not I was the only girl at the track and, when I wasn't, the other girl was Natasha. I saw my name butchered on almost every timing sheet on my way up through the ranks, a missing H here or there, sometimes even the C too, sometimes the spelling was something I could barely recognize. I remember being laughed at every time I made a mistake and having to work twice as hard just to be recognized. I was recognized though, eventually graduating from the karts and into the French Formula Renault 2.0 series, taking a win in my debut. I clawed through the ranks, getting into better and better machinery, leading to me racing in the Formula 3 Euro series when I was just sixteen, going on seventeen. I also ventured out of Europe for the first time in 2005, taking part in the infamous Macau Grand Prix, finishing fourth on debut. I figured I was going to have to do another campaign in Formula 3 in 2006, hoping that I wouldn't have to be against drivers as good as Anthony Harrison, Lorenzo Barbaro, and Maximilian Renner, but then, I finally got an opportunity. Kazakhoil approached me, offering me considerable funding if I would represent the country of my birth in high level motorsport. Next thing I knew, DAMS chose me as their Asian driver for the GP2 Asia series, taking the Kazakhoil funding. I now had the chance to shine in high level machinery and that, ultimately, is what got the attention of Williams. I got to test the car the 2006 car, three times in fact, and that led to Williams choosing me as their second driver for 2007. I'm in Formula One now, I've gotten to the series I've been working towards for thirteen, fourteen years, and Kazakhoil is part of that. I'm not proud of the fact that I'm taking oil money from a corrupt, autocratic regime, but Formula One is full of dirty money. Every driver will do what it takes to race at the highest level, even if it is morally questionable.
Of course, I'll never admit how I feel about this in public. In fact, I'll need to speak out in favor of Kazakhoil in public, not only that, but I think there is actually a plan to do an exhibition run in Astana in a Williams F1 car in Kazakhoil company. I believe it's going to be a 1999 Williams FW21, due to the fact that the 2000 Williams all the way up to the 2005 car are all powered by BMW, and BMW has put their support behind Sauber. The 2006 car, meanwhile, is powered by Cosworth, which admittedly isn't as much of a hurdle as BMW, but it's a very new car, very similar to the current one, and the FIA has rules about what kind of cars can be used in such exhibitions. So, I was going to be a spokeswoman from Kazakhoil and I would be showing off Formula One in Astana - which, on some level, i was still excited about, because this might be the only time that these people will get to see an F1 car in person - right in Kazakhoil's backyard. Some of the very government officials that I called autocrats will be there as well, perhaps even their President. I didn't want to think about that right now though, the showcase will come when it comes, and I'll face that when I face it. I didn't want to think about this during my flight though, the last thing I needed was twenty-two hours of depressing thoughts about my F1 career.
Natasha and I walked through a supermarket in Monaco - keeping a fridge stocked as an F1 driver was a bit of a nightmare, especially with long stretches spent away from home - I mean, on race weekends, I need to be at the race by Wednesday morning and I'll leave either Sunday night or, preferably for me, on Monday morning. That's not all though, because the winter testing season at Jerez lasted a week, the team's base was in England and so was the simulator, so I spent a lot of time up there as well, and I also had various sponsorship commitments throughout the year, such as the aforementioned Astana showcase event. So, what I ended up doing in practice though is buying a few days' worth of groceries when I was in Monaco and keeping the shelves of my apartment bare in the meantime. As for Natasha, she came along because she wanted to - I guess she's getting bored during the admittedly long gaps during the beginning of the Italian Formula 3 series. None of the series in the Formula One ladder are anywhere near as long as F1 - separate race weekends a year - so they usually compensate for that by holding two or three races a weekend, but that still only means a handful of racing weekends a year. This usually tends to vary from five to ten race weekends, in the case of Italian Formula 3, it's eight race weekends. This means sixteen races, which is a respectable amount, but she'll be waiting until June for her next race, the price of trying to string those eight weekends out from April to mid-October, I guess. So yeah, I can understand why she's bored enough to go grocery shopping with me.
"Tamara?" I turned to see Tommy Koskinen of all people, dressed in an off-white polo, white cargo shorts, tennis shoes, and black sunglasses. I suppose it shouldn't be too shocking, I mean, he lived in Monaco too, this country isn't exactly known for being big or spread out, but it is odd to see my teammate in such a mundane context. I've been thinking of Koskinen as the Williams golden boy who I needed to try my hardest to match, which I suppose has put him on somewhat of a pedestal in my mind, making him this ethereal rival character rather than, you know, an actual person who has spent most of his life within a kilometer or two of me. The point is that, while I know it's weird on my end, for me it's weird to see my personal and professional worlds meeting for the first time. Natasha and I have seen F1 drivers before, a lot of them live here after all, but it's usually just seeing them across the street or something and then whispering to each other about it, this is the first time that we have been approached by an F1 driver. Though, I guess this is also one of the first times I've been home since becoming an F1 driver, so I got plenty to get used to as well.
"Oh, hello Tommy. This is my cousin Natasha," I greeted him, trying not to seem awkward despite the fact that, quite frankly, I hadn't been expecting this encounter. I also took the liberty to introduce Natasha to my teammate. The blond and the blonde shook hands, exchanging pleasantries, while I internally composed myself and remembered something I've been meaning to say to the Finn since the debrief after Malaysia "You know, I've been meaning to thank you for standing up for me at the team briefing. I felt really awkward when the team just looked at me silently, then you spoke up and I think things got better."
"I mean, you raised a good point. We both had issues and it was only the second race of the season, you were fully within your rights to ask the team to work harder on the reliability. I think the team just wasn't expecting that out of you so early in the season. I doubt Michael or anyone else is going to be mad at you, and maybe what you said will have an effect by the end of the season." Tommy replied, smiling a bit sheepishly and making it seem like it wasn't a big deal at all. Maybe to Tommy it wasn't, but, I don't know, I felt like the team wasn't receptive to my comment at all and things only turned in a more positive direction once the team's number one driver spoke up. I'm not suggesting that this is a gender thing, at least not entirely, I'm going to give the team the benefit of the doubt and assume it's more about me being the young and inexperienced pay driver, new to the team, and seemingly trying to make demands. I guess that, with bringing up the 2008 regulations, I was telling the team what they already knew and maybe that came across as talking down to them, but it certainly wasn't my intention, quite the opposite in fact. What I was trying to do is justify myself, because I didn't feel comfortable making the comment.
"Well, thanks anyway. Listen, Nat and I need to finish shopping, but when we're done here, we can continue this conversation if you'd like." I offered, extending an olive branch over to my teammate. A purely platonic olive branch, I must add. I had no interest in Tommy or any other F1 driver, at least not in that way. I did want to be friends with my teammate though, he was contracted for multiple years at Williams and I wanted to be at this time for the long haul as well, so it would suit the both of us if we had a good relationship, as the last thing Williams needed while trying to rebuild was petty rivalries between the drivers. Driver rivalries denied Williams the 1986 driver's world championship after their drivers had dominated all season long, and rivalries continued into the early 1990s as big names like Piquet, Mansell, Prost, and Senna all clashed over what was, at the time, one of the very top seats in Formula One. Sir Frank Williams doesn't need that stress again, especially when we're supposed to be the ones rebuilding the team: the idea was that Tommy brings the speed and I bring the funding, though obviously, I wanted to be more than just the money. In any case, we finished our groceries and then headed out. Tommy stood on the other side of the street, against the barrier, looking out at the city and harbor below.
Monaco was basically a series of neighborhoods wedged into a hilly bit of the Cote d'Azur. The heart of the city was Monte Carlo, with its harbor and the casino, both of which feature prominently in the Monaco Grand Prix. The race, crown jewel of the Formula One calendar, is coming up at the end of May, not too many races from now, but the point is that the race goes through the heart of the country and is somewhat of a greatest hits of Monaco, hitting so many of the greatest landmarks. Though, at the same time, a lot of these places are landmarks because of the Monaco Grand Prix, such as the Lowes Hairpin, one of the most famous corners in F1, due to being so unique and so tight, as well as being home to an iconic TV shot, especially on the first lap. I'm sure every single F1 fan has seen the cars go through that section of track, entering the frame up in Mirabeau, coming down to the hairpin, negotiating the tightest corner in F1, and then heading down hill through turn seven, going out of frame as they set up for the tunnel section. I remember as a child, I would watch the first lap on TV, seeing all the colorful cars and famous drivers go through that section of track, then as they neared Rascasse at the end of the lap, I'd run to the balcony to see if I could catch a glimpse of the cars from all the way up here. I would actually get to start attending the race once I got older, and even raced at various support races on my way up to F1. The Monaco Grand Prix itself, though, would only come in May.
"What is it like to race here, in an F1 car?" I asked Tommy as my cousin and I joined him in overlooking the race track.
"Oh, it's unbelievable. There's nothing on the calendar quite like it, you just have all the power in the world on this very tight track and there's twenty-one other driver who want a result just as much as you do. It takes everything to keep from crashing when you're going at speed through Tabac and the swimming pool section. You're going to love it and you're going to hate it at the same time." Tommy's eyes lit up as he explained the track. It was F1's signature event, it was somewhat of a home race for the Finnish driver, and it was a race his father had famously won in 1983, all the more reason for the young cosmopolitan driver to love this race. If Tommy managed to win this race, which I'm sure he dreams of - we all do - then he and Johannes would be the first ever father-son duo to win the Monaco Grand Prix.
"I'm looking forward to racing there." I responded, not sure how else I could respond to such a passionate description.
"So am I," Natasha said with a smirk, the Kyrgyzstani-born woman making no secret of her ambitions to eventually join me in F1. She might not do it as a teenager - me being here at this age is rare enough as it is, because I apparently now hold the record for the youngest driver to be a part of a Grand Prix weekend - but she intends to do it sooner rather than later, and I fully support her efforts.
"Oh, you're a driver too?" Tommy asked, not knowing Natasha Tsirinskaya.
"Yup, Italian Formula Three." she responded, still smirking, still proud of her racing career. Natasha is still at the stage of her career where F1 drivers are still kind of heroes to her, expecting me because she's known me long enough that she still sees me as family rather than as an F1 driver - so she's thrilled at getting to talk shop with someone at such a high level. I'm sure she'll be telling everyone at her school about this discussion she's had with her prestigious colleague.
"Nice, nice. I hope you do well." Tommy said it. I admitted it sounded a bit generic, but I got the impression that there was a level of sincerity to it, like Tommy really did want Natasha to do well even though he barely knows her. Tommy did know me though, and apparently, he did seem set on trying to get to know his teammate even better, based on what he said next "How are you planning on getting to Bahrain though?"
"I figured I was going to catch a commercial flight to Grove a few days early, do some simulator work, and then leave for Bahrain with the team." I explained, doing essentially the same thing that I did before Australia and Malaysia - flying to the team's base in England, preparing for the race there, and then getting to the race itself via the team's chartered flights.
"Ah okay, though if you change your mind, you're always free to fly with my father and I. We have a full plane and plenty of unused seats." Tommy offered. I did say I would consider it if he ever made it clear he was open to the idea, so I did think about it: on one hand, it would get me to the race, and I'd get to spend the flight in company with my teammate and an F1 world champion rather than sitting alone on a commercial flight like I did coming back from Sepang. On the other hand - and I'm not suggesting anything about Johannes or Tommy specifically here - I don't want to be the only woman on a plane full of men. Again, I'm not suggesting either of them would try anything, everything I've seen suggests that they're both good people, but it's just a matter of comfort. I'm not sure if I want to put myself into a ten-foot wide tube with two men that I've only really interacted with for about two months since preseason testing.
"Thanks for the offer, I'll text you letting you know, okay? Alright, goodbye Tommy!" I thanked Tommy, promised to respond to his suggestion, and waved goodbye as Natasha and I headed home, groceries checked off the list and another thing for me to think about in the lead-up to the Bahrain Grand Prix. The season had begun down under, in the streets of Albert Park in Melbourne for the Australian Grand Prix, then we hit Asia for the Malaysian Grand Prix, racing under the iconic canopy grandstands and the ever-present Petronas sponsor stickers at the Sepang International Circuit. Now, it was time for round three in the deserts of Bahrain. I had raced at Sakhir in GP2 Asia, and I had been there to witness a double-points finish for Williams, now I was going to try and be a part of a repeat performance.
The white, silver, and blue Bombardier jet sat in the aviation parking section at Nice Cote d'Azur airport. The Mediterranean sun shined down on us as the airport literally jutted out into the sea, right on the coast of Nice, taking a position of prominence on the Cote d'Azur, hence the airport's name. It was also the closest major airport to Monaco, hence, F1 drivers were no strangers to this airport, nor were their private jets. The jet could hold nineteen passengers, but we would be well below capacity for this flight - Tommy and Johannes were going, while I was bringing Natasha as my guest, plus I invited an old friend, Giorgio, to come with us. Giorgio had been my driving coach years ago when I was in Formula 3, and I've stayed in touch with him since. Giorgio also worked with Nat in the past in Formula Renault 2.0 Alps. Giorgio also conveniently solved the problem of Nat and I feeling a bit awkward being the only women on this plane, since he was somebody that both of us knew we could trust. That unfortunate matter of personal security aside, I also wanted to bring Giorgio out for a race sooner rather than later, because i wanted him to see me race in Formula One. This flight with the Koskinens gave me the opportunity to do so.
"...well, we'll see how it goes. Trident is a new team but they're hiring good people. I also want to finally work for a team in Italy, so yeah, I think it would be happy even if the results we're all that good." Giorgio explained to Natasha, explaining that he was applying for a job at Trident Racing, a GP2 team that had formed in 2006 and was rapidly expanding into new categories, such as GP2 Asia and International Formula Masters, the latter of which was supposed to be somewhat of a rival to Formula 3 Euro series, but I didn't know too much about it. In any case, Giorgio wanted to get involved in the team and had recently sent an application, something which my cousin found rather interesting, since he seemed pretty well established in his current position. I did wish him well though.
"Hey, you made it!" Tommy called out, walking down the ramp of his plane. He was wearing a white T-shirt with a small, black puma logo on the right breast, gray sweatpants, and black flip-flops with socks. It wasn't exactly the high fashion idea of an F1 driver, but I guess it was a comfortable way to dress as we flew first to Grove and then, in a few days, to Bahrain. We were about to spend a lot of time on a jet and, this far away from any official engagements or cameras, there was no reason to dress for anything other than comfort. Tommy pointed out where we should take our bags and then let us board the plane, taking a moment to talk to the pilot as we settled in. Johannes Koskinen, older, blonder, and wearing a goatee, was already reclining in his seat wearing sunglasses, a polo shirt, sweatpants, and slippers. I thought that the 1982 world champion was asleep, but he greeted us too.
"Eh, hello, hello. Welcome to the Koskinen Express." Johannes laughed as he gestured around the plane, maybe being just a bit drunk - he did have an empty glass with some ice on the tray next to his chair - but I guess different people had different ways to cope with flying. I can't imagine the planes flying from Finland to South Africa back then were particularly new or high quality, and after some of the bad F1 accidents, maybe a turbulent flight is a lot to deal with. The 80s, particularly the mid-80s when engines were making 1000 horsepower in qualifying trim and aerodynamics were no more than a few shaped slabs of carbon fiber, were crazy. The cars got super fast, and the circuits still were very dangerous, which would lead to tragedies, even going into the 1990s. F1 cars now are technical and aerodynamic marvels, but the most impressive thing about them is how safe they are compared to the cars of the past. The 1980s came after some big waves in terms of safety sure, but it was still an incredibly dangerous era. Guys like Koskinen, who won championships in that era, they really were risking their lives every time that they got in the car, and it must have left a mental effect on them, even now.
"Hello Johannes, a pleasure to see you again." I greeted, having already met the champion at the track as he often appeared in the paddock or the garage with the team, both in support of his son and as acting as somewhat of an advisor to the team. For better or worse, Koskinen is one of the few drivers form that era to leave Williams without having burned bridges with the team. Sir Frank was always looking for the best drivers and anything that could give him a competitive edge, that meant that a lot of egos got hurt and a lot of drivers were left without contract, many of whom didn't take it well. Koskinen is an exception to that rule, and that's why he's one of the few classic Williams drivers who is still associated with the team today. I'm sure the fact that his son now drives for Williams has a lot to do with it as well, I just don't think that it is the whole story. I think there is always a certain connection drivers have towards two teams in particular in F1: the team that they debut with and the team that they take their first win with. For some drivers, that's the same team - I imagine that will be the case for Anthony Harrison - but for others, these are different teams. There are also potentially two other categories: the team with which that driver takes their first championship, and Ferrari. These unique milestones are something that drivers never forget, while many would argue that getting to drive for Ferrari in itself is a milestone on par with wins or even championships. I suppose it makes sense, kids grow up wanting to take wins, championships, and, often enough, wanting to race for Ferrari.
"Good to see you, Tamara. I assume this is Natasha and this is Giorgio? Well, good to meet you." Johannes replied before pointing to my cousin and my former mentor, identifying them correctly. In any case, a few minutes of greetings and putting away bags later, Tommy came back out into the cabin.
"Alright, everyone, take your seats, the engines are firing up and we're going to get to taxi in just a few minutes. We'll be off to Grove before you know it." Tommy replied, so, we took our seats - Natasha and I took seats in the big captain's chairs facing Tommy and Johannes, while Giorgio took a seat in the chair on the opposite side of the cabin and laid back, setting the seat to recline as much as possible. The Italian laughed before complimenting the champion on his plane, something with the elder Koskinen clearly took a lot of pride in. My father has money, cars, and investments, yes, but he doesn't quite have private jet money. Sure, Kazakhoil provides me with a lot of funding, but the great majority of that money is going to the team. In terms of what I actually make, I'm only really making a little over $200,000 a year. Perhaps it is wrong to say only when I am making that much money, especially when that money is coming for a country with a per capita GDP as low as Kazakhstan's, but, in the context of F1 drivers, it is not very much money at all. I'm well aware of the fact that I am making a lot of money to the average person, but not so much in the world of private jets and racecars. In any case, I would have plenty of time to think about the cost of all this as we leave the sunny Mediterranean shore and fly for cheery England.
"A question for Tamara." I tried to not react too much as someone suddenly had a question for me at the Thursday driver's press conference here in Bahrain. The press just spent several minutes asking Hamalainen, Harrison, and Alvarez - the three drivers sitting in the front row - and the championship battle and where the McLarens and the Ferraris stack up next to each other, leaving me and Piotr Kaminski in the second row without much to talk about. I didn't mind that, having spent the last few days flying with the Koskinens and doing simulator laps back at Grove, but it seems my respite had come to an end. I wasn't even entirely sure why I was picked to be one of the five drivers at this presser, reckoning that it was just about making sure they cover each driver at least once in the season. Natasha had a more positive few, arguing that it was because I had a really good, strong first two races. In any case, the question as I got it, had little to do with my performances so far "As an outsider from the title battle, can you give your opinion on how the Mercedes-Benz engine in the McLaren compares to Ferrari's power?"
"Well, it's a difficult question really. It's not like I have experience with either the Mercedes or the Ferrari engines, my car has a Toyota engine and the only other V8 I've driven is a 2006 Cosworth engine. I can look at the lap-times, but, first of all, so can everyone else, and second of all, it's not like the time reveals everything. I mean, it's not like the McLaren is a carbon copy of the Ferrari, they have different data, different people, and that means the cars are very different. So, the times don't really tell us everything about the engines. All I know is that, when I go back and watch the race, it's very fun to see the McLarens and the Ferraris so close together. It's shaping up to be a very good fight and I think we can all enjoy that." I answered, explaining why I would, quite frankly, have no idea how to answer that question, but also trying to have a positive message about Formula One and the title fight in 2007.
"If you could choose, would you run a Ferrari or a Mercedes engine?" the same reporter asked a follow-up question, trying to get me to indirectly answer his question after all. The reporter seems to be trying to cook up a story about one engine being better than the other in a season where, so far, Ferrari has won one race and McLaren has won the other, but McLaren seems to have had the edge overall. Now, without the direct context of the championship battle, he wanted to see if he could get me to say that one was better than the other via asking about preference. I, of course, couldn't do that.
"I think if I was given the freedom to choose any engine in F1, I would choose the Toyota engine because they've been really good partners to us this season." I responded, avoiding making a statement about this question at all and making sure to say something positive about Toyota. The fact that I was even being asked this could be seen as a slight against the Toyota unit, implying it wasn't even worth considering in the best engine's conversation - and, honestly, our engines weren't as good as the championship protagonists, but that's now what our sponsors and partners wanted to hear - so I made my preference for Toyota clear. The questions then moved away from me again, with an English reporter asking Kaminski if he thinks that BMW's upgrade package for Spain, the next race, can bring them closer to the Ferraris and the McLarens ahead. A lot of teams are bringing upgrades to Spain as it is the start of the European season and, therefore, close to home for most F1 teams.
"I uhh...I think the car this year is very good, and we made some progress from last year, which is very good. I was very happy when BMW gave me a chance last year, I was the first Polish driver in F1, and I managed to score a podium in Monza. I hope we can continue this success this year. Victor has already scored some good results, I've had some issues so far, but, hopefully my boys and I can start with the points this race." Kaminski answered, the Pole revealing how he felt about BMW Sauber and where that team was relative to the front runners. The team has already jumped up to third, ahead of last year's constructors' champions, Renault, so that is already a great leap for a team that was, just a few years ago, a privateer backmarker running year old rebadged Ferrari engines. Though I do have to say, even when the team was just Sauber-Petronas, they did punch above their weight, scoring very good results, and known for being the first team for some very good drivers, such as Matti Hamalainen and Henrique de Matteo, who now form the Ferrari driver line-up. All of that is to say that BMW Sauber is maybe not all that surprising, as the near infinite resources of BMW which propelled Williams to fighting for titles in the early 2000s combined with a team that consistently made itself known. Just to illustrate how successful Sauber was for a small team a few years ago, they had Red Bull and Petronas as title sponsors, the former now runs two of their own teams in F1, the latter of which is still the fuel partner of BMW Sauber and provides the team with a generous amount of funding. I guess we'll see how BMW does when the Bahrain Grand Prix gets underway.
"Alright, Tamara, the time to beat is a 1.33.2, but a lot of cars are out for their final lap, so give it your all and we'll see where it all shakes out." Peter Malmedy explained, telling me what the current 10th place time was. We were getting up to the end of Q2 and I was trying to break into Q3 for the first time in my young F1 career, wishing to take advantage of the fact that, this weekend, I've been very competitive with Tommy Koskinen thus far. So, I weaved down the back-straight at the Sakhir International Circuit, getting some more heat into the soft tyres. The car was light on fuel, we had the soft, option tyres on the car, and these were going to be the fastest laps of the race weekend, since those who got into Q3 had to do their laps on race fuel. I braked for turn fourteen and then shot through the final kink at turn fifteen to blast down the start-finish straight, heading down for turn one: Ziegler.
The first corner of the track was named for the seven-time world champion, and it was somewhat of a hairpin, but a fast one. I braked hard for the hairpin and turned the car around but sped up because the exit of turn one was very wide and open, meant to keep the racing going into turn two, not that any of that mattered here in qualifying. I hit the apex of turn two flat-out, hitting the left hander and then riding out onto the outside kerb. I brought the car back onto track in time for turn three, which was basically just the slightest bit of a kink as we were once again on a long straight, barreling down towards turn four as I brought the car up to seventh gear, letting the 2.4L V8 engine roar at 19,000 revs as I unleashed its full power here in the Middle East. All that power and all those revs went out the window in turn four though, because I had to brake, downshift, and through the car into turn four. The radius was tight but there was a good amount of space, keeping the speed up as I rode the kerbs and even some tarmac, as this was where the endurance layout diverged from the Grand Prix circuit. I kept going down the hill though.
Turn five was the slightest bit of a kink but I had to lift through turn six and even brake a bit going into turn seven, as I set the car up for the lowest part of the track: the turn eight hairpin. This was one of the hardest braking zones of the track and the corner was graded in such a way that the ideal line was pretty far away from the apex, riding out a wide line and setting up on the outside kerb to ride back up the hill. I couldn't stay on the outside for too long though, because I needed to be on the other side of the track in time for turns nine and ten. In theory, turn nine is a bit of a nothing corner, but, in practice, it is so close to the hairpin of turn ten that many cars treat the two as one long corner, starting to brake in turn nine and then trying to keep as much speed as possible through turn ten, riding out onto the outside kerbs yet again, but being careful not to take too much kerbing, as that could compromise my exit onto the infield straight. I negotiated the corner rather well though, and opened up the taps heading down the straight, about to enter my favorite section of the track: the run up the hill.
Turn eleven was another braking zone, but not as heavy as the ones at turn eight or ten, slowing the car down and hitting a bit of a depression in the circuit, one that only made the hill seem bigger. I sped up on the exit of eleven and went from the outside of eleven to the inside of turn twelve, lifting just a bit and downshifting as I tried to keep as much speed up through this section of track, but also making sure that I didn't go off and ruin my lap, since the track seemed to narrow here at the top of the hill. I didn't get much opportunity to speed back up, since I was downshifting and braking yet again for the deceptively tight turn thirteen. My instinct was to take the corner as fast as possible and ride the car out on the kerb and even onto the tarmac, but the FIA were wise to drivers doing that, and there was a strip of gravel not very far off the kerb on the exit, so that meant drivers had to have some self-control. Not too much self-control and caution though, because the exit of turn thirteen sets you up of the back straight, so some speed was of the essence.
I felt I was having a pretty good lap, so, I headed up to the top of the hill about halfway down the straight and then spent the last half of the straight heading downhill to turn fourteen. I just had to negotiate these final two turns one last time. Turn fourteen required the braking and the downshifts, whereas the challenge of turn fifteen was getting up to speed and getting a good line without taking too much of the kerbs, since, while most kerbs on this track are very flat and pretty easy to attack, the exit kerbs of turn fifteen can catch you out at the end of a good lap. I kept pretty far away from the dangerous kerbs and climbed through the gears as I tried to accelerate as far as possible up to the line. The timing and finish line here in Bahrain was surprisingly close to the last corner, as it was at the end of the grid, compared to the start line which was about 60% of the way down the straight, making for a relatively short run down to turn one, all things considered. All of that meant that, for the frontrunners especially, the start was critical here at Sakhir. The start was a matter for tomorrow though, for now, I wanted to know if my grid position was determined or if I was one of the lucky ten who managed to advance into the Q3 shootout.
"Okay Tamara, that was a very good lap. 1.32.915, just a tenth off Tommy. It's P11 though, lots of drivers improved at the end there and Jyri Kaasalainen was just two hundredths behind us. It's very competitive here." Peter announced, giving me the good news first: I outdid the target laptime by four tenths, the problem is, our target laptime underestimate something. I don't know if we underestimated how much the track would improve in these final few minutes of Q2 or just how much speed our rivals had, the point is that we thought the team to beat was four tenths behind what it actually was. It wasn't all that bad though, I outqualified the Renault of Kaasalainen for one, and I was just behind Tommy, so I was looking good relative to my teammate. The only problem is that tenth of a second is the difference between lining up eleventh and having a chance to get another shot at making it higher up in the top ten.
The two green lights came on for the formation lap and the cars rolled off the grid for the build-up before the race. Everyone was trying to warm-up their tyres and get one last look at the track before the start of the race. Tommy had gotten into Q3 but, despite his best efforts, could only manage tenth, so he would be starting a row ahead of my and to my right, while the Toyota of Ivan Tripoli was starting directly ahead of me in ninth. A few moments later, I did my burnout and slotted back onto the grid in eleventh, Ivan and Tommy in the row ahead of me, Jyri Kaasalainen in the Renault lining up next to me, while the Super Aguri of Louis Sanderson and the second Toyota of Roland Ziegler occupying row 7 behind me. Williams had a good opportunity for double-points lining up here in 10th and 11th, so, when all five red lights went out, I was hopeful for a good race.
Tommy and I took off from the grid but Kaasalainen had a rocketing start, shooting past not only me, but Tommy as well. I didn't manage to outbrake him into turn one, but I thought about maybe trying to sweep under him in turn two and get a tow down the straight into turn four, but I didn't get the chance. James Buxton in the Honda, Lorenzo Barbaro in the Spyker, and Giuseppino Leone in the Toro Rosso was enough to bring out the safety car, effectively neutralizing the race for the next few laps. It did give me the chance to conserve my tyres for a little while, so maybe later in the race, I could extend a stint and maybe use that to get the overcut on some of the drivers ahead of me. Obviously, they would all be trying the same thing, but it was worth a shot anyway.
On the safety car restart, all of us were waiting to see when Matteo would get going, as the safety car had returned to the pitlane and the race leader could restart the race at any point between now and the start finish line, the only question was, when was he going to start? Well, I went to go warm-up my tyres again, weaving out of line, hoping that warm tyres would give me the edge over Tommy ahead. That was, unfortunately, the exact moment that Henrique de Matteo decided to hit it, so the cars ahead of me got the launch on me and I was struggling to catch up while, at the same time, Daniel MacGowan, who had secured a few places back after the first lap carnage, was trying to overtake me in his Red Bull. I was powerless to stop him from overtaking me into turn one and was left with no choice but to tuck in behind him and hope that I could come back at him later in the race. So far though, it wasn't the best of starts, as I had already fallen from eleventh to thirteenth. Not exactly what I wanted to happen on a track I actually thought was pretty good for a modern, Middle Eastern venue, after a good qualifying.
I did get two bits of good fortune later in the race though: first of all, when MacGowan caught up to Koskinen, he forced the Finn off track and that gave me the opportunity to slip ahead of my teammate. Then, later on in the race, after both me and Tommy had stopped, both Red Bulls were hit with technical issues in rapid succession. Daniel MacGowan retired on lap 36, the Scotsman's driveshaft having failed, and, just a few minutes later on lap forty-one, Martin Weaver's gearbox failed. Weaver had started eighth - a points paying position already - and MacGowan was having a rapid rise up from 21rst on the grid, so seeing them both retire was a lifeline for us. It still wasn't enough to change course of the race though, because, on lap 57, I crossed the line tenth and Tommy crossed the line eleventh. For all the promise of the start, we finished in the exact positions we started, with the only caveat that we were the other way around this time. Our pace relative to the front runners was also concerning, as race winner Henrique de Matteo was just a few seconds behind us on track, meaning we were both on the verge of being lapped.
The points-paying results of the 2007 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix went as follows:
1: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
4: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
5: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber.
7: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota.
8: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Renault.
So, McLaren finished 2nd and 3rd in Australia then led a 1-2 in Malaysia, but here in Bahrain, Ferrari bounced back with a double podium. They couldn't stop Anthony Harrison from getting his third podium in a row. Not all was good for McLaren though, because a struggling reigning champion Felipe Alvarez couldn't keep Victor Hartmann from finishing fourth yet again. Kaminski, true to his word, did finally score points in 2007, while Tripoli's second consecutive 7th place made sure Toyota was now on four points, having taken fifth from us by one point. Petronelli scored on a weekend where Renault were on the edge of the top ten, making sure that they, too, were out of reach. Not the best weekend for us I had to admit, but we had some upgrades coming in Spain. So, off to Spain and Monaco for the first leg of the European season.
Notes:
So umm, this story is surprisingly easy for me to write.
Chapter 3: The Jewel in the Crown
Notes:
Hello everyone! Here is chapter three. This one will cover the Spanish and Monaco Grand Prix.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter III.
The Jewel in the Crown.
I was flying with the Koskinens yet again as we flew from Grove to Barcelona for the Spanish Grand Prix. I had just used the bathroom - lavatory, as aviation people call it for whatever reason - and was about to reenter the main cabin when I head Johannes talking about me to Natasha and Giorgio. Tommy, meanwhile, was reclined back in his chair fast asleep, taking the opportunity to rest before we land in Barcelona and have to conduct an in-season test before racing in the Grand Prix the next weekend. A lot of work was ahead for us drivers here in Barcelona, as the track was famous as a testing venue to begin with and was one of the few venues experiencing a layout change for the 2007 season. The long, flowing final sector was gone, replaced with a slow chicane meant to bunch cars together and encourage overtaking. I was slightly sad I didn't get to throw an F1 car through that long right-hander that made up the famous New Holland corner. New Holland itself was still intact, but, coming out of the slow RACC chicane, the character of the corner has completely changed. I'll deal with that once I get to the track though, for now, I'll just hide back here and listen in on what the 1982 Formula One World Champion thinks of me.
"She's quick Giorgio, quicker than she realizes, I think. How did you find her?" Johannes asked Giorgio, speaking about my performance levels. I looked back on my first three races in F1: eighth in Australia got me a point, then 9th and 10th in Malaysia and Bahrain, respectively, left me just outside of the points. That is hardly the worst start to a season in F1, especially given that, right now, Williams is a midfield team, and this is, essentially, the beginning of a rebuilding plan. Last year, Williams lost their BMW factory support to Sauber, leaving us with Cosworth engines. The Cosworth V8 could rev to 20,000 RPM on the dyno, but in terms of actual on-track performance and reliability, the Cosworth engine was disappointing. Now we've entered our first year as a partner of Toyota and I think overall, our start to the season was stronger. Sure, we technically had more points at this point in 2006 thanks to a strong Bahrain race, both cars retired at both Malaysia and Australia. Right now, while both cars did have issues at Malaysia again, we have managed to get at least one car home in the top ten at every race this year. That is the beginning of the consistency we need to lay the foundation to get back up to the front where Williams belongs. That is also why reliability is important and something we should focus on, because that is the next step, at least for now. Right now it seems like we have the pace to be competitive, maybe not quite as secure as it could be, but we're in a position to fight, and now we just need to make sure that we have the reliability to actually finish the fight. The old saying goes: to finish first, you must first finish. Well, the same applies to fifth or eighth or any other points paying position. That is what sunk us with Cosworth, we can't let it sink us again, especially with Williams priding itself on our engineering and technical process. We're the team that built the FW14B after all. As for me, well, I'm just the driver, one of many cogs in the machine that makes the car go fast.
"I met her when I was with Signatech in F3. They took a chance on a young girl driver for the third car, not expecting her to be anything special, and, when I met her, I figured that she was in over her head. She seemed nervous in the paddock, like she didn't belong - who could blame her, she was sixteen, seventeen years old - and I wasn't expecting her to be a force in the series. Then she got into the car, and everything changed. She was instantly quick, she won the second race at Hockenheim, she took a podium at Pau and again at Spa and finished fourth at both of the Monaco races. She was amazing. The only rookie comparable to her was Maximilian Renner, and she got attention for it. Before I knew it, she won another race at Zandvoort and got the attention of DAMS for their GP2 Asia program, she got involved with her sponsors in Kazakhoil, and she was off to Formula One before I knew it. There was a special group of drivers in that field, guys like Anthony Harrison, Lorenzo Barbaro, and Maximilian Renner. I think that Tamara has to be counted among them." Giorgio explained, telling the story about our time together. From there, Giorgio would take a higher position in a lower series, which is how he ended up in Formula Renault Alps 2.0 in time for Natasha's career, but after years working in France, I think Giorgio wants to come back home, hence his want to take this chance with Trident. He did have a question for Koskinen though "You had a team back then, what did you think of her?"
"It was a lot like your story. I didn't think anything of her at first, Signatech was expanding to three cars, and they chose this girl to be their third driver, then she went on an amazing run at the beginning of the season. They ran into reliability issues later on, but she still came through and won at Zandvoort. I can't imagine what she would have done if she had a better car. I was losing interest in the formula racing by then though, I had gotten Tommy through Formula 3 in 2003 and 2004, then I slowly started turning my attention back towards the DTM cars. In all honesty, I found her performances more impressive than what my own drivers did in 2005." Johannes answered, speaking about Team Koskinen's final year in the Formula 3 Euro series in 2005. They had been a race winning team with Tommy in the car, but Tommy had gone to GP2 in 2005 and Johannes was left managing two midfield drivers. I could understand why he lost interest and pulled out of the series at the end of the year, but I don't understand all the praise he's throwing at me. The truth is Anthony Harrison and Lorenzo Barbaro in the ART cars were dominant that year, while Maximilian Renner in the Mucke Motorsport car beat me to the rookie championship. Renner was consistent whereas, in the middle of the season, Signatech didn't have a really reliable car and, by the time we solved the problems, the season was just about over. I never imagined back in 2005 that I would get into an F1 race seat before Renner, and I definitely didn't think that I would be in the same rookie class as Harrison. I figured Harrison would get to F1 two years ahead of me, then Renner the next year, and only then me. I suppose that is the debt I owe to Kazakhoil though, they accelerated by career and made all this possible.
"What do you think she'll be able to accomplish?" Natasha asked the two men, by younger cousin wondering what the former world champion and the experienced junior career manager thought about my potential. I was wondering too. I have talked to Giorgio about these kinds of things before, but there is a difference between what he'll say to me in person and what he really thinks. This is as real as it gets though, because they don't know I'm listening in and they know that Tommy is still asleep, the only one they might be tempering their opinions for is Natasha and this doesn't concern her directly.
"If she plays her cards right and ends up in the right team? She can fight for championships. She'll need confidence though, if she can't realize that she belongs and that she has the speed to fight, Formula One will eat her alive." Johannes answered. That was when I decided I didn't want to hear anymore and entered the cabin, pretending I had just finished up in the bathroom. Johannes greeted me with a nod as if he hadn't just been talking about me, Giorgio did as well before yawning and stretching his arms out, hiding any other reaction he may have had. I sat down next to Ms. Tsirinskaya as she seemed to stare off into nowhere, likely still processing the implications of what the 1982 champion said. I couldn't blame her, it was a shocking thing to hear. A world champion thought that I could be a world champion too. I couldn't see it right now, I couldn't even really see myself winning races in F1, but maybe that's what he means about the confidence. I don't think it's quite that simple though, I'm up against a lot more than just confidence: Williams is just beginning to rebuild and, even if we do get to a level where we can win races and even fight for championships, then, presumably, I'll be up against Tommy Koskinen. I'd like to see what Johannes would have to say about my championship hopes when it's against his son.
"You okay?" I asked Natasha, still feigning that I didn't know what they were talking about. I probably would tell her about it later, but not in front of Johannes or Giorgio, I didn't want either the Finn or the Italian to know I knew that they really thought of me. Of course, I didn't really know how I felt about all of this either: it's a huge amount of praise and pressure, but it also represents a new set of expectations I'll have to live up to as we arrive in Barcelona. The three-day test session has been divided evenly between the three of us: Hideki Kitagawa would get day one, I'd get day two, and then Tommy would test on the final day, so already an improvement for me over the last in-season test at Malaysia. Then, a week after that, comes the race weekend itself. I am going to hope to qualify better and then get into a good position on the first lap, because if Johannes Koskinen sees this, then that means other important people in F1 are starting to notice my skills: I'm going to want to score points in Spain, and I'm really going to want to have a strong showing in the next race: the Monaco Grand Prix, the jewel in F1's crown.
"...it's not just the computers either, Lenovo is a serious part of this operation and an integral technical partner. They give us support both on the track and back at Grove, they help us design the cars, and they give us the tools we need to run a Grand Prix weekend." Michael Coronet explained to the camera as the three of us sat on two couches in the Williams hospitality area, doing a blurb for our sponsors. In this case, it was Lenovo, our sidepod sponsor and computer supplier. Of course, we had to paint them as more than that for the media day, sponsors liked getting all sorts of titles and grandeur attached to them, even if they didn't really do much more than throw money at the team. Not that I'm complaining, Lenovo is one of our biggest sponsors - up there with FedEx and Kazakhoil - so they're quite literally financing our campaign to get back up to where Williams belongs. Fly Saudia, Petrobras, Philips, RBS, Scania, Bridgestone, and, of course, Toyota, are our other major partners. There are a handful of others, of course, but these are the ones that bring the bulk of the money, give us technical support, or, in a few cases, do both.
"For sure, we would not be able to run a race weekend the way we need to without Lenovo. Every time a race engineer radios us during the race, that's because our race teams are pouring over tons and tons of data that Lenovo is bringing us. Data on our car, rival cars, track conditions, weather, all sorts of stuff. We wouldn't be the F1 team we are today without them." Michael handed over the microphone to Tommy Koskinen and our lead driver said his portion of the script - the team manager was one thing, but the sponsors wanted to hear from the actual drivers that were driving the cars they sponsored as well - while I took a deep breath and prepared for my part of the script. The camera was going to be aimed at me and, right behind it, Mariana Petrova stood next to Tommy's PR manager, the two women making sure we were doing the right thing. So, the microphone was passed to me and it was my turn to finish the script.
"It doesn't end there, Lenovo compiles over a terabyte of data from each race for us to go over back at the factory. Our team combs through this data and we use it to inform our approach both later in the season, and a year from now when we'll return to this circuit. The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya has been revamped and reconfigured this year, so the data we get from Lenovo will be key for Williams F1 team for years to come." I finished the speech, closing out with a note about this race itself. I waited a moment longer, holding position, before the cameraman finally gave us the thumbs up. The shoot was done, and I could relax. I lowered the microphone and smiled sheepishly at the team, knowing how awkward I felt during the whole thing. The Spanish Grand Prix was the start of the European season, and that meant that a ton of new activity was going on now. For starters, the amount of fans and media was a lot higher - Australia was impressive as the season opener, but even they couldn't match the attention that Felipe Alvarez got in his home country - and, thusly, the demands of the sponsors were higher as well. Lenovo wanted their special piece, we filmed a bit for FedEx that will air on American television before the race, showing the logistics of transporting the cars and equipment to Barcelona in time for the test last weekend, and Kazakhoil sent some of their personnel here for the first time as the team's VIP guests. It's a lot of attention already and its nothing compared to the kind of stuff we're going to have to do before the Monaco Grand Prix.
"Alright, Tommy, you're done for the day. Tamara, there is just something I want to talk to you about really quick." Michael stood up, giving Tommy permission to return to his hotel room but wanting just one more thing from me. I got the impression that this was just going to be some quick conversation about something in the future, rather than yet another media commitment today. I got up and walked over to Frank Williams' right-hand man whilst Tommy gathered his things and headed out, and our media assistants rewatched the video the cameraman made, making sure everything came out right. Of course, the cameraman had already been watching everything as it came through, so I'm sure it was fine, but it was their job to be sure after all. In any case, Michael told me what the situation was "A reporter from Russia approached me about doing a feature about you for a magazine she writes. She wants to do an interview with you before the Monaco Grand Prix to discuss how you got to F1. She wants to focus on you being a woman and on being from a post-Soviet country, and how all of that affected your road to F1. This is the kind of thing we normally do, there hasn't really been circumstances like this before, but the choice is yours, do you want that kind of exposure?"
"I mean, I can't promise it will be a very interesting story, but I can talk to her." I answered, feeling honored that someone wanted to interview me specifically for my story, not just my performance or whatever the latest controversy in F1 was. Now, I did also feel awkward about it, due to my somewhat uncomfortable reputation with the country I represent afterwards - what do I say about Kazakhstan? Yes, I was born there but I moved out when I was three years old and spent my whole junior career racing in Europe, mostly France and Italy to be honest, before the whole Kazakhoil and GP2 Asia thing. Even then, I was living in Monaco and I was racing for a French team, so what can I really say about eastern Europe and my career then? Sure, my country and my name made me somewhat of an oddity in the racing circuit, but it wasn't like I was trying to get to F1 via some strange, regional Russian karting program. I came through the same prestigious series as everyone else in F1. In some ways, I'd argue that's more impressive, since I beat Europeans at their own game, but I'm still afraid that it won't quite be the story that this reporter hopes it is. I am also not sure what my relationship with Russia is going to be. I am a Russian, ethnically and culturally, i would say, and the country I represent borders Russia, so I could see Russians trying to adopt me as their own, what do I do about all that? Right now, I didn't have a clue.
"Don't worry Tamara, she's the journalist, you're the subject. It's her job to make it interesting." Michael said with a smirk, clearly having fun with it but I guess there is an element of truth to that. I can't help it if the honest answer isn't exactly what the journalist wants to hear, she chose to pursue an interview with me and now she needs to make that happen. I've accepted it and I will try to answer her questions in a way that is both truthful and entertaining, but, fundamentally, if the article is bad, that's more on her than it is on me. So, I had yet another media commitment before the Monaco Grand Prix, but I was somewhat excited about this one - it was certainly more interesting that reading off a script about Lenovo computers. In any case, I made my way through the rest of my media engagements before the Grand Prix - lots of interviews, lots of reading off of scripts, and lots of posing dramatically in a race suit holding a helmet beneath my arm - and, soon enough, it was time for yet another race in Formula One: The Spanish Grand Prix.
I sat in the car at the end of the reconnaissance lap, letting the team wheel the car up to my grid slot. I qualified 13th, lining up just behind Tommy Koskinen who qualified eleventh, with the Hondas on either side of me. Rudolfo Goncalves of Brazil was at the end of row six, having qualified 12th, and James Buxton of Great Britain qualified 14th, taking up the end of row seven. Umberto Petronelli was in tenth, the Super Aguris were in 15th and 18th behind us, while Daniel MacGowan in the lead Red Bull qualified ninth. Qualifying was a mixed bag for the Toyotas, with Ivan Tripoli all the way up in sixth, while Roland Ziegler will be hoping for a strong start from all the way down in 17th, lining up two rows behind us. In terms of other potential rivals, the BMW Saubers of Piotr Kaminski and Victor Hartmann were up in 5th and 7th, out of reach for us, while Jyri Kaasalainen in 8th was probably out of reach as well. Still though, on pace, we should expect Hartmann and at least one of the Renaults to be able to pass Tripoli, leaving him in eighth and vulnerable to us, so perhaps points were possible, especially if some of the guys ahead of us suffered from attrition. We qualified well, just like we did in Bahrain, but I intended for this race to go better for us: we were going to score points this time, one way or another.
The team was on three points right now, all from Australia, thanks to Tommy finishing 7th and me finishing 8th in the opening race of the season. Toyota was on four points, just ahead of us in the constructors' championship thanks to Ivan Tripoli scoring two consecutive seventh places in Malaysia and Bahrain. Red Bull has not yet scored points, while Renault was on nine points, building the beginning of a gap on us. Honda, Super Aguri, and Toro Rosso, much like Red Bull, have not yet scored. So, right now, Toyota was our focus, and Ivan Tripoli in particular, as the Italian has had the edge over his teammate thus far, but we know that Red Bull and a lot of other teams could be a potential problem for us. 2007 was an insanely tight season: Ferrari and McLaren were fighting hammer and tongs at the front of the field, BMW Sauber and Renault had the pace to score points consistently, while as many as six teams were fighting for the last few leftover scraps at the edge of the points paying positions. In any case, the car parked up in my grid slot and I got to climb out of the car for the time being, taking off my helmet and gloves and putting on my blue and white FedEx Williams hat. My team members - guys like Derrick, Daniel, Terrence, and others - got to work on the car, while Mariana walked over to me with a water bottle. Finally, I looked over at the girl dressed in white and blue standing in front of the car.
She was dressed in blue heels, a white pleated skirt with a blue edge, and a white jacket with a blue zipper and a blue Movistar logo on her right breast. She was holding a black lollipop style sign topped with a black square with the number 17 painted like the Kazakh flag. She was a grid girl, it was part of the glamor and the spectacle of Formula One, and she was one of twenty-two girls dressed the same way lined up on this grid. Now, some would consider this demeaning, to have girls in slutty little outfits on the grid of a sport where men race each other. I disagree with that idea, because, first of all, it's not like these women are being forced to be here, they are professional models who are being paid to stand on this grid, get the exposure, and represent various global brands - in this case, Movistar, a brand owned by Telefonica, who was the title sponsor for the Spanish Grand Prix. Second of all, for better or worse, at least it's getting women on the grid, as the only female driver in F1 and having twice as many points as all other women to have ever raced in this sport - long story, but in the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix, Lella Lombardi scored half a point in a rain-shortened race - I would rather have other women on the grid as eye candy than no other women at all. Finally, the pragmatic point is that sex sells: nobody dislikes the idea of seeing an attractive woman on television. What could possibly be gained by removing grid girls? There are far, far bigger obstacles to getting women into Formula One than whatever alleged stigma comes from sexualizing women in F1.
"Tamara!" I looked over my shoulder to see Katherine Symmons bringing her BBC crew over to me while she was doing the grid walk. The redhead walked over to me wearing a sundress, sunglasses, and a white sunhat - I guess her English ginger skin can't handle the Barcelona sun - not that I'm much better off with my pale, Slavic skin. In any case, she came over to ask me a quick question "You've qualified thirteenth, some might call that position unlucky, but it also puts you close up to the points paying positions if you can get a good start on that long, long, long run down to turn one. What do you think you and the Williams team can do today?"
"Well, like you said, it's a long run down to turn one and if we get good position and a draft, we can definitely gain some positions. I think we got good speed and I think it's fair to say by now that I'm stronger in the race than qualifying, so I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure that holds true and hopefully we can have a result here." I responded, trying to make it clear that I was here to fight and make a statement, but not wanting to come across as arrogant or entitled. I was trying to really stamp down my authority and prove that I belong here, not just to everyone else in the paddock, but to myself, so that meant I needed to get the results on track, conversely, that also meant that I needed to let the results do the talking for me, at least for now. That little tense moment at Malaysia in the debrief, before Tommy spoke up for me, that shows what the team thinks when I step out of line, so I still have work to do before I can truly feel secure in this seat. Scoring good results is the first step of that and it'll help me achieve the second step, which is to pass the performance evaluation coming at the end of the 2007 season which will determine whether or not Williams take up that extension for the 2008 season. That's all in the future though, for now, I have a Grand Prix to race.
I came out of New Holland weaving across the track to generate some last-minute heat in the tyres. I lined up the car on the left side of the track pointing towards my grid slot and did my last little burnout, lighting up the rears and hoping my Bridgestone tyres wouldn't cool too much as I stopped in my grid slot and waited for the rest of the grid to form up behind me. I took a deep breath, the last moment of calm before the race. Then the green flag was waved at the back of the grid and the first red light came on. This is when my stomach started feeling tense and I tried to keep from shaking: that sense of anticipation as I knew the race was about to begin and that, in just a moment, there would be no taking back my actions. No redos, no next times, no fixing the car between sessions, this was going to be it. Two lights. Three. Four. Five. Zero. The lights came off and the cars fired away towards turn one. Henrique de Matteo led from pole position once again, but the Brazilian in his Ferrari was followed closely by Felipe Alvarez in the McLaren, then Matti Hamalainen in the other Ferrari, and Anthony Harrison fourth in the second McLaren. That was well ahead of us though. I was focused on going far to the left to pass the Honda of Goncalves, since I got a better start than the Brazilian Honda driver.
I was pushed near the grass, but Goncalves knew the limits and played it firm but fair, nevertheless, by braking later into turn one, I made it past the Brazilian. I managed to keep the car together as we turned right and then accelerated as we turned left into the immediate follow-up that was turn two. Tommy was forced wide as I took the inside line and got a better exit. The grid calmed a little bit into the fast turn three, the long, nearly flat-out right hander where the correct line was crucial - taking the right line through turn three meant the difference between taking the corner damn near full throttle and going off into the gravel and losing a ton of places - fortunately, for this lap anyway, I kept my line tidy. As I went into turn four, Ivan Tripoli was directly ahead of me, Umberto Petronelli was ahead of him in the Renault, and the Red Bull of Daniel MacGowan was leading this particular group of cars. These were all cars that I could conceivably compete with, and I fully intended to. As for the situation behind me, well, as I glanced into my mirror heading downhill into the tight turn five, I saw that Tommy Koskinen was contending with the Super Aguri of Haruki Tanaka and the fast-starting Toyota of Roland Ziegler. The brother of the seven-time world champion was having an impressive start of his own.
Turn six was little more than a kink as we reached the bottom of the hill, but then turn seven started the run back up the hill. Eight was another meaningless kink, but the kerbing there was more consequential than the corner might suggest, as it makes moves into turn seven difficult to pull off. I paid that no mind though, because I had a move in mind for the La Caixa hairpin of turn ten. So, as we crested the hill and came though the very fast turn nine, I tucked in behind Tripoli and tried to set up my move. There were a few problems here though: first of all, Ivan seemed to be lining up his own move on Petronelli, forcing his countryman in the Renault towards the far inside where he'd have to take a very tight, compromised line into turn ten. At the same time, Tommy was trying to defend himself from Tanaka who got a really good tun through turn nine. So, I was going to leaving Tommy some room on the outside so he could brake deeper than the Japanese driver. The idea was that I'd make my move, Tommy would go on the outside of me, Haruki would be boxed in behind my car, and then Koskinen would tuck back in behind my car coming out of turn ten. That was all well and good, put, when we actually got to the corner, I was the one getting boxed in.
Ivan Tripoli pushed Petronelli so far inside he actually hit the inside kerb, but Umberto wasn't fazed and kept coming, rejoining the track ahead of the Toyota. Ivan Tripoli braked to avoid his fellow Italian, but, at the same time, Tommy locked his front brakes, going deeper into the corner than he probably intended. Almost on instinct, Koskinen tried to fix it and darted back onto the track from the right, meaning I couldn't go right. I couldn't go left because, quite frankly, there wasn't any track left at that point. Tripoli couldn't go forward because Petronelli cut back in right in front of him, while I couldn't go forward because of Tripoli. I got a good exit from turn ten as well, so that meant I was going pretty quickly relative to the cars around me. Problem was, I was heading pretty quickly into a space that didn't exist. I crashed into the back of the Toyota, my front right tyre riding over his rear left, crushing pieces of my front wing between them, and then my car came crashing back down to the ground. If my front right suspension hadn't been broken already, it was now. I pulled off onto the crash on the left in my ruined car while the whole grid passed me. Ivan Tripoli wasn't much better off, his left rear was punctured, either by the crash itself or by the shattered carbon from my destroyed front wing.
"Dammit, I'm sorry guys. I crashed into Tripoli in turn ten. I didn't have anywhere to go...sorry." I apologized profusely over the team radio to Peter Malmedy. I was apologizing to the whole team though, both my car's crew and the team as a whole, including Michael and Sir Frank. This was a good chance for us, I wanted to score points, and here I've gone and blown it. In Malaysia, the issue I had in qualifying was a reliability issue, whereas in Bahrain we just plain didn't have any race pace. Here though, I couldn't blame anyone but myself. Sure, the circumstances meant there wasn't exactly anything I could do, but I ruined my own race. Not only that, but I had to deal with the fact that I ruined another driver's race. Maybe on some level, a ruthless driver would think that, at least when I've retired, I've caused problems for our chief rivals over at Toyota at the same time, but I didn't want to think that way.
"Right. Stop the car near a marshal's post and turn off the engine. Don't forget to leave the steering wheel in the car. There will be a safety car for the debris on the racing line." Peter calmly explained over the radio, but I could tell in his voice that he was feeling deflated too. Not that I could blame him, it never felt good when you crashed a race car, and it never felt good for the team when their two-hour race ended on lap one. I know that these things happen in motorsport, I've been around long enough to see it, to experience it, but that didn't mean I felt any better about it. In any case, I did as instructed: I took the steering wheel out, climbed out of the car, and then placed the steering wheel back in before jumping out of the car. I got behind the barrier and watched as the marshals wheeled my car behind the barrier. A pair of marshals ran off towards turn ten to clean the debris, while I sat down next to the barrier and put my head down in my hands. It was my first F1 retirement and it was entirely my fault. Now I had to go back to the garage and face the team while the car was going to be put on a flatbed and driven back to the team for us to collect. Nobody wanted to see their multi-million-dollar racing machine on a flatbed, especially not when the race is still going on.
The medical car arrived, and I saw down in the Mercedes estate car. Only then did I take off my helmet, not exactly wanting to be seen my cameras or by fans after having just crashed out on lap one. I underwent a basic check-up in the car to find I had no concussion symptoms whatsoever - it was a low-speed crash, all things considered - it could have been worse if we crashed closer to turn eleven or back on the straight before the braking zone, but we crashed just when we were getting back up to speed after a slow corner. The cars were built to take most of the blow in cases like this, leaving the driver fine. So, once I was cleared, they dropped me off in the pitlane, one step closer to facing the team. I took a deep breath and entered the garage to find that...the situation was actually fairly calm. I suppose it helped that Tommy was still in the race and the restart was coming up, so the team had that to focus on, but even then, I could tell that my crew was more dejected than the rest of my team.
"I'm so sorry about that Peter, I couldn't have avoided it, there were cars everywhere. Even if I could've backed down in that space, I probably just would've gotten hit from behind by the Super Aguri. I threw myself into an avoidable situation and paid the risk." I started, trying to explain myself but making it clear that I was accepting responsibility as well. It was something I picked up on in school. I studied at the Lycée Albert for as long as I could, but my junior racing career got increasingly disruptive as I got older, especially when I was racing in places like Italy or Germany, so I missed out on a lot of school assignments and had plenty of Friday absences, sometimes even Monday too, and all of that came together to mean a lot of teachers weren't happy with me, even when I liked their subjects. What I always hated in school was when I was trying to explain myself and the teacher didn't let me, preferring to yell at me instead, so I learned how I could justify my actions - when they were justified anyway - in a way that wouldn't just give the teacher more ammunition to throw at me. For whatever reason, that was the image and the feeling I was facing when I returned to the garage. I suppose the English would describe the mood as being called to the headmaster's office.
"Calm down Tamara, it's okay. We'll put the car together and try again at Monaco. For now, the best thing you can do is support Tommy in his race." Peter Malmedy responded in such a way as to tell me to quit with the excuses for now and just let the team concentrate on their one remaining car in the race. I suppose that Peter did have a point, what could we do at this point? The car was out but a race was still going on, so the team was going to focus on that, while I needed to get myself ready to bounce back in Monaco. I'm sure the team would talk a little bit about what happened to me in the race, but it's not an egregious accident on my part, in no way could it be called deliberate or clumsy on my part. Maybe I took some unnecessary risks or could have made better decisions, but, ultimately, I was a victim of circumstance. There wasn't really much that could be accomplished by yelling at me. So, I went to the back of the garage to change while the rest of the team focused on Tommy's race. I did lock eyes with Sir Frank Williams on my way back to the changing area in the garage. The elder statesman of Formula One simply shut his eyes and shrugged, not having anything to tell me, which wasn't positive, but it wasn't negative either. Considering the circumstances, that was pretty damn positive to me.
I came back out in shorts, blue and white converse, and a dark blue and white Williams polo, plus the cyan Kazakhoil cap. I stood in the back of the garage and watched as retirement after retirement occurred: Martin Weaver had a hydraulics failure, ensuring Red Bull still wasn't going to have the chance to capitalize on our issues. Ivan Capelli eventually succumbed to the damage from our crash and retired a lap after Weaver. The Ferrari of Matti Hamalainen was easily the most high-profile retirements thanks to his electrical issue, but he was joined by both Toro Rossos, the other Toyota - more good luck for us I suppose - of Roland Ziegler, and finally, Victor Hartmann's points-scoring streak came to an end. All of that chaos meant that Tommy Koskinen was able to capitalize on the mistakes of others to finish 6th and take a further three points, adding to our tally for the first time since the Australian Grand Prix. So, without further ado, the points paying results went as follows:
1: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
4: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber.
5: Daniel MacGowan - Great Britain - Red Bull-Renault.
6: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota.
7: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault.
8: Haruki Tanaka - Japan - Super Aguri-Honda.
So, Henrique de Matteo took a second consecutive win, building on his good form from Bahrain, but, with his teammate retiring, McLaren now had a nine-point lead in the constructors' championship. Last time out, I praised Anthony for having three consecutive podiums, but now the American has done better, taking three consecutive second place finishes to make four podiums out of four. Felipe Alvarez can never be discounted though, and the Spaniard was just two points off of the new championship leader. A retirement meant that Hamalainen fell to fourth, while Victor Hartmann was still fifth thanks to his consistency earlier on in the season, despite likewise retiring. In terms of the top five teams in the constructors, McLaren was on top, as mentioned, with Ferrari nine points behind. BMW Sauber was a safe third with 23 points, Renault was feeling rather secure in fourth thanks to their eleven points, while Williams retook fifth place, having six points compared to the four points of Toyota. Unfortunately, though, thanks to MacGowan's great race, Red Bull was hot on our heels, occupying sixth place with four points as well - they were counted ahead of Toyota due to the quality of MacGowan's fifth place over Ivan Tripoli's two seventh places - meaning the predicted three-way battle for fifth was finally materializing. One final note is that, with Tanaka scoring a point, this means that Super Aguri has scored points in 2007 before Honda. Not a good look for the team that won a race last year.
To be fair, it wasn't a great look for me either, crashing out on lap one on a weekend where our car showed promising place. It was my first retirement of the season - despite that close call with Tanaka and MacGowan in Australia - and a squandered opportunity. I wasn't happy, the team wasn't happy, but there was nothing to do but hope that I can bounce back in Monaco. Every single driver in Formula One has been involved in a crash at one point or another, and every single one of them was predominantly at fault at least once, in this case, I don't think I was predominantly responsible. I'm not sure if any one individual was predominantly responsible to be entirely honest, it was just an unfortunate incident of cars being in certain parts of track in a corner where everything converged into one. Had one or two little things gone differently, the accident wouldn't have happened, or at least wouldn't have eventually resulted in two cars crashing out, but it is what it is. Matti Hamalainen, one of the best drivers in F1 period and a championship contender for the third time in five years, retired too, so I'm hardly the only one left unsatisfied in Spain.
We were in a spot not too far from where Tommy and I overlooked the track a few weeks ago. Of course, the view was a bit different now, as the barriers were coming into place and the actual Grand Prix track was being assembled now - grandstands, barriers, marshal posts, etc, etc, all to go up two weeks before the race and go down two weeks after the race - and, of course, there was also that floating monstrosity Red Bull brought to the Monaco Grand Prix, but the less said about that, the better. It would be part of the backdrop though, because there were also two seats set up for us and a small table. I would sit down next to Roksana Yurasova - the reporter that Michael Coronet told me about - and her photographer would take a picture of us to act as the cover image. Once that was done, the photographer would leave the three of us alone for the interview. Yes, three, because, as this was a media event, Mariana Petrova was present, making sure nothing was said that could potentially hurt the team's image, my image, or that of our sponsors. Not that I think many of them would care about a Russian-language publication. That brings up another topic, Michael had been slightly oversimplifying Roksana's situation, since, while she did indeed write for a Russian language magazine, said magazine was published in western Europe primarily, and she herself was born in Portugal to a family from eastern Ukraine. As if that wasn't complicated enough, she's already mentioned that she's fine if people call her a Russian, since she thinks that's also true from a certain perspective. Then again, I'm a Russian from Kazakhstan who lives in Monaco, so who am I to judge?
"Thank you Ludwik, send the pictures to me once they're done, I'll take one last look before deciding which one to go with." Roksana finally accepted after the fifth consecutive picture her cameraman took, but it was the end of that, and that meant it was time for the interview. This part I was actually kind of excited about, despite not really knowing what to say, so, I paid deep attention to Roksana when she leaned in. The blonde journalist was dressed in a white blouse - very corporate but she wore it well - a black pencil skirt, and high heels. She had gray eyes with a hint of blue in them, she didn't wear makeup, nor did she paint her short, neatly clipped fingernails. She was a good-looking woman, and every bit of it was natural. I'd imagine some of the male drivers would be rather disappointed that I'm the one she chose to interview rather than them. She held a hardcover journal in her lap and, interestingly enough, was left-handed. Well, maybe that isn't interesting, but I did notice it, just like i noticed the fact that, out of all things to write with, she chose a mechanical pencil. That seemed somewhat adolescent to me, but I guess it made sense, Roksana was a pretty young reporter. If she went to journalism school and graduated, it must have been only just, because she couldn't be older than twenty-five and even that's pushing it. In any case, she started off the interview with a pretty basic question to ease me in "So Tamara, let's start with the obvious question, how is the season going so far?"
"Well, I think overall, I have to say that it's a good start. You know, I scored points on debut, I finished my first three races in the top ten, and I've only had one retirement. Obviously, I'm hungry for more and I know more is possible since my teammate, Tommy, is now on five points compared to my one, but I know I can't be upset when I've already done something so few other people have done." I put the whole thing in context, deciding that, while I was competitive and did wish I could have pulled off more in this season so far, it's hardly a bad start for a rookie season. Any season honestly, as Daniel MacGowan, one of the elder statesmen of F1, someone who has been here for more than a decade, had three retirements before finally breaking through and scoring those four points at Spain. I should be happy enough that I'm finishing races in my position, and if I can keep that up, I think I have the pace that the points will come.
"Something so few people have done, but also something no other woman has done. You became the most successful woman in Formula One on your debut, can you talk about that for a little bit, please?" Roksana asked. So, based on the quick conversation we had before the interview, her magazine focuses a lot on feminism, gay rights, abortion, and other such issues which don't exactly make her or her colleagues popular within Russia, hence the magazine is published abroad, mostly for an audience of Russian immigrants in western Europe. Roksana herself currently operates out of Marseille. The point of all this is that she is interested in the gender aspect of my career, perhaps more so than I am, but it is something that even I am aware of.
"I don't know. I guess it's always just been a fact of my career. In karting, I was always the only girl on the grid, and when i wasn't, it was because of my cousin, Natasha. I guess you could always say I was the girl in the boy's club, I was always being underestimated, and I suppose I always had to work harder. I couldn't just be as fast as the boys around me, I had to be faster than them. It was like my gender came with the assumption that I was going to be half a second slower than I actually was. Maybe I didn't do myself any favors because I was always better in the race than I was on one lap pace, but there did seem to be a stigma around me back then. Though I do think I was able to push through that stigma fairly easily. I would be underestimated for a race, maybe two, but I'd blast through it with good performances." I tried to give the most honest answer I could, remembering the various jokes made at my expense when I showed up for a new series for the first time, but, at the same time, I do have to admit that the jokes ended rather quickly. They assumed I was going to be slower because I was a woman, but once my competitors realized I wasn't slower, they tended to treat me with the same respect as any other rival. Once I beat them, I wasn't the token female anymore, I was competition.
"This was all in France, correct?" Roksana asked a clarifying question.
"Yes, southern France mostly, sometimes in Italy as well, but I was mostly karting in France. I started racing in places like Italy, Germany, even Benelux a little bit as I got into cars, but I didn't get out of Europe until GP2 Asia. Which, speaking of, is I guess when you could say I turned some of my disadvantages into advantages." I answered, watching as Roksana Yurasova scribbled down my remarks in her notebook. A moment later she nodded, wanting me to continue, so, I did the best I could "I had a few options with what flag I could fly under - Russia, Monaco, and, of course, Kazakhstan - and I had actually gone back and forth between racing under the flag of Monaco or Kazakhstan a few times, but I had largely defaulted on Kazakhstan when I was doing F3. Some official in Astana must have seen my flag on some result sheet, the Macau Grand Prix I think, and that is when Kazakhoil approached me with sponsorship. I had some serious funding, furthermore, I qualified as an Asian driver for the new GP2 Asia series, and DAMS took a chance on me. I was expected to be second driver to my teammate Bernard, but, instead, I went and fought for the championship, eventually winning it. This was actually the first time I won a championship in proper cars. I took some karting titles when I was young, I fought for some titles in cars, but I didn't breakthrough until 2006. So, I was a champion in a series that was supposed to be equal to the main GP2 series, I had significant funding behind me, and Williams was in need of a driver to replace Martin Weaver, who was going to Red Bull. So, the stars aligned for me."
"You said you had an option to fly the Russian flag, is there any reason why you didn't?" Roksana asked, seemingly more out of curiosity than because of the interview, but maybe I could turn this into something she could use.
"Well, fundamentally, the country I was born in no longer exists. I was born in Almaty in the Soviet Union in 1988 and I moved to Monaco as a child in 1991 as the Union was collapsing. I'm not a defender of the Soviet Union or anything, but I'm just making the point that the national circumstances when I was born are different than the national circumstances of today. I am Slavic, my ancestors come from what is today Russia, but my family has been in Central Asia for decades. I don't claim to be an ethnic Kazakh, I don't speak Kazakh, but I was born in Kazakhstan, and I think it is fair to say I have more connection to that land, personally, than I do to Russia itself. I am also very, very grateful for Kazakhoil, Kazakhgaz, and all the financial support they have given to my career. I would not be in F1 this early without them. As for where I live and where I grew up, it's over there." I pointed over in the general direction of my apartment. I was trying to be honest to my ethnic origins and my feelings while also making sure not to offend my sponsors. I can't publicly say that I feel just as disconnected from Kazakhstan as I do from Russia, but I can at least be honest about the fact that I am not an ethnic Kazakh and that I have grown up in Monaco for the vast majority of my life.
"What do you think you can do for Formula One and for Kazakhstan?" Roksana asked, getting back to the typical interview questions, though that didn't mean the subject was any easier for me to talk about. I fully admit these circumstances are awkward for me to talk about and I can't really produce a short, succinct answer without being dishonest to myself, dishonest to the facts, or dishonest to my sponsors.
"Well, I hope that I can bring motorsport to a group of people untouched my Formula One. There has never been a Grand Prix in Central Asia or anywhere close to it really, nor have there been Central Asian drivers before me, I want to change that. I hope that I can make Formula One an achievable dream for young Kazakh children, i hope that I can put Formula One on public television in Kazakhstan so that people can watch F1 for the first time, and I hope that getting the name of this country out there in a positive way can bring tourism and money to a country that is still rather poor and dependent on the energy sector." I answered, really revealing the positive effect that I hope to have on Kazakhstan and Central Asia as a region. I also looked over to Mariana because there was something I wanted to talk about "You know, I'm not sure how much I can talk about right now, but during the summer break, before the Turkish Grand Prix, I am going to drive an old Williams F1 car through the streets of Astana for a showcase event. It'll be my first time in Kazakhstan since 1991 and it'll be the first time an F1 car has ever been driven in Central Asia."
"You can hint at it, but don't give the date or any specifics." Mariana Petrova interjected on behalf of the team, letting Roksana tease that I will be doing something F1 related in Astana pretty soon, but not saying anything about a full-on F1 car showcase or the mid-August date. I understood why it had to be that way, there were still corporate considerations to deal with and the team - along with Kazakhoil - probably already had a media campaign planned around promoting that event, so it wouldn't be proper, at all, for me to spoil that in what is supposed to be, for all intents and purposes, a minor magazine interview. So, Roksana decided that was actually a pretty good way to end the interview and thanked me for a time, while I stopped thinking about the Astana showcase for a little while, because I had another showcase event to plan for: 25 years ago, in 1982, Johannes Koskinen became Williams' second ever F1 world champion, therefore, before the Monaco Grand Prix, the pinnacle event, Tommy Koskinen would drive his father's championship winning FW08, while I would drive the 1980 Williams FW07B, which won the 1980 drivers' and constructors' championship with Australian Alan Jones. Now, we would take the cars on a slow parade lap the Wednesday before the Grand Prix, then Alan and Johanes would speak about Williams and their championships, along with Johannes' 1983 Monaco Grand Prix win, and it would all make Williams look very good and historic.
There is plenty of grandeur ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix. Tons of celebrities, tons of models, tons of media coverage all converging on a few pieces of road in the middle of a little fishing village with a gambling den. There was even a fashion show - I wore a suit, long story but I felt I would look less out of place in a suit than I would in a dress, but we'll see what the tabloids have to say about that - but none of that spectacle compares to what Tommy and I are about to do. Today, rather than a pair of FW29s, we were going to be driving a pair of classic early 1980s F1 cars. Both of them powered by perhaps the single most impressive engine in all of F1: the Cosworth DFV. For almost two decades, this Cosworth-developed, Ford-funded engine powered almost the entire F1 grid. The Cosworth DFV allowed British privateers like McLaren, Williams, Tyrrell, and Lotus to take the fight to the likes of Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, and Renault. Cosworth powered cars could run circles around the big, powerful 12-cylinder engines of Ferrari and Alfa, while still beating the innovative turbo engines of Renault into the 1980s. The Cosworth DFV powered Williams to their first two drivers' championships in 1980 and 1982, and their first two constructors' championships in 1980 and 1981.
"Alright Tamara, there's a 500 horsepower 3.0L V8 engine behind you, how do you feel?" Peter Malmedy asked through the radio as we fired up the car. Our 2.4L Toyota V8s are more powerful than these old Cosworths, but there is still something very impressive about them, especially when paired with the rest of the car. It was a white, dark green, and black body on an aluminum monocoque. The rear Goodyear tyres were massive, compared to even the front tyres, two venturi tunnels underneath the body of the car used negative pressure to suck the car to the ground at speed and tear through corners at speeds beyond the technology of the time, and here i was controlling that car, the top of my torso very exposed as I held onto the circular steering wheel and the manual five speed transmission. All of that was to say that, while the car was less powerful and slower over a lap, it all felt so much more raw. That also meant that it felt faster in a way, because it was more dangerous, less stable, and the aerodynamics weren't quite as consistent. If I went too slowly, the ground effect might not work well enough and I'll understeer into an outside wall, or, alternatively, I could bottom out on a bump and lose all the downforce and all the control really. It was a very different driving experience compared to my usual car.
Tommy was released onto the track first, as the 1982 FW08 was the real star of the show, but I was released just behind him. We came out of the pits parallel to the track and followed the exit, curving through Sainte Devote and emerging heading up the hill. It was a flat-out run, even in these cars - though, considering these were verifiable museum pieces, we weren't pushing that quickly - as we went through the kink of Beau Rivage. Next, we crested the top of the hill and curved through Massenet as we entered casino square. Casino proper - turn four - was next as we entered one of the most famous sections of the track. We ran down the hill now, avoiding the bump here at the end of sector one, before braking for Mirabeau. Then the Lowes hairpin, the slowest and tightest corner in all of Formula One, with the towering Monte Carlo casino overlooking the corner. Then it continued our run downhill, going through the fast right-hanger of turn seven, before almost immediately braking for Portier. Now we opened the taps yet again and allowed the two Cosworth DFV engines scream through the Tunnel yet again, curving through turn nine, and emerging out onto the Nouvelle-Chicane, which really wasn't all that new anymore.
Turn ten was a quick and tight left-right, requiring heavy braking, while turn eleven was a fast right-left coming out of the chicane - avoiding the inside barrier - to blast down towards Tabac, now right next to the harbor and the traditional row of yachts that made the Monaco Grand Prix famous. Turn twelve, Tabac, was taken as fast as drivers dare, but the wall was right there, ready to catch out anyone who was too greedy. That attitude continued into the swimming pool section, left-right, a short shoot, and then right-left as we cleared a literal swimming pool, built over a piece of the original track. Turns fifteen and sixteen were particular brutal, with heavy kerbs on the inside and a deadly wall on the outside, ready to catch-out any driver who was just over the edge. The track now tended slightly to the left before the tight right-hander that was La Rascasse, careful not to park up like a certain seven-time world champion infamously did last year. The pitlane exit was to our right but we continued, braking for the tight turn eighteen and then got through the kink of turn nineteen before arriving on the main straight. Of course, the main straight at Monaco wasn't all that straight, being slightly curved, but not to the point where anyone considered it a corner. In any case, I followed Tommy as we did our proper lap of the circuit, at just about the same speed as our out-lap, just going through Sainte Devote this time. We did this lap than another lap before parking up in the middle of the track, in front of the podium structure. We got out of the cars as the English media cameras swooped in on the two of us as well as the world champions that actually drove the cars. We posed for pictures, we talked about the cars, and we listened to what Alan and Johannes had to say about their championship winning cars. The 1980 FW07B and the 1982 FW08 were from the beginning of Williams' era of greatness in the 1980s and 1990s, a greatness that Tommy and I were trying to bring back to Grove.
Driving a classic, championship winning F1 car around the Monaco Grand Prix track was an amazing start to the weekend, but the celebration of Williams' heritage was followed up by a good performance in qualifying. Tommy Koskinen took the headlines with a phenomenal fifth on the grid, but I had a pretty good performance myself, qualifying in twelfth - but I'll get to start eleventh as Daniel MacGowan directly ahead has a three-place drop penalty for impeding another car - so I'm happy enough with that, but I'm also happy because our pace suggests that more is possible. I was on a faster run when, directly ahead of me, Matti Hamalainen crashed in turn sixteen, having a brush with the wall and damaging his suspension, as well as leaving carbon on the track and bringing out the yellow flag. It was tricky to overtake at Monaco, but we were starting the highest up the grid we've been all year, we have good pace, and at least for my car, Peter Malmedy has me set for a fast two-stop strategy. If we can get lucky with the traffic, we might be able to pull off something very good here.
"Tamara, it's George Tarantano, Speed Channel USA. You're starting eleventh but it seemed like more was possible before Matias' crash, can you tell us about that please?" the same American reporter who interviewed me after the Malaysian Grand Prix approached me for another interview here on the Monaco GP grid. It was a tighter grid than most here in Monte Carlo, not only because the actual road wasn't that wide, but because the grid was full of team personnel, executives, celebrities, models, the grid girls, and, of course, all the various F1 media people. Of course, the media people were in slightly bigger numbers here - the numbers already increased for the start of the European season in Spain, but this was a further increase on top of that - as Monaco was one of the top media events on the calendar, along with Silverstone and Monza. Silverstone being the home of the English press, which seems to be the majority of the press around F1, while the Italian motorsport press is very vocal and very powerful, especially in matters concerning Ferrari, so yeah, lots of people here at the crown jewel event.
"Well, normally I would agree with you, but I'm actually pretty optimistic today. I think we have a strong car and I think that, even if we can't pass the other cars on track, we can pass them on strategy." I responded, keeping an optimistic face on things, wanting to give the team a strong result to not only act as an apology for what happened at the Spanish Grand Prix, but to finally get my season going as well. Tommy scored points again in Spain, now he's on five points - two from Australia, three from Spain - whereas I'm still on one, and I want to close that gap. I know the team expects Tommy to be ahead of me, but they want me to be bringing in a good amount of points as well, meanwhile, I don't just want to be bringing in some points, I want to be close to Tommy points-wise, ahead of him if possible. I want to make it clear to the team that I belong here and that I'm not just here because of money or as some marketing gimmick.
"Thank you Tamara. Happy birthday by the way." George concluded the interview.
"Oh! Thank you!" I responded, legitimately surprised that he knew - it was probably on the file the FOM distributed to the various media outlets about me, ensuring they had some level of familiarity - and appreciating the small little gesture. I celebrated my nineteenth birthday on Friday, I was born on May 25th, 1988. Friday, incidentally, was a free day during the Monaco weekend, as practice was held on Thursday - the authorities did not want to close off the streets of Monaco for three consecutive days, so they divided up the race weekend so they could open up the barriers for civilian traffic on Friday, meaning there were only two consecutive days, on the weekend no less, when the roads were shut down. Needless to say, I appreciated getting to celebrate on my day off. I didn't get too carried away though, my main focus was still on the race, and, a few minutes after that interview with Tarantano, I was off on the formation lap, heating up the car before the start of the race.
Felipe Alvarez of Spain lined up first on the grid, followed by American Anthony Harrison, Henrique de Matteo of Brazil followed up his two consecutive wins - first driver to accomplish such a feat in 2007 - with third on the grid, Italian Umberto Petronelli threatened to put Renault out of reach with fourth on the grid, but local Finn Tommy Koskinen is lining up fifth to make sure Williams has a fighting chance. Martin Weaver was sixth, but that didn't surprise us, as Red Bull tended to do well here at Monaco, with Daniel MacGowan famously having scored a podium here last year. It was the Australian leading the Scot this time around. Next up were the two BMW Saubers of Victor Hartmann of Germany and Piotr Kaminski of Poland, followed by the two Hondas, with Brazilian Rudolfo Goncalves ahead of Brit James Buxton. I was representing Kazakhstan in eleventh, lining up ahead of the Toro Rosso driven by Italian Giuseppino Leone. As mentioned before, MacGowan was in thirteenth, meaning he'd have a lot of work if he wanted to repeat that podium. Toyota was not very strong here, with their experienced Italian driver, Ivan Tripoli, leading the team all the way down in fourteenth. Finland's Jyri Kaasalainen in the Renault couldn't be happy either with him all the way down in fifteenth.
Matias Hamalainen had his crash in Q2 - bringing out the yellow flags that prevented me from improving - so, the Ferrari driver ensured that row eight was all Finnish. Britain's Louis Sanderson in the Super Aguri was in seventeenth, his team not doing particularly well either, while New Zealand's Max Marcus disappointed Scuderia Toro Rosso with eighteenth. Uruguayan Lorenzo Barbaro was down in nineteenth, but that was probably the absolute limit of what the Spyker F8-VII chassis could do. Germany's Roland Ziegler was down in twentieth in the second Toyota, though that's hardly the worst thing to happen to the Ziegler name in Monaco within the last twelve months I suppose. Continuing the theme of Japanese teams struggling here in Monaco, Japanese driver Haruki Tanaka in the Japanese Super Aguri car could only manage twenty-first, beginning row eleven. The unfortunate honor of lining up last at a track where it was notoriously hard to overtake, however, went to Dutchman Martijn van der Berg. Berg was the last driver to lineup on the grid of the Monaco Grand Prix, and he, like most of the drivers at the back, could not actually see the main lighting gantry, so instead, they looked over at what was essentially a traffic light about halfway down the grid, one that would light up with five red lights just like the main gantry, albeit vertically, and then go out to alert them of the start of the race. I could see the main lights though, and I was ready to start strong and capitalize something from this race.
Five red lights went out and I immediately got a good start, the Toyota V8 in the back of my car powering me past the Honda of James Buxton as we curved down towards turn one. I was now behind Rudolfo Goncalves, and I considered taking a look on the inside, but the Brazilian veteran has driven this track a lot of times, and he knew exactly how much room he could leave on the inside and still be safe, so, with that door well and truly closed, discretion got the better of valor going into Sainte Devote. I tucked in and followed the Brazilian up the hill, both of us closing on Weaver who seemed to be struggling. Up ahead, I could see Tommy in between the BMW Saubers, meaning that one of them managed to jump him and the other was busy trying to overtake. I couldn't focus on that too much though, because i was preoccupied with my own race, particularly on throwing my car through Massenet as quickly as possible, determined to stay as close to Rudolfo as possible through the casino section. I followed the Brazilian through Casino and Mirabeau, hoping to set up a move into the hairpin, but, again, I wasn't quite close enough to pull off a risky move on a veteran driver. It was possible to overtake into the hairpin - the iconic name for it was Lowes but it was currently named the Grand Hotel hairpin - but you needed to be close, the other driver had to take a deep line, and, even then, there was still a risk factor to it. I wasn't going to take an unnecessary risk on lap one again, especially when I felt in my bones that the car had the pace to take points.
I didn't let Goncalves get away even if I had to back down through the hairpin, so I followed him down through turns seven and eight, following him into the tunnel. I got into the draft and closed in through the bend in the tunnel, and especially in the downhill run out of the tunnel and into the Nouvelle-Chicane. i put my nose in on the left and, this time, it was the veteran Brazilian who had to give way in the name of preserving the car. I kept the car away from the inside barrier then kept it relatively straight into the first element of the chicane, riding the kerb and making sure Rudolfo had to hesitate on exit, meaning he wouldn't be in a good position to strike back. I negotiated the rest of the chicane and emerged ninth. Martin Weaver was struggling in eighth ahead of me, but he did manage to pull a few car lengths of a gap ahead of me while I was battling with Goncalves, so there was a little bit of work to do. As for my teammate ahead, I wasn't too sure what was going on, because I caught a glimpse of a blue and white car going into Tabac, but the problem there is that both the Williams and the BMW Sauber share that color scheme. The Williams was predominantly the darker blue, while the Sauber had a lot of white on it, but the differences were hard to tell, especially when my focus is firmly on overtaking a car rather than looking at the cars a whole corner ahead of me. So, through Tabac, through the two chicanes of the swimming pool section, and then finishing the lap up with La Rascasse and then the final sequence which put me back onto the main straight. The start-finish straight at Monaco is one of the few start-finish straights in Formula One where overtakes don't actually tend to happen that often, mainly due to the nature of Sainte Devote as a corner, so I was still chasing the Red Bull as we came up the hill, through Massenet, and into Casino.
"Safety car! safety car! Leone banged the barriers in Massenet." Peter called out through the team radio so, as we neared Mirabeau, both Weaver and I calmed right down, keeping it slow and going easy on the cars - something which I'd expect Martin needed more than I did - heading to meet the SC. A small, one car crash tended not to bring out the safety car at most tracks, but Monaco is not most tracks, so Leone's Toro Rosso was up against the outside wall on the exit of a blind corner, meaning he could have easily collected a car taking a wide line into casino square. A few moments later, once the two of us had negotiated the hairpin and caught up with the cars ahead, Peter radioed me again "We are going to stay out, it's only lap two, our tyres are fine and fuel is good, we would not gain anything from pitting at this time. Stay out Tamara, we would not gain anything at this time."
"Copy that, I understand." I responded, then starting to weave through the tunnel to keep temperature in the tyres now that I knew I was going to stay on these for awhile yet. Peter repeated himself because going into the tunnel, radio can get spotty, and that's on top of the fact that I have a high-revving V8 engine just a few inches behind my ears, headphones or not. When I was about to finish the lap and line up behind the safety car, which was waiting for the grid at pit exit, I saw Tommy dive into the pits, indicating that we were splitting strategies. Now, there were two possibilities here: either one: Koskinen's team sees something that we don't, or two: the team made the decision to split strategies because it is unclear which strategy will be faster, and the team wants to cover all the bases. That being said, you would think the driver ahead, especially given he is the team's first driver, would get the preferred strategy. I didn't have time to think about that right now though, we were lining up behind the safety car, Tommy Koskinen would fall to last - even if his pitstop is unbelievably quick, the red light at pit exit will hold him in place until the whole grid passes pit exit as a sort of safety measure - and I would soon be restarting the race up in eighth. This was already a points-paying position and it seemed like Martin Weaver had some sort of issue with his car, so seventh was possible as well. More than that though, I liked the fact that I would have a bit of a buffer to the points, as I suspected that Matti Hamalainen in his Ferrari will close up regardless of it being difficult to overtake, so I may just lose a place to him later on.
So, with the team splitting strategies, it was now Felipe Alvarez in first, Anthony Harrison in second, Henrique de Matteo third, then Umberto Petronelli completed an unchanged top four. Piotr Kaminski formed the first change, having risen from eighth to fifth in the first two laps, while Victor Hartmann ensured the BMW Saubers were still back-to-back, having been left in sixth place thanks to Tommy boxing under the SC. Martin Weaver was seventh in the Red Bull, though, even when i asked Peter over the radio, he couldn't identify what exactly was wrong with the car, beyond guessing that it could be a gearbox issue. I was in eighth, completing the points paying positions for the moment, but there were plenty of threatening cars behind me, not the least of which was Rudolfo Goncalves directly behind me. I wasn't sure how the Brazilian felt about my move down in the Nouvelle Chicane, but I also wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't happy about it. Regardless of what the Brazilian thought though, it was hard to overtake around Monaco, and a good exit out of the final two corners on the safety car restart ensured that I could focus on the cars ahead, at least for now. So, with the race having started in earnest, I launched my onslaught on Martin Weaver ahead.
The Red Bull was struggling, and we were eventually able to determine that it was a gearbox issue - Martin couldn't use third gear - which was hurting him on a circuit where accelerating out of slow corners was a repeat feature. Still though, Monaco was a tight track, and I was losing time to the BMWs stuck behind this sick Red Bull. That didn't mean that I wanted to take a risky chance, especially after what happened in Spain. I did finally get passed on lap eighteen though, managing to get alongside on the main straight thanks to the acceleration, then outbrake the Australian into turn one, forcing him to back out of what he knew could be a risky proposition if he stayed in it. So, that was seventh place as I began trying to catch up with the BMWs ahead. As for Martin Weaver, well, apparently, he put more strain on his gearbox trying to keep me behind, and his problem got worse. The Australian eventually retired on lap twenty-two, accepting that he wasn't going to get anything out of the race. Knowing that he was going to retire anyway, I kind of wished that Weaver let me through earlier, but, one: hindsight is twenty-twenty, and two: after the last three races I've had, I suppose I couldn't complain too much given I was running well in seventh.
"Box this lap, box this lap." Peter called through the radio on lap twenty-five. I obliged and entered the rather strange Monaco Grand Prix. The nature of the pit entry almost turned La Rascasse into a hairpin as I negotiated the left-hander and then almost immediately turned left again into the pits, keeping left to avoid the barrier, then turning right again as the pit-lane curved in line with the track. I stopped on my marks and the team got to work. Daniel and Terrence on the front tyres and Derrick on the fuel hose were just three of the members of my team, put it was a massive operation. A front and rear jackman, three men for each tyre - one on the wheel gun, one removes the tyre and gets out of the way, and then the last one puts on the new tyre for the first guy with the pneumatic gun - two guys holding onto the side of the car, a lollipop man, and of course the fuel hose operator. It was an awful lot of people, but for me, they worked together like cogs in a machine, switching out the tyres, dropping the car, and then raising the lollipop for me so I could go, leaving the pitlane with just a bit of wheelspin to get heat into the tyres. Now I negotiated the pit exit, keeping it tight to the wall as I slipped inside of Sainte Devote and exited on the road up the hill.
I took advantage of the fresh tyres - hards, but fresh hard tyres were still better than worn softs - and clear track space to launch some fast laps, using up some of the full fuel load. This was where my strategy would be made or broken, as there were guys ahead of me who would only do one stop, but I had some good pace right now, the kind of pace that the car was teasing us with during qualifying. On lap thirty-two, Victor Hartmann pitted and came out behind me, elevating me to fifth - Umberto Petronelli had been the first to stop - while Kaminski finally stopped on lap forty-five, meaning I was now fourth. The podium, something known only to Ferraris and McLarens so far, was within grasp, but I knew I had to stop again. All the while, I couldn't shake Petronelli, who was just behind me and I knew he was on the same strategy. The Italian in the Renault had the faster car and, as the hard tyres fell away, he was dealing with the wear better, but, after spending most of the beginning of the race having to try and pass cars, the walls of Monaco were finally helping me. Umberto had to work to overtake me now. The both of us came in on lap fifty-five, switching back to the softs for the final stint of the race, and I thought I had an edge for a second, but then, right as I was about to pass the Renault pit box, Umberto Petronelli was released, cutting ahead of me and forcing me to slow down. It wasn't a dangerous release, but a tenth of a second later? It could have been.
"Oh, come on! That shouldn't be allowed!" I called out over the radio as I followed Petronelli out of the pits, having had to slot in behind thanks to Renault's last second release. We exited right next to Hartmann, with Kaminski a little bit up the road. Hartmann had a good exit out of Sainte Devote and wanted to pass us both heading up the hill, and he managed to pass me, but Petronelli managed to stay ahead. So, four cars from three different teams were together, spread across two different strategies in the most prestigious race in Formula One. Umberto seemed to be the fastest of us at this stage, chasing after Kaminski, while I was struggling to put heat into this set of tyres while still staying close to Hartmann ahead. The dirty, turbulent air from the cars ahead wasn't helping either, as the front wings, flick-ups, chimneys, and other aerodynamic elements of the cars ahead left turbulent, chopped up air in their wake, air I then had to drive through. All of this meant that, by the time the last few laps came up, Petronelli was about three seconds ahead of me, then Kaminski and Hartmann, with me hanging about a second behind the BMW Saubers to avoid the turbulent air, and Matias Hamalainen in the Ferrari beginning to appear in my rear-view mirror. The Flying Finn certainly put the pressure on me, and I knew that he had the faster car, but I managed to hold him off all the way down to lap seventy-seven, when I crossed the line to finish the Monaco Grand Prix in seventh place.
The points-paying results of the 2007 Grand Prix de Monaco go as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
3: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
4: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Renault.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber.
6: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
7: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota.
8: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
So, I was now on three points, having finally bounced back and taken points at what was, essentially, my home race. Tommy, meanwhile, was down in twelfth thanks to his strategy of pitting on lap two and then again on lap forty-four not really working out. The BMW Saubers managed a one stop strategy, while Petronelli and Renault's pit release was legal according to the FIA, even if I admittedly felt differently. Alvarez's win gave him the championship lead on quality, but Harrison had just as many points as his teammate on 38. Henrique had 33 and Matti had 23 for Ferrari, meaning that McLaren had the edge in the constructors' championship at the moment. Matti had one win, Henrique and Felipe both had two, while with a third place and four consecutive second places, it seemed like Anthony Harrison was going to get his maiden F1 win any day now. That was well ahead of us here at Williams though, we were content with the fifth place in the constructors that our combined eight points granted us. BMW Sauber was out of reach, while Renault had twice as many points at us in eighth, so, realistically, they were probably out of reach as hell. Who knows though, maybe the two consecutive races in North America will mean the F1 season will look very different when we return to Europe in July.
"Thank you guys, that was a good strategy. I'm really happy with that." I said one final thing over the team radio before climbing out of the car as I parked it in pitlane. I stood up in the cockpit, raised a fist in cheer, and climbed out of the car, very happy with that. Tommy came over and congratulated me, glad to see the team scoring points for the second race in a row after a bit of a dry spell in Malaysia and Bahrain. So yeah, we could be happy, I was happy with the points I scored, but the media was more focused on McLaren in the aftermath of the Monaco Grand Prix, for two reasons. First, there was the dramatic pace that McLaren had this weekend, having lapped everyone up to fourth place, and even Henrique in third was over a minute behind Alvarez. Second, there was the matter of pace within the team, as the press almost immediately alleged that McLaren compromised Harrison' strategy to benefit Alvarez. Tensions, it seems, are heating up in McLaren.
Notes:
USA and Canada next - well Canada is first but it feels more natural to put USA first, deal with it.
Chapter 4: The North American Races
Notes:
Alright everyone, here's chapter four! I do have a question for you guys though. Are you fine with the two-races a chapter format or would you rather see a one chapter, one race format? Geez that sounds wrong out of context. Moving on though, I think I'll continue with two races a chapter until and unless I hear otherwise, but I have a one race chapter coming up in a little while, so you'll get to see that format if you want to make a more informed decision. The F/F aspect of the story starts to feature here as well.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter IV.
The North American Races.
"...and Ludwik's from Poland. So yeah, I think we have a pretty wide range of countries represented for a Russian-language magazine." Roksana explained as she told me more about her magazine. Yurasova got most of her money and her popularity thanks to various columns and articles she has written for other magazines, but she, along with her other business partners, were passionate about social issues, women's rights, homosexuality, and all of that, hence this magazine. Roksana does still freelance occasionally, she has to make a living after all, but the magazine is her passion project, at least at the moment. I got the impression that she had a lot of passions though, and that she wanted to write bigger and better stuff. Even this magazine, I think there is more to it than simple entertainment, I think she legitimately wants to help facilitate a change in the culture for the Russian diaspora, a group of people coming from a culture that is, admittedly, on the traditional side. Women's rights, gay rights, abortion, those might as well be forbidden words in Russia itself, and that has an effect on Russians even in places as free and liberal as the Netherlands.
"It is. It's better than Formula One at least, if you ignore Finland, me and Piotr are the only eastern Europeans on the grid." I compared her profession to mine. Formula One has always been biased towards western Europe, I mean, that's where the teams are and that's where most of the funding has been, but the difference between east and west is particularly stark. The fact of the matter is that the Cold War can't be ignored in this context. There simply wasn't the same kind of karting scene in eastern Europe and there wasn't a ladder to F1 out there, nor was it easy for people from the east to get to western Europe to compete in the ladder that did exist in the west. In a series where only twenty-two or so seats exist, any disadvantage or delay can be crippling, so eastern European drivers didn't really get a chance in F1 until the 2000s, even after the Hungarian Grand Prix had already been around for about twenty years. I'm one of the first eastern European drivers in F1 to begin with, if you want to consider me that due to my ethnicity, and Piotr is one of the only other ones. Of course, there is a difference between a Pole from Poland, which has been an ethnically homogenous country since the end of World War II, and a Russian from Kazakhstan, which even now is a rather ethnically divided country. That being said, I did feel a certain connection to him, even if we haven't really talked, because of that similarity in background.
"What do you think about his chances?" Roksana asked, taking an interest in the sport. We were sitting together in front of a cafe in Marseille, a few days before I was going to fly out to Canada for the next Grand Prix. Roksana sent me an email congratulating me for the race result after Monaco and then asked if I wanted to meet up with her, I accepted, and here I was, having driven out to France's second largest city, the capital of the south. Marseille traditionally wasn't seen as top tourist destination, at least not in the same way that Paris or Nice were. No, Marseille was more of a working-class city, with immigrants from every background imaginable: from Algeria to Ukraine, Marseille was as colorful as a grid of F1 cars. All of that being said, I still found it to be a beautiful city, and I could see why Roksana chose to operate out of this city when she moved to France. At the same time, I wasn't naive, and I could see how this city was very different from Monaco and even Nice. The city had a different character, I felt differently here, but I also liked it in a way. The press and the F1 media circus weren't here at all really, here, I was just another woman sitting at a table across from another woman at an outdoor cafe. It was interesting going from the media whirlwind that was the Grand Prix de Monaco to this.
"He's really quick, and I think he's better than Hartmann on his day. Victor is an experienced veteran though, so I think he probably still has the edge. Come the end of the season though? Kaminski may well have the edge." I responded, giving my estimation on the Pole. Kaminski was a rookie too, in a way, since he made his debut halfway through the 2006 season, so this is the first time he's raced at places like Bahrain, Spain, and Monaco, the latter of which already saw him outperforming his teammate, if only just. Hartmann was a really good driver though, quick in his own right, having established himself as a consistent, dependable midfield driver, and that made him a good benchmark for Piotr. It was one of many interesting driver line-ups to watch in 2007: how does Kaminski match up to Hartmann over the course of a full season, what is it like to be Felipe Alvarez to step into a new team as champion only to be confronted with an incredibly fast rookie teammate in the form of Anthony Harrison, and what about Ferrari where the legacy of Wilhelm Ziegler is up for grabs? Will Matias Hamalainen be able to establish himself in a new team and carry the German's torch, or will Ziegler's final teammate, the Brazilian Henrique de Matteo, emerge to lead the prancing horse? All good questions, and I hope the question of who will come out on top here at Williams will be added to the list before long. I am very close to Tommy points-wise right now and I may well close up even closer in Canada.
"Sounds like you and Tommy. He's got a year of experience on you, and he's got the name, but you're faster." Roksana made a comparison to my situation vis-a-vis Tommy Koskinen. A year of experience isn't all that much in F1 terms: Tommy made his debut in Bahrain at the start of the 2006 season, I made by debut just a year later, so there isn't a massive experience gap between us, that being said, I understood what she was getting at, at least with her first point. Tommy had the focus and the pedigree: he was the son of a champion and the driver that Williams was banking on for their future. Tommy is the number one driver, the car is going to be built to suit his driving style, and, as I found out after the Malaysian Grand Prix, Tommy's word is worth a lot more to the team than mine. As for experience, like I said, it's not a lot, not comparable to the gap between Hartmann and Kaminski, but it is indeed an edge he has over me. As for me being faster, I thought that was nonsense.
"I'm not faster than Tommy, not at all. He has like half a second on me in qualifying." I countered, pointing out the fact that, across the five races so far this year, Tommy has had an edge over me in qualifying, and that edge has been rather big at times, seven tenths even, so yeah, I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that Tommy has on average, half a second over me in qualifying. Now, that is a number I hope to whittle down over the course of the season so that I am matching him, maybe even beating him once in awhile, but I am not on that level just yet. The race has been a different story, and I think I have generally outperformed Tommy in the race, but, Tommy has also had worse luck with reliability, and, on the races where he did outperform me, he went on to score decent points, meaning that, even if I've probably had the edge over Tommy at more races than not, I still have three points compared to his five.
"Sure, you aren't a perfect driver, nobody is, especially not as a rookie, but I seriously do believe you're faster. You've recovered from terrible qualifying conditions and you scored points at the Monaco Grand Prix while Tommy went and squandered a fifth-place start. You have pace to compete with him in the race and you're just a nineteen-year old in her first season in F1. Give it a year or two and Tommy won't be anywhere near you on track." Roksana predicted, having a much higher estimation of my abilities than I did, but also having evidence to back up her beliefs. I didn't know what to think of that or what to make of it, all I know is that I'm focused on doing the best job I can and I think Tommy provides me with an excellent benchmark to try and live up to. Tommy is certainly not a slow driver, honestly, I don't think that anyone on the current grid is a slow driver. Obviously some drivers are faster than others, and there will always be a handful of paydrivers, particularly at back of the grid teams, but I would argue that, nevertheless, the 2007 grid is one of the best F1 grids in a long time. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, with an awful lot of small teams popping up, there were a lot of paydrivers, but now, with so much manufacturer investment, that seemed to be changing. Of course, that's a double-edged sword, because a manufacturer like BMW or Toyota is more likely to leave the sport than a privateer team like Williams that exists for the sole purpose of racing in Formula One. McLaren is a bit of both, as McLaren itself is an F1 team first and foremost, but their major partner and part-owner, Mercedes, is a manufacturer, one that has only been back in F1 for about fifteen years. A long time for an engine deal, but not very long when you look at historic teams like Ferrari, McLaren, and Williams which have been in Formula One in their present form for decades. The point is that, right now, with all this young talent and all this manufacturer money filling the gap of the lost tobacco revenue of the last two decades, F1 is in a pretty good space, I think.
"Well, I'm glad you think highly of me." I accepted before lifting my cup and taking a sip of my coffee. It was mostly to cover up my nerves, because I'm not used to that kind of praise. I was hearing it more and more though: I overheard Johannes Koskinen mention it and that was before I went and scored points at Monaco, now I was hearing it from Roksana. I was wearing a watch on my left wrist though, and I caught a glimpse at the time while sipping my drink "I gotta get going, I have a session with my physio today. I'm going to get a massage to relax the muscles and then it's going to be a few days of hard neck training before I head out to Canada for the next race."
"A massage, eh?" Roksana wiggled her eyebrows.
"Oh don't even go there, you're nasty." I laughed.
"What's wrong with a good message?" the Portuguese-Ukrainian woman kept joking, a smirk on her face.
"It's less fun when the build up is for hard training rather than sex." I responded. Certain types of cynics will say that F1 isn't a sport, because we aren't running around a field chasing a ball or whatever, but F1 is most certainly a physical activity. First of all, in a world with obesity on the rise, most people can't even really fit in an F1 car, let alone drive one. Second of all, throwing the car around is no easy task, especially through a 5G corner when five times the force of gravity is trying to push my arms, my body, and my head away from the direction of the corner. That head thing means there is tremendous stress on the neck, hence the HANS device bracing the head and neck in event of an accident. Finally, and this is actually somewhat of an advantage for me, but being smaller and lighter than most of the other drivers means there is more weight left over for ballast. The driver has to sit in one part of the car and the weight goes down there, but the team can move ballast around and ensuring the weight of the car is strategically placed to benefit the car. Ballast tends to be a negligible weight most of the time, but it is one small advantage I have over other drivers, especially guys like Lorenzo Barbaro who are on the tall side.
"Why not both?" Roksana teased.
"Ugh, sex is the last thing I would want after training. I'd be sore, sweaty, and out of breath." I complained.
"Eh, I wouldn't mind seeing you sore, sweaty, and out of breath." Roksana said with a smirk. She was a bit relentless about the teasing - well, I say teasing, at this point, it's blatant, downright vulgar flirting - but I didn't necessarily find myself minding that.
"Is that right?" I asked, a smirk on my own face.
"I don't know, maybe I'll have to see to be sure." Roksana leaned in a little bit, the blonde woman making no secret of what she was getting at at this point.
"Hmm, maybe you'll get the chance one day." I replied coyly before taking one last sip from my coffee, rising from the seat and leaving my money on the table - enough to cover both me and Roksana - and walking over to my car. I bought a blue Alfa Romeo Spider last year, when I was already affiliated with Williams, and that has remained my daily driver. I quite like it, it's a bit bulbous but I love the triple headlights and I like the black softtop, at least on a car like this. When I sat down in the car though, I finally dropped the confident act and took a deep breath. I just flirted with someone. I just flirted with a woman. I've never flirted with anyone before, not having time for it during school because I was much more preoccupied with a junior racing career, but that just changed. Not only did I let Roksana flirt with me, but I played along, I enabled her, despite having little idea of what I was doing. This is all despite the fact that I knew what she was doing - it was easy enough to guess that she was a lesbian, she openly wrote about homosexuality in a Russian language magazine, that's not something you really do without a personal stake in the matter - and I also knew that she was getting bolder with what she said or tried. She all but said she wants to see me having sex today. I haven't even kissed anyone, let alone had sex. I couldn't get my mind off the situation as I drove all the way back to Monaco from Marseille, but I was very glad I was putting an ocean between us for the next few weeks. I needed some space to figure out what I was going to do before seeing her again.
Anthony Harrison. Felipe Alvarez. Victor Hartmann. Henrique de Matteo. Tommy Koskinen. Martin Weaver. Umberto Petronelli. Piotr Kaminski. Matias Hamalainen. Tamara Shchegolyayeva. For the most part, the list of drivers progressing to Q3 was a list of the usual suspects, with McLarens, Ferraris, BMW Saubers, and at least one Renault, but there was more to it. Tommy Koskinen continued his very good performance in qualifying so far this season, but I was joining him now, I was through to Q3, which meant that, unless I crashed spectacularly and had to take a gearbox penalty or something like that, I was guaranteed a top ten start. This was going to be my best start of the season, the best start of my F1 career. It was fantastic, and now I had twelve minutes to put my FedEx Williams-Toyota in the best grid position possible. I was not, however, going to be as fast as I was in Q2, because Q3 regulations meant that I had to go out on race fuel and my race setup. This meant that the car was going to be heavy and set up to do twenty-plus laps, so the car was going to be at least a few tenths slower than it was during Q2. I couldn't call that a disadvantage though, because everyone else had to put up with the same conditions.
The green light came on at the pitlane to mark the beginning of the season and I drove out right away, making my way around the Ile de Notre Dame in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River in Montreal. A few moments later, I cleared the turn 12-13 chicane and drove past the Wall of Champions to emerge onto the start finish straight and begin my qualifying lap. At the end of the start-finish straight, the track began to tend to the right, and that was the point where I transitioned from focusing on going as fast as possible down the straight to taking the best line possible through turn one and the sequence of turns that immediately follows on it. Braking was critical into turn one as it was very, very easy to overshoot the corner and end up in the run-off or in the grass. I kept it on track through the left-hander through and that set me up for the hairpin that was turn two. Picking up where to put the power down on the exit of turn two was tricky, as it was in my instincts to pick up the throttle and go as fast as possible down the short shoot to turn three, but the rear tyres could be grip limited coming out of here. Nevertheless, thanks to good timing and some timely intervention by the traction control, I managed to put the power down pretty early. That set me up for the turn 3-4 chicane.
Canada was essentially a series of straights linked by chicanes, and this was the first example of that, as I hit the brakes into the right-hander of turn two, feeling the car lift up as I went down the hill, then immediately attacked the kerb through the left-hander, setting me up for the end of sector one as I headed for turn five. Turn five was a long curve with the wall right on the inside, meaning it was possible to end your race if you were too greedy. I kept it clean through the right turn and that set me up for the second chicane: a slow left and then a fast right onto one of the longer straights on the track. Once again, on the exit of turn seven, there was a wall right there on the left, just inches away from the kerb I was now riding to maximize the exit. I got off the kerb before it terminated in the grass and let the Bridgestone tyres spin their way down the tarmac towards yet another chicane. This one was one of my favorites though. I braked hard for turn eight but then rode the inside kerb into turn nine, taking as straight of a line as possible, going from the inside kerb to the outside kerb as I maximized the chicane and set myself up well for the hairpin coming up. Just before the hairpin came the end of sector two though, and that meant I was entering the last section of track.
I turned the car 180 degrees around through the slowest corner on the lap and then guided it through the kink, setting up the car to head left as the casino straight had us parallel to the old Olympic canoe basin. I didn't have time to think about canoeing, because the slight kink of turn eleven brought the track into more of a rightward direction. The pitlane was directly ahead of me now but my attention was focused to the right, where the final two corners were waiting for me even as I was heading more than 200 miles per hour down the longest straight on the track. Brake hard, turn right, then immediately left, avoiding the high sausage kerbs on the chicane itself but riding the kerb on the outside on corner exit, not too much though, because just beyond the kerb is the famous Wall of Champions. Why is it called that? Because the notorious wall does not discriminate with its victims, taking experienced world champions just as easily as it took inexperienced rookies. I was not going to be one of its victims, not yet anyway, as I brought the car back onto the tarmac and buried my foot in the throttle, hoping all my work would amount to something. In the end though, it was Anthony Harrison on pole, Felipe Alvarez in second, Victor Hartmann in third, Matti Hamalainen in fourth, Henrique de Matteo in fifth, Martin Weaver in sixth, Tommy in seventh, Piotr Kaminski in eighth, Umberto Petronelli in ninth, and I was in tenth. I would be lying if I said I didn't wish for me, but it was already by best qualifying of the season, and I'll be damned if I don't turn this around into a points-paying result.
Of course, nobody was really concerned with my lap, as the big story of Saturday was that Anthony Harrison secured his first pole position. Rightfully so to an extent, I was happy for the McLaren driver, and I hope he goes on to win the race, but that doesn't mean I'm not proud of what I've accomplished though. I suppose I shouldn't complain, after all, people around me are way ahead of me in terms of recognizing my success, so maybe it doesn't matter that there doesn't seem to be too much media attention on me after all. The people who matter are paying attention, and those people, from what I can see so far, see a potential in me that I don't even necessarily see. Oh well, attention or not, I'm going to do everything in my power to get a good result out of the Canadian Grand Prix.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Go. The race started and the cars thundered down the road to turn one. I heard the reverberations of my Toyota V8 engine as the soundwaves bounced off the walls on either side of me and back before the kink to the right ahead of the left-hander of turn one. I outbraked Petronelli into the corner and got inside the Italian, even ahead of him a little bit, but I couldn't entirely force him off - though there was chaos up ahead as Alvarez ran wide in turn one - meaning he would have the inside line for turn two. I braked late in the corner, making sure my nose was ahead of his, both for position and to make sure he knew I was on the outside, and then I put the power down. I went around Petronelli, and it was a drag-race down to turn three, Toyota power against Renault power. Turn three is a one-line corner though, so one of us would have to give way, and I made sure it wasn't going to be me when I outbraked Umberto into the chicane. The car went light and then came back down on the inside kerb of turn four as the downforce kicked in and the air forced the car back into the ground. I had a wiggle coming out of turn four, but I managed to hold onto the car and guide it through turn five, feeling safe in my position by the time I got to the chicane. I was now up to ninth already.
Once again, I found myself battling Martin Weaver and Umberto Petronelli as I now set after the Red Bull. I suppose this is to be expected, Renault and especially Toyota and Red Bull were always going to be our main rivals this season, so guys like Petronelli and Jyri Kaasalainen are typically going to be just ahead of me, guys like Ivan Tripoli, Roland Ziegler, Daniel MacGowan, and Martin Weaver are going to be right around me, while guys like Haruki Tanaka and Louis Sanderson in the Super Aguris, Rudolfo Goncalves and James Buxton in the Hondas, and Giuseppino Leone and Max Marcus in the Toro Rossos are typically going to be the ones competing just behind us. Once in a while we'll be able to fight with the BMW Saubers ahead or the Spykers behind will catch up to us, but, for the most part, Williams is battling for fifth with Toyota and Red Bull, while the fourth placed Renaults ahead represent the fastest cars we can reasonably and consistently compete with. Things would need to go very unexpectedly for us to be able to take fourth place from Renault, but we can actually fight them, whereas the McLarens, Ferraris, and BMW Saubers are in another league. Monaco is probably the only track where I could have stayed ahead of Matti Hamalainen.
That was last race though, this race, I'm coming out of the third chicane and chasing Weaver to the hairpin. I pulled alongside the Red Bull and even ahead a little bit as my Toyota engine, already proven against the factory Renault, was now outperforming the customer-Renault engine in the back of the energy drink company's car. I intended to finish the move in the hairpin by outbraking Weaver, unfortunately for both of us though, that's not exactly how it happened. I did indeed get into the hairpin ahead of Weaver, but the Australian locked up behind me while trying to set up for an over-and-under attack down the back straight. The end result of all this is that the front right part of his front wing struck my rear tyre going into the hairpin. Weaver had front wing damage from this, I had to contend with worse.
"Puncture! Tamara, you have a puncture. Make keep it steady and make it back to the pits, if the car doesn't get too damaged, we can still salvage something from this race. I didn't respond, instead, I turned the car around through the hairpin, watching the white, yellow, orange, and dark blue Renault of Umberto Petronelli disappearing in the distance as more and more cars passed me. Even Martin Weaver was a third of the way down the straight, heading for the pitlane, but I had to gingerly drive the car, not daring to put the power down with just one wheel properly on the road. Even if I don't immediately spin out and crash, putting the power down is likely to rip up the punctured rim and start throwing a rubber carcass into the carbon fiber floor of the car, smashing one of the most delicate aerodynamic elements of the car apart. I certainly wasn't going to win this race, but slow and steady was still the name of the game.
I did manage to make it back to the pits though, so that was an immediate improvement over the Spanish Grand Prix a few weeks ago already. I found my pit box and the team proceeded to do everything they could to put me back into the game: the tyres were replaced with fresh, untarnished softs, the fuel tank was topped off, and Malmedy gave me a thumbs up in regard to car condition: I was good to go. I went from tenth to eighth to twenty-second in the space of one lap, but I was still in the race, and that meant that I still had plenty of time left. This was just lap one, I had sixty-nine more laps before the finish: those are nice odds. So, I chased down the racing pack, still clustered up since it was, essentially, still the beginning of the race. Martin, having pitted to change tyres and get a new front wing, wasn't far up the road from me, so there were two ways this could go: either I could follow him through the other cars if he was quick enough, or he would be the first of my victims if he wasn't. There was only one way to find out which it would be as I gave chase to the Red Bull who had caused all this.
"You and Weaver are faster than the cars ahead. It's a long way up the road but you're making good progress, keep it up." Peter called through the radio, the horseshoe bald Englishman wasn't sugarcoating it, we were still a far way off the cars ahead, but we were slowly starting to catch back up to the tail end of the back, and that's about the best I can hope for at this stage of the race. I thought back to the Bahrain Grand Prix, my previous best qualifying of the season when I started eleventh, and I thought back to how, during the race, Tommy and I didn't actually have much space and couldn't capitalize on our good grid positions. I was really, really hoping that the Canadian Grand Prix wasn't going to be a repeat of that. Especially because I really liked the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve: it had all the good parts of a street circuit with none of the bad: the walls were close, every corner came with a sense of danger, and there was a massive urban center acting as the backdrop for all this, all without the typical series of ninety-degree corners and poor track surface that comes with a street circuit. I'm sure it helps that this circuit is on an island that, outside of the race weekend, isn't really known for vehicle traffic, but the point remains, the surface here on this track is one of the smoothest out of all the street circuits. I don't even think of this track as a temporary street one, in my mind, Canada is as much of a "real" track as Silverstone or Monza.
"Copy that, I'm doing my best." I responded as the two of us chased the pack ahead for the next fifteen or so laps. At one point, I actually was the fastest driver on track, setting a lap time that stood for a few minutes until the leaders proved the superiority of their cars. That did bring me some confidence though, because that means, at least for that one lap, I gained on the whole grid, not just the last few cars. I was also gaining on Weaver, but I still wasn't sure what exactly I was going to do about that: I needed to get ahead of the Red Bull at one point or another during this race if I wanted a good result, but, at the same time, if I got into a battle with Weaver for track position and it didn't immediately work out, I could actually end up losing time. I was faster than Weaver, but the Australian was still quick, so it might actually be the safer idea to stay behind him for the time being, at least until and unless I become fast enough that I can pass him with ease. The absolute worst-case scenario - well, besides more damage anyway - would be getting stuck in a back-and-forth battle with Weaver that slows us both down and ends with us getting lapped. No, I intended to end this race on the lead lap. So, lap nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, I was tucked in behind Weaver, but, as we came through the final chicane and sped down the start-finish straight to start lap twenty-two, I had a good run on Weaver, and here, it might get be ahead incident free.
"Safety car! Safety car! Barbaro is in the wall at turn four. Mind the debris." the battle was halted by the SC being called out thanks to Lorenzo crashing in the Spyker. This was actually a good thing for me, since it gave Weaver and I the chance to catch up to the rest of the grid. A few moments later, when we did indeed catch up to the rest of the grid, a second boon revealed itself. The first stops were already underway, with race leader Anthony Harrison having already pitted, but this also means that there are cars on the verge of running out of fuel, so they had to pit even while it was closed. This meant that Felipe Alvarez and, unfortunately, Tommy Koskinen, had to enter the closed pitlane for emergency pitlane, both of them earning a ten second stop-go penalty for this infringement, something which would put them right at the back of the grid considering the safety car build-up. Yet another boon came when both Henrique de Matteo and Umberto Petronelli entered the now open pitlane the next lap but left before the whole grid passed by and the green light came on, meaning those two cars were under investigation as well, with the looming penalty of disqualification. If the FIA does indeed disqualify a Ferrari and a Renault, then that essentially creates free points paying positions. It's such a tantalizing opportunity, yet we're not doing a very good job of capitalizing on that, considering I'm still behind the remaining Spyker and Tommy is a few cars behind me. I intend to change that though.
On lap twenty-six, the safety car was finally coming in, and everyone was wary going down the casino straight: this was the first time that Anthony Harrison led a safety car restart, how was he going to handle it? When was he going to put the power down? How was he going to cope with the cars right behind him? Well, I raced with him in Formula 3 Euro and apparently that gave me good intuition about what he was going to do. I saw the McLaren going through the chicane, putting the power down there, hoping that the cars behind had gone slowly through the chicane thinking that Harrison was going to bunch up the cars, and, to his credit, that did give him a few car lengths on Victor Hartmann. The advantage of seeing this from all the way back here is that I had plenty of straight to work with, so, with a combination of good timing and Toyota power, I finally got the jump on Weaver and overtook him down the straight. I set myself up for the race to resume, thinking I still had ten, maybe fifteen laps before I needed to stop, and hopefully that meant I could chase down the cars ahead in the meantime. Something else happened though, because, as I neared the hairpin, I saw utter carnage. Carbon fiber everywhere, tyres against the walls, and the wrecked remains of a BMW Sauber sitting against the wall, looking like the fuselage of an early generation supersonic jet that had its wings clipped.
"Oh my God, what happened?" I asked through the radio as double-waved yellows and eventually safety car lights lit up around the track.
"Piotr had a big accident, Tamara. The safety car is out, and the medical car is on its way too. We don't know his condition at this time." Peter explained over the radio, trying to speak clearly and calmly, but I could tell that even he was a bit shaken up: the accident must have looked horrible on the TV screens then. The grid calmed right down and lined back up for the safety car which was out again after not even a whole lap of green flag running. Peter was silent for a few minutes, likely composing himself, or at least waiting for some more news to come in - I realized that, with Piotr Kaminski being a BMW development driver, Peter probably knew him from the BMW Williams days - and that left me with the sinking feeling that maybe, just maybe, I just saw somebody die. I thought the incident in Australia, when MacGowan flew over Haruki's car, that I saw a scary incident, but this seemed much, much worse. Malmedy probably realized that leaving an F1 rookie alone after having just witnessed a massive F1 crash wasn't a very good idea, so he called in again to get my mind off things "How are your tyres doing?"
"They're fine right now, I think they can go long if we have the fuel." I responded, now thinking that those ten to fifteen laps I mentioned earlier could be turned into fifteen to twenty laps, maybe a bit more, because I can take it easy here during the safety car period and conserve tyres, conserve fuel.
"Go easy on the throttle and try and do a few laps on lean fuel once we get restarted. I think the way to recover right now is to stay out and gain as much track position as possible." Peter responded, giving me instructions to use a leaner fuel mixture and thus burn less fuel even when we go back onto racing. I think it's safe to say I'm now on a one-stop strategy - Peter doesn't actually want to say that on the radio out of fear that other teams will overhear it and figure out our strategy - so the strategy here is going to be less about flashy overtakes and speeding passed cars, and more about staying out as everyone pits twice, then only pitting once and hope that the time gained by only stopping once is more than the time lost by saving fuel and tyres for most of the race. Of course, technically, this was a two-stop strategy since I had that emergency stop on lap one and topped off on fuel, replacing my punctured tyres at the same time, but, in practice, this was a one-stop strategy, since these two safety-cars back-to-back effectively eliminated the time that I lost on lap one. I did still lose plenty of track position during all of that, but I was determined to regain that as soon as possible. I got another advantage when Peter called up on the radio and cleared up any lingering worries "Alright, good news Tamara, Piotr is out of the car and getting into an ambulance for observation. They say he was making jokes in Polish when he got into the medical car."
"That's good to hear." I responded. So, after so many historic crashes and tragedies, the F1 circuit is now well prepared for any serious accident. The medical car with Dr. Sid Watkins in it responds to any incident rapidly, and, from there, drivers can be taken to the medical center at each and every circuit or taken to a nearby hospital by either ambulance or helicopter, depending on the circumstances and what was warranted. From what I could gather from this incident, Kaminski was conscious despite everything, and they got him out of the car pretty quickly, though still felt that, given the forces involved and the severity of the accident, it was still best to send him to a Montreal hospital for observation. I was just glad that he was conscious coming out of the car, that was usually a good sign, though I guess we'll have to wait and see what exactly the situation is. For now though, I'll have to focus on my race, as I use attrition, penalties, and fewer stops to cycle my way up the grid. James Buxton didn't even make the start of the race, his Honda's gearbox failing at the beginning of the race, Max Marcus retired with suspension damage thanks to a bang with the wall on lap eight, Lorenzo Barbaro's incident brought out the first SC, and now Piotr Kaminski had his crash. Felipe Alvarez and Tommy Koskinen are already behind me thanks to their penalties, while Matteo and Petronelli are likely to be outright disqualified for their pitlane infringements.
"They're placing sand on the inside of the hairpin due to oil from Kaminski's crash. Take a wider line through the hairpin from now on." Peter advised as the safety car restart was coming up. The carbon was cleaned up and sand was placed on the road in the hairpin area to soak up some of the oil from the crash - running over a patch of oil into a heavy braking zone could cause a serious accident, hence such a solution - meaning the area was now clean to go racing. At the same time, putting a wheel into the sand could slow me down or even outright spin me out, due to the difference in grip, so yeah, Malmedy told me to avoid it and I'm sure every other driver was going to hear about it as well. I got a good look for it myself as we drove past it, all lined up for the second safety car restart in the race, and various cars capable of varying speeds placed all over the grid. This was going to be a pretty crazy part of the race. Weaver was behind me, then Tommy, then Alvarez, while Leone, MacGowan, and Tripoli were ahead of me. A Toyota, both Red Bulls, the remaining Toro Rosso, both Williams, and a McLaren, a very interesting setup.
Anthony Harrison again hit the throttle going through the chicane. Victor reacted better this time, but there wasn't much the BMW Sauber could do, as the leader determined when the grid could go and that meant the following cars could only be so aggressive through the chicane, compromising their entry onto the start-finish straight. I wasn't able to launch any heroics either, following Giuseppino down into turn one as I watched Alvarez attack Tommy behind me, my teammate accepting that the McLaren was faster and yielding so he wouldn't lose time fighting the Spaniard. That meant that, right behind me, a very hungry Spaniard unhappy to lose all this time and track position due to unfortunate timing on the first safety car, just had to contend with Weaver's slightly damaged Red Bull before he'd get to me. I needed to work on getting a bit of a gap, or better yet putting a Toro Rosso between me and him. Through the three-four chicane, there wasn't an opportunity to attack, nor through turns five and six as we ended sector one, but through turn seven and onto that straight, I had a bit of a chance. It was my Toyota engine against Leone's year-old Ferrari engine, and I had the advantage, powering passed him and ahead as we went through the third chicane. I checked my mirrors, making sure I had a bit of a gap going into the hairpin, and then I set the engine mode back down to use up less fuel, just like Peter and I had talked about. Now that I wasn't at risk of losing positions on the restart and even made some forward progress, I couldn't justify running this fuel mixture anymore.
My race calmed down at this point, I let Felipe pass me without trouble down the back straight about two laps later, and then, on lap thirty-seven, I finally came into the pitlane. My team got to work, taking off the worn option tyres that did a commendable distance - thirty-six laps is no joke, safety car or not - and filled me up on fuel, meaning I could push a bit harder now since we knew what we were filling up for now. It was still going to take some effort to save fuel, as there was still a bit over forty laps to go here at Montreal, but it was definitely an improvement. Once serviced, i was released and left to return to the track. I was wondering where exactly I would emerge, having gained a lot of positions thanks to other cars pitting before me, but I expected to lose a lot of that now that I made my stop, and we'll see where that shakes out at the end of the race once people who two-stop make both stops and all that. Nevertheless, when I exited the pitlane, I found myself in a rather confusing situation. In turn one, Tommy Koskinen was chasing down Tripoli, both of them should have been well passed me as, while they were behind me on track, I had to pit, however, it seems they made contact in turn one and both spun out as a result of it. Thanks to these synchronized spinners, I came out ahead of my teammate and the Toyota, keeping two places that, for all intents and purposes, I really should have lost. This is on top of the fact that I already gained a third place thanks to MacGowan, who had been ahead of me, retiring with gearbox damage a lap prior. Part of the reason why Peter called me in this lap was just in case there was a safety car to pick up the Red Bull, but that does not seem to be the case. Nevertheless, the strategy seemed to be working.
The threat of yet another safety car in this race couldn't be avoided forever, as, on lap fifty, the safety car came out as Martijn van der Berg crashed his Spyker into the wall, throwing carbon fiber all over the track and ending the race for the Silverstone based team, having lost both of their cars to individual incidents. This is the part of the race where my position finally began to clarify. Matti Hamalainen was in the lead now ahead of Felipe Alvarez, but both of them would have to pit as soon as the pitlane opened, then Anthony Harrison was in third, Victor Hartmann right behind him as he has been all race long, then Henrique de Matteo and Umberto Petronelli, the Ferrari and the Renault still uncertain over what exactly was going to happen to them. I was behind Petronelli, and Kaasalainen was behind me to put me in a Renault sandwich. Tommy and Ivan Tripoli were just behind Jyri. This safety car was when the stewards finally decided to take care of business they fell behind on during the race, so, as we came onto the back straight on lap fifty, I got the following radio message.
"Be aware, Henrique de Matteo and Umberto Petronelli have been disqualified. They are going to enter the pitlane this lap." Peter explained. The grid was going slowly to catch the safety car, which was waiting on pit exit, so that meant that the pitlane was closed, so only cars in absolute need would enter - or in this case, cars which were going to retire from the race - so Malmedy was making sure I was aware of what those cars ahead were going to do. Both of them exited the pitlane when the red light was on and that's a major infringement of the safety car regulations, hence the disqualification. The only question is why exactly that took so long, but the FIA and the rotating panel of race stewards at each event are beyond my comprehension. To say that F1's governing bodies work in mysterious ways in an understatement. So, two cars ahead of me were gone, but then, two laps later, once the pitlane was finally open, Hamalainen, Alvarez, Koskinen, and Roland Ziegler, amongst other cars, all entered the pitlane while the rest of us were going slowly behind the safety car, and, thanks to the pit exit being in lap two, that meant that, once the green light came on, those cars were able to exit without much issue, emerging just a few places behind me. That left Anthony Harrison once again leading the race, then Victor Hartmann, then me. The yellow lights on the safety car turned off to signify that the race was about to restart here on lap fifty-two, and that meant that I was going to be running in third place on the restart. I started this race tenth, I fell all the way to twenty-second at the end of the first lap, and now I was in third.
We came through the chicane and the green flag flew. Harrison restarted the race, and we crossed the line to start lap fifty-three. Immediately, in my rearview mirror, I could see that Tripoli was attacking Kaasalainen, giving me some breathing room. I made my way around the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and took stock of my situation. I was currently in third, but Tripoli was quick, Kaasalainen also had the potential to be quicker than me in his Renault, and I had to imagine that Alvarez and Hamalainen would be coming back up the grid as well, recovering from their stops. So, assuming I lost all those places, I was still going to be in seventh, so I would match my result from Monaco, maybe even getting ahead of Tommy in the championship, but that meant having the potential for a podium and losing it. No, I wasn't just going to let those cars passed me, I was going to do everything in my power to preserve this position.
I tried to pull a bit of a gap on the cars behind as Ivan battled Jyri, but, unfortunately, Williams still didn't quite have the pace of the McLarens and the BMW Saubers ahead. Anthony Harrison took a healthy lead and Victor had a few car lengths behind him and ahead of him, while I was left in a similar situation. I couldn't quite keep up with the leaders, but I was putting some space between me and the two battling rivals. Ivan had the pace advantage, at least at this point in the race, and the Toyota managed to get passed the Renault on the casino straight on lap fifty-three. Kaasalainen tried to get back at him on the start-finish straight, but the Italian in the Toyota held position and kept the Finnish Renault driver behind. The Toyota driver was now trying to give chase to me, but, in a race that has been as chaotic and carnage filled as this one, we weren't quite out of the woods just yet.
"Safety car is out, Giuseppino Leone hit the wall of champions at the end of lap fifty-four." Peter called out in the radio, his tone seemed to indicate he was sick of mentioning the safety car, and who could blame him? This was the fourth safety car in the race. So, a few more laps of weaving, keeping temperature up, and saving tyres and fuel before the race got restarted for the fourth time. This did, unfortunately, eliminate the gap I had to Tripoli behind, so the Italian attacked me straight away on the restart. Ivan has had a crazy race so far: he started twentieth as Toyota had no pace in qualifying here, but he has recovered all the way up here, and he was going to overtake me when he spun battling Tommy on lap thirty-seven. Ivan knew he made a mistake and potentially threw away the chance at a podium here, now he was trying to come back at me, pass me, and return to a podium position. We knew the stakes here: we were Toyota and Williams, we do not fight for podiums, that has been the domain of McLaren and Ferrari all season long, so whoever gets third place here may have an advantage over the other team all season long. It would take six eight places to match the number of points I could get from finishing third once. It was critical, we were fighting hard.
Tripoli had a run on me out of turn two, but I was ahead, and I had the better line into the first chicane. Nevertheless, Ivan had his nose stuck in and refused to give way, even as he knew damn well that the natural line of the corner meant I had no choice but to close the door on him. My left rear and his right front made contact as I turned into turn three. My car nearly spun out and speared into the barrier as a result of the contact, but I managed to steer into it, get control of the car, and then turn into the corner, just barely keeping the car out of the outside barrier. I put the car back onto track and steered through turn five, making sure everything was under control, before getting onto the radio and figuring out what just happened.
"What was Ivan doing? That's not an overtaking spot!" I asked as I threw the car through the chicane.
"I don't know Tamara. Ivan pulled over with suspension damage, the marshals are already pulling the car in, so I don't expect a safety car. Maybe we can finally get this race finished." Malmedy responded, again sounding exhausted with how this race has been going and all these safety cars. We went from tenth to last to third, the last thing my race engineer wants to see is a scary incident that might have put damage on the car. The car seemed to be fine though, the tyres were fine, and I had a decent sized gap back to Jyri Kaasalainen behind. Twelve more laps to go and I was still in third. Matti Hamalainen was coming up the grid a few positions behind, but, further back, Felipe Alvarez wasn't having the kind of impact on the race he wanted to, given that he was in a battle with the Super Aguri of Haruki Tanaka and losing. As we got into lap sixty-five, I started thinking I had a chance of actually doing this. On lap sixty-six, Peter radioed me telling me I was closer to Hartmann ahead than I was to Kaasalainen behind me. On lap sixty-seven, I had over a second on the Renault behind. On lap sixty-eight, I heard that Hamalainen was nearly eight seconds behind me, meaning I was safe from the Ferrari with just two laps to go. On lap sixty-nine, Peter told me the pace was nice and then went quiet on the radio as the lap ended, both of us knowing what could happen with just one more lap to go.
Through turn one without a problem, keeping the car inside the two white lines on either side. Then turn two and the short shoot to the chicane formed by turns three and four, a chicane which led right into turn five. I finished sector one knowing I was less than a minute away from finishing a race on the podium. I couldn't celebrate just yet though, so I guided the car through turns six and seven, relaxing just a bit down the straight before the eight-nine chicane. Now it was a fast shot down to the hairpin, avoiding the sand on the inside of the corner and blasting the car down the final straight, through the barely-there corner that is turn eleven. I handled turns twelve and thirteen just fine, keeping the car well away from the wall of champions and then swinging the car towards the inside wall where my team was already cheering for me. I pumped my first in the air as I crossed the line to take third place in the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix.
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva that is third place at the Canadian Grand Prix! Congratulations Tamara, that was an absolutely amazing race, you did exactly what we wanted to do, you drove through the damage, and you had some good battles on the race. Great work, great work. Take it slow, pick up some rubber, and bring it back to parc ferme, okay? Michael has something to say next." Peter congratulated me, the weary voice exchanged for one of utter relief as he let go of all the stress and the anticipation, there was nothing more to worry about because we brought the car home. I went and put this white, dark blue, and cyan car up onto the podium, and the whole team was here to witness that. Now I was going to hear something good from the boss himself.
"That was fantastic Tamara, you really delivered for us today. Thank you and congratulations, we can't wait to see you up there. Cheers." Michael radioed in, not quite as ecstatic as Peter - Peter was just as much a part of this podium as I was, so he had more reason to be cheering that Michael - but that doesn't mean that Michael Coronet is any less proud of what I accomplished.
"Thank you, Peter, thank you, Michael. I couldn't have done this without you two. Sir Frank too, I'm so glad that you guys trusted me with this car, and it feels great to finally prove I belong here. I'm so happy. I can't quite believe it..that was amazing guys. It was a crazy, crazy race but the car was quick, and we nailed the strategy. I'm so, so grateful. Yeah. YEAH!" I cheered as I pulled into the pitlane, the reality of the situation sinking in as I parked the car up and began to climb out. I took the wheel off, then the headrest, and then I rose to my feet, pumping both my arms into the air and cheering. If you told me two years ago that I would be in Formula One already, I wouldn't believe you, and if you told me I would score a podium within my first year, just a couple of races into my career, I would have laughed in your face. Yet, reality is often stranger than fiction, and I've pulled it off, I put the Kazakh flag on the F1 podium for the first time ever. Of course, I wasn't the only one tasting success for the first time, as, just twenty feet away from me, I watched Anthony Harrison climb out of the car and run over to his team, hugging his mechanics as they cheered and congratulated the American on his first ever win in Formula One. The first American to win an F1 race since Mario Andretti himself in 1978.
The points paying results of the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix go as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
2: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota.
4: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault.
5: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
6: Haruki Tanaka - Japan - Super Aguri-Honda.
7: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
8: Roland Ziegler - Germany - Toyota.
It was an amazing, amazing race for me that strengthened our hold on fifth in the constructors' championship, though Jyri finishing right behind me ensured that we didn't really gain any points on fourth place Renault. Nevertheless, I would rather those points go to Renault who was almost definitely going to finish ahead of us than Toyota, who we are fighting for position. Anthony, meanwhile, has given himself an eight-point lead in the drivers' championship over Alvarez, giving a pretty commanding lead to the young American, so much so that Anthony could retire from his home race next week and still be tied on points with Alvarez if the Spaniard went on to win the race. The Spaniard would lead on count back, since that would be his third one compared to Anthony's first, but the point remains, Harrison is definitely a very, very capable teammate to the two-time world champion. That meant that, a few moments later when I found myself in the podium waiting room, I wasn't just sharing it with a race winner, I was sharing it with an honest-to-God championship contender.
"You finished in third? Congratulations!" Anthony said as soon as I entered the podium room, the mixed-race American with an English mother legitimately seeming happy to see me sharing the podium with him. Harrison seemed like a nice guy in Australia at the rookie photoshoot, but I didn't really know speak to him all that much beyond that, so I had to admit, I found it surprising to see him legitimately nice.
"Thank you, you too." I responded as I tied my hair out of the bun and let it fall down my shoulders, I ran my fingers through it just once, hoping that I would look presentable in all the media pictures of the podium, but not really able to do much about it here. Once I was done, I looked over to see Victor, in his white and blue Petronas sponsored overalls, handing me the third-place hat. A red, yellow, white and black hat with the Bridgestone logo on the front and a yellow 3rd on the side, with Hartmann's hat having the 2nd and Anthony's obviously having the first. In any case, I thanked the German "Thank you."
"It's nothing. You had a good race." Victor replied, the oldest driver in the room congratulating me as well.
"Is Piotr alright?" I asked a few minutes later after wiping the sweat off my face with a towel.
"I don't know for sure. I'm going to try and visit him in the hospital later." Victor responded.
"I'd like to go with, if you don't mind." I asked, wanting to check on the Pole. That was a scary accident and, while I was really proud of what I managed to accomplish today, I have to admit the mood was a bit weird considering that a fellow driver was hospitalized in the middle of it.
"Sure." Victor accepted with a shrug, not seeing it as a big issue. The FIA people then lined us up in the hallway leading out to the podium itself and told us to wait for the announcer to call our names.
"...in third place, Tamara Shchegolyayeva!" the announcer called out, and I walked out onto the podium, blindsided by the cheers of the fans and the sound of air horns as I emerged out in front of the Canadian crowd. I waved at them as I came to grips with the fact that they were cheering for me, for the first woman to ever stand on the podium of a Formula One race. At just over nineteen years old, I was also the youngest person, male or female, to stand on the podium. It was a record-breaking race in a way I didn't even realize. I then shook hands with a Quebec motoring official as I received the third-place trophy. Victor Hartmann came out next, and I have to say, I think I got a bigger cheer than he did. Of course, the biggest cheer of them all came for Anthony Harrison as the North American driver stepped out onto the podium and took the top step. He put one hand behind his back, holding his hand in it, and put his other hand over his heart as they lowered the flags and began playing the American national anthem followed by the English. They only played the anthems for the winners, but I was acutely aware of the fact that the Kazakh flag, cyan and gold, was hanging above me. The anthems played, then the spraying of the champagne commenced.
Hartmann took a swig from the bottle, Anthony Harrison focused on spraying the team rep from McLaren, while I walked up to the edge of the podium, raised the bottle in one hand and the trophy in the other in front of the cheering crowd, and then dropped the bottle to a team member below who caught it and spraying the bubbles on the team. It was probably for the best too that he had it, since I wasn't quite sure what the drinking age was in Canada. It's eighteen in sensible countries, but it's twenty-one in America, and Canada is right next to the latter. That didn't matter though, what mattered is that I stood on an F1 podium for the first time in my career, and I absolutely loved that feeling. This is the feeling that every race driver lives for, the feeling of success in front of an adoring crowd at a historic race track, that one that can only be topped by two things: the first was to win a race, the second, well, that was to win the championship itself. I didn't think i was going to hit this milestone, let alone hit it so early, but now that I did, was winning a race something I could expect? What about the championship?
Sir Frank Williams sat in his wheelchair looking out onto the canoe basin that afternoon. I had just returned to the track after visiting Piotr in the hospital with Victor, Roland, and a few guys from BMW Sauber, and had checked in with the team. They were packing up the garage in a celebratory mood, concentrating on getting everything packed up for the USGP next weekend, but very much celebrating the fact that we just got a podium and had the first trophy since Weaver's podium at the 2005 Monaco Grand Prix, and I was the one to do it. The man the team was named after, however, wasn't in the garage, having rolled himself here on his own power. Considering everything that happened today, I thought it was appropriate to approach him.
"You had rear wing damage the whole race, did you know that?" Sir Frank asked, not quite turning around to face me.
"No, Peter asked me how the car felt but he didn't say anything about damage. Maybe he thought it would break my confidence and slow me down." I theorized, not quite sure why my mechanic didn't tell me that.
"Confidence. That's the problem, isn't it? You have so much speed and you bring money to the team, but you don't recognize your own worth and your own speed. You need the confidence though, that's what separates a good driver from a great driver. A great driver doesn't need to have things hidden from them, a great driver doesn't need things to go their way, and a great driver doesn't need others to tell them that they're a great driver. They know it themselves, that's what makes them so hard to work with, but it's also what makes it all worth it." Frank spoke, and I could only imagine the caliber of driver and the examples that were coming to mind for him as he spoke. At one point, I felt like he was ridiculing me, like he thought that I did something wrong despite the podium, but that wasn't what this was. This wasn't Frank Williams diminishing my result, not at all, rather, he was telling me what I needed to know to repeat this. It also echoed a lot of the things I've been hearing already, both from outsiders like Roksana Yurasova, and from people in the know like Johannes Koskinen.
"Yes sir," I responded, agreeing with the seasoned veteran of Formula One. Sir Frank wasn't a driver, he never was, but he was certainly an F1 veteran, and he had more titles to his name than any driver did.
"Good. You did well today, Tamara. I'm proud of you." Frank made sure that I knew he wasn't criticizing me by following up his lesson with praise - not too much praise, just enough for me to know I was doing well to the man whose name is on the team I drive for - then he continued looking out at the canoe basin. It was essentially just a long rectangle cut into the side of the island and filled in by the Saint Lawrence River, but it did look pretty beautiful, especially now in late evening with the sun setting and the last glimmers of sun light shining on the gentle ripples in the water. It was an interesting change in pace from the chaotic, stop-start motor race that happened earlier in the day. In fact, the only hint of there having been an F1 race here at all were the faint sounds of the teams packing up in the distance. The both of us seemed to be enjoying the silence for a few moments before Frank asked "How do you think we'll do in Indianapolis?"
"Honestly, I don't know sir. As a team, we've scored points in Australia, Spain, Monaco, and now Canada, those are all pretty different tracks. It's difficult to say what kind of conditions will suit us. Indy is a really fast circuit, with two long straights, and the banking obviously, but there are also some twisty sections in between. We've done well in Monaco and we've done well here, so theoretically our car could handle both those conditions, but those conditions at the same time? I don't think we'll know until we get cars on the track." I responded as honestly as I could. The United States Grand Prix returned to the F1 calendar in 2000 and, since then, it has been held on the infield course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the most famous venue in all of racing, home of the Indy 500. From what I've seen, I really like the circuit, but this is the last year on its contract and, after the disaster that was the 2005 US Grand Prix with the Michelin teams retiring due to not being able to handle the banking - this is likely why Michelin left at the end of 2006 by the way, leaving Bridgestone as the sole tyre provider in F1 - it may not want to extend. American driver Anthony Harrison might just be enough to save the event, but we'll have to see what happens next week.
"Hmm, quite right. I'll see you in Indiana, Tamara, and I'll be excited to see what you can do." Frank turned to face me, the elder statesman of Formula One showing me a kind of respect that I never thought I would actually get in the F1 paddock. For the first time in my F1 career, I felt like I didn't need to justify why I was here or be timid in front of the team personnel, I had finally proven I belong on track, and maybe, just maybe, this was the beginning of my career in earnest. The moment where I went from just another driver to a serious part of the Williams organization.
"It is the weekend of the United States Grand Prix at the world-famous Indianapolis Motor Speedway and that could only mean one thing: we are here live from the speedway's yard of bricks with some of the rising stars of Formula One." George Tarantino began a special feature for American television ahead of the USGP for Speed Channel, one which I was asked to be a part of, likely as a result of my surprise podium at the chaotic Canadian Grand Prix. We were dressed in more casual team-wear for this, polo shirts, shorts, sneakers, and team hats, with the Midwestern summer sun shining down on us. in any case, George continued, introducing the group of us "We have Anthony Harrison, an American driver from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and F1's newest race winner. We have Henrique de Matteo of Brazil representing the Rossa Corsa behemoth that is Ferrari. We have Williams driver Tamara Shchegolyayeva of Kazakhstan fresh off her Canada podium and Max Marcus of New Zealand representing the Toro Rosso team. Finally, in his first ever Formula One race, we have exciting BMW Sauber reserve driver Maximilian Renner, filling in for Piotr Kaminski after his horror crash last weekend."
Now, Piotr only really had minor injuries from the accident and was conscious when we saw him in the hospital, however, with only a week having passed, the FIA felt that he was at a heightened crash risk and thus did not clear him to race. That meant that yet another driver from the 2005 Formula 3 Euro series had made it to Formula One, specifically Max Renner, who just barely beat me to rookie of the year. The German was a fast youngster and in high demand, with ties to both BMW Sauber and Red Bull, meaning he was always going to get to F1 sooner rather than later, I'm just surprised that I made it here before he did. I suppose that's just the power of money though, and, even with my podium, I know the Kazakhoil money I have behind me is powerful, perhaps more powerful than I would like it to be. I didn't really want to be throwing the weight of tens of millions of dollars around here in F1, but what choice did I have? Kazakhoil approached me with the opportunity to live out my dreams and, yeah, I don't love them as a company, nor do I feel like they should be using their money on me, but their money and support is, fundamentally, why I was able to take that podium last weekend. I brushed those thoughts aside though, I was doing a media event, this was not the time to deal with my guilt over the moral implications of taking money from a corrupt third world government.
"So, we start with you Anthony, you've won the Canadian Grand Prix and that means you have the perfect momentum going into your home race. Can you keep that kind of pace going into the USGP?" George asked the McLaren driver who rapidly went from rookie to championship leader. I won't say that Felipe Alvarez has had the best start for his season, he's had some bad luck, particularly in Canada, but that doesn't change the fact that Anthony Harrison has made himself look very, very impressive by not only matching the world champion, but, quite honestly, beating him so far. Now, I'm sure that Felipe will bounce back later in the season, he's a double world champion after all, and a driver of his caliber can never be disconnected, but, at the same time, Anthony will really be getting acquainted to the team. I guess the story of McLaren this year will be what happens first: will Felipe rebound and make his case for a third consecutive title, or will Anthony Harrison become an integral part of McLaren and make his case for being team leader? Well, whatever it is they do, they'll need to be careful, because Ferrari is right there behind them, and if the McLarens are too busy fighting amongst themselves, Matias Hamalainen and Henrique de Matteo might just slip past them.
"Well, I hope so. McLaren has given us - me and Felipe - a really good car and we've had good pace at every track. Obviously, Matti got the better of us in Australia and Henrique has his two wins, but we've been competitive. My team of mechanics has been fantastic so far, we've gotten the car on the podium every race so far, and last weekend we broke through and won a race. Maybe we can do it again here. We'll find out either way on Sunday." Anthony answered, making sure to thank the team and not seem too arrogant, but certainly not showing any signs of backing down. Anthony wasn't promising wins or discounting Felipe's efforts, but he was also making clear that he would fight for wins whenever possible and that he is hungry for wins and has been all season long. That is the kind of answer I wish I could give in the media, but one I haven't quite been able to deliver yet.
"Thank you, Anthony, good luck in the race." George thanked his compatriot before turning over to the Brazilian currently leading Ferrari's championship charge "Now, Henrique, you are third in the championship race, and you could theoretically overtake Felipe in this race. We know that France is a strong track for Ferrari, what can you do to give yourself the best chance possible going into the French Grand Prix when we return to Europe?"
"Well, Ferrari has been quick at this track always. Last year we scored the 1-2 with Wilhelm and me, so for sure we want to try something and take the battle to uh, to the McLarens. You know, right now it is the story of McLaren, but I won two races, Matti won a race, and, who knows, maybe Ferrari will win the next two races. We want to fight, and we want to win." Henrique de Matteo answered, speaking of how Ferrari has been strong here historically and how, with Magny-Cours traditionally being a Ferrari track - Wilhelm Ziegler absolutely dominated at the French Grand Prix year after year - Ferrari might just be able to turn the McLaren narrative on its head and take control of the championship going into the second half of the season. As somewhat of an outsider, at least from the championship fight, it was absolutely spectacular to watch this: Felipe Alvarez, Anthony Harrison, Henrique de Matteo, and Matias Hamalainen: four top drivers going head-to-head within Formula One's two greatest teams. I honestly didn't know who was going to win and I wasn't sure who i wanted to win, because I could think of reasons to support any one of them.
"You've mentioned Wilhelm Ziegler and that kind of brings to matter a second question: Wilhelm won five titles in a row with Ferrari and made the team his own. You were his last teammate while Matti, fresh from McLaren, was one of Wilhelm's fiercest rivals: how is it when the two of you go head-to-head over which one of you will carry his legacy forward?" George asked a follow-up question to the Ferrari driver.
"Well, I don't think that there is that same kind of relationship. There is no number one or number two in the contract. I am a Ferrari driver, Matias is a Ferrari driver, and, fundamentally, Ferrari is the team, and the team has to come first. For sure Wilhelm was an amazing driver, he won seven championships and five were for Ferrari, I would be honored if I can be his protege, successor, whatever you want to call it, but we also have to look forward. Wilhelm is retired now and Ferrari is still here so, we fight for Ferrari instead of fighting each other." Henrique answered, following the party line and putting the team ahead of himself, at least vocally doing so.
"Thank you, Henrique." Tarantino now turned to me and asked his question "Alright Tamara, tenth to last to third, tell us about the Canadian Grand Prix?"
"It was the craziest race I've ever been a part of. Four safety cars, a puncture, and apparently, I had damage to the lower corner of my rear wing all race long - my engineer didn't even tell me! No, it was an insane race, the kind of event that puts a strain on us drivers as we stop, start, and stop again, but me and my team pulled it off and I'm very grateful for that. The next step now is to keep working hard and hope we can build off of that." I answered the question, smiling as I went over the Canadian Grand Prix. I won't pretend it was particularly fun to be sitting in the car as the fourth safety car came out mere laps after the third one ended, but I did have to look back on that race fondly, especially given how it ended. So, next up, George asked Max Marcus about being the lone New Zealander in Formula One and if the Toro Rosso could match the Red Bull given the smaller team has challenged the senior team a handful of times this year. The real focus of this feature once they were done with me though, was on Maximilian Renner, the BMW Sauber debutant.
"So, Maximilian, we've seen you in junior categories, we've seen you in tests, but this is the first time we're seeing you taking full part in a Formula One weekend, what are you looking forward to the most?" George asked as we were running out of time in this short little promotional piece to build up the USGP.
"First of all, i want to say good luck to Piotr, we were all very glad to see him okay and we hope he'll be cleared to drive as soon as possible. Second of all, while I'm in the car, I want to thank BMW Sauber for this wonderful opportunity, and I think the best way that I could thank them would be to score some points. The best thing I can do is not be noticed, make the team think that nothing happened, you know?" Max explained. I guess the German did have a point: he didn't really want to get noticed or make this about himself, he wanted to prove himself by proving he was just as good as the highly regarded Piotr Kaminski, thus, if there was too much attention on him, that could be because he wasn't doing as good as he should have been. Max didn't want to be talked about during the race, he wanted viewers to see the results at the end of the race and be impressed by that. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what the young German rookie Maximilian Renner could do in his debut race this weekend.
Well, it turns out the young German was just as quick as ever, as he put his BMW Sauber up in seventh place, with only Jyri Kaasalainen between Hartmann and his compatriot. Things were not, however, as good for us at Williams. Quite frankly, as a team, we didn't have any pace whatsoever. Tommy Koskinen was down in fourteenth and I was directly behind him on the grid in sixteenth, Rudolfo Goncalves off to the side splitting us and Louis Sanderson in seventeenth. McLaren was up in front, led by Harrison, then the two Ferraris, led by Matteo. Then Hartmann in fifth, Kaasalainen in sixth, Renner in seventh, Ivan Tripoli in eighth. Weaver, Petronelli, and MacGowan, then Roland Ziegler and James Buxton. We scored a podium in Canada, but here in America, we were busy fighting the Hondas while the Renaults, Red Bulls, and Toyotas were ahead of us. We weren't in a great position to start the race, but it was a long run down to turn one here at Indianapolis, and I wasn't counting myself out quite yet.
We thundered down the main straight - head the opposite direction compared to the Indycars who run the oval here in May for the Indy 500 - and I got an excellent run on Tommy ahead. I pulled alongside Rudolfo almost instantly, but, with Koskinen fighting the Honda ahead and the other Earth Dreams Honda boxing me in on the inside, I was forced to go outside. I was accelerating and accelerating right next to the concrete wall, having no idea how the Indycar drivers do this at well over 200 miles per hour, but, soon enough, it was time for turn one and I had to make my move. I came down on the brakes and turned into the right-hander leading into the infield section. There wasn't much I could do though, because Koskinen wasn't giving way, so I had to keep it off the grass and slow down, enabling Tommy to stay ahead and letting Goncalves get ahead of us both. It was more of a curse than a blessing for Rudolfo, because passing us putting him into Ziegler and MacGowan, who were crashing ahead. Tommy and I survived the damage and got through the carbon rubble to take the left hander that was turn two. Turn three then, was a fast kink to the right. We got out of the yellow flags as we turned right again in the tighter turn four, onto green track once again.
Turn five was another fast right hander, but it set up for the slow hairpin that was turn six. Turn seven was a right-hander that got us out of the twisty bit and onto the all critical infield straight. I stayed close to my teammate through sector one and got a run on my teammate going into turn eight. The cyan Kazakhoil logo on the back of his spoiler motivated me as I feigned to the right and then left, giving me the inside line for the right-hander of turn eight. This was critical because turns nine and ten were a pair of slow pairpins that set up for the return to the oval section. There was a short shoot from turns ten to eleven before the right-hander of eleven got us onto the oval yet again for the fastest section of track in all of F1. It was flat-out all the way to the finish line in a long, long banked corner that literally destroyed Michelin tyres in 2004 and 2005, but the now ubiquitous Bridgestones held on, on, and on all the way through twelve and thirteen, then onto the long-long start-finish straight once again. It was essentially half an oval with an infield section in between. I was up to twelfth at the end of the first lap and, pace in the car or not, I was going to do whatever I can to recover from this poor qualifying.
In the end though, it was a futile effort, I finished in tenth, Tommy retired with two laps to go thanks to an engine problem. It was a deflating result after a podium, but, as I look back at the season so far, my results read as follows: Australia: 8th - 1 point, Malaysia: 9th, Bahrain: 10th, Spain: retired, Monaco: 7th - 2 points, Canada - 3rd - 6 points, and USA - 10th, I have to say, I can be proud of what I've done so far. I've scored 9 points, putting me four points ahead of Tommy, who was on 5 points. I scored a podium, I was outperforming my teammate, and I was being very, very consistent with only one retirement - and even that wasn't entirely my fault - this is a very good start for a rookie driver, and I can only hope I get it going as F1 returns to Europe.
As for the points-paying results here in Indianapolis, they read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
2: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
3: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
4: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
5: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault.
6: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota.
7: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault.
8: Maximilian Renner - Germany - BMW Sauber.
So, Anthony wins his home race, second in a row, Renner scores a point on debut, and Toyota and Red Bull both make small gains on us. It wasn't a perfect for us, but it wasn't a catastrophe either. The French Grand Prix is next.
Notes:
Alright everyone, I hope you enjoyed the in-depth focus on Canada here.
Chapter 5: The Origins of Motorsport
Notes:
Hello everyone! I hope you've been enjoying the story so far, this chapter will cover the French and British Grand Prix.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter V.
The Origins of Motorsport.
I smiled at my father's secretary as I entered his office in Monaco. I had gotten back home after the race in America, and it wouldn't take me very long at all to get to Nevers for the French Grand Prix at the beginning of July, so that meant I had a little bit of time. My father had once been a minor functionary in the Soviet Union, just one of many bureaucrats overseeing the flow of Central Asia's natural resources to the industrial centers in western Russia and Ukraine. As the union was falling apart and privatization began, my father managed to get his hands on several logistics contracts, contracts he then sold for a massive profit. It is exactly the same robber baron technique that all the oligarchs of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and everywhere else in the eastern Bloc did. I suppose the only difference is that my father got out after the first set of privatization sales, moving us out to the west. In Monaco, my father used his money to create his own company, Goliath Logistics, based out of the principality but primarily going business in southern France, occasionally branching out to places like Barcelona, Turin, Milan, and Genoa. Goliath sponsored me all the way up to Formula 3 Euro, at which point my father said the costs were simply too much to justify. I understood, of course, his money isn't infinite, and I'm not particularly comfortable with the source of it, but the sponsorship did the job it needed to do, as it got me to high enough level in motorsport that I was able to get the attention of Kazakhoil. I'm not particularly comfortable with the morality of that either, but again, it got me to Formula One.
Third world oil companies, corrupt tobacco conglomerates, Middle Eastern governments...if you've been in Formula One, you've taken money from at least one of those groups, likely more. The same can be said about football, cricket, baseball, or any other sport. The Olympics are about to be held in Beijing for Christ's sake. Should the athletes be held responsible for the morality of their sponsors? I would argue no, as sponsors give those athletes the opportunity to live out their dreams. I don't know if anyone in the world truly has the strength of character to refuse millions of dollars to live out their dream jobs. Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps I've been desensitized by growing up around my father and quite a few other oligarchs from the former Soviet Union now living in Monaco, but it's not like anyone condemned FedEx or the US Olympic team for the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Am I the best thing Kazakhoil could do with its money? Absolutely not, it is a shame that the mineral wealth is being used by a corrupt regime to appeal to westerners rather than to help their own people, but it's not like that money was earmarked for benevolent causes only to go to me. The cynical fact of all this is that, if immoral corporations are going to waste their country's money, I might as well make sure I benefit from it as well. That's not the way I want to be thinking, of course, but it's the reality of the situation. I can promise you I am not taking away money from any common Kazakh people, they money that is now sponsoring me is marketing money, not humanitarian money, not charity money, nothing of the sort. The only one who should be blamed for this are the people at Kazakhoil and in the Kazakh government that made this decision. I am merely taking advantage of money offered to me.
"Tamara, come in!" my father finally called, saving me from the moral implications of sponsorship in sport. I entered the office of Anatoliy Shchegolyayev, founder and CEO of Goliath Logistics. My father's hair was graying, but he dyed it in such a way that it appeared a healthy black bar some wings of silver on either side of the head. He thought it made him look good, I thought it made him look like some sort of real estate agent, but he seemed happy with his appearance, so I wasn't going to ruin it. He was dressed in a black suit with a white shirt, no tie at the moment, something he presented as a casual decision, but was likely just a calculated move to appeal to his subordinates. My father wanted to appear like a modern, western businessman, but he couldn't quite hide the fact that he was a cutthroat businessman who made his money in the collapsing Soviet Union. Goliath didn't change that, his restaurants couldn't change that, and a property development in Nice definitely couldn't change that. Not that anyone would say that to his face, especially not me, because I profited off his business ventures. My father gave me a hug before walking back behind his desk and taking a seat, gesturing for me to sit down across him "How can i help you?"
"Did you watch the race?" I asked, sitting down in the chair, hoping that my father had seen what happened at the Canadian Grand Prix. If not, I would settle for the United States Grand Prix as well, even if I didn't do as well in that race. I just want to know that my father is paying attention to my Formula One career and has been able to witness my moment of triumph in Canada. I took a podium in a Williams, something that Tommy Koskinen hasn't done yet, something which no Williams driver has done since Victor Hartmann at the 2005 European Grand Prix. Of course, Victor was only there because of BMW, so when BMW bought Sauber, he followed, while Martin Weaver left for Red Bull the following year, clearly the space for me. I was the one that was supposed to be the paydriver that funded Koskinen's attempt to bring Williams back to the front of the grid, but instead, here I was, bringing the team to its first podium in years. I could be proud of that, and I could only hope my father was too.
"I didn't get the chance to Mara. you know I've been busy setting up the Lyon deal." I couldn't help but feel my shoulders drop as my father spoke. I knew he was busy trying to expand the company and open a distribution point in Lyon - being active along the Mediterranean coast from Barcelona to Genoa was one thing, but my father wanted to expand inland - the eventual goal was to have Goliath operating across western Europe. I knew this was a pretty important step and would involve the company taking control of a warehouse in a major French city to act as a launching off point for business deeper inside of France, but it still hurt to see that my father missed what was one of the biggest events of my young life. The fact that Natasha and my father were the only family I had left didn't exactly help matters either. To his credit, my father seemed to notice that, so the next thing he said was better "Tell me about what happened."
"I scored a podium in Canada, dad. I took the car all the way up to third and I got to stand on the podium looking out at the cheering crowd. The Kazakh flag was hanging over me and the whole team was ecstatic for me. Sir Frank even had some positive things to say to me." I told him, focusing on the Canadian Grand Prix. I didn't score points in America despite having a pretty good race considering the car didn't have very much pace at all that weekend, not capable of fighting for points, let alone the podium, but Canada was definitely the race I wanted to remember out of the North American leg of the season. It was my best Formula One race yet and I can't imagine I'll do anything quite that good for awhile now, but I did in Canada.
"Congratulations Mara, I'm very proud of you." my father stood up and walked over to me, putting his hands on my shoulder and looking me in the eyes to show that he was sincere and that he did wish that he got to see the race. My father helped negotiate my contract and he was part of my Formula One career, obviously, but he was much more concerned with running his business ventures, Goliath chief among them. I understood that, and I was grateful for the financial support I got from my father's companies earlier in my career, but I can't deny that I wish he were more interested in my day-to-day career.
"I...thank you dad." I eventually responded, realizing that there was some genuine remorse in my father's voice and that this was, realistically, the best that I could hope for at this moment. I wish he watched the race - hell, I wish he would have attended the race in person, but I would be content if he was at least following along to my career to the best of his abilities - but I had to hope that he would eventually once he had the time. My father would find out about my accomplishments one way or another, because I would simply tell him whatever he missed on TV. This was far from perfect, but it was something that I was going to need to live with, and at least he knows about my podium now. I'll settle for what victories I can get in this context.
"I'm proud of you, Tamara." my father said again, trying to assure me. I nodded, stretched, and then headed out, knowing that my father was busy and also knowing that there were a lot of other things I wanted to do right now than sit in an office with a father trying to make up for the fact that he missed the biggest moment of my career so far. I didn't want to hear him try and make up for it and tell me he loves me, I didn't want to hear him call me Mara like he did when I was little, and I didn't want him asking if I understood why he didn't have the time. I understood that he was working, I did, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm disappointed. In short, with him trying to make up for it and me not being in a particularly receptive mood, there wasn't anything we could accomplish in this office. So, exiting the office, I walked home, wearing black flats, white jeans, a white tank top, and a light off-white jacket, along with sunglasses. It was how I've always seen upper class women dress in Monaco, and I thought I should like nice and maybe even a bit professional when I appeared at my father's office, not that it made much of a difference. This would've gone just as well if I showed up in a T-shirt and shorts. Come to think of it, I would much rather be wearing that as well, considering I don't have any reason to dress up anymore, nor did I really to begin with. That was, until I saw a familiar blonde woman sitting on the hood of her Peugeot wagon, right outside my apartment.
"Tamara, I mis - whoa, you like nice." I smiled awkwardly when Roksana Yurasova started greeting me only to get blindsided by my appearance and giving me a once-over, or three. Right, I had been avoiding this during my break in North America, but now I was back home, and that meant that I had to deal with the fact that, for the first time in my life, I knew a lesbian, not only that, but I didn't entirely dislike the fact that I knew a lesbian, in spite of the fact that I know that lesbian has an interest in me. That interest is reinforced with how she's ogling me right now. Acting before reason, I decided to give her a once over as well. Roksana was definitely dressed more casually, wearing flip-flops, white shorts, a white tank top, and an open blue, white, and gold flannel shirt. It was a distinctly feminine outfit, but it was also like the feminine version of a frat boy from an American movie. Nevertheless, I had to admit the aspiring writer and magazine columnist looked good in it.
"So do you." I responded, perhaps just acknowledging the fact that she was an attractive woman, or perhaps meaning it in the same way that she did, I wasn't quite sure, since my brain was still trying to figure out how exactly I meant it. The smart thing to do would've been to take the privacy I had in North America to think about this and figure out how I'm going to deal with the Portuguese-born Ukrainian woman a few years older than me, but, instead, I ignored the problem altogether and found that as a bit of a relief. Now though, I was back in Europe, and I would remain here for the duration of the summer, so I needed to figure out what I was going to do about all of this. Right now though, I was too preoccupied with the present battle to consider the larger overall strategy. I did have a bit of an offensive move available to me, so I decided to buy myself a little bit of time while I tried to get a better hold of myself "So, what are you doing here?"
"I wanted to congratulate you on the race! You're the first woman to stand on a Formula One podium you idiot, you deserve to be celebrated!" Roksana announced, teasing me about my accomplishments. it's nice to see somebody in my life watched the race - now, I'm being a bit bitter here, I know that Natasha watched the race, and Giorgio, and a lot of other people important to my career and to who I am as a person, but I also know my father wasn't among them, and that gave me the right to be a bit disappointed and just a bit bitter - but again, I didn't quite think about it in the same way as Roksana. I didn't see myself as some sort of champion for women in motorsports or as a Central Asian athlete or anything like that, I just saw myself as a competitor. I was a racer and everyone else on the grid was my equal - sure the level of ability or the performance of the car varied, but we're all in the same sport on the same stage - sometimes, it's hard to even remember that I'm such an outlier on the grid. I saw the gender stuff as an obstacle I've overcome - nobody at this stage thinks I'm some sort of waif in over her head, they see me as a rival they need to study, they need to know how I drive and what my weaknesses are to try and beat me on the track. Roksana though, she wrote for a queer magazine, she wrote to an audience of Russophone expats in the west, so these things were at the forefront for her.
"I...thank you Roksana, it was an insane race and I'm so, so very happy that it ended the way it ended. The race seemed like it was pretty much over for me on lap one and I almost considered pulling the car over and retiring. Then Piotr crashed and all those safety cars...mad, mad race. This was the first time that teams besides McLaren and Ferrari were on the podium, and I'm glad I got to put Williams up there along with BMW. That might be the season for us." I answered, explaining how important that podium might be, because depending on how the rest of the season goes, 6 points might be the difference separating the entire midfield. I've said it over and over and over again, but the battle between Williams, Toyota, and Red Bull is super close, and Renault isn't that car ahead of us, while teams like Super Aguri, Honda, Toro Rosso, and even Spyker aren't very far behind us. Consistency was going to be vital, but maximizing opportunities is also crucial. I scored a podium on the day that the Williams had some pace in Canada, whereas our rival teams didn't pick up all that many points in the US when we had an off day.
"Practicing for the media?" Roksana asked with a smirk, finding my answer a bit too forced and official.
"Sorry," I said with a sheepish grin "I don't really know what else to say, I'm so happy with what happened. I finally feel like I proved that I belong in F1 and that the team was right to trust me. I'm on cloud nine and the fact that the USGP wasn't too good for us is barely even on my mind."
"I wouldn't say it was a bad race, you did what you could with the car." Roksana responded. So, she watched both races. Yurasova had no reason to follow F1, she wasn't a motorsport journalist or involved in any of the drivers, but she was following my career more closely than the man who was my father, funded my junior career, and was acting as my manager. I was hoping I was going to have a long conversation with him about what happened and about what I could do with the rest of the season, I even had something I wanted to show him, but all of that meant nothing once I found out he didn't even watch the Canadian Grand Prix, or the United States Grand Prix, or probably any race outside of Monaco, the one race he could watch from his own balcony.
"Well, thank you for that." I responded, still somewhat awkwardly, to her praise. A moment of silence later, I realized that, if my dad didn't care about what was going on with my career, I could at least discuss all this stuff with someone that does seem to care "You know, I was going to show this to my father but, well, things happened, so I might as well show it to you instead. Mariana printed out this picture for me just after the race, a picture of me and the whole team gathered around the third-place trophy. Sir Frank, Claire, Michael, Tommy, Malmedy, everyone."
I pointed to the figures as I made them as I showed her the group shot of the team gathered around the trophy. Tommy and I were in the front crouched on either side of the trophy, my team was behind me, Tommy's team behind him, and the top staff directly behind the trophy, with Sir Frank himself positioned in his chair directly behind the trophy, as Williams Grand Prix Engineering was back on the podium and the founder and team principal deserved to be a part of the celebrations. His daughter and deputy team principal Claire was on his left, while Michael Coronet, the day-to-day boss of the team, was on his right. Sir Frank's right-hand man, quite literally in this case, stood in front of a wall of team personnel in Williams shirts. It was a powerful, powerful display, and it was all because of me. I'm not sure if the team necessarily planned on winning a trophy this year, this early in the rebuilding project - and, lets be honest, if there was any such expectation, it was for Tommy to be in that position - but here I was, bringing the first trophy since 2005 back to Grove. It was just a third place trophy, I admit, but it demonstrates the progress we've made with Toyota and our other partners, and it's a big accomplishment for me as well.
"Are you going to frame it?" Roksana asked, quickly figuring out what I wanted to do with this. This was a big moment for me, a big moment for my F1 career, and a big moment for my motorsport career in general, of course I want to celebrate this, just like I've been celebrating so much of my motorsport history thus far.
"Yup, it'll go next to the class of 2007 picture I have. I'm also having a copy of the trophy made, when it's done, I have a place for it picked out in my apartment, it's going to be the new centerpiece of my collection." I explained, putting the picture back under my arm. I had copies made of every race winning trophy I have from my junior career, now I' going to add any and all F1 trophies to it, along with the fact that I still have every helmet and every race suit from my career stored in my apartment. I'm sure it'll eventually be too much to keep it all in an apartment in Monaco, but having too much memorabilia from a motorsport career is a pretty good problem to have, in the grand scheme of things.
"Can I see it?" Roksana asked.
"Of course," I said before leading her into the apartment. It was only when I was heading up the stairs of my building did I realize I was inviting an attractive woman who was a lesbian and has demonstrated interest in me into my home. That was a bit scary just to begin with, and it probably wasn't the smartest way of trying to cope with all of this and what it means. On the other hand, though, it's not like Roksana Yurasova is some sort of predator that is going to jump me as soon as we enter the apartment, no, she is someone who is interested in me and interested in what I do for a living. Roksana wants to see the material history of my motorsport career and I'm happy to show it, there doesn't have to be anything more to it. I am only being anxious because I'm allowing myself to be anxious. So, I took a deep breath as we got to my floor and composed myself before opening the door and allowing Roksana in. I closed the door behind me and led her through the living room and into the corner of the room that I've reserved for my memorabilia. There was a simple white pedestal in the middle, currently holding the trophy from the GP2 Asia feature race at the Dubai Autodrome that sealed the championship for me, but it would be offset by the Canada third place trophy. I suppose it would have to take a place on the floor along with my other two GP2 Asia trophies - the Shanghai sprint and the Bahrain feature - but I would figure out where that went when I actually got the trophy. For now though, I was going to put the class of 2007 picture to the left of the trophy rather than above it, so that I could put the Canadian celebrations picture on the right and keep the look balance. I held the picture against the wall in the spot to show Roksana what I wanted to do.
"So, the trophies and the pictures on the back wall, helmets on the cabinet on the left side, and race suits hanging on the right...well, if the whole race car driver thing doesn't work out, you could always try your hand at curating." Roksana joked, getting a laugh out of me. I did see that there was a bit of truth to her comment though, because I definitely think I've maximized my use of this little nook, effectively an extension of the living room formed by the fact that the bathroom filled the right corner of the apartment, leaving this space in the left corner. I put the picture down for now and went over to where Roksana was to look out onto the space, seeing the appropriate helmets opposite of the race suits they went with. I had a few different designs through the years, though the golden Kazakh sun on the cyan field on the top of the helmet has been a bit of a standard. My DAMS helmet from GP2 Asia was pretty much defined by that design, being entirely cyan and gold, with the Kazakh hawk filling up the sides and the Kazakhoil text on the top of the visor. This was because, at that point in my career, I was practically contractually obligated to promote Kazakhstan. I suppose I still am, though the corporate dark blue and white colors of Williams feature more prominently on my current race suit, with the cyan and the gold effectively limited to the top of my helmet. Still though, I liked the design I ran last year, and I suppose there is something rather distinctive about a helmet which is almost entirely cyan, apart from some golden details, and that makes it distinctive. Quite like the red helmets that Wilhelm Ziegler quite famously ran at Scuderia Ferrari during all those championship winning years.
"I guess I'm really good at portraying myself." I joked, laughing off the suggestion.
"Well, it is an interesting subject." Roksana responded with a flirt. I wasn't all that bothered about that line though, because, after the disappointment I encountered in my father's office, it was refreshing to find someone who was actually interested in my career and was aware about how I was performing. Roksana and I are different people, she is a lot more politically minded than I am, she is somewhat of an activist, particularly for the intersection of the homosexual community and Russians living abroad. I'm not sure how big of a group that is, but I know that Yurasova has found a niche for herself there. That's not me though. I'm a race car driver, I want to do well, and I want to help rebuild this team which, just fifteen years ago, was still a force that was fighting for championships. I'm less concerned with what I'm doing for my gender or nationality or maybe even sexual identity, instead, I'm concerned with what I'm doing for my team. We're very different people with very different priorities, but we get along, and I like her company, and I don't particularly mind the fact that she's attracted to me.
My home life was one thing, but my focus was still very much on my professional life. Grand Prix racing - as the name would suggest - emerged in France and the governing body is based in France. Alain Prost, one of the greatest F1 drivers of all time, is French, and the French Grand Prix, in its various forms, has been a fairly consistent feature on the Formula One calendar. Right now, the French Grand Prix is held at the Magny-Cours circuit in central France, located in the countryside near Nevers. It was not the most accessible circuit, but with a history of some good circuits and a design that sought to bring together corners from iconic circuits from across the F1 calendar, the hardcore fans would still find a way to attend the event. I hoped that would continue, because I actually liked Magny-Cours when I drove it in the junior series, and I still like it now that I'm in the pinnacle of motorsport.
My qualifying lap began with me heading through the tight chicane at the end of the lap and blasting down the straight, climbing through the gears all the way up to seventh as the revs of my Toyota engine climbed over and over and over again. I had to lift for turn one and provide just a bit of brake, but the corner was definitely a fast sweeper, and turn two was just the slightest bit of a kink aligning us for the approach to Estoril. Named for the circuit that once hosted the Portuguese Grand Prix, Estoril, the third turn, was a long 180-degree right-hander. I did have to brake for this one to bring the nose into the apex, but I kept the speed up enough to get a good exit onto the longest straight on the track. Towards the end of this straight, turn four was the slightest bit of a kink, but not really in these cars, and we completely disregarded it as we stayed flat-out into turn five. The Adelaide hairpin slowed cars way down and ended sector one, while I brought my car around to the right to begin sector two. One more short straight with the slightest bit of a kink in the middle being counted as a corner at this track then brought us up to turns seven and eight, the Nürburgring chicane. A bit of braking and a downshift or two into the right-hander of turn seven, but then the left-hander of turn eight was flat-out.
Turn nine was a smaller, tighter version of turn three, because we were now inside of the radius of the larger corner, so now, rather than a right-hand sweeper, this was a left-hand hairpin, requiring mechanical grip to bring the car around and head up to speed. The car was at the point where it transitioned from primarily mechanical grip to primarily aerodynamic grip as the right-hand adjustment of turn ten proved to be the most substantive kink thus far. The same thing could not be said about turn eleven, which was a bit of a correction, bringing me back the slightest bit to the left as this infield straight ended sector two. Next up was going right then left in the Imola chicane, similar to the Nürburgring complex from earlier, but not quite the same. This threw the car onto a short shoot for the tight hairpin of turn fourteen, which deposited me onto the back straight. The clock ticked away as I forced the car down the straight at full throttle, hoping that I could end this lap as soon as possible and get as good of a grid position as possible. Turn fifteen, the right-hander, slowed things right back down, aiming the car right at the pit entrance, but I wasn't going into the pitlane, rather I turned right and then immediately left as we negotiated the final chicane, the tightest of them all. Fortunately for me, the finish line was not very far past the final chicane, so I ended my lap and waited to hear what time I managed to do.
"Alright Tamara, that is P15, P15. We do not advance to Q3, but you're right in the mix with the Red Bulls and the Hondas are just ahead. MacGowan did not set a laptime in Q2, but you had good pace. Tommy has managed to advance to Q3 so let's get back to the pitlane and see what he can do." Peter reported through the radio, telling me about what I expected, considering that we didn't quite have the pace here in France that we did a few races ago in places like Monaco and Montreal. Tommy was ahead of me, yes, and that was enough to get into Q3 for him, but his pace is not much better, and that fact was illustrated when Tommy was slowest of all in Q3, only managing to put the car up into P9. That would have easily been P10, but Felipe Alvarez had a gearbox problem in his McLaren, and he was not able to complete any laps, giving Tommy a free position, but one that he couldn't really take advantage of. Ivan Tripoli was just ahead of Tommy, while Roland Ziegler was just behind, so my job in the race was going to be to try and close the gap so that I can assist my teammate and hopefully help him keep our rivals behind.
Anthony Harrison put his McLaren up into second, but Henrique de Matteo put his Ferrari on pole as the red team sought to bounce back at a track where they've been so successful historically. Adding to that, Ziegler's effective replacement, Matti Hamalainen, was in third, meaning that McLaren was outnumbered up front thanks to Alvarez's reliability issue. Piotr Kaminski, finally cleared to race after his horror crash in Canada, showed everyone that he lost none of his speed by putting his BMW Sauber all the way up in fourth, the Pole lining up next to the Finn. The third row consisted of the Renaults, with Umberto Petronelli ahead of Jyri Kaasalainen. I suspect that Renault's home race may be the event where the French team truly prove that they are out of our reach. Victor Hartmann in the second BMW Sauber was down in seventh, but the car concerning us was, as I mentioned earlier, Ivan Tripoli in his Toyota in eighth. We knew that Toyota would score points, and we knew that some of those points would come at races where we couldn't really respond, but Toyota has had a car in the points for the last few races, and if that keeps happening, they will eventually chip away at those six points I scored in Canada. I probably won't be able to score points today, Tommy might, but we'll need to bounce back sooner rather than later, or else our rivals will catch up and will pass us. 2007 was a year defined by the battle for first between McLaren and Ferrari, but the battle for fifth in the constructors was just as heated.
"We ask the drivers to gather around for a moment of silence for the deceased." the announcer called out over the track's megaphone before the race. Three people - two PR people and the pilot - died in a helicopter crash last night. I didn't know any of the people involved personally, but a lot of the other drivers did, and the mood on Sunday morning was a pretty depressing one. In the middle of an F1 weekend, as nobody was expecting it, two of our own; two paddock figures, along with an innocent helicopter pilot, died in a freak accident. Considering the remoteness of the track, I could imagine a lot of the wealthier drivers flew here in a helicopter, if not for this race in particular, then for races in the past - not to mention that, in the event of a bad accident, any one of us could wind up in the air ambulance for transportation to a hospital - so it likely hit close to home in that aspect as well. Formula One was a fast and dangerous sport, we all knew that when we went into the car, and that's why we kept racing even after crashes like the one where MacGowan went over Haruki in Australia or Kaminski's awful crash in Canada, but the PR people weren't part of that. They didn't think they were risking their lives by being involved in F1, but thanks to this freak accident, here we were. A moment later, I took a deep breath and walked over to the car. It was a tragedy, I'm sad it happened, but the show goes on, and I need to drive this race,
A formation lap later, we formed up on the grid. One red light, two, three, four...five...lights out. Twenty-two Formula One cars driven by drivers from about a dozen or so different nations thundered down the straight and into the first few corners. I was relatively cautious through turn one, it wasn't an overtaking zone due to how fast it was, especially not now with so many cars bunched together in a relatively narrow piece of track. Turn two was a nothing corner, and then we finally came on the brakes in earnest in turn three, and cars tried to put themselves in the best position possible, tucking into the slipstream down to the overtaking opportunity that was turn five, the Adelaide hairpin. I pulled alongside Martin Weaver - somehow, I always end up fighting either him or Daniel MacGowan in the race - down the straight and through the barely-there kink that is turn four, but, as we neared turn five, that's when all hell broke loose. Ivan Tripoli ran into the back of Jyri Kaasalainen and the two of them slid off the track onto the run-off area. The Finnish Renault driver was able to continue, albeit behind us on the grid, but the lead Toyota was out of the race. This meant that Tommy Koskinen was promoted to seventh, a points-paying position, while Felipe Alvarez behind him in the McLaren ensured that it wasn't a rival car in the final point-paying position that is 8th place. Martin and I were promoted a few places, but I didn't risk trying to overtake him in the hairpin, as I couldn't but sure if there was carbon or oil on the track. Instead, I tucked in behind the Red Bull, waiting for another opportunity to overtake or hoping that we could pass him on strategy.
That's not how it worked out though, because, as the race went on and the strategy began to factor in, it quickly became apparent that the Red Bulls were faster over the course of the race, so Martin Weaver stayed ahead of me, and, as I came out of the pits after my final stop, I saw that Daniel MacGowan had gotten the overcut on me as well. Fortunately, none of us were in the points, so it wasn't a huge loss, but it was still frustrating that, so soon after scoring a podium, we don't have the pace to fight our rivals. Things weren't all that much better for Tommy up front, as he was passed but James Buxton in the Honda of all people, and the only thing that prevented my Finnish teammate from losing ninth to Roland Ziegler behind is the fact that, at the end of the race, Ziegler had to slow down to allow Matti Hamalainen to pass him, while Tommy managed to stay on the lead lap just long enough for Matti to cross the finish line and win the race, meaning that Tommy had to go around again in order to be the very last car to finish on the lead lap. So, while I was five places behind Tommy, my race technically finished first. So, not a very good race for us, but, thankfully, it wasn't a very good race for Toyota or Red Bull. Honestly, it wasn't as commanding a race for Renault as I expected either.
The points-paying results of the 2007 French Grand Prix go as follows:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
2: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
4: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber.
5: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
6: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Renault.
7: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
8: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda.
So, both McLaren drivers and both Ferrari drivers both had two wins a piece. Ferrari scored a one-two to begin their bounce back after the McLarens assembled a pretty commanding lead in both the drivers' championship - where Harrison leads from Alvarez and Matteo - and the constructors' championship, where McLaren is the only team to have more than a hundred points at the moment. Piotr Kaminski bounced back with the best possible result for BMW Sauber under normal circumstances, while Victor Hartmann finishing right behind him ensured that the German remained in fifth, best of the rest. Finally, the last notable note was that, after having collapsed from a race winning team last year to an effective backmarker this year, Honda finally scored their first points of the year. They are still behind their junior team, Super Aguri, but the Japanese manufacturer can feel slightly less embarrassed right now. The other Japanese manufacturer, Toyota, squandered an opportunity to score points, meaning that we were still secure in fifth place in the constructors' championship. A place we could hopefully preserve as we went to Williams' home race at Silverstone, the home of the British Grand Prix.
The French Grand Prix is the race that Formula One can trace its lineage from, but when one speaks of historic Formula One races, the British Grand Prix at Silverstone instantly comes to mind. When the Formula One World Championship was established in 1950, the British Grand Prix was the first race, and the track essentially consisted of the ring road around RAF Silverstone, one of many such World War II airfields turned into race tracks in Britain. Silverstone looks quite a bit different today, having undergone countless changes, but the course is still similar, and the unique nature of Silverstone is a defining feature of British motorsport in general. British motorsport is a grand thing too, because every F1 team, regardless of what flag they fly under, is based in Britain, except for Ferrari and Toro Rosso, which are Italian, BMW Sauber, which is based in Switzerland, and Toyota, which operates out of Cologne, Germany. This includes Williams, which is based in Grove, our rivals Red Bull, based in Milton Keynes, and McLaren-Mercedes, the current championship leader, based in Woking. This naturally means that the British Grand Prix is very important to many teams, even if only two of the current drivers are British, but one particular driver on the grid is half-English. That driver is Anthony Harrison of the United States, winner of the Canadian and US Grand Prix, and now polesitter at the British Grand Prix. Anthony has already won his home race, the country that his father is from, and now he has put himself into the best position possible to win his mother's home race.
As for myself, I was down in 13th - lucky, I know - but it was actually the first time that I outqualified Tommy Koskinen. My Finnish teammate had a bad day yesterday and was knocked out in Q1, all the way down in 17th. All of that was to suggest that neither of us had a particularly good day, but our rivals didn't exactly have a great day in qualifying either. Rudolfo Goncalves was lining up in 14th and James Buxton was down in 18th, so we were already ahead of the Hondas. The Red Bulls were ahead of me, in 11th and 12th, but they weren't in the points either. The biggest threat came from Toyota, who had Ivan Tripoli in 10th, and Roland Ziegler all the way up in 6th, but that wasn't quite catastrophic, and Silverstone was a race-y circuit, so maybe we could get something out of this race after all. Renault really should be breaking away from us here though, because, with their cars in 7th and 8th, they were already starting in the points and had split the BMW Saubers. With any luck, the Renaults will overtake Ziegler as well and we won't have to worry about the German's high start after all. As for McLaren and Ferrari, they were in a whole different world than the rest of us. A whole different world on performance anyway, because, as we climbed onto the trailer for the parade lap before the race, it was all twenty-two of us on the same parade float being pulled by the same silver Mercedes-Benz Actros.
"So, 13th, huh?" Lorenzo Barbaro of Spyker asked as the two of us leaned against the guard rail and waved at the fans as the truck lapped slowly around the Silverstone circuit. Drivers were gathering together in their various groups, all except for Anthony Harrison, who was wearing his headphones and standing in the corner alone, waving at fans, but not really focused on the parade - he was focused on the race. I've already explained how important the British Grand Prix is, and Anthony Harrison is starting on pole for it, so I understand why he's doing this. Right now, it's more important for his race to get into the right state of mind than it is for him to socialize with other drivers or answer some media questions. It was a little while before the race - hence most of us were still in casual wear with a team shirt and cap - but all of us knew what was coming and we were all focused on that in one way or another.
"Better than 20th," I teased. That's the unfortunate reality of Formula One I suppose, Lorenzo Barbaro was Anthony Harrison's chief championship rival in Formula 3 just two years ago, but now Harrison is in the top car, while Barbaro is the slowest car, splitting the Super Aguris in qualifying, but being unlikely to get ahead of their rivals, since those points Super Aguri scored earlier in the year are practically a death nail in the championship. The British Grand Prix probably wasn't going to be a great race for Spyker, or the European Grand Prix, or any other race really. It's a bit of a shame too. In any case, I let Lorenzo off the hook and got back to the conversation "I dunno, I don't consider myself very superstitious. 13th is just like any other position, and I would rather start in 13th than 14th. It's a bit far back but, you know how it is, we'll do what we can."
"I guess so. You've had some good results though." Lorenzo responded.
"I mean, so have you, you've been consistently ahead of Martijn and you've driven the car as far as you can." I reassured Lorenzo, because the German-born Uruguayan really was doing the job he needed to do. The first measure of any driver in F1 is how they do against their teammates, then its how they do against the team's immediate rivals, finally, its how you perform overall. For me, so far, in terms of races we've both finished - Tommy retired in Malaysia, Canada, and the US, I crashed out in Spain - my record is 2-2 to Tommy, as I finished 10th to his 11th in Bahrain and 7th to his 12th in Monaco, whilst he was 7th to my 8th in Australia and 9th to my 14th in France. Tommy scored 2 points thanks to a 7th place in Australia and 3 points from a 6th in Spain for 5 points total, while I scored 1 point in Australia, 2 points in Monaco, and 6 points from my podium in Canada for 9 points total. So, I've retired less, scored more points, and am tied with him on head-to-head performances, a very good performance for a rookie overall, I would say.
"Hey, good luck in the race." I turned to see Anthony had walked over to me as we neared the end of the parade lap and wished me luck in the race. I reciprocated the gesture and thought about what just happened. We've talked a handful of times before, most inconsequential chatter in the paddock, and we've shared a podium in Canada, but I didn't think we had very much of a relationship. That being said, and maybe I'm thinking like Roksana here, Anthony is an American in a sport dominated by Europeans, not only that, but he's a black American, half black anyway, so that introduces a whole racial component to it as well, while I'm the only woman on the F1 grid, and, although I'm not Asian, I'm also representing an Asian countries. To put a long story short, we're the minorities of the F1 grid, and maybe Anthony sees some sort of connection between us even if we haven't really become friends yet. An interesting idea, but not something to think about now, because once the truck stopped, it was all about preparing for the race, dealing with the media, and getting a bathroom break out of the way before the race started in earnest.
I burned out the tyres as we came out of Woodcote and straightened out onto the main straight of Silverstone. I slotted my car into the 13th slot, the two Red Bulls of Martin Weaver and Daniel MacGowan directly ahead of me, the Honda of Rudolfo Goncalves next to me, and the Toro Rossos of Max Marcus and Giuseppino Leone behind me. So, a Williams and a Honda in an energy drink sandwich, as the row ahead and the row behind were locked out by the teams owned by Red Bull, embracing Formula One as part of its extreme sports gimmick and seeking to turn the former Jaguar team into a championship winning force. Weaver and MacGowan are good drivers and the car is okay, but Red Bull is a far way off winning the championship any time soon, though former Williams and McLaren designer Adrian Newey is likely working hard to turn that around. So, Red Bull has a ton of money, a pretty good driver lineup, and one of the most successful designers of F1 in the recent era, all of which would make it all the more satisfying to beat them in the race. I prepared to start the race and think about how I could attack the usual suspects ahead as the red lights turned on the gantry above. One light, two, three, four, and five...
"Abort! Abort! We are not starting, we are not starting! Henrique has stalled on the grid, we are doing another formation lap. The race length will be shortened by one lap." Malmedy called out through the radio as the red lights turned off and the grid shot off the line, only to slow down again as one of the frontrunning cars failed to make it off the grid. Henrique de Matteo stalled on the grid in fourth. In any case, a few moments later, after lapping the circuit again, I lined up in twelfth, the grid having reformed without the Brazilian, who was forced to start from the pitlane as a result of the incident. Assuming that Ferrari dealt with the problem, I had to assume that this was 13th in reality though, because Henrique will be coming back up the grid. The race did start this time, and I blasted off behind the Red Bulls, hoping to make some progress. Copse was a fast right-hander, almost flat-out in qualifying, so the grid was pretty orderly through the first corner, with me alongside MacGowan but not pushing him too hard. Copse was not an overtaking opportunity, so turn one was more about survival, at least until the cars put some space between each other and created more room for us to work with. The fast left-right, left-right, left sequence that made up Maggots, Becketts, Chapel were more fast corners without overtaking, but Chapel led onto the hangar straight, a long, straight line leading up to the first heavy braking zone at Stowe.
I pulled alongside MacGowan but the Red Bulls were playing a team game, so the Renault engined car tucked behind his teammate Weaver and used the slipstream to stay ahead of me. I had to back out in Stowe because overtaking just wasn't possible under these circumstances. Stowe was a right hander but kinked back to the left to form a short straight heading down to Vale. Vale was another overtaking opportunity that I couldn't take advantage of as Weaver led the four of us - Rudolfo was directly behind me - a left-right chicane that deposited us into the long corner that was Club. I tucked into the slipstream of MacGowan and tried for another move as we came out of Club. I was planning on maybe trying to speed past MacGowan, but I knew he was tucked into the draft of Weaver, so I was already doubting my ability, and then I saw Goncalves heading to the right, trying to pull alongside me. I lost some time to the Red Bulls as I also pulled right to cover off the elder Brazilian in his Honda, defending all the way down to Abbey. The straight out of Club extended just a tiny bit into the airfield before the left-right chicane of Abbey deposited us back onto the old Farm Straight, once the southern half of the ring road.
This set us up for perhaps the best corner on the current layout of Silverstone. We passed under the Bridgestone bridge and then almost immediately went through the fast right hander, flat-out and on the throttle up to the final sequence of corners. Priory was a left-hander that led us to another left-hander, Brooklands, and then through a pretty fast 180 degree right-hander of Luffield, bringing us around and onto the straight. Woodcote was the final corner, but in practice it was just a kink in the middle of the start-finish straight, taken as I again had to defend from Honda. It was at this point that I realized I kind of screwed myself, since I wasn't tucked into the draft of the Red Bulls anymore, while Rudolfo was still getting a tow off of me. Even if I could keep the Brazilian behind, I would be getting the dirty air off of the cars ahead through Maggots and Becketts without even getting much benefit from the cars ahead blasting a hole in the air, as the air would start reforming just in time for my car to go through, conveniently leaving a gap just where Goncalves is. Realizing all of this, I didn't fight too hard when Rudolfo passed me on the straight before Copse, hoping that I could tuck in behind him and use his draft to close up to the Red Bulls again, deciding I could sacrifice this place for the opportunity to fight for that place and the two places ahead later in the race. It was a bit of a bargain, but it was what I had to do with this level of performance.
The car wasn't great today, but there was some form of fortune on our side, as Martin Weaver retired on lap eight with a hydraulic issue, elevating our whole group up a place. Roland Ziegler in the Toyota retired on lap twenty-two when his team wasn't able to get the wheel nut in properly on his pitstop, meaning the German lost a tyre on pit exit and retired on the spot. I was going to pit around this team, but the team was having an issue, as Tommy had a long, botched stop, meaning Malmedy hesitated to call me in. I did come in on lap twenty-six, but at this point, I exited behind James Buxton, as our rivals got the undercut on me. As if to illustrate how dreadful our day was, Tommy was the car behind, but he was three seconds behind me at this stage. We would both stop again, but things didn't really work out for us, so I finished the race a lap down in 12th, while Koskinen was just behind me in 13th. Koskinen gained more positions in the race, while I finished ahead, but neither of us had a great day today. Fortunately, neither did our rivals. Rudolfo finished 9th, Buxton in 10th, and the remaining Red Bull of MacGowan directly ahead of us in 11th. Haruki Tanaka in the Super Aguri was 14th behind us, while both Toyotas and a Red Bull retired. So, that takes care of the results relevant to us, but the points-paying results go as follows:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
2: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
4: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber.
5: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
6: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
7: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault
8: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Renault.
So, Ferrari continued their fight-back, with Matti winning two races in a row and denying Harrison the chance to win McLaren's home Grand Prix. Felipe Alvarez also passed his teammate, likely the beginning of the Spaniard trying to reassert his authority over his new team after having been challenged by the young American driver in his rookie year. Piotr continued his comeback with another fourth, Henrique recovered brilliantly from his pitlane start to split the BMW Saubers, Toyota fell out of the points, and Renault scored a double points finish, even if it wasn't quite as commanding a one as they would have wanted. Honda didn't score points here, but they scored a point in France, and they finished just outside of the points here, so maybe the other Japanese team is closing up to the battle for 5th as well. The biggest championship implication of all this, however, is that Matti overtook his teammate to become the lead Ferrari driver, currently third in the championship. This also meant that Ferrari was beginning to close up to McLaren ahead.
McLaren still had the lead though, and the Scuderia had some work to do if they wanted to close the gap. It was a fascinating, fascinating contest between two of F1's greatest teams including four of F1's greatest drivers, and I got to watch that from the rarefied stage that is another F1 car. These people are my co-workers, my equals, maybe even my friends. Matti, Henrique, Felipe, Anthony...they may have better cars, but it's the same sport, the same rules, the same tracks, so, in a way, I'm part of this title battle. I was fighting Matti at the end of the Monaco Grand Prix - perhaps me finishing 7th, giving him only one point from his 8th position, could be a title deciding point. This is a crazy place to be in, and I'm so, so very grateful for it. Moments like this are the moments that ensure I'm not strong enough to say no to Kazakhoil sponsorship, because I'm living my dream right now, and I wouldn't give that up easily.
Notes:
Alright everyone, this has been a bit of a shorter one, since we're dealing with races where Williams really had no pace and I want this story to stay pretty grounded, at least to start out with. The divergence will increase as time goes on, but right now I don't feel comfortable putting my OCs too far from reality just yet.
Ciao!
Chapter 6: Complete and Utter Chaos
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter VI.
Complete and Utter Chaos.
"...and the team will be reporting before the FIA on July 26th to address these rather serious allegations." Natasha and I sat on the couch of my Monaco apartment watching the news report on what was being dubbed Spygate. The crux of the story is that a disgruntled Ferrari employee leaked sensitive information to a McLaren engineer, and the accusation is that McLaren used that data to build a car that is, for all intents and purposes, better than Ferrari's F2007. The Woking based team had a dreadful car in 2006, becoming the first McLaren in years to fail to win a race, now suddenly, McLaren is well ahead in the constructors' championship. Now, to be fair, no one is questioning that Felipe Alvarez and Anthony Harrison is a very, very strong driver lineup, but so is Matias Hamalainen and Henrique de Matteo, so it's not a straightforward matter of McLaren having superior drivers. No, there is more to this story, and that is what the FIA is trying to find out. It isn't of much concern to us over here at Williams, but it is still a massive, massive story that is changing what has been an exciting, aggressive title fight between equals into something dirty, something stained by these allegations. From the perspective of someone who is a fan as well as a driver, I can only hope that this is resolved before the Brazilian Grand Prix at the end of the season, so that whatever happens on track decides the championship.
"Do you think they cheated?" Natasha asked, speaking about McLaren. My Kyrgyz cousin was establishing her own racing career at this point, with the girl that was two years younger than me taking on Italian Formula Three. She's taken quite well to the series, having started out with a 5th and a 10th in Adria in the first weekend, she has since scored an 8th and a 3rd at Misano for her first podium, followed up by two 3rd places in the two races at Magione. Three consecutive podiums going into the two race weekends at Mugello, not a bad place to be at all. This also meant that she was now on 23 points - Italian F3's point system was 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1, just like F1, with the addition of a point for fastest lap and another point for pole position, though neither situation impacts Natasha, at least not yet - which, again, was a respectable number. I was worried about Natasha for a little while; only a small percentage of the boys involved in motorsport ever make it to the top level, apply that attrition rate to the small number of women who enter motorsports to begin with and it's little shock why the records for women in F1 are so easy to break. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore though, because I think this is Natasha's breakout year, and maybe, just maybe, this'll mean that, a few years down the line, I won't be the only woman in F1 anymore. All of that is a bit speculative though, for now, she's just asking about the data scandal descending upon F1 as we near the European Grand Prix, coincidentally being held the same weekend as Natasha's first Mugello race weekend.
"I have no idea, this is the first I'm hearing of it all. All I know is that, given this involves the two championship rivals, it's probably going to get messy in the courts with accusations and appeals and all that stuff. Lets just hope they resolve it before the end of the season." I responded, basically sharing my thoughts with my cousin. I don't know the situation, I suspect most people at Ferrari and McLaren don't know the situation entirely, it's a matter between a few individuals which could have massive, massive implications on the championship. The race teams will do everything in their power to ensure this doesn't stop them from maximizing their results at the Nürburgring, at the Hungaroring, and at Istanbul Park, while the legal teams will do everything they can to keep the actual sport out of sport. I don't see a good way out of this because, if there's an element of truth behind this, then that either means that McLaren gets to compete for the title with Ferrari data and, the way things are going, beat them, or Ferrari wins the championship in the courtroom. Neither option seems particularly sporting to me, which is, again, why I hope all of this ends with the championship being decided on the track despite all of this. I sighed and said this "Either way, it doesn't really effect us, so all we can do is see what happens while getting on with our lives."
"Well, let me know if you hear anything in the paddock, alright? I got my own race to keep me busy." Ms. Tsirinskaya responded, getting on with her life as well, but making sure that I would relay any paddock gossip over to her. I would, of course, oblige, but I also had a hope that, one day, I wouldn't have to pass these stories on to her, because she would be a part of them. Maybe it was unrealistic to start thinking of her in Formula One just because of some positive results in a national Formula Three series, but I can't help myself but to hope and to imagine what might happen at the end of this. I don't know how or when, but I want to see Natasha in Formula One, not just because she's my closest friend and she's like family to me, not just because Roksana is rubbing off on me a bit and I want to see other people like me in this sport, but also because I think she deserves to be considered. I raced against Natasha in karts, she had speed, she had race craft, she had talent, and now, a few years later, that skill she displayed in karts is beginning to translate to cars. The next steps for her are to finish out her Italian F3 season strong, to find a drive in a higher series for 2008, ideally on the European stage rather than the national, and to maybe even take a crack at the Macau Grand Prix. Italian Formula Three mostly consists of young Italian drivers in a developmental stage of their career, so Natasha's target for next year, at very least, should be something like Formula 3 Euro series, where the grid is more diverse and the eyes watching the series are a little bit bigger. Progression is key to the junior series. Hopefully she can do well at Mugello and set herself up for a move forward, meanwhile, I'm going to be in Germany on a little circuit on the southern end of the Green Hell: the Nürburgring GP-Strecke.
The 2007 European Grand Prix was an odd weekend for a number of reasons. The first of which was that, despite Germany only having one race in 2007 - with Wilhelm Ziegler retiring at the end of 2006, Germany felt they could no longer justify racing at both the Nürburgring and the Hockenheimring - a contractual dispute between the two venues meant that the Nürburgring had to continue using the European Grand Prix name. The German Grand Prix will return in the 2008 at Hockenheim, as the two venues now alternate, and we'll have to wait and see what the 2009 Nürburgring race will be called. The second odd thing was that there was a new driver in the paddock: Martijn van der Berg was dropped by Spyker for sponsorship reasons, and replaced by another Dutchman, Andreas Wilhelmus. Martijn hadn't been performing great, Lorenzo Barbaro has comprehensively outperformed him this season, but I think it was more down to the money that he was dropped. So, a change in the grid was already weird, but the biggest, oddest thing about this race weekend was that Spygate was looming over this weekend. Everyone knew that McLaren was accused of this and everyone knew that they were going to report to the FIA in Paris shortly after this race.
McLaren wasn't letting that that stop them though, as Anthony Harrison took the top spot in Free Practice 1 and Felipe Alvarez was close behind in third. Renault had a bad morning, though perhaps they were just working on long runs, because their cars wound up 18th and 19th. We had half a chance to capitalize on that, with me in 12th in FP1 and Tommy Koskinen just behind in 13th, but both Toyotas, both Hondas, and the Red Bull of Daniel MacGowan were ahead of us. It was only Friday morning though, there was plenty of time still to go before the race on Sunday, so we could still improve the situation. Every F1 weekend is set up as such: the team and equipment all arrived by Wednesday and everything got set up, Thursday was reserved for various media engagements and sponsor events, then Friday had two practice sessions: FP1 in the morning and FP2 in the afternoon, the latter happening at roughly the same time as the race will be held. FP3, the final practice session, was held on Saturday morning, with the cars going into Parc Ferme immediately afterwards. This meant that, once the car left the garage at the start of qualifying, no modifications could be made before the start of the race. The FIA even goes so far as to demand that no team members touch the car during this time. All of this is to ensure that nobody cheats, furthermore, it challenges teams to find a compromise between qualifying pace and race trim. Teams can't just set the car up for ultimate one lap pace and then change it over to an ideal race setup an hour later, no, teams have to work for it. Then on Sunday afternoon, those compromises are put up to the test.
"Hello Peter," I greeted once I was back in my race suit and through with some interviews; now it was time to get back into the car for FP2. The horseshoe bald race engineer was dressed in black pants, loafers, and a dark blue and white Williams polo, holding a clipboard in his hands with his headset resting around his neck. Peter was telling Henrik, a Norwegian turned English citizen, to do some final adjustments to the front wing while Derrick was fueling up the car, Daniel, Terrence, Rich, and Mikkel were placing the Bridgestone tyres on the car to prepare for what was going to be a fairly busy session for us. I really liked the team I had on this car, I was getting to know them better, and I appreciate the fact that Michael Coronet partnered me with an experienced pro in the form of Peter Malmedy. Peter's been a part of this team for awhile and the younger guys on my car respected him, meaning he could dish out orders all day long and the team would follow them. That's not to suggest that Peter is a slave driver, because he isn't, but he's respected, and he knows when to be warm with the team, and when to be forceful with them.
"Hello Tamara. We've gone through the setup changes you've requested. I want you to get out there right at the beginning of the session to see how it runs so we have time to fix it if it doesn't work out. Once we got the right setup, we're going to work on some long runs, including at least one simulated pitstop. We're going to keep a set of the options reserved for a fast run later on with low fuel. We'll see where we are time wise after that, but keep in mind I want you to do a practice start from the pit exit at the end of the session, got that?" Peter ran through his checklist, reading out his plans for the session and what he expects from me. Now, obviously there is more detail and more notes on his clipboard, but he's telling me what I need to know - there are things for the driver to know and there are things for the engineers to know, oftentimes those things overlap, but not always - and he'll probably tell me more as and when I need it. Right now it's just a quick overview of what he wants to do with the session, starting out with correlating the setup I said I wanted from FP1, then adjusting if need be, then race runs and a qualifying run, and a practice start for sure, though we might be able to squeeze more into this session, especially if the setup works well enough the first time.
"Alright then, I'll be ready to go as soon as the car is ready." I responded, nodding at Malmedy before pulling my hair back into a bun, plugging the radio headphones into my ears, putting on the white balaclava, and then putting the white, dark blue, cyan, and gold helmet. The cyan and white Kazakhoil sponsored racing gloves were next, then I climbed into the car. The team worked like a well-oiled machine because, as soon as I was seated well in the car, Artur, another crew member, handed over the steering wheel, allowing me to plug it in and get control of the car. I saw Daniel and Terrence lift the tyre heaters off the front tyres and the jackmen lowered the car to the ground and got out of the way. A controlled burst of throttle got me moving and I turned right down the pitlane, heading for the exit. The GP-Strecke was the modern racing venue at the south end of the famous Nordschliefe, the historic racing venue consisting of a high speed, ruthless loop through the Eifel Mountains in southwestern Germany. This elevated piece of European land stretched into the Ardennes and essentially included the same lands as the famous Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps over in Belgium. This was prime racing country, the very origins of Grand Prix racing were in these forested hills, and the GP-Strecke was just a way of bringing that into the modern age. The thin, winding Nordschliefe with its Armco barriers wasn't safe anymore, it hasn't been for a long time, but this kept the Nürburgring in F1.
The circuit wasn't the Nordschliefe, nothing else quite compared to the hallowed ground that is one of the roughest tests of both a car and a driver, but it was a good track. There have been a few revisions over the years, most prominently in sector one, but the character of the track hasn't changed much: it's always a fine mix of technical venue and old school style circuit. These are the thoughts that filled my head as I went through the final chicane and up to the long turn fifteen that ended the lap by placing me back on the pit straight. There was also a left turn which connected the GP-Strecke to the Nordschliefe for a combined circuit, but that was irrelevant to the F1 weekend. I stayed left and put the power down, guiding the car down the straight and beneath the iconic BMW Motorsport bridge that housed the light gantry. The track headed downhill and the slightest kink foreshadowed turn one. It was hard on the brakes and quick on the downshifts as the car came down for one of the slowest corners in F1 and certainly the slowest on this track: turn one. It was a tight hairpin on entry but widened out as a lot of track revealed itself, though not all of it was optimal. I stuck to the racing line as I started the arena section, the newest part of this track, and perhaps the most divisive.
Turn two was a decently fast left-hander but did require a touch of braking. It was almost the second that I got the car settled down after turn two that I needed to start acting for turn three, as that one was a tighter left-hander and slower. I came all the way around the corner and, a burst of throttle later, I arrived at the ninety-degree right-hander that was turn four. This corner put me back onto the original track, as, before the arena section, turn one was the first part of the Yokohama chicane which led onto this short straight. The nature of the entry had changed considerably, but the short straight was still a short straight. It was downhill and then left into turn five, going straight for only a moment before turning right again in turn six, a tad faster this time. Turn six led out onto a straight that was perhaps a little bit longer than the previous one, but the most notable thing that happened here is that we were truly at the bottom of the circuit, both according to the track map and the actual elevation. Turn seven was a hairpin but a fairly wide one, and once I was down with the 180-degree corner, I began the run back up the circuit.
It was a fast left in turn eight and then back right through turn nine as I drove through what was now known as the Wilhelm Ziegler S, named for its shape and for the 7-time world champion that made this circuit and the Hockenheimring so successful for a time. The S deposited me on a straight that effectively shadowed the one from turn four to turn five, only this time I was heading up the hill. This culminated in the ninety-degree turn ten, somewhat of an overtaking spot during the race, but a risky one, hence the generous amount of paved run-off. The shoot to turn eleven was just a bit longer than the one between 5-6, but not much longer. The nearly ninety-degree right-hander got me back on the line and heading for the steepest bit of circuit. This was a flat-out section of track heading up towards the top of the circuit, divided up only by the kink that was turn twelve and the chicane between that and the final corner. The fact that the lead car was having to climbing meant that a slipstream could be pretty powerful here, though the tight nature of the chicane at the end of this made it difficult to actually do anything with that slipstream. It was left then immediately right through turns 13-14, and this once again left me driving on the top of the circuit, needing only to handle the right-hander at the final corner before speeding down the start-finish straight towards the line, which came up fairly quickly at this circuit.
"The setup was good that lap, want me to do a few more?" I asked Peter over the radio, making it clear that I was comfortable with the way that the car was behaving and how my recommendations since FP1 were incorporated.
"Copy that Tamara, give me one or two more laps so we can compare the data, then we'll come in and talk about the race sims." Peter responded, wanting me to do just a few more laps like this so that he could compare my pace to what I was doing in FP1 on the original setup. I obliged and we got to work, collecting data, figuring out what works and what doesn't, and then building on that foundation with race runs, qualifying runs, and practice starts. Friday and Saturday practice sessions were all able correlating data, getting the car ready for the race, and making sure the drivers had an idea of what to expect in the later sessions. Not just the circuit itself, but what kind of pace your car had relative to your teammate, your rival teams, and just overall. This session went better for us overall, with Tommy up in 7th and myself not far behind in 12th, but maybe our pace was being flattered by the fact that BMW Sauber didn't seem to be going for speed runs in FP2. Nevertheless, we were in a better place relative to Red Bull and Honda, though the Toyotas were 5th and 6th ahead of Tommy. The Renaults still were pretty far down the field so I'm not quite sure what they were doing with the practice sessions. So, a better afternoon for us than the morning, but there were no points for practice, this was just about giving us the best chance for later in the weekend. Tomorrow, we would have one final practice session in FP3 and then determine the order for the race in qualifying.
On Sunday, twenty-two cars gathered on the grid, but all attention was on the sky. Rain was coming and rain was coming quickly, but it was dry right now, and nobody was going to start a dry race on the wet weather compounds. That meant that there was already a certain risk involved in just starting this race, but the risk was bigger for us here at Williams, since we were starting 11th and 12th, right in the thick of it. Tommy and I were surrounded by cars as we lined up next to each other on the grid, knowing a crash could happen anywhere, in front of us, behind us, hell, even between us, but we were going to try nonetheless. The tyre blankets came off, the jacks rolled off, and the cars sat on the grid, waiting for the formation lap to behind. A warm-up lap around the circuit began, even as the threat of rain loomed over a version of the very same circuit where, in 1976, Niki Lauda crashed and had half of his face burned off in changeable conditions on what became the last Formula One race on the Nordschliefe. Much like that year, Ferrari and McLaren were fighting for the title, and both teams were dragging politics into it. It was Matti Hamalainen in 1st, then reigning world champion Felipe Alvarez in 2nd for McLaren, followed by Henrique de Matteo in 3rd. 4th place did not go to Anthony Harrison however - that particular starting spot was filled by Victor Hartmann - no, Anthony Harrison was starting just ahead of us in 10th thanks to a crash in Q3. The American was okay though, and he was cleared to race, so, with the team having repaired his car, I doubted he would stay in tenth long.
It certainly felt different lining up behind a McLaren, though seeing my teammate off to the left, half a car length ahead, and the row behind me being filled by the Renault of Umberto Petronelli and the Honda of Rudolfo Goncalves, did lend a sense of familiarity. There was one car that didn't take the start though: rookie Andreas Wilhelmus, who took the gamble and came in on the formation lap to change straight to the wet tyres. It seemed someone was bold enough to try that after all, though it probably didn't matter much given he was in a Spyker. Backmarker antics aside, I turned my attention to the lights. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Zero. Twenty-one cars blasted off the grid and a twenty-second waited in the pitlane for a green light as the 2007 European Grand Prix began. I followed Harrison down the hill and tucked in behind him, considering it my best chance to score some points if I did my best to follow the McLaren up the grid. This meant that I passed my teammate, who ended up on the outside of turn one, but all's fair in love and motorsport I suppose.
I followed the McLaren through turns two and three, the awkward twisting sections where it was difficult to pass, and then, as we came through turn four and down the straight, I began wondering if he was going to try and overtake someone into turn five. I quickly lost focus on that, because I noticed something far more pressing at that point: it had started to rain, quite heavily at that. Anthony Harrison wasn't overtaking anyone in turn five, nobody was, because the priority became keeping it on track as the circuit suddenly became very, very slippery. They were right about the rain coming, oh yes, because it went from dry to verifiable downpour in the blink of an eye. I negotiate turn five and held the car as the weight transfer threatened to send me into a spin by the time that I got to turn six, managing to keep the car on track, albeit going wide and giving a place back to my teammate behind.
"We need to stop!" I called through the team radio, needing to change onto the wet tyres immediately. I wasn't even going to mess around with the intermediates since if it was getting wet this quickly, the track was going to be properly soaked by the time we got around again.
"You will lap at the end of lap two, Tamara. Tommy is ahead right now and will get to stop first. Hold it together." Peter replied. I bit my tongue and resisted pointing out the fact that I was ahead up until the conditions caused me to lose a place and concentrated on holding it together as I did the first of two laps in miserable conditions. I understood why the team didn't want to double-stack, that's hard on the pit crew and it usually involves losing a lot of time, especially if the first car is loading up on fuel and the second car isn't very far behind, but this was a bit ridiculous. Double stacking can't possibly be worse than possibly writing off a car. Nevertheless, most of the other teams seemed to make the same decision, so I wasn't the only one still out there on dry tyres. In all this chaos though, there was one driver who was having a field day, and that was Andreas Wilhelmus, passing me down the straight as the rookie in the backmarker team was charging up the grid from last, being the only driver on the appropriate tyres right now. I was more focused on the fact that I finished one lap, having one more to go. I also gained quite a bit of positions thanks to all the cars pitting, but I would lose all those positions thanks to being on the wrong tyres for another whole lap, and then needing to pit. I would just have to grin and bear it though, it was a wet race, my first wet race in Formula One, and that meant there would be a lot of chaos. Perhaps I could gain from that, if I could keep it on track, that is.
It wasn't easy. Constant oversteer, opposite lock, and heavy braking as I sought to keep the car on the track. If I got it into the gravel, I was going to get beached and I wouldn't be able to recover the car, if I got onto the kerbs, I would spin out on wet kerbing and maybe even get blindsided by a car behind me, and if I get on the grass, I'll be getting even less grip out of these tyres. The one good thing is that, since 1998, F1 has run grooved tyres rather than slick, so they weren't completely hopeless in the wet, just mostly hopeless. That information wasn't worth much, but maybe it gave me some sort of motivation to keep going, since I managed to make it all the way around and then dip into the pitlane, joined by everyone else who hadn't been lucky enough to get to stop on lap one. The useless dry tyres came off and the full wet tyres went on as the team topped me up with fuel and released me to do whatever I could out on the track.
I exited the pits on the appropriate tyres, but I got an immediate warning that these tyres were no guarantee of safety as I saw a whole bunch of cars that pitted the lap before out in the gravel trap off of turn one. These were cars on the wet tyres who misjudged turn one and ended up beached as they were passing us in the pitlane. I saw the Honda of James Buxton facing backwards, the McLaren of Anthony Harrison, the Spyker of Lorenzo Barbaro sitting close by, the other Williams of Tommy Koskinen, the Toro Rosso of New Zealander Max Marcus, and a tractor working on recovering them. I turned my attention to the track on my left to see the other Toro Rosso of Giuseppino Leone, got turn one was practically a river, and the Toro Rosso spun out too, sliding backwards into the tractor and bouncing off the wheel. Needless to say, I took turn one as gingerly as I could, desperate not to become the seventh car in that mess.
"Safety car! Safety car! Charlie's decided it's not safe out there." Peter Malmedy called out, relaying the call from race director Charlie Whitting. The weather was ridiculous and it was sudden, cars were literally piling up in turn one even on what were supposed to be the appropriate tyres for the conditions, and visibility was also terrible. It was bad enough in front of a gaggle of cars, but behind, the spray coming off the cars as downforce displayed huge amounts of water made it downright dangerous to follow a car, especially if an incident happened up ahead. We didn't have to worry about that now, because the cars were going at a controlled pace thanks to the safety car. Even that didn't last that long because, not even a lap later, Charlie brought out the red flag, halting the race on lap three. The cars gathered up in the pitlane, including Anthony Harrison, who had managed to get a push from the marshals and got going again, albeit a lap down. Now we had to wait and see what race control was going to do, all the while the rain kept falling and falling.
The team came over to the car, put the warmers on the tyres, and put an umbrella over the cockpit, keeping it as dry as they could as I climbed out of the car and went into the garage for the time being. I walked over to the white counter along the edge of my side of the garage and took off my helmet, balaclava, and gloves for the time being. I knew that race control wanted to get the race going again, but the question was when would that be possible and what that would look like. Various team personnel from all the teams were making their way towards either the bulletin board or to the steward's office directly to try and get more information about all this, but I doubted we were going to get much of an answer until the rain subsided. If it's too wet to race right now, and no cars are running right now, then conditions aren't going to get any better until the rain itself stops. The cars can go a pretty good job of draining the water - as I mentioned, the cars can displace an awful lot of water - but that also puts the cars and the fragile drivers within into the danger zone. The safety car, a Mercedes sports coupe, would probably get out there and displace a little bit of water, but there isn't much that one sports car could do compared to twenty-two heavily aerodynamic machines. This was especially the case with the rain still coming down, meaning that the safety car would be, to use a water analogy, swimming against the tide. So, with all of this established, I felt it was going to be a little while before we got going again, and we were likely waiting for the weather to change before we could do anything.
"Crap guys, I'm so sorry." I turned to see Tommy Koskinen entering the team garage on the opposite side, his car among the five who retired in turn one. The two Toro Rosso cars, the Spyker, the Honda, and my teammate, the lone exception to that being the sixth car, Anthony Harrison. As I mentioned, the American recovered and was able to get a push and got going, albeit when the grid was already coming around under SC, putting him a lap down. Normally, the lapped car would be allowed to go ahead before the safety car ended, but the red flag came before the procedure went through, so Anthony Harrison's car was still lined up on the back of the grid, but a lap down on top of that, so it was unclear where he really was. McLaren, naturally, will be telling the stewards that he is at the back of the grid already, so he should just be given his lap back and allowed to start from the end of the grid, but the backmarker teams like Super Aguri will demand that his lap down status stays, because a lot of cars are gone, and this could be an opportunity for them. An opportunity that would be made that much harder if a faster car instantly passed them. Anthony having to do a whole lap before he could overtake for position would help them out a lot.
"It is what it is Tommy, the conditions were treacherous, and you were hardly the only car aquaplaning off of the track. There is a reason the race was red flagged not long off of that. Now all we can do is wait for the race to get restarted and concentrating on helping Tamara take advantage of the situation." Michael put a shoulder on the blond Finnish driver's shoulder and reassured him, keeping morale up, and reminding the team that we still had a job to do, even if our lead driver unfortunately retired. Combined with my shock podium in Canada, this could be seen as a bit of a turning point within the team, as Michael Coronet is literally saying that, thanks to Tommy's retirement, the focus is turning over to me. Now, obviously this is just about this one race, but it's a change, nonetheless. For the first time, I had the whole team behind me and all the eyes were on me: Williams' chances in this race are with me. Tommy has had a few retirements, Malaysia and Canada come to mind, and I had my own issues, retiring on lap one of Spain while Tommy went and scored points chief among them, but this was perhaps the starkest example. The team put my second driver status into practice, they gave Tommy priority on pit strategy, while I had to stay out a lap longer, but Tommy is the one who slid off track on wet tyres while I managed to hold it together on the dry tyres all the way around. I'm not saying I'm better, just that I had a better performance under these conditions so far, and Michael is taking note of that. This was the second best thing to Sir Frank Williams himself putting the focus on me.
"You know, if they're waiting out the rain, we might get something out of starting on the intermediates, maybe giving us the chance to speed past some of the cars ahead." Peter proposed, taking advantage of the fact that the team knew that all our chances were on me right now, trying to get maximum points out of all this. It was a gamble though, Tommy literally just slid off into retirement on the wet tyres and my engineer was proposing going on a compound beneath that, it sounded ridiculous right now when, just outside the garage, the rain was still pouring down.
"We'll keep that in mind Peter, but we don't even know what the plan with the restart is right now, we can talk about what we're going to do once we have an idea of what's going on. What does the radar suggest?" Michael Coronet responded from the middle of the garage, taking the position of the team leader. Michael was not team principal, that honor went to Frank Williams, the man that the team was named after, but he was team principal in all but name. He made sure that Malmedy was not insulted, but he was reminded to stay focused on the present, before turning over to some of Koskinen's mechanics, now watching the weather radar. From this side of the garage, I saw a lot of yellow and red on the weather radar right now, indicating not just rain, but heavy rain. Not a very promising picture at the moment. They sped the radar picture up and went for the weather predictions: cloud cover would remain all through the race, meaning we wouldn't get the help of the sun to dry out the track, but there did seem to be a window between the current wave of heavy rain and a second wave of light rain, a wave we could probably race through. This window of dry weather followed by a manageable amount of rain was probably as good as it was going to get today.
"The clouds are moving pretty quickly actually, the worst of this should be over in about twenty minutes, but there is risk of light rain again at the end of the race." the Englishman on the weather radar system responded, adding context to the visuals I already identified. So, twenty minutes or so, not a very long red flag after all. This might not be all that different from the Canadian Grand Prix, all things considered. I could only hope that the end would be just as positive for me. I walked over to counter again and grabbed my water bottle, taking a drink and letting my hair down before putting on a cyan Kazakhoil cap for my sponsors. It was good timing too, because not a moment later, I saw Katherine Symmons enter the Williams garage in a raincoat, followed by two BBC cameramen in transparent plastic ponchos. I finished my drink and turned to face them, shooting the cameras a respectful smile and trying to look dignified.
"Hello Tamara, we're going up and down the grid trying to get an idea of what it was like out there, what do you think about the conditions?" the redhead reporter asked, it was a pretty standard question given the circumstances. BBC still had a broadcast to do - they didn't have the luxury of going to commercials like I imagine a lot of other channels will be doing - so they were trying to produce some interest by getting interviews with some fan-favorite drivers. I guess that includes me. The fact of the matter is that I'm somewhat of a novelty on the F1 grid, being the only woman in the sport - as Roksana tends to remind me - and that draws eyes regardless of my performances. The fact that I've had a pretty good start to the season on top of that doesn't hurt either. It seems ridiculous to me, but I probably am disproportionately popular given that I drive for a midfield team, and I come from a country without a motorsport heritage. Then there's also the pragmatic explanation on top of that: an awful lot of drivers, particular the English media's darling, James Buxton, are out of the race, so they need to find people still in the race to interview.
"Oh, it was properly soaked out there. Obviously, we don't like it when a race is suspended like this, but it was the right decision to make. I had a bit of a slide on lap one and I lost a position to Tommy, and obviously a lot of drivers were having issues too. The real problem was the standing water in turn one, there is just too much of it to keep racing - all those drivers were on the wet tyres but there was so much water on the racing line that cars were just aquaplaning off of the track. James is a race winner, Anthony is fighting for the championship, Tommy is very quick, all those drivers were very good, it's not a talent thing. Anyone could have gone off in turn one so there was no chance we could've kept the race going, Charlie did the right thing. Now though, the forecast is looking promising so hopefully we can get back out there and get this race done and give something to all the fans at home watching the race, or here in the stands despite the rain." I responded, making sure to defend the drivers that went off in turn one and maybe explain to some frustrated fans why the race was stopped like this. Nobody likes to see a race red flagged, especially not a wet race since those tend to be rarer and provide a fascinating spectacle of what drivers are capable of, but there is a difference between the rain making racing more difficult, and the rain making racing dangerous or even impossible. Anthony had a crash yesterday in the dry in Q3 and had to be cleared to race by the medical center, nobody wants to see what kind of accident could happen under these conditions. I mean, imagine if Leone hadn't been backwards when he hit that tractor...
"You managed to keep it around on dry tyres for an extra lap compared to most drivers, explain how that was?" Katherine asked, referring to the fact that I had to pit on lap two with the other second drivers compared to stopping on lap one, like Tommy did.
"Yeah, I have no idea how I did that. I certainly wouldn't want to be asked to do that again. The conditions were awful, and I understand that the team didn't want to double stack, but I was very, very lucky not to lose a car. Maybe it was for the best though, because maybe if I changed on lap one, I would've been in the gravel trap along with all those other drivers. It's not easy to make strategy calls in this weather." I responded, trying to convey how I felt about that extra lap and making it clear that it wasn't something I wanted to do, but also not wanting to be harsh on the team. Based on the fact that Michael or Peter or anyone else didn't seem to be shooting me a bad glare, I guess my answer was fine. It seemed to be fine for Katherine as well, as she was content to end the interview there. As for me, I decided to take a bathroom break and then prepare myself for getting back into the car and finishing the rest of this race.
The safety car led the cars around for the second of two laps to start the race, and this time, Anthony Harrison was allowed to unlap himself. Tyres were the name of the game here, because up in front, Andreas Wilhelmus was still on the wet tyres, Spyker clearly either believing there was more rain to come that we weren't seeing on our end, or simply hoping that the strategy that got them to the front would pay off. The rest of the grid was on the intermediate tyres as the rain had, by now, mostly passed, with the track expected to dry out - us displacing the water as we went - and a switch to the dry tyres was expected not very long after we got racing again. That is, of course, assuming that we're right and Spyker is wrong, of course. There turned out to be another dimension to all this though, because as the safety car entered the pitlane and we bunched up behind Wilhelmus, waiting for the Dutch driver to restart the race, Anthony Harrison pitted in and switched straight to the dry tyres. The American clearly expected it to dry out quickly, and now that he had his lap back, he wanted to quickly carve through the field.
My focus was not on the McLaren right now though, it was on the restart. Andreas took off and led across the line for Spyker for the very first time in the team's short existence thus far, followed quickly by Henrique de Matteo in the lead Ferrari, Felipe Alvarez in the McLaren, the two Red Bulls of Martin Weaver and Daniel MacGowan, the Renault of Jyri Kaasalainen, then there were the cars that pitted on lap two, mainly Matias Hamalainen and myself, as I started right behind the Finnish Ferrari driver. The BMW Saubers of Victor Hartmann and Piotr Kaminski were behind us, not particularly high up the field right now, but both still in the race, which is more than most teams can claim at this point, to be fair. In any case, we all gained a position in the next few laps, since it quickly became clear that Andreas Wilhelmus was on the wrong tyres. I almost felt bad when I sailed past the orange and black car, since this was the best chance the backmarker team was going to get to score points, but he went from the lead to out of the points in the blink of an eye. I understand why they took the gamble, they didn't want to risk their position, but everyone else at the table had the better cards, and Spyker had to bust out. Andreas would retire not even ten laps later with a reliability issue.
It was around the time that Andreas retired that most of us pitted for the dries. At the back of the grid, this included a very disappointed Anthony Harrison, who did a horrid lap on the dries, returned to the pits to switch to the appropriate intermediates, and now had to switch back to the dry tyres. Once again, it was a gamble that didn't pay off, but now that he was back on the appropriate tyres, I'm sure the American will do everything in his power to regain position. As for me, the team topped off my fuel tank as much as they could and put the prime tyres on my car, intending to go as long as possible and, ideally, to switch directly from these tyres to the intermediates at the end of the race when it started to rain again. There was a lot of race still to cover though, so maybe I shouldn't be getting too ambitious just yet. I got out back on track and set about doing a quick outlap, gaining two positions on rotation as I ended up ahead of Jyri Kaasalainen and Daniel MacGowan, my usual rival directly behind me now. The Scot was one of the oldest drivers in F1 right now, right up there with Rudolfo Goncalves - Daniel raced for Williams in 1994 and 1995 after Ayrton Senna tragically died, and then spent the bulk of his career at McLaren, before switching to Red Bull in 2005 - yet I was the youngest driver in F1. Interesting how I repeatedly found myself facing these veterans of the sport on track.
The car ahead of me, though, wasn't a veteran of the sport, rather it was one of the top drivers in the world in his prime. Matti Hamalainen in the Ferrari, and the pace difference was beginning to show. Rain was somewhat of an equalizer in Formula One, as cars could only go so fast and raw talent mattered a lot more when the machinery couldn't work at peak efficiency, but now that the rain was gone, the true pace of the cars was being revealed, and Matti started to pull away from me while, further up the grid, Henrique de Matteo started to pull away from Felipe Alvarez and build up a lead. This was a big opportunity for Ferrari considering that Anthony Harrison probably wasn't going to score points today. So, the Finn was chasing down a podium finish, meanwhile, I was chasing down Martin Weaver, another one of the usual suspects in terms of my on-track rivals, because I realized the math was against us today. BMW Sauber and Renault were both having a bit of an off-day and Anthony Harrison was having a properly miserable one, so big points were on offer, and Red Bull had two cars in the points compared to one here at Williams. I couldn't do much to stop them from getting two cars in the points, but I could at least try and limit the damage by finishing in front of them and scoring the largest individual points haul.
The race was running dry and there were a lot fewer cars left, but if you thought that meant the retirements were over, you were wrong. A mere few laps after Andreas Wilhelmus dropped out of the race, there was an incident between Victor Hartmann and Roland Ziegler, with the German Toyota driver pulling off the track with damage. A safety car was avoided, and a rival was out of the race, so it was pretty good news for us overall. A lap after that, Haruki Tanaka retired. Super Aguri had some solid pace at the beginning of the season and seemed to have the edge over their senior team, Honda, but that situation has changed. I don't think we'll have much to worry about from Super Aguri for the rest of the season, but Honda seems like it is slowly but surely becoming a more consistent threat to us. I would describe the order of the midfield as BMW Sauber clear ahead, then Renault, then us, then Toyota, Red Bull, and Honda as the eighth fastest car, at least at the moment. The biggest retirement of the race, however, came when Matti Hamalainen retired, perhaps from pushing hard in an attempt to catch Henrique and Felipe, who have been running at the front all day. The Ferrari ground to a halt and Matti had been looking for a gap in the wall that the marshals could pull his car through, but he hadn't quite found one.
"Box, box, box this lap please. We're getting double waved yellows because of Hamalainen, and we think there might be another safety car." Malmedy explained, giving me the instructions first and the reasoning second, making sure I did what I was told while also justifying it. Martin Weaver came into the pits ahead, meaning it would be a race between Red Bull and Williams. Daniel MacGowan stayed out, which wasn't too damning, as the marshals managed to get it done without having to call the safety car, but we were more comfortable on this strategy anyway, and I now had a fresh set of option tyres with which I could chase down both Martin and Weaver. So, yet another car that should've been ahead of us was out, meaning that as the two of us came out of the pitlane, some of the biggest points of the season were on the line. We were quick too, because, with the exception of Henrique de Matteo and Felipe Alvarez who were in a league of their own, we were the fastest cars on track. It didn't take long for us to close in on MacGowan, the Scot's tyres having run down. He let his teammate by without a problem, but it seemed like Red Bull was willing to play dirty, since they kept MacGowan out on worn out tyres seemingly just to hold me up. It didn't much matter though, because, coming out of turn ten, Daniel was really struggling, while I had a good exit on fresher, faster tyres. The veteran driver tried, but there was nothing he could do to keep me from overtaking him through the kink of turn twelve and solidifying that advantage by the time we got to the chicane. Red Bull admitted defeat and had Daniel pull right into the pitlane.
The second Red Bull was now firmly behind me, so I could turn all of my attention onto Weaver. The BMWs were behind us, the Renaults were behind us, Matti Hamalainen was out, and Anthony Harrison was well outside of the points. All of that meant that we were fighting for a podium position. Henrique de Matteo, the Brazilian in the Rosso Corsa Ferrari, was leading the race and had a healthy gap, Felipe Alvarez in the silver and red McLaren wasn't quite as quick as Henrique but still miles ahead of anyone else, Martin Weaver was on course to give Red Bull its third podium of the season, but I was closing quickly. Daniel MacGowan did keep me behind for most of a lap and that did give Weaver some breathing room, but that breathing room was rapidly disappearing, and as we entered the last ten laps of the race, it seemed like it was only a matter of time until I closed the distance and overtook the Australian. So then, perhaps it was little surprise that was the moment when the promised light rain came and added another obstacle I had to overcome in order to end up on the podium yet again.
"Pit for intermediates, pit for intermediates." Peter called through the radio much like he did some fifteen laps earlier when I switched onto these option tyres. It was a good thing that we stopped, we wouldn't have made it all this way on one dry compound, and if we tried, we would've been slow like MacGowan had been on that final lap before he pitted. Furthermore, the option tyres did their job and allowed me to not only chase down Weaver but put a gap between me and the cars behind. It already helped that the rain meant everything behind me had to pit at one point or another, but when I came in for my stop, there was no pressure from behind, merely pressure to try and beat or at least match the Red Bull crew so as to avoid making the gap even bigger. So, I exited the pitlane for the fifth time that day on the intermediate tyres, to find that the rain, while lighter, was coming just as quickly as it had been earlier. It wasn't unsafe or anything like that, but it was remarkable how quickly the track changed from dry conditions to wet and slippery. The other interesting thing was that the balance between the leaders completed changed, since now, Felipe Alvarez was reeling Henrique in rapidly. I didn't have much time to think about that though, because I had two and a half seconds to Weaver and seven laps to make the difference. What Alvarez was doing was impressive, but I needed my own version of that.
So, I closed and closed the gap, chasing after the Red Bull and taking a few tenths out of him each lap, breaking under two seconds, then a few laps later, I was within a second of him, I was so close to him that I was having to peak out of the spray coming off of his car into turn one, but I was also running out of time. On the penultimate lap, I positioned my car well through the final car and took a run at him, bravely pointing my nose into the spray and getting as much of a tow as I could. We crossed the line to start the final lap like this, two cars fighting hard for the final podium place. Weaver saw this coming though, so he defended to the inside. This got me out of the spray though, so I tried to hang it on the outside. I was ahead in the braking zone, but that didn't help me much considering that Martin had the better line through the corner. I tucked in behind him for now and thought about, realistically, what I could do. I was running out of time and running out of places where I could do a move. Weaver was smart with how he was driving and covered off the inside of turn five. I was also denied a move into the podium when Weaver went to the outside but then turned in earlier, meaning I had to brake earlier or risk running into him. Through the Ziegler S and turn ten, I had nothing, but coming out of turn eleven, this was where I overtook MacGowan earlier in the race, and maybe I could repeat that feat.
I was right behind Weaver down the straight and took a look into the chicane, but he braked just late enough to stay ahead in what was, for all intents and purposes, the last overtaking point on the track. My only chance now was to out-drag him down the final straight, but that was unlikely given that the line was so close. I was beginning to resign myself to a fourth place when, in a rare mistake, Weaver dipped a wheel off of the somewhat drier racing line and into the wet track just beyond it. The Australian caught some oversteer and had to counter-steer to keep the car from spinning out. To his credit, Weaver did catch the car, but his little mistake gave me all the opening I needed, and I sailed past him to the line even as he mashed the throttle coming out of the final corner, intent on preserving his lead. By the slimmest of margins, I matched what I did in Canada, I finished third.
The points-paying results of the 2007 European Grand Prix go as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
2: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota.
4: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault.
5: Daniel MacGowan - Great Britain - Red Bull-Renault.
6: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
7: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber.
8: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault.
So, Red Bull took nine points to move into sixth place ahead of Toyota, but another six points from me made sure Williams still had a buffer to the teams behind. Anthony Harrison finished just outside of the points, Toyota had a bad day, and BMW Sauber and Renault both underperformed in changeable conditions. Felipe Alvarez managed to get around Henrique de Matteo, though not without the Brazilian shoving him around a little bit on track, while led to the Spaniard shoving him in the cool down room after the race, the two men arguing in Italian over what happened. So, it was the European Grand Prix, but, at the end of it, three continents were represented on the podium.
Notes:
Okay everyone, let me know what you think about this one race format. The next chapter will be a bit longer and on the busy side, but with a race like this, I felt it was best to go into depth and keep it focused on the one event. Anyway, ciao!
Chapter 7: Hungary, Kazakhstan, and Turkey
Notes:
So, last chapter gave you guys a taste of what one race chapters would look like, it was also a 10,000-word chapter rather than 15,000. This one is going to be back on the long side because there is a lot that I want to deal with. Let me know what you guys think of the shorter format versus this usual format.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter VII.
Hungary, Kazakhstan, and Turkey.
"Alright, three...two...one...and there we go!" Natasha's mother snapped the picture of me and Natasha with her camera as we stood together in the Tsirinsky family's apartment in Monaco. I held my third-place trophy from the European Grand Prix, Natasha held her winner's trophy from race two at Mugello in Italian F3. The two of us had a very good weekend: I had my comeback race in wet conditions at the Nürburgring, starting twelfth, getting up to eleventh, falling back to twelfth, and then having to go all the way around on a soaked track on dry tyres before pitting, eventually coming back up the field on the dry tyres, and then finally taking third at the very last corner, now on the intermediate tyres as rain came yet again. As for Natasha, well, in the sunnier environs of Mugello, she built on her three consecutive podiums to finish fourth and first in the two races that weekend. Natasha was now up to 38 points in Italian F3 with just over a month before the next race weekend, also at Mugello. Once the second weekend at Mugello was done, it was onto Varano, Vallelunga, and, finally, Monza. As for me, I started my debut season in F1 with a point from Australia, I added another two points thanks to a 7th place at Monaco, followed the very next race by my podium at Canada, and then, four races later, I added to my points tally with another third place, this time at the European Grand Prix. All of that meant that I was now on 15 points myself, not a bad place to be at all with more than half of the season finished.
To illustrate why such a small number as 15 is actually really impressive for me right now, the first measure of competition was my teammate: Tommy Koskinen. Tommy started off the season with an advantage over me, finishing just ahead of me in Australia to bring in two points from a 7th place finish. Tommy added to this tally in Spain with a 6th place for another three points. This meant that I had three times as many points as my highly rated teammate and, furthermore, I had the bragging rights of two podium finishes to my name. Everyone, myself included to be honest, expected for Tommy to have the advantage over me this year, but, so far, I've handled him very competently. Now, of course, there's plenty of good luck on my part and plenty of bad luck on his, and, in general, we've been a lot closer to each other on track than the results suggest. I've been able to take some great opportunities on races where Tommy wasn't in a position to do much of anything, yes, but I've by no means been dominating my teammate. The next measure, then, is our rivals. In terms of Toyota, Ivan Tripoli scored two 7th places at Malaysia and Bahrain, plus a 6th in the US for 7 points total, putting him in between us. Roland Ziegler, meanwhile, has had some properly rotten luck so far this year and has so far only got an 8th place finish from Canada to his name, giving him a solitary 1 point.
Toyota has slid back a bit in the last few races though, and that has allowed Red Bull to become our primary rival. Daniel MacGowan was two fifth-place finishes to his name, coming from the Spanish and now the European Grand Prix, giving him 8 points. Martin Weaver, his Australian teammate, meanwhile, has finished 7th in the United States and then 4th at the Nürburgring, leaving him on 7 points. So, looking at the battle for fifth in the constructors' championship right now, we have Williams on 20 points, followed by Red Bull on 15 points, and Toyota has just 8 points. Driver wise, I was also at the head of the pack my 15 to MacGowan's 8, Ivan and Martin's 7, Tommy's 5, and Roland's 1. As for the Renaults ahead of us, Umberto Petronelli was on 17 points and Jyri Kaasalainen was on 15 points as well, meaning that I was only ahead of him on quality of points, as my two podiums weighed above his single fourth place. I imagine that Jyri will get ahead of me quite soon and stay ahead, as one podium was far more than I expected from this season, let alone two. I've had luck on my side to get this far, whereas the points tally that Renault has shows that, even if they aren't a championship winning team this year, they're still a very good car. Without a massive stroke of luck, fifth in the constructors' championship is the best that we can hope for. Still though, it's fun to see my name up in ninth in the drivers' championship at the moment, splitting the Renault drivers.
So, this was the peak of my season as far as I was concerned, while Natasha had her first Formula Three win to her name, so it's natural we decided to celebrate. Hence, the two of us were here, standing on either side of Natasha's mother - who I considered my aunt - as the short-haired dirty blonde woman showed us the picture on her digital camera. I couldn't help but smile at the sight, Natasha and I so earnest and happy holding our trophies facing her loving mother, knowing that her father was just behind her, watching the scene from the living room couch. There was a twinge of sadness to this smile, and that concerned the person who wasn't here: namely, my father. He was invited, of course, and I told him I was sure his office could do without him for an hour or two, but he wasn't here. I would think that, at very least, with the amount of money he has thrown into my racing career to get me to this point, he'd be more willing to celebrate my successes. My dad was instrumental to getting me here and he served as my agent as Kazakhoil, Williams, and him all worked together to negotiate this deal, but now that the deal is done and I have my seat in Formula One, he seems to have completely lost interest in me and my career.
"There were a lot of crashes last weekend." Natasha's mother mentioned, looking at me, referring to the European Grand Prix. The stuff in turn one before the red flag was the most obvious one, but there was also that big incident that Harrison had in the Ziegler S during qualifying. That accident could have been much worse, with Anthony getting a concussion or otherwise being injured in such a way where he wouldn't have been cleared to race. The American was pretty lucky, all things considered, that he was able to race at the Nürburgring, even if he didn't manage to score points. I had a clean race; I've been pretty clean in my F1 career so far. The biggest mark against me, in my opinion, is the incident in the Spanish Grand Prix, and even that wasn't one hundred percent my fault. I had a little bit of wheel-banging in Canada on the road to my first podium, and there were some scruffy moments during this last race, losing a position in the wet and all that, but I've been pretty fortunate thus far. That is a bit of a gift and a curse though, because, at this level of motorsport, almost every driver has a big accident at one point or another, a few actually get injured in the process, and, especially in the past, there have been some who haven't been able to walk away from the crash at all. I'm probably going to have an accident sooner rather than later, and it might be a bad one. The accidents in Nürburgring, particularly Harrison's, are an example of that. Anthony is a world-class driver, he's a championship contender in his rookie year and destined for greatness, if he can crash, I can crash, and my adopted aunt knows that too.
"There were, yes, but the cars are the safest they've ever been. The helmets are more advanced too, and along with the HANS device, we can take many, many more forces than we ever could before. An accident that would have killed someone in the 1970s could leave someone with nothing worse than a headache. I mean, look at Piotr Kaminski, he had a horror crash at Canada and only needed to miss a single race." I explained. I couldn't deny the fact that I could always get into a crash, nor could I deny the fact that I was very much scared of that possibility, but I also felt that almost every accident I could survive. I might break a leg, an arm, have a concussion, whatever, but to actually die in a modern race car? It would take a truly crazy type of accident. The main concern now, in my opinion, is an inherit problem of open wheel cars as a concept, and that is the fact that we're more vulnerable to airborne debris than we would if we were in a tintop race car. You will never be able to remove all the risk out of motorsport, there is no way to replicate every freak variable in a lab, all of us are aware of that, but we also know that this is the safest that Formula One has ever been and we have the potential to have the longest careers F1 drivers have ever seen.
"I just hope we don't have to see you in one of those crashes." my aunt sighed, still not entirely convinced, and not without reason.
"I'll do what I can to stay safe then." I responded, giving what promise I could to try and avoid these situations, but not that if it meant compromising anything else. Racing means racing, I was going to fight open wheel, I was going to be aggressive when I needed to be aggressive, and I wasn't going to let myself be trampled over in a race just because defending might be a bit risky. If we stop taking risks, that's when F1 stops being a sport. For better or worse, bravery is a part of the sport: anyone can drive a car, anyone can turn left, and anyone can turn right, so it is the superhuman feats of driving that set us apart from everyone else. Not too long ago, in 2005 and 2006, Felipe Alvarez in the Renault and Wilhelm Ziegler in the Ferrari battled for the race win, with Alvarez winning the first time around and Ziegler finishing first the second go around a year later. That was truly a champion's battle, that was the two best drivers in the sport going head-to-head, all out, for a race win. That is what Formula One is, and Formula One would not be the same if they decided not to take risks or that it was too dangerous.
If McLaren thought that the controversy of the 2007 was over after their meeting with the FIA in Paris, they had another thing coming in Hungary. As we gathered at the track outside of Budapest - Hungary was first brought to F1 in 1986 as the first race behind the Iron Curtain, and even now, it still stands alone as a race in eastern Europe, joined only by Turkey, which is a slightly different context, I think we can all agree - we heard the following story: so, Anthony Harrison was supposed to let Felipe Alvarez by in qualifying to give him the track position advantage, but Anthony did not, and was thus able to set a better laptime. Felipe Alvarez got ahead on the in-lap and pitted first, getting new tyres for the second run. This is when the controversy really starts because the team held Alvarez for twenty seconds, ostensibly to get a good position relative to the other cars, but then, once Alvarez was released, the Spaniard stayed still for a further ten seconds, even as his mechanics were rushing him to get going and to get out of the way. All the while, Harrison was sitting behind, waiting to get serviced as well, and because of Alvarez's actions, Harrison didn't have time to set a second lap. Alvarez, meanwhile, was able to go faster and qualified on pole. The Spaniard got that taken away though, left sixth on the grid after a penalty came down from the stewards. This left Harrison starting at the front of the grid as McLaren seemed to be on the verge of descending into a civil war.
Most of the time, I would saw that the drama at the very front of the grid doesn't really affect us here at Williams, but today is an exception to that rule. I have to throw my hands up and admit that Tommy Koskinen demolished me in qualifying yesterday, putting his car all the way up in fifth place, now turning into fourth thanks to Alvarez's penalty. The luck was a bit spread out though, because, from my lowly thirteenth grid slot, I was promoted up to twelfth thanks to a penalty that Umberto Petronelli got in Q1 for impeding the Spyker of Hideyoshi Ikeda. The Japanese driver who briefly raced for Super Aguri in 2006 made his return to the sport thanks to Spyker yet again changing its second driver: leading the race was apparently not enough to keep Andreas Wilhelmus lining up next to Lorenzo Barbaro. The rotating cast of Spyker wasn't the only change though, because Max Marcus was replaced by Maximilian Renner over at Toro Rosso. Renner impressed a lot by scoring points in his substitute appearance for BMW Sauber, so now, the driver jointly developed by BMW and Red Bull was getting a more permanent chance, this time with Toro Rosso. I say more permanent because Toro Rosso has revealed itself to be a rather merciless driver mill for Red Bull, with American Craig Cross only getting a season in the seat last year, and now Max Marcus getting less than that. Even Giuseppino Leone, who has been with Toro Rosso for its entire existence, is not safe, with the rumor that Red Bull is interested in having Toro Rosso run a completely new lineup in 2008. I guess Renner is the first part of that transformation.
I knew Renner from our time together in Formula 3 Euro, the German and I contending for rookie of the year. Renner won out on that occasion, but I still impressed, and thanks to some good luck, good timing, and my nationality being beneficial for a change, our careers went in different directions. I went to GP2 Asia with DAMS, where I was able to unexpectedly win the championship, whereas Renner continued in F3 Euro, now with the all-conquering ART team, and there he managed to finish second overall, winning four races and being beaten only by Italo-Scottish driver Richard di Paolo. A pretty impressive campaign, all things considered, and it is exciting to be in the same series as Renner again, especially because I seem to have the edge in machinery for the time being. I suppose it's true what some of the more cynical figures in the media say - every Formula One driver likes the idea of competition up until they actually see it. As much as all the other drivers grumbled about the dominant seasons that Wilhelm Ziegler and Ferrari had together at the beginning of the decade, every driver on this grid would kill to have a car like that. Fortunately for the fans and unfortunately for the drivers, 2007 is a very different season than that though. Twenty-two cars lined up on the grid of the Hungaroring with two new faces at the back and controversy upfront in what was rapidly becoming a very, very memorable season of the world's greatest motorsport.
Five lights came on and then, as they turned off, it was like the great Murray Walker says - it was go go go! I tucked in behind Daniel MacGowan instead and used the Scot's draft to help me power past Jyri Kaasalainen right at the beginning of the race. The Hungaroring was a narrow track and it was absolutely essential to get track position whenever possible, because the opportunities to try again seldom came on this track. So, as we braked hard and came around the hairpin of turn one and began the downhill drive towards turn two, I found myself behind the Red Bulls yet again. Martin Weaver was ahead with Daniel MacGowan directly behind him, and me pulling up in the rear. I suppose there was somewhat of a kinship between the three of us now, considering we were all Williams drivers at one point or another, and we all happened to find ourselves occupying the same piece of tarmac over and over again. I suppose it was to be expected though, with Toyota having suffered a slump lately, Red Bull has emerged as our greatest and most direct rival as of late. Of course, as I say that, Roland Ziegler is running in the top five thanks to his best qualifying performance of the season, so perhaps Toyota isn't out of the game quite yet. Thankfully Tommy was right ahead of him. If I couldn't be up there fighting in the high points, my teammate being up there was the next best thing, because every point Tommy got was a point our rivals weren't getting.
Turn two was another hairpin, albeit wider, and this time to the left rather than the right. The track got faster at this point though, because turn three was a very fast right-hander with a good amount of kerb on the outside to take advantage of before beginning to uphill run to turn four. We crested the hill to complete sector one before immediately turning left for turn four, again having a healthy amount of kerb to use, but not for too long, since the nature of the track advantaged those who got back onto the track early. This is because the distance between turns four and five was short, with five being a long right hander that brought us around to the top of the track. A slightly longer straight before one of the most recognizable sections of the track: the tight turn 6-7 chicane with its threateningly high kerbs - it was right then left with the goal being to keep as much speed as possible. I then followed the Red Bulls into the left-hander of turn eight, also a fast one but not quite flat out. The right-hander of turn nine was rather similar in that regard, but it also started the fastest section of the track. Turn ten was little more than a left-hand kink in what was basically a straight heading down to turn eleven. A hard braking zone and a roughly 90-degree corner released us onto a proper straight as we ended sector two. It was a straight blast in the slipstream down to turn twelve, but the tight turn twelve meant I wasn't brave enough to overtake. Two hairpins, a left-hander at turn thirteen and a faster right-hander at turn fourteen to end the lap, brought us back onto the main straight, crossing the line to begin lap two.
Ultimately though, Hungary is always more about strategy than actual overtaking, so I worked the two-stop strategy to work my way ahead of the Red Bulls, but I didn't manage to stay ahead of Jyri Kaasalainen who was using the pace of his ING Renault well in a fast three-stop strategy. In the end, I finished ninth, just outside of the points, but directly ahead of some key rivals, such as Ivan Tripoli who ended the race in tenth, Daniel MacGowan who was down in eleventh, and Martin Weaver, who slipped all the way down to fourteenth thanks to a problem on his car. So, just like Malaysia, I was teased with points just beyond my reach, though this time, at least the team had something to be happy about, since Tommy managed to keep his car in the points for a decent haul, helping protect our position now that it seemed Toyota was back in addition to Red Bull, who has been right at our heels this whole time. Honda, meanwhile, had a truly awful day, as did Toro Rosso and Super Aguri for that matter, so, with more than half of the season in the bag, I imagine the battle for fifth place in the constructors is going to remain a battle between Williams, Red Bull, and Toyota, three very different teams with very different origins, but each one of us deserving to be in this fight.
The points paying results for the 2007 Hungarian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
2: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
3: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber.
6: Roland Ziegler - Germany - Toyota.
7: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota.
8: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault.
So, Felipe recovered a little bit from his penalty, but he still left the door open for his rivals to capitalize, and now Anthony joined him on three wins with a seven-point gap - Felipe had only just narrowed it down to two, but now, thanks to his actions in qualifying, he's given himself more work to do - more than that, it opened the door for Matti to have yet another good race for Ferrari. The Finn was once again ahead of his Brazilian teammate and once again leading the charge for Ferrari. Hartmann continued to enjoy a quietly successful season, as did Kaminski who was showing no signs of being deterred by his injury earlier this season. Ziegler finally turned one point into four thanks to his first substantial points haul of the season, Tommy joined Ivan Tripoli and Martin Weaver on seven points, while Jyri Kaasalainen was now a point ahead of me in the driver's championship, putting me back down into tenth in the drivers' championship. Oh well, ninth was fun while it lasted. Now, the F1 circus is going to be preparing for a few weeks off before Turkey in the traditional summer break, all except me, because I have that long-dreaded sponsor engagement with Kazakhoil to do. So, in a week's time, it'll be me, Malmedy and the guys, and a 1999 Williams off to Astana, the capital of Nursultan Nazarbayev's Kazakhstan.
I won't deny the fact that Williams is a shadow of its former self, it's a shame, and it's a shame that we're working hard to rebuild from. Despite all of that though, driving for Williams still has its perks, and those perks are illustrated in the fact that I've about to get to drive my second classic F1 car. The first was, obviously the 1980 championship winning Williams FW08B, and now, it's the 1999 Williams FW21. The FW21 originally wore a red and white livery, that of Winfield tobacco - the FW21 was actually the last Williams to run a tobacco livery, before the 2000 transformation of the team into one associated with BMW and with big tech firms like Compaq, HP, and now Lenovo - but now, the livery is dark blue, white, and teal, like the current car, with special consideration paid to the Kazakhoil stickers. Pretty natural, considering where we are. It was a bit of a shame to see this car out of its classic livery, but the team assured me that another FW21 chassis sits in the Williams Museum in its original colors. This is just a written off chassis from 1999 that's been rebuilt for various test runs and exhibitions, much like this. I didn't feel particularly good about this, a run around the central park area of Astana while the people - and the government officials - watched, but I had an obligation to the team and my sponsors. Furthermore, while I really didn't feel good about doing this for the government, I didn't mind doing it for the people of Kazakhstan who, otherwise, won't ever really get the chance to experience what it's like to see an F1 car up close and personal. So, here I was, about to drive a V10 F1 car through a city under construction. A tiny northern village being transformed into Nursultan's oil money ego city; a Central Asian Dubai or Abu Dhabi, if you will.
"Alright, you know the course. Get onto the main road, put the power down, give them some of that V10 sound, then circle around and give them some donuts in the wide area. I'll be on the radio if you need anything." Peter explained, giving me a last minute run-down on the course before getting away from the car and giving the crew instructions to let the car down. So, a 1999 Formula One car, showcase grade tyres from Bridgestone, and a course around the center of Astana. I heard the V10 fire-up and I drove out of our little tent area and onto the road proper, seeing the crowd gathered out to see the show. There was once a time where Astana, like Almaty, had been a majority Russian city, but now, thanks to Russians leaving the country and an influx of Kazakhs here ever since it became the capital, the population was now Kazakh majority, though a significant Russian minority still existed. All of this meant that I saw a great diversity of faces. Asian, Turkic, Persian, Slavic, and every possible combination of those features was reflected, and that meant that this was the first time that I felt good in this country. I haven't been to Kazakhstan, at all, since my family left Almaty at the fall of the Soviet Union, and I've felt really, really dirty about taking money from the government, but when I saw the looks of shock mixed with awe as the people heard a 3.0L V10 for the first time, I couldn't help but smile underneath my helmet.
I turned onto the main road and headed down the straight, which left me facing an interesting site. As I said, Astana was a city under construction: the Kazakh government was trying to turn it into a gilded city and building lots of skyscrapers - sooner rather than later, Astana will be the site of the highest building in Central Asia by a huge margin - and one example of that was the Kazakhoil Building. A pair of brown and white multistory buildings linked by an elevated walkway, like a smaller, less impressive version of the Petronas Towers from Malaysia. That was where Kazakhoil and Kazakhgaz operated out of, and that building towering over the park like this brought me right back to feeling gross and ugly about this. I tried not to think about that though, instead, I focused on the sound of the V10 behind him as I reached the top of 6th gear and then hit the brakes and downshifted into the 90-degree corner as I reached the far end of the track. The attendees got to listen to the popping sounds of a downshifting Supertec-badged Renault engine as, even when running at maybe just 80%, the brake calipers glowed red into the corner. A short shoot in front of the Kazakhoil building and then another 90-degree corner. It was now a long straight mirroring the one I was just on, but at the end of it, I did something a little bit different. I braked and slowed down the car and turned it into a wide area just off of the corner: wide, open, and ready for an F1 car.
I turned the wheel as far to the right as it would go and then hit the throttle, bringing the car into a donut and then I continued going around, treating the Kazakh fans to the sounds of a V10 engine and a smoke show courtesy of Bridgestone. This was the kind of thing you could only get from an F1 showcase event like this, no F1 driver would do this during a race weekend because conserving the tyres is too important, keeping the V8s high in the revs was dangerous because these engines now needed to last multiple races, and, due to the unpredictability and danger of a race weekend, the fans were kept rather far away from the barriers. Here, it was just a bit of a tyre wall and a fence separating the fans from this Formula One action. I eventually straightened the car out, pointing back towards the tent where I started, and waved to the fans as I slowly drove back to the crew, letting them take the car and roll it into the tent. Now, I had to get out of the car, hold my helmet under my arm, and take some uncomfortable photos with some really powerful people.
I had to smile for the camera and put an arm around Makhmud Abdullayev, the President of Kazakhoil, while he put an arm around me. Makhmud was dressed in a dark gray suit with a bluish white shirt and a blue and white striped tie, he wore circular classes and had a combover on the top of his head, as well as being somewhat on the heavy side. I've met with Makhmud before, but my father was with me then, I was alone in this country now, with just the guys from the team with me. I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable like this. That only got worse when, next, I had to take a picture with Nursultan Nazarbayev himself, shaking his hand before presenting my helmet to him for the photo-op. I felt really, really ugly about this, since Nursultan has been the dictator of Kazakhstan in all but name since 1989, taking control as the Soviet Union was beginning its collapse and not letting go of an ounce of power since. I would later look at the picture and see that it was clear as day that the smile was forced and I felt very uncomfortable, but the President of Kazakhstan didn't say anything about it: he and Makhmud got their photo-op, they got good publicity for their city, and that would hopefully lead to them getting more foreign investment. This is the real reason why Kazakhoil is sponsoring me: it has nothing to do with my racing career or using Kazakhoil's gas in Formula One, no, it was all about getting Kazakhstan's name out there and creating good press for a corrupt government. I was just the latest tool in quest to wash Kazakhstan's reputation, and I won't be the last.
There probably would've been more convenient ways to leave Kazakhstan if I were more patient, but I wanted to get out of the country as soon as possible, hence, in the end, I flew from Astana to Moscow, then from Moscow to Marseille. I could've gotten a flight to Nice with a layover in Istanbul, but that would've meant spending two more days in Astana, the flight to Moscow got me out of the country the same day as the showcase event. Russia has its own set of problems, its own megalomaniac dictator as well, but I felt a lot better there than I did in Kazakhstan. Maybe the story would be different if I was Ukrainian or Georgian, but I'm an ethnic Russian, I'm fluent in the language, even if Russians would accuse me of having a French accent - funnily enough, the French would accuse me of having a Russian accent - and I know how to carry myself through Russia, even as a woman travelling alone. The fact that I don't have to think about the corruption that funds my career probably helps a lot in terms of that, but it is what it is. So, I left Kazakhstan as soon as I could, I handled myself in Moscow for the four and a half hours between my flights, and now I've found myself in Marseille. Once I was in France's second city, I had two options: I could rent a car and drive back to Monaco, or I could visit a friend and recover from the flights here. Being exhausted and stressed out, I decided on the latter, hence, I found myself holding my phone in my hand as I waited for Roksana to pick me up at the airport.
I was dressed in a black Adidas jacket - I just came from Russia, after all - a white tank top, white shorts, and black and white converse. I wanted to be comfortable during the flight, no jeans or anything like that, but now that I was back out in public, I felt a bit self-conscious about myself. Its France, you have to dress nicely in public, you can't be outside in shitty clothes with bags under your eyes, yet here I was, the consequence of trying to get out of a country as soon as possible. I wouldn't have to be here for much longer though, because I saw the familiar black Peugeot 407 SW pulling up in front of the airport. I glanced down at my rolled suitcase and smirked, maybe I should ask for Roksana to pick me up more often, it's better than trying to fit my suitcase in a random taxi or my little blue Alfa. My smile didn't last long though, because then I thought about my appearance again, and I got self-conscious again, but for entirely different reasons now. The Peugeot pulled up, Roksana got out and shot me a smile, and then she headed over to the trunk to open it for me. I put my suitcase in and spoke to her.
"Thanks for this, I really don't want to deal with a taxi or a rental right now." I explained, putting my taxi in her trunk and then shutting it, heading over to the passenger side.
"No problem, Tamara, I like seeing you." she said before climbing into the driver's seat. I leaned back into her car seat and closed my eyes for a few moments, just enjoying a quiet drive after being on a loud plane all day. I've been traveling with the Koskinens for most of the races this year, so I suppose I've forgotten a bit of the commercial air experience, only to receive a reminder of it during this trip all the way to Central Asia. Perhaps it goes without saying, but Central Asia isn't much of a travel destination, at least not yet, so most of the flights I can get there are either through Istanbul or someplace in Russia, usually Saint Petersburg or Moscow because Russia itself isn't all that connected to western Europe either. I'm not quite sure if I fell asleep for a moment or not, because it felt like only five minutes later when I felt us pull in front of a building and opened my eyes to see us in front of Roksana's apartment. The Portuguese-born Ukrainian woman handed me her keys and gave me instructions "Hey, you're tired, go ahead and go to the apartment, I'll take your bag and follow you."
"I...thank you." I thought about protesting for a second, insisting that I could handle it myself, but I relented, deciding to just accept the help and head up. A few moments later, I let myself in and hung my jacket on the empty coat rack, leaving me in just the tank top and the shorts. I got self-conscious for a second, feeling like I was showing too much skin, like I was suggesting something I didn't mean to suggest by being dressed like this, but the warm apartment and the comfortable looking couch in front of me was practically calling me, and I decided I didn't mind that much anyway. Once Roksana arrived and told me to take my shoes off - apparently, she walks barefoot through her apartment, so I suppose I'll follow her lead - I finally felt free to get to the couch. I laid down while Yurasova headed off to her room to ger changed. I laid my head down and looked around the apartment, seeing two couches in this living room facing a 40-inch TV, a kitchen behind me with a dining counter, and a large bedroom and bathroom taking up the rest of the apartment. This was a good-sized apartment for a young journalist like Roksana, especially considering that her magazine, her passion project, is a niche publication at best and she gets most of her money from free-lance work she does elsewhere.
"I'm back," Roksana announced a few moments later, coming back into the room in a pair of black shorts and a blue and white T-shirt with the Olympique de Marseille logo on it - I guess she had some civic pride. She held her laptop and sat down on the other couch, sitting with me while she got to work writing something on her laptop, presumably her next piece, either for her own magazine, or as part of the free-lance work I just mentioned. I kinda liked this, watching the blonde work on her laptop - the gentle clicking of the keys as she typed at a fast yet remarkably even pace, the way she bit her lip when she wasn't sure how to word something, and then her long, bare legs, with her ankles crossed...it was a nice site. It was getting to a point where it was hard for me to deny the fact that I'm attracted to women, and it's getting even harder to admit the fact that I'm attracted to this woman in particular. It was a few moments of looking at her legs later that I realized the sound of her typing had stopped. I looked up to meet her grayish-blue eyes meeting my brown eyes, and I blushed red as I realized I was caught.
"You uhh...you look nice." I responded, trying to save face, but not really managing much.
"And you look wonderful Tamara, you look better coming off a ridiculously long flight than I do, and I've had all day to get ready to pick you up." Roksana responded, only making me blush further. The message was obvious: if I wanted to flirt with her, she was more than ready to take it to the next step. She is absolutely attracted to me, she's made sexual remarks before, and she's gotten me to say the same kind of things back to her. I've never pursued a romantic relationship in my life, I've never had the interest in doing that, but here I am staring at a woman's legs and blushing at her remarks.
"How did you realize you were gay?" I asked, my mouth speaking before I really got the chance to think, but Roksana didn't seem too phased by it, almost like she was expecting me to ask something like this sooner rather than later.
"I was thirteen years old, living in Porto at the time, and there was this girl at my school. Maria Perreira or something like that, I don't even remember anymore, but I remember feeling weird around her, but weird in a good way. I liked looking at her, I liked holding her hand or brushing her hair, anything I could do to be close to her I did, but then I got the idea that I wanted to kiss her. I tried to, she wasn't having it, and I ended up feeling embarrassed and alone in school. I was isolated, the other kids made fun of me, and the teachers pretended not to know what was going on. It was the worst I've ever felt in my life. I decided back then that I wanted to do something in my life to help people like me, and when I found out that my parents wouldn't accept me if they found out the truth about my sexuality, I decided that I had to start with my own community before I could judge other communities. So, I started writing, fiction, nonfiction, magazine articles, whatever, it was a way to express myself and it was a way to try and make a difference. Eventually, I found myself here, disowned by my parents, half a university degree to my name, and a magazine that operates at a loss, but I still write it regardless. I make enough money from the other stuff to pay for this place and to pay my share of the magazine's bills, and I'm going to continue doing this for as long as I'm able to." Roksana shared her story.
"I'm sorry that happened to you." I responded, not being sure what to say or how to even respond. The best I could do is try to have empathy, empathy that was hard to muster considering that I barely knew what my own sexuality was about.
"Don't be, you had nothing to do it. You've been nothing but accepting of me. I honestly didn't know what to expect when I asked your team for an interview, I didn't know if you'd care at all about my little magazine or if you would have some kind of problem with me or not, but no, you've been kind and open to me. I hope you know that I appreciate all of that." Roksana responded, seeing that I was being vulnerable with her and deciding that she wanted to be vulnerable too. Roksana was clearly a sports fan, Formula One and football in particular, but she was a liberal journalist, she wasn't really in the sports world, and she took a bit of a risk trying to get me for her magazine, she had no idea it was going to pay off and she definitely didn't expect to have me laying on her couch having a deep conversation with her only a few months later. She knew I was a woman from the former Soviet Union, sure, but she didn't know we had anything else in common. I was an F1 driver, I had a rich father who, for all intents and purpose, was an oligarch, and I've spent my whole life in Monaco. I would easily have been a snobbish, opulent bitch with no respect for her type of journalism.
"Thanks." I responded, not knowing what else to say. We returned to silence after that and Roksana started typing again, but it didn't take me too long to build up the courage to ask another personal question "You said you left weird around this Maria girl, but like...weird in what way?"
"Well," Roksana took a deep sigh and set her laptop off to the side, article forgotten just as soon as she started working on it again. The Portuguese-born Ukrainian woman had something she wanted to talk about, but it wasn't going to come easily, nevertheless, she was going to try "I can't tell you how you're going to feel or what you're going to think, but I have an idea that might give you more information to go off of. How about this, you and I go on a date together, a quiet dinner to a place here in Marseille - that way you don't have to see anyone you might know or have anything to be embarrassed about - and you see what it's like to be romantic with a woman. Well, to be romantic with anyone in your case. If you don't like it, you'll have an answer and I'll be sure to keep my interactions with you strictly platonic. Meanwhile, if you do like it, well, I guess we'll have to have a conversation then."
I pulled myself up, so I was sitting on the couch rather than laying down, and then I just thought for a few minutes. Roksana was trying to be accommodating towards me, but this wasn't just about seeing what I wanted, I wasn't that naive, I knew that she wanted a date with me and this was her way of trying to make a move. That being said, she also already promised that she'll stop the flirting and the pushing if, after this, I told her that I didn't want it. Furthermore, I couldn't deny the fact that I played along with the flirting, that I had just been staring at her bare legs, and that I'm asking these questions because I'm dealing with feelings I've never had to deal with before. I also didn't mind the fact that this date would be in Marseille, because Monaco was a pretty small place all things considered, and the kind of nice restaurant where you'd want to go on a date is also the kind of restaurant that people involved in Formula One would tend to go to. That being said, this was also putting all the balls in her court: it was on her turf, she would be choosing the place, and we'd probably start and end the date in her apartment. I could handle that though, Roksana wasn't a bad person, and I was a big girl, I could handle myself. That's not saying this is a small thing though, this is a pretty big thing to accept, and I'm not really exaggerating when I say this could be a lifechanging date. One way or another, I'll have a clearer idea of my sexuality because of this.
"Okay." I accepted. We talked for another half an hour and figured out the plan: I would stay here for the night, sleeping on Roksana's couch - courtesy of a few pillows and blankets she graciously allowed me to use - and she'd even let me raid her kitchen for breakfast. After that though, I'd head out, buy some nice clothes for the date and just generally spend some time around the city - I wasn't going to drive all the way to Monaco and back in the course of one day - and I'd meet her back here before we started our date. It was her way of sort of putting us on an even playing field without having me head all the way back home. I know that people in America or Canada or Russia - any of these countries with huge distances in between cities - might think that Marseille isn't all that far from Monaco, and it really isn't, but because of the way the roads are set up and the fact the drive takes you through the lower end of the Alps, it takes a good three hours to make that drive - a far cry from the half-an-hour drive between Nice and Monaco. These are still pretty small distances for a racing driver, but this is easier, and after the week I've had, I could use an easy experience. So, I curled up on the couch and fell asleep, wondering what this could possibly be like.
"...and I just couldn't bear to be in that country any longer. I needed to get out of there, and I ended up here." I told Roksana as we sat across from each other in the restaurant, speaking in hushed tones and waiting for our food. I was catching up my date - crazy as that sounds - on my week and about how I felt about the whole Kazakhstan situation. I was still going to take their money because I had to, for my career, and I was still going to represent their country, because toxic government or not, it's where I was born, and I want to have a positive effect on the people, even if I know I'm not really one of them. The situation is hard on me - woe is me, I know - but every time I see my name now, there is a Kazakh flag attached, or a Kazakhoil sponsor sticker, or a mention of the government that I'm sponsored by, I don't like being attached to it, especially now that I've seen it for myself and been in those picture I don't want to be in, but I have to be. I know that I've impressed for Williams so far this season and I know that this is the best I've felt in F1 so far, but I also know that my being here is still tied to my Kazakhoil sponsorship. I want to fly the Kazakh flag, but I want to fly it as my own person and sending my own message. Right now, with this sponsorship agreement, I'm not my own person, I'm an agent of the Kazakh government and a propaganda tool of a dictator. This is not about Kazakhstan or its people, I have no problem with them, and I'll happily represent them, but I can't wait for the day that I'll be able to sign a contract in F1 which is truly and completely free of Kazakhoil.
That brings a complex question though, and a question I'm not prepared to answer right now. That being: would I accept a seat at a worse team if it meant I was finally free of being a paydriver? I want to be in F1 and, now that I've been on the podium twice, I can begin dreaming of getting back up there, I can begin dreaming of getting my first win, and once i get that first win, I'll be able to dream of unthinkable things like top drives and championships. That means that what I want is to move forward year after year. I want to build Williams back up and turn them into a winning team again, but I would love to have the opportunity to move to a McLaren or a Ferrari one day, because that's the dream really. A seat at a team like McLaren and Ferrari, at least right now, is practically a guaranteed shot at the championship. It won't always be like that, Williams itself is proof of that, but everyone would agree that a change to those teams would be a step forward from the Williams of today. The dream is to move forward, the goal is to at least stay where I am, so again, would I accept moving to a smaller team if it meant being truer to the values that I represent, or at least claim to represent? I really don't know, and I won't be able to answer that right now when I'm on a date, but I may well have to face this question one day.
"I'm so sorry. You should've brought someone with me, Nat or Giorgio, hell, if you couldn't find anyone else, I would've gone with you." Roksana offered, clearly not liking the fact that I felt like that. I guess she is right, I shouldn't have been alone there, I should have had some kind of support network with me other than just the team, but I didn't ask, I went alone, and I ended up feeling so terrible about it that I basically fled the country as quickly as I could.
"I mean, I'll keep that in mind if I ever have to go back, but I'm just glad to be home...or close enough to home anyway. I know I'm from that country and I want to be a positive force for that country, but a photo op with a dictator? I'm not helping anyone like that. I just feel like I'm being used." I shuddered, not happy about the fact that I'm sure every paper in Kazakhstan now has a picture of me shaking hands with a dictator who rigs elections and disappears opposition.
"Don't let him and his actions scare you away from Kazakhstan though. There are so many good people from there, millions of them, and don't let one man, no matter how powerful he is, ruin that for you. You have just as valid a claim to that country as anyone in his government, and what you want for that country is more admirable than anything he's actually gone. You're a good person Tamara, the money behind you being dirty doesn't change that." Roksana assured me. I suppose it was the kind of thing only someone else from eastern Europe could understand: the griping with your love for a country and your hatred for its corrupt and despotic leadership. It is an all-too-common thing in a region which has suffered more than its fair share of suffering. I did appreciate the fact that she wasn't blaming me though, because I'm sure Roksana would feel very weird if she was offered unlimited funding for magazine from a despotic regime. I have the opportunity to live my dream job and I'm trying to do something positive for the people of my country while doing it, that means taking money from a despot, yes, but there are a lot worse things that money could be going to than me, things that don't have any positive side to them. At least I can try to do some good.
"Thank you," I responded, putting my hand down on the table and letting her put her hand on mine. I trailed my eyes up her arm and onto her body, seeing the blonde woman with her hair lightly curled and her body in a black bustier, a black skirt, white heels, and a white leather jacket. Meanwhile, I was dressed in a little black dress with fairly low black heels - I didn't like being too high up, personally - and a black sweater, all of which I brought today. I probably would've bought something new even if I wasn't hours away from home, because this isn't the kind of thing I typically do, and, therefore, I don't really have clothes for this type of thing. I didn't even wear a dress to the fashion show during the Monaco Grand Prix since I didn't feel like being much of an outlier, so this is new territory for me for the most part. I have some nice clothes, don't get me wrong, and I do care for my appearance, but it's always been about being presentable thus far, I've never dressed sexily for someone, the thought was always looking nice for my benefit, never about looking nice for anyone else. This is new territory for me, and I can't deny the fact that I'm a little bit nervous, even now, but I'm not uncomfortable. It feels new to be dressed like this, it feels new to be romantic with someone else, and it feels new to be looking at someone sexually, but none of it feels bad, at least not right now. I can live with this.
"So, Natasha is a racing driver too?" Roksana asked, changing the subject to something more pleasant.
"Yup. She's in Italian Formula Three, she's had some really good results this season. 5th, 10th, 8th, 3rd, 3rd, and 3rd again, 4th and 1st at the last race weekend at Mugello. They'll be having another race at Mugello on the 31st." I explained, giving a run-down of her season so far and getting excited at her results. Like I said during that little party we had with her family a few weeks ago, this feels like it's her breakthrough season, and I'm utterly thrilled about that. She's 17, this was a bit of a make or break season for her, one that will either decide if she has a chance of getting into Formula One, or if she is simply going to have an also-ran motorsport career that puts the maximum of her career at something like a GT ride at Le Mans. Natasha still has a lot of work to do, but this season has been a very good one, and I think this could very well be the beginning of a momentum streak that gets her into Formula One, or otherwise into some other kind of top drive at Le Mans or Indycar or any of the other top series around the world. Though I have to admit, my dream is to get her into F1 alongside me.
"That's a great start...what does she think about all this?" Roksana replied before trailing off and then asking a question, a question about us.
"I don't know. I haven't talked to her about this. I know I'll be able to talk to her about this, she knows me and I'm sure she'll accept me, but I haven't had the chance to talk to her yet. I barely know what's going on with all this myself. I'm coming into this with no idea what I like or what I really want...that's not a problem, is it?" I responded, revealing just how clueless and inexperienced I was about this. I've taken some very big steps forward in terms of my sexuality in the last forty-eight hours, and I haven't been able to talk to anyone other than Roksana about this, but these are the first big steps I've taken. Now, right now, I'm open to taking more steps forward, but I know that Roksana is well ahead of me, she's had serious relationships, she's had sex, and she's known about her sexuality for eleven years, I've known about my sexuality for eleven minutes. I'm willing to move forward, but I need her to understand how much of a novice I really am about all this, and how it's going to take me time to be at even a comparable level to her. I'm not ready to have sex, I don't even know how long it's going to take me to be comfortable kissing her, it could be tonight, it could be in a year, it all depends on when I'll get the courage to breakthrough the nervousness. Even going out in public in Monaco, I don't know how long it's going to take for me to be comfortable with that, because those are people I work with, rivals, and press people. I'm clueless and sheltered, I don't know much about sexuality in general, and I'm in a career where I race in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South America, eastern Europe, and a lot of other areas that are on the homophobic side, so I'm not even sure if being out is an option for us.
"Of course it's not a problem. I figured that was the case to be with. I will say one thing though: I hope you can find some supportive people in your life. I know it's awkward to be dating the very person teaching you about sexuality, and I know there are awkward things you're not going to want to talk to me about, try to find someone you can talk to those things about. It's not going to do either of us any good if you're dealing with these kind of things alone." Roksana offered some advice, suggesting I find some supportive people around me. Easier said than done, I admit, but I can't picture a reality where Natasha doesn't accept me. We've been too close for too long for this to be a problem, furthermore, I don't see Nat as particularly religious or intolerant or anything else that could be a problem in this context. In any case, I was glad that Roksana was accepting me and where I am in regards to this potential relationship.
"I'll try to." I responded. The waiter came along not long after that and gave us our food, so we descended into a comfortable silence and ate our food, joked back and forth every once in awhile, and generally had a good time. That was, until, about five minutes after the last conversation, an idea occurred to me, and I decided that I had an idea for a second date, albeit one that wasn't very romantic "You know, the Turkish Grand Prix is coming up in about a week, I'd love to invite you to come along as my guest. Team hospitality, a seat in the back of the garage during the race, and exclusive access to the paddock. The only thing is we need to present as just friends, at least in public, because I don't know what the laws are like in Turkey and I'm not ready to be out to the media either."
"I'd love to be there, and don't worry, we'll take things at your pace." Roksana responded, and thus, we had plans for Turkish Grand Prix. The three-week summer break was coming to an end and F1 was returning to the track with Turkey, Monza, and Spa, one of the best tracks of the modern era combined with two all-time classics, absolute legends of motorsport in general, let alone just grand prix racing. It was an exciting way to restart the season, and I'll be looking to hold onto my place as the best of the rest behind the McLarens, Ferraris, BMW Saubers, and Renaults ahead. Tommy Koskinen will be looking to reassert his dominance over the team and make up for a rather lackluster middle of the season, at least compared to my lucky breaks at Canada and at the Nürburgring. Red Bull and Toyota will be trying to strike at us, Honda will hope for a less miserable second half of the season, Toro Rosso will be hoping to get some impressive performances out of Maximilian Renner now that they have the German in their arsenal, while Super Aguri and Spyker will hope to get some lucky results to solidify the lucrative 10th place. The difference in prize money between 10th and 11th is huge, and that will define the battle at the back of the grid. Up front, McLaren will try to push all the recent controversies aside and put the championship away, whereas Ferrari will try to exploit their weaknesses and win an unexpected championship. BMW Sauber will try to solidify third place, whereas Renault will devote everything to try and take third place from them. It has been a brilliant, brilliant first half of the season, but there is still half a season to go, and Roksana will be with me to witness the first race of that in Istanbul.
"Meet me in my apartment, I need to talk about something." I texted Natasha the next day once I was finally home. I changed into some casual clothes and waited for my adopted cousin to show up, taking Roksana's advice, but also knowing that I'll have to have this conversation at one point or another regardless. I took a deep breath and sat down on the couch only to hear a knock on the door just a moment later.
"Come in." I called, knowing the moment was here. The dirty blonde Natasha Tsirinskaya entered the room, wearing a tank top and gray pajama bottoms, suggesting that she's spent the day at home having a lazy day. I'm not sure if that made this any better or worse, I suppose better because it gives us more time to have a real conversation, but worse because that means that I called her over for this and this alone. No time to back out now, I suppose.
"What's going on?" she asked, even seeming tired as she spoke, as if I just woke her up...maybe this wasn't the right time after all.
"I had a date last night." I announced, starting slow.
"Oh wow, that's great. Who with?" she asked, waking up now, genuinely surprised to hear this coming from me, and not without good reason.
"...Roksana." I admitted, letting the anvil drop. I wasn't surprised when there was a moment of silence right after, but I did get worried for a second, because I was suddenly doubting what I just said about her accepting me. I knew there was no logical reason to think that, but I couldn't help but be scared when I was making such a big admission for the first time in my life. What a crazy year this has been, becoming a Formula One driver, making the podium in that sport, and now finding out my sexuality. My life after 2007 is going to be nothing like my life was before 2007.
"Oh...umm...okay. That's...that's great." Nat eventually answered, seeming more surprised than anything, suggesting that she didn't have a problem with anyone being gay, she's just surprised to find out I, of all people, am a lesbian.
"You're not mad?" I asked just to be sure, needing the emotional assurance right now.
"No, no, not at all. Whatever you are, you're just you. I just didn't expect it." my cousin clarified, so I was right, it wasn't an intolerance thing, she did tolerate me, but she hasn't gotten any semblance of sexuality out of me at all, so perhaps she just assumed I was straight by default, or maybe she just assumed I wasn't attracted to anyone or particularly interested in sex. She didn't see anything to suggest I was into women until now, and in the society we live in, heterosexuality is the norm, so if you don't see the difference, you don't perceive the difference. It was a positive reaction overall though, so that's the best thing I could hope for.
"Neither did I to be honest, but...it's pretty hard to deny at this point. Roksana has been pretty open about being attracted to me from the beginning, and I guess it didn't take long for that physical attraction to evolve into proper affection. I didn't mind that, I didn't mind the flirting, and I didn't mind being on a date with her. I've even caught myself staring at her a few times. I've never been attracted to men, I've never felt an urge to date them or pursue them or any of that, but I have felt those kinds of things with Roksana, and for the first time in my life, I'm thinking about going further." I explained, trying to convey what it's like to feel attraction for the first time, to go through the kind of things most people go through in secondary school. I've never had my first kiss and I've never had the desire to pursue that type of thing, but right now, I have the desire to kiss her. Maybe not right now, maybe not for a long time, but the idea of kissing Roksana isn't freaky to me.
"But like...you haven't been attracted to women before?" Nat asked, trying to learn more about my sexuality and about why this is all just coming out now.
"I don't know. I don't think so, but maybe I just haven't noticed it. Maybe I just finally allowed myself to think that type of way around Roksana because I knew she was a lesbian and figured out quite early on that she was attracted to me." I proposed, not having an answer myself.
"But...I think women are pretty too, I can tell you're pretty - what's the difference between just knowing that someone is pretty and being attracted to them? Like what do you feel for Roksana that isn't usual?"
"I'm not sure if I can answer that just yet, but I know it is different." I answered before I sighed and rolled my head back against the top of my couch behind me "God I got no idea what's going on in my life, but I know I like her, and I know I like spending time with her. It can't hurt to see where this goes, can it?"
"No, I suppose not." Natasha shrugged, she probably had a thousand more questions she wanted to ask, but she realized that the kind of questions she was asking was the exact kind of thing that I was going through in my head. I wasn't ready to answer them because I honestly didn't have the answers just yet, so my cousin decided to lay off for the time being and just came over and relaxed next to me, plopping down on the couch. Nat took a deep breath before joking with me again "Boy that was heavy, huh? What do you say we just go back to the race cars for a little while?"
"Ha, agreed. Back to the race cars." I smiled, happy to just switch my mind off and enjoy some time with my cousin as we wait for our individual races coming up at the end of the month. I was going to race in the 2007 Turkish Grand Prix, with Roksana Yurasova in attendance as my guest, while the weekend after that, Natasha Tsirinskaya would go into the second Italian Formula Three race at Mugello as the defending race winner. We were both in a really good place in our career and, after some really serious conversations and some big changes in my life, I was looking forward to getting back on the track.
Last weekend I was in the geographical heart of Asia, a day after that, I was on Europe's Mediterranean coast, today, I'm somewhere in between. Istanbul Park was located on the Asian side of the city of the world's desires, basically just across the highway from Sabiha Gokcen International Airport. The highway in question connects the old Imperial capital of Istanbul with the modern republican capital of Ankara. So, all of that should suggest that the Istanbul Park circuit should be a great success: it's near a massive metropolis, it's got easy access to both the airport and a major national highway, and the circuit itself is pretty good too. The situation isn't as simple as that though, because ever since the first Turkish Grand Prix in 2005, the attendance has been falling off rather quickly, and as qualifying began for just the third Turkish Grand Prix in history, even the main grandstand wasn't filled out. That made me sad, because I didn't want to lose this race from the calendar, but F1 is F1, and the show must go on, so qualifying started regardless of the frankly concerning ticket sales. I did see one positive sign as I left the pitlane though: a Kazakh flag in the grandstand. Kazakhstan is a Turkic country, as is Turkey, so, despite the vast distances, there is a certain cultural affinity between Kazakhs and Turks, and with a driver from Kazakhstan on the circuit, they made the trip. It was a nice sight, and it did boost my mood a little bit as I began my warm-up lap.
Two Q1 laps ensured that I made it out of that session: Hideyoshi Ikeda in 22nd, Lorenzo Barbaro in 21st, Maximilian Renner in 20th, Haruki Tanaka in 19th, Roland Ziegler in 18th, and Giuseppino Leone in 17th did not. So, both of our cars advanced into Q2, but this was going to be a harder session for us, because the top few positions in Q2 or the bottom few positions in Q3 is about where our pace is. Tommy and I would try to do the best we can, and both of us have that extra little bit of motivation behind us to do better this weekend. Tommy has had to deal with F1 journalists questioning his pace and his leadership role in the team after my strong first half of the season, he's going to want a strong, strong second half of the season to reassert his authority and prove he belongs in the team his father won a championship for. As for me, well, I had a certain Roksana Yurasova sitting in my corner, and I wanted to impress her. So, at the start of Q2, both Williams cars left the garages and turned left down the pitlane to begin our lap of this anti-clockwise track straddling two continents.
Toyota V8 power blasted me down the straight leading down to turn one. I hit the brakes hard and then turned left as the track dipped down to its lowest point, but then it was back up hill and to the right for turn two, a long sweeper leading to a short straight up to turn three. It was a dab of the brakes and a few downshifts as I turned left through turn three, just about 90-degrees, but faster than a squared off corner like you might see on a street circuit. The right-hander of turn four, however, was more of a squared-off 90-degree corner, as was the left-hander of turn five, but after turn five, the track opened up as we began the best section of the track. Turn six was a fast left-hander leading inside the track and to the relatively wide hairpin of turn seven, slowing the car down just enough that we could now begin a flat out run. Blasting out of turn seven and accelerating, the aerodynamics kicked in as I turned left to hit the first apex, then the second, the third, and finally up to the top of the track to the fourth and final apex. This was the mighty turn eight, the most iconic part of the track. The right line could take you flat-out through the whole corner, the long line would leave you understeering into the run-off and losing a ton of time right at the most important part of the circuit. In any case, I was about halfway down with the lap, with sector one having finished shortly before turn seven, and based on the lap delta on my steering wheel, I was on course for my best lap of the weekend; good.
All the adrenaline and the speed came to an end in turn nine, a left-hand 90-degree corner as we began the flat-out run to the final few corners. Turns ten and eleven were just small kinks on what was essentially just a long straight down the west end of the track, heading south at first and then progressively getting more into a southwest direction as I powered down the hill and finally mashed the brakes into turn twelve, the first corner of sector three. Turn twelve was basically a hairpin bringing me all the way around and facing the inside of the track, but as I passed the pit entrance and turned right down the 90-degree turn thirteen, I had just one more lap to go. Turn fifteen was another right-angle corner, now to the left, and it brought me back onto the main straight. The start-finish line was pretty far down at this track, but it was all flat-out, so all I could do was hold the throttle down and hope. I gave it all I could, but at the end of the day, it was a 1:27.979, just a tenth off of Umberto Petronelli. Tommy was some way ahead, with a 1:27.750, so he made it into Q3 with a little over a tenth to spare, so it wasn't a complete wash for the team. I couldn't deny the fact that I was frustrated: not even three tenths off of my teammate but that was the difference between 8th and 11th, but it was still a very good place to start, especially with the Red Bulls down in 12th and 13th. Ivan Tripoli was slightly concerning up in 9th, but with his teammate all the way down in 18th, we didn't have much to fear from Toyota.
In other news, at the front of the grid, Henrique de Matteo took pole position, with Anthony Harrison on the other spot on the front row, with their teammates directly behind them: Matti Hamalainen was third and Felipe Alvarez was fourth. So, Ferrari was coming back at McLaren hard and likely taking advantage of the fact that McLaren was going through all of these controversies as of late. Henrique took his first win here last year, back when he was the second driver for Wilhelm Ziegler, and he's put himself in the perfect position for a repeat performance, while the other three title protagonists were right on his heels. Anthony had a seven-point lead over his teammate at the moment, and the Ferrari drivers were neck-and-neck with Matti just barely ahead of Henrique after that last race, so the title race is still wide open. It's exciting to see and it's exciting to watch, especially when I have the privilege of being another driver on track, sharing space with these titans of the sport. Wilhelm Ziegler dominated the beginning of the decade, Felipe Alvarez and Renault emerged to take the fight to him in 2005 and 2006, but now the seven-time world champion is gone, and four drivers from three different continents driving for two different teams are vying to see who will replace him. Will it be Felipe Alvarez, the man who dethroned him to begin with, taking his title to McLaren and defending it? Will it be Matias Hamalainen, who pushed Ziegler hard in 2003 and Alvarez hard in 2005? Will it be Henrique de Matteo, who was practically Ziegler's protege in that one year they had as teammates? Or will it be Anthony Harrison, the young American rookie in his first season in Formula One? Any one of them could win it, and any one of them would deserve it. What a thrilling time to be an F1 driver.
"Good luck out there, make me proud." Roksana smiled at me and I smiled back before I had to walk off to listen to the Turkish anthem right before the start of the race. Once then anthem was done, they would begin clearing the grid and I would have a few moments with the crew to do some last night preparations, but I wouldn't have the chance to see her again before now. I was happy enough to get this though, I knew she was here, and I knew she was watching, now I had to reenter the world of Formula One and join my fellow drivers on the grid, standing alongside my teammate. Elsewhere on the grid, the Hondas, who qualified in 14th and 15th yesterday, were demoted to 21st and 22nd thanks to an engine failure. It wasn't affecting us, we were ahead of it, but it was another shot in the foot for Honda, and it practically guaranteed that Honda was out of the fight for fifth. Their Earth Dreams car just wasn't as fast as the 2006 Lucky Strike sponsored car. Of course, I think Honda's problems are deeper than just the loss of the tobacco money, but they won the Hungarian Grand Prix last year with James Buxton, they're a far cry away from that now. An anthem and a few moments of last second preparations later, the grid began clearing up for the formation lap.
A Ferrari, a McLaren, a Ferrari, a McLaren, two BMW Saubers, a Renault, a Williams, a Toyota, another Renault, my Williams, two Red Bulls, a Super Aguri, a Toro Rosso, the second Toyota, the Super Aguri of Tanaka, Renner's Toro Rosso, both Spykers, and finally both Hondas began the formation lap. Twenty-two Formula One cars completed a parade around the Turkish circuit and lined up around the grid. The time for the celebrities, the anthem, and the parade lap was over with, from now until the checkered flag flies, it was a no holds barred motor race. The red lights came on one after the other until all five were on. Tension reached a high point as the lights seemed to be on for an eternity, but then they went out, and the Grand Prix began. The Ferraris instantly got clear of the McLarens as Matti slipped past Anthony and Felipe was consumed by the BMW Saubers due to a bad start. The story was actually rather similar back here, thanks to Ivan Tripoli's Toyota not getting away too quickly, allowing Umberto Petronelli and I to sail past him. The Italian - another one of my typical rivals, as was turning out - cut across to cover the inside and made me head over to the right onto the outside, giving him the better line into turn one, but giving me some breathing space, letting me go through the corner without issue.
I tucked in behind Petronelli for now and waited to see how this was going to turn out, since I wasn't going to have much luck outside of the slipstream thanks to Umberto getting a tow from Koskinen and Kaasalainen up ahead. The back straight was a good overtaking opportunity, but when everyone had the benefit of the slipstream of the car ahead, it didn't really translate into overtakes, since none of us had the speed boost over the other cars, effectively bringing us back to ground zero. So, I bided my time and avoided unnecessary risk, keeping close to the Italian but letting strategy do the talking for now. Speaking of, on lap twelve, a new dimension to this race revealed itself when Piotr Kaminski pitted early, elevating all of us one position, but also ensuring that there was a fast car on fresh tyres somewhere behind us. We would have to see how tyre strategy shakes out, because BMW Sauber is doing something different, and it's hard to tell how that's going to turn out at this early stage. Victor Hartmann was not quite as extreme, pitting on lap seventeen, but it showed that BMW was committed to this early-stopping strategy. Tommy Koskinen followed the BMW into the pits, hoping to cover him off and maybe gain a position on this strategy. Lap 12 was very early for Kaminski, but lap 17 for Hartmann is more reasonable, coming at the early end of the recommended pit window.
"Okay, we're ready for you this lap - go opposite to Petronelli, opposite to Petronelli." a lap later Peter Malmedy gave me the call and began our play to get me into clean air and potentially past the Renault ahead. I came through turn thirteen to see Umberto turn right and continue down the track, so, following my engineer's instructions, I slipped inside the pitlane and put Renault in an awkward position. I was going for the undercut, I'll be on new rubber as soon as this is done, and once I have the heat in my tyres, I'll be faster than Petronelli - what does Renault do? I stopped on my marks and the car went up on the jacks while the lollipop man held the stop sign in front of my face. Four option tyres came off the car to be replaced by four fresh Bridgestone prime tyres. I was lowered back onto the ground on these newer, harder tyres as the team topped off my fuel tank for a long middle stint and the team released me. I drove down the pitlane, patiently waiting for the limiter line so I could speed up and put the power down, but as I curved left and was deposited into the right-hand turn two, I saw Kaminski coming up right behind me. So, I just barely stopped the Pole from getting the undercut on me, but now he had tyres that had six laps worth of experience on them compared to my cold tyres.
I did what I could to heat up my tyres while keeping Piotr behind, knowing that if I could just stay here for a lap or two, I would probably be safe. I defended through turn three and that meant there wasn't much risk in turn four, five, or six. I finished sector one still ahead of the Pole in the faster car, but my advantage didn't last much longer, because I locked up the front right brake in turn seven and Kaminski, with all the traction on his side, took the inside line. I recovered and tucked in behind the German-licensed, Swiss-made car, but there was nothing I could do in turn eight. So, again, I was behind a car, and we were playing the strategy game. Petronelli went contrary and stayed out until lap twenty-two, falling behind us, but only just, and that ensured he had the freshest tyres of all in the middle stint - his tyres were a whole ten laps newer than Kaminski's. The flaws of that strategy showed when Kaminski had to pit on lap thirty-seven, meaning that the fight was between Petronelli and I again. This time though, we went contrary, because Petronelli pit first, on lap forty-three, while I pit a lap later. Option tyres, fifteen laps to go, and exiting just behind Petronelli: the race was on now. Williams vs. Renault, at one time a partnership that dominated the mid-1990s, now two formerly championship winning teams clashing in the midfield. I was pursuing hard, but Petronelli has been part of a championship winning team for a reason, so the laps ticked away and away...until finally, with ten laps to go, I had a run out of turn nine. It was through the kink of turn ten and downhill into the draft. I pulled alongside through turn eleven, but I was out of the stream and Umberto had the better line, so he was pulling ahead slightly, but I outbraked him into turn twelve and defended my position in turn thirteen. Up to 8th. I had to defend a few times after that, but a stroke of luck came when Piotr Kaminski came back at us, and Umberto turned his attention to defending from the BMW Sauber. They fought for awhile and Piotr eventually passed, but by then, I had enough time to cross the line.
The points-paying results of the Turkish Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
2: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
4: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
5: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
6: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault.
7: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota.
8: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota.
So, Ferrari bounce back authoritatively, Felipe cuts Anthony's lead to just five points, and Williams gets two cars into the points for the first time since Australia. So, Jyri is now on 19 points, having pipped Umberto as a result of scoring points at the last two races, an impressive performance for my fellow rookie driver. Tommy scored his second-consecutive seventh place to bring him up to 9 points, while my 8th place added a point to my tally, bringing me up to 16 points. Renault was the fourth-place team, that much was very clear, but we're solidifying our grasp for fifth place. A very good place to be right now. The garage was full of smiles when Tommy and I entered after the race, but the one I cared about most was Roksana's.
Notes:
Alright, that was chapter seven. I know a big chunk of this chapter was the romance stuff and I know some of you probably don't care about it as much as the racing stuff, but it serves a purpose, I promise. I'm also trying to cover multiple aspects of an F1 driver's life as we go on, I want this to be more than just the racing. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed!
Ciao!
Chapter 8: Two-Hundred Miles Per Hour
Notes:
Hello everyone! I'm finishing up the semester right now, so I think I'm going to have more time coming up in just a few weeks. I think I'm going to use the extra time to write an additional story alongside this, but we'll see. For now, here's chapter eight.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter VIII.
Two-Hundred Miles Per Hour.
"You know, this is the first time I've been to a track since I got to F1," I pointed out to Roksana as the two of us walked through the paddock at Mugello. We were here to surprise Natasha, who finished third yet again in the race yesterday, and was running in the front group in this race as well. A little over a month ago, at the last Mugello Italian F3 race weekend, she finished 4th and 1st. Now she was following that up with another podium, and potentially something else today. We would find out where exactly she finished by the time we get to her team's garage to watch her cross the line. My blonde companion, however, seemed amused at what I said, because she laughed out loud in the paddock. I blushed for a moment at the attention directed towards us before asking "What?"
"I know what you mean, but it's funny hearing a race car driver saying they haven't been to a track in awhile. You're at one every other weekend." Roksana pointed out, finding the statement a bit ridiculous, but understanding what I was trying to say. I know that I was at Istanbul Park last weekend and that I'll be at Monza this weekend, but that's been as a race car driver, that's been as part of my job. This is the first time I've been to a race track in a casual context in...years maybe. Now, don't get me wrong, being a race car driver is my dream job and I've literally taken blood money in order to get here, I know how fortunate I am, but the point remains, it's different to be at a track as a fan than as a driver. Hell, I'm standing in a pocket in a tank top and a flannel shirt - no sponsor wear, no Kazakhoil cap, no team handler - listening to the sound of the cars going by. That's something I haven't experienced in a long, long time. The closest I've come to that is sitting in the garage with the team during a test when Tommy Koskinen or Hideki Kitagawa was driving, but even that is different. When I'm at a test, I'm still representing the team, I'm still working on the car, and I'm still in a position where I might have to be subbed into the car if Tommy isn't feeling well or Hideki has an injury or something like that. Today, I don't have to worry about driver, I don't have to worry about autographs, and I don't have to play up to a team or a sponsor. I can just be a person. The plight of an introverted celebrity, I suppose.
"Well, I'm glad you're enjoying yourself." I smiled at my girlfriend's antics. Girlfriend. Yeah, I have a girlfriend now. I admit I never thought I would be thinking that, but here we are. I like Roksana, I enjoy spending time with her, and I've enjoyed our dates so far. I think we're good together. She obviously knows more than I do about all this gay rights stuff than I do, and she has more experience in the actual relationships, but that doesn't bother me too much. Besides, there are plenty of things that I know just as well as she does or better, and motorsport is one of them. That's not to suggest that Roksana is stupid or that I would have some sort of problem dating someone more intelligent than me, it's just that I don't want to be some naive girl constantly in need of guidance. In any case, we walked through the back of the garage to see Natasha's Italian F3 team gathered around the monitor. We joined them, watching her not only cross the line in third, but taking the fastest lap while doing so. This meant that the Kyrgyz-born girl scored seven points. If I'm doing the math correctly, this brings her season total up to 51 points, putting her fourth in the championship, just nine points off of the leader. Not a bad performance for a rookie, not at all.
"That was a good race guys. Good points. I love this track. Grazie...grazie mille." I heard Natasha radio the team, sounding out of breath and a bit out of it, but immediately thanking the team in spite of that. I liked that, that was a really good attitude to have and a good way of getting recommendations for the future. I'm not quite sure where exactly she'll go from here - there are a lot of different paths she could take, graduating to the Formula 3 Euro series would be the most obvious, but far from the only option - but an attitude like that is a lot more likely to get her a positive recommendation than if she were arrogant or unappreciative. These are young, hormonal kids in these championships, and there are a ton of cases of 16-18-year-old kids who had the pace to go far in their careers but had toxic attitudes. These are the types of kids who would react poorly to a bad start and cause an accident or complain about finishing second because they could've won. Nobody wants to deal with those kinds of personalities, not the teams, not the media, and certainly not the other drivers. Natasha's attitude was quite different though, and I smiled as her team rushed out to see her car pull into parc ferme, in the middle of the best performance any woman has ever had in Italian F3. I'm not sure if there is much competition for that, but, when I saw Natasha walk out onto the podium and that red and gold flag flying on the podium next to an Italian and an Argentine one, I knew it was something special.
"You're proud of her." Roksana observed as we stood next to the team. Natasha looked over to us and I watched surprise flash across her face before her smile grew larger and she waved to us. So, the surprise worked exactly as I had intended.
"I am. Maybe you'll be writing an article about her someday." I responded, referring to the article about a woman in F1 that she wrote about me.
"Is that something you'd want me to do?" she asked, putting on a more professional voice, as if to tell me that, if I asked for it, she'd do everything in her power to drum up publicity for Natasha. I didn't answer right now, instead, I just put an arm around her and watched my cousin on the podium, impressed by her performance, and feeling grateful that Roksana was willing to do her own little part to help her career forward. My father was making himself an absentee figure in my career, but seeing Natasha and Roksana right now, maybe I had some sense of family after all.
Henrique de Matteo finishing first at the Turkish Grand Prix ensured that all four of the title protagonists were now on three wins a piece. Matti Hamalainen had won the first race of the season in Australia, had a long slump, but then added France and Britain to his tally in rapid succession with wins at Magny-Cours and Silverstone. Henrique de Matteo, his teammate at Ferrari, has the first to get two wins, winning two in a row at Bahrain and Spain, but had to wait a lot longer for his third. Anthony Harrison, the American driving for McLaren, continued the trend of drivers winning two races in a row with his efforts at Canada and his home race, the USGP, later adding the Hungarian Grand Prix to his tally. As for reigning world champion Felipe Alvarez, the Spaniard's title defense hasn't yet warranted back-to-back wins, but victories at Malaysia, Monaco, and the European Grand Prix at the Nürburgring ensure that the McLaren man is also on three. That meant that, as the Formula One circus descended on the Royal Park of Monza and its circuit of the same name, each of them had a hunger to break ahead of the others. Henrique and Matias were fighting over Wilhelm Ziegler's legacy, and what better way to do that than to win the Italian Grand Prix? The Italian press holds a high degree of influence over Ferrari, and they would gladly embrace whoever can win the event, especially now that Imola is gone, and Italy is down to just one Grand Prix. As for the McLaren drivers, with all the controversy of the spying scandal and the drama from Hungary looming over their heads, they would like nothing more than to ruin Ferrari's parade.
So, a Finn, a Brazilian, a Spaniard, and an American were competing for the top prize in global motorsport. The first two drove for Ferrari, the pride of Italia, and the latter two drove for McLaren-Mercedes, a British team founded by a New Zealander holding a close connection to the German manufacturing giant. Drivers from three continents competing for the title really made Formula One feel like a World Championship in a way it really hasn't before. Sitting over here at Williams, a British team with Japanese engines employing a German born Finnish driver and a Kazakh driver of Russian descent, we were certainly contributing to the diversity and the globalism of F1, but we weren't really having much of an impression on the championship. McLaren and Ferrari were in a different league than anyone else, BMW Sauber filled what was practically a middle ground between them and the rest of us, while Renault was the fastest of the midfield, holding an edge over the battling pack of us, Red Bull, and Toyota. Honda wasn't very far behind us either, and rarely, teams like Super Aguri, Toro Rosso, and even Spyker could be a threat as well. All of that was to say that there is a lot to play for as the Italian Grand Prix was now just one day away.
"Five-minute warning." Peter called out, just like I requested from him. We had a pretty positive impression going after FP3, but free practice pace doesn't matter much, it's not until qualifying that things really start to matter. So, with Q1 approaching in a few minutes, I adjusted the wire of my headphones and tied my hair back into bun, getting it out of the way. My gloves and helmet rested on the counter in front of me as my balaclava was up next - letting the fireproof fabric surround my head. So, now that I was relatively safe from any potential flames, time to deal with any potential impacts. My race helmet was next, blue and white on the sides with a circular Kazakh flag on top, the golden sun and outline of an eagle against the cyan field, with my number 17 on the back of the helmet. Once that was dealt with and I didn't need the dexterity anymore, I put my gloves on - again, fireproof - and then headed over to the car. I was dressed and ready, then I was in the car, and at that point it was just a matter of last-minute preparations while letting the tension build up before a two-hundred mile per hour qualifying session.
"Alright, green light coming up. Go get 'em." Malmedy encouraged as I drove out onto the pitlane to begin qualifying. A few moments of waiting at the end of the pitlane and a lap around the track building speed, and then it was time to begin the lap. Coming out of the Parabolica and unleashing the power of a 2.4L racing V8, the sound reverberated between the grandstand and the iconic pit divider wall, next I passed the pit exit, jutting into the track from an angle, and at that point, the track narrowed in as the wide straight gave way to the tight chicane of turn one. Hard on the brakes and downshifting all the way down the box, it was a tight turn to the right, followed almost immediately by a left turn that continued as we rejoined the main track. Up next, it was time for one of the most underrated corners in Formula One. Curva Grande, the third turn of Monza, is a long, flat-out right-hander that brings F1 cars around and spits them out into the approach of Variante della Roggia. It was left then right through a tight but quick chicane, though I didn't dare take took much exit kerb as that would compromise my exit and my approach into the Lesmo complex. Lesmo 1 was a good right-hander, requiring a bit of braking, but letting me put the power down satisfyingly early. There was a bit of a kerb on exit, but I got off of it immediately, as it really was just a tiny strip between the track and the gravel.
Next up, it was time for Lesmo 2. The second corner at the top of the circuit was a slower, tighter right-hander, but with the right line and just a bit of exit kerb, it was possible to get a really good exit onto the next straight. Speeding down back towards the rest of the track, the grown gave way and I passed beneath the overpass formed by Monza's old oval, before the ground rose back up in time for the Ascari chicane. Braking then flicking the car to the left, then right, and then left again, finally letting the car ride out onto the paved run-off before gently bringing the car back over to the left down the back straight. Monza is the fastest track in Formula One, where the mighty BMW Williams V10s set the highest average lap speed in Formula One history at over 160 miles per hour. Keeping in mind the tremendous lows reached in the heavy braking zones, that really illustrates the insane speeds that the V10s could achieve, and, while the V8s aren't quite as fantastical, I was still over two-hundred miles per hour as I hit the brakes for the Parabolica. Then it was a turn of the wheel to the right and a mashing of the throttle. Parabolica was exactly what it sounded like - a long, fast, 180-degree corner bringing the cars back around onto the main straight and spitting us out towards the start-finish line. I climbed up the gears as quickly as I could, willing the car to accelerating rapidly and to eat up the distance as quickly as possible.
It was a really good lap, and the start of a really good qualifying overall for me. I would make it out of Q1, I would make it out of Q2, and I would eventually put my car up into tenth place for one of my best starting positions of the season. I've generally been around 12th place, give or take a few at any given race, but about that zone where I usually get to Q2 and put in a pretty good showing, but fail to make Q3 by just a few tenths. Today was an exception to that rule, I finally broke into Q3 again, and, to really put the cherry on top, Tommy also got into Q3. He put the car up into eighth, meaning he would line up directly in front of me on the grid. It was a very strong showing for Williams here in Monza, and it was made all the more sweeter by the fact that our rivals had a comparatively rough session. Ivan Tripoli in the lead Toyota was in ninth, splitting us, but his teammate Roland was all the way down in eighteenth, and that was a vulnerability we could exploit. Martin Weaver was eleventh, just behind me, but Daniel MacGowan had a miserable qualifying and was only twentieth. As a team, then, our closest rivals were Honda, with Rudolfo Goncalves in twelfth and James Buxton in thirteenth. We even had a Renault behind us, thanks to Umberto Petronelli having a miserable day. All of this set up for the potential for a really good race for us here at Williams here in the little town not far from Milan.
The Italians are a special people with a deep love of motorsport, and a deep love of Ferrari in particular. The main grandstand at Monza was like being the away team at the Camp Nou or the Bernabeu, because the fans made no secret of which team they supported. Yellow Ferrari flags with the black prancing horse, red banners with the name of their drivers, Italian flags waving in the wind, and whole families - even the mothers and the children - booing the McLaren drivers at the front of the field. It wasn't personal, I'm sure they would cheer for Anthony or Felipe if they ever wound up at Ferrari, but for now, they're with McLaren, and that makes them the opposition. The passion isn't just limited to the fans, because the government makes their support of the event clear. Every year the Italian Air Force does a fly over of Monza, dropping trails of green, white, and red smoke to produce a giant tricolore in the sky. It was a beautiful display, the kind of display that made me proud to be Italian and I didn't even have an Italian bone in my body. The flyover is part of the DNA of the Italian Grand Prix, and I couldn't imagine this race without it. This is the first time I've witnessed it as an F1 driver and I already know that I want to see it again next year, the year after that, and the year after that ad infinitem.
"Alright, good luck Tamara," Lorenzo pushed off the pitlane wall and shook my hand before heading down to the back of the grid.
"Thanks, you too." I responded to my unlikely friend from Spyker before heading to the middle of the pack. I got along with the German-born Uruguayan, I also got along well with Tommy, and while our interactions were limited, every conversation I've had with Anthony has been a positive one. I wouldn't necessarily say that Anthony and I are friends, at least not yet, but Lorenzo is a mutual friend, and I have a deep respect for the young driver turned championship contender. I got the impression that Anthony had respect for me as well, impressed by some of the results I've been able to achieve in this Williams, particularly the podium at Canada, the same place where he won his first Grand Prix. On the other end of the spectrum, I can't really think of any drivers who dislike me. I haven't experienced any overt sexism, and I think by now my results have ensured that nobody is going to underestimate me. Martin has been nice to me despite being a common on-track rival, Rudolfo is a nice guy in general, Daniel has shown some respect for me in his own way. Matti is a bit aloof towards me but that's just Matti being Matti. Of course, I'm sure certain words that start with B or C come to mind in the heat of the moment when battling on track, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that anyone on the grid outright dislikes me. This might take some of the romanticism away from F1, but for the most part, we see each other as colleagues or respectful rivals, rather than hated enemies.
"Alright, the engine is good but remember, you can't run in fast mix for the whole race." Peter reminded me gently, just making sure I wouldn't do something stupid like run the engine hard on the fastest settings available, and potentially getting myself an engine failure. Perhaps slow and steady was a silly thing to say at a two-hundred mile per hour circuit, but the old adage goes, to finish first, you must first finish. I'll run the engine normally for most of the race, maybe dipping into the fast mix when overtaking or when going for in-laps and out-laps, and hopefully that would be enough. Koskinen is starting up in eighth, I'm starting in tenth; hopefully this can be a good day for Williams as the teams cleared off the grid and the lights came on for the formation lap. Twenty-two F1 cars weaved across the circuit, coming around and giving the fans a taste of what was about to come: it was the calm before the storm.
Felipe and Anthony lined up in row one, Henrique de Matteo and Victor Hartmann right behind them, with Matti Hamalainen and the other BMW Sauber of Piotr Kaminski filling out row three. It was an all-Finnish row four with Jyri Kaasalainen in seventh and Tommy Koskinen in eighth. Then my row had Ivan Tripoli on the racing line and myself on the inside. The rest of the grid formed up behind me, but I didn't want to pay much attention to the cars behind me, rather, I wanted to have the luxury of being able to focus on the cars ahead. I held the clutch with my left hand, kept my right foot on the throttle to build the revs, and tapped my right fingers on the steering wheel as the lights came on. My right hand gripped the steering wheel once all five red lights, and my left hand tensed, ready to release the clutch and let the engine's power finally get unleashed. After an impossibly long moment, the lights came off and I released the clutch, pulling forward and holding the wheelspin before upshifting and coming out of, pulling alongside the Toyota and hoping that I could start the race with an overtake right away. I pulled the car a bit to the left on the road down to turn one, putting pressure on Tripoli, knowing that I was on a compromised line from my starting position and hoping that I could compromise his line as well. Finally, we got to the braking zone and my front axle just barely pulled in front of his. I held the brakes just a split-second longer to slow the car down and then I turned right, then left, coming out of the first chicane with an imperfect line, but that line did get me up into ninth. I held ahead in the draft going down to Curva Grande and eliminated the two car-length gap to Tommy ahead in the braking zone leading to Variante della Roggia. I lost a little bit of time with that overtake from the inside, but I gained a position, and now, the Williams cars were running line and stern.
I followed Tommy around for my first lap of the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza as a Formula One driver. I negotiated the first chicane once again, being able to take the proper line this time, but I didn't get much green flag running beyond that, because as I was exiting the Curva Grande, I saw a Red Bull spear off the track and into the wall. Double-waved yellow flags followed not long after that, and the SC was called out soon enough as well. It was Daniel MacGowan, the Scot had a brilliant start and made his way up to fifteenth on the first lap, only the suffer a catastrophic suspension failure a lap later. The benefit of starting higher up the grid than usual is putting some distance between myself and the craziness, as the more cars around you, the greater of a chance there is of an accident. If I started in my usual position - well, maybe a few places behind that, like fourteenth or fifteenth - then, who knows, perhaps I might have been collected in this accident. As it is though, I was still in the race, and MacGowan was the own casualty of that crash. So, a few laps later, the safety car was coming to an end with twenty-one cars remaining in the 2007 Italian Grand Prix with nearly fifty laps remaining.
I didn't get the chance to attack my teammate on the restart, because instead, I had to defend from Martin Weaver behind. The Renault engine in the back of his Red Bull, combined with a somewhat better reaction to the green flag restart, meant that he was gaining on me quickly into the braking zone. I thought about what to do into turn one, trending towards the inside just a bit, but then committing to the outside, deciding to use my one definitive move wisely. I was on the brakes late, almost as late as the Australian, but I was on the correct line for turn one, and that gave me better drive into turn two. Weaver had to yield for the second element of the chicane, and in interrupting his rhythm, that allowed me to get a better exit and speed away, putting some distance between me and the attacking car behind. By the time I got out of the second chicane, I now felt safe, and I turned my attention back to the cars ahead.
"Henrique is retiring, Henrique is retiring. It seems to be a suspension issue." Malmedy informed me a few laps later. I was coming through the Parabolica when I saw a Ferrari pulling into the pitlane - the cars were still fairly bunched up after the safety car so early in the race - so, that answered that question. This also means that I was elevated another position, which, when combined with the fact that I overtook Ivan on the start, meant that I was now up into a points-paying position. With Tommy just ahead of me, we were in a position to score good points yet again. Now we just had to execute our pit strategy and keep our noses clean. Well, we were on a one-stop strategy, and Tommy was up first, the Finn coming in on lap thirty to switch to prime tyres and fill up the tanks. I stayed out awhile longer since I actually started on the prime tyres, which is probably why I didn't have the pace to overtake Koskinen for most of the race, but hopefully, that would change in the final stint. I pulled into the pitlane, hit the brakes and got on the limiter, and then took the excruciatingly slow drive to my box, all while hearing cars cruise past me at full speed down the main straight. The only consolation is that, so far, these were all cars that had already pitted and only ended up behind me due to us being at different phases of the strategy. I switched the slower, but longer lasting prime tyres for the faster but less resilient option tyres, and filled up for the final stint of the race. The jackmen released me and I guided the car down the pitlane, waiting for the moment that I could get off the pit limiter, and rejoicing the moment that I got to put some power through the grooved Bridgestone tyres. I put the power down and got into turn one, successfully defending my position from Weaver who, yet again, was right on my tail.
I spent the next few corners putting heat into the tyres and defending from the Red Bull behind. Soon enough though, the superior pace of these fresh tyres kicked in. I was able to put some distance between myself and Martin, and this allowed me to turn my attention onto the cars ahead. I received word that Tommy was battling Jyri for position, and I was hoping to get the chance to contribute to that battle and maybe climb a bit higher up than just eighth, but the amount of laps left was ticking down quickly. I couldn't help but think that we were maybe just a few laps late on the pit strategy, because, soon enough, Felipe Alvarez completed the fifty-third lap of the Italian Grand Prix and crossed the line to win the race. Anthony Harrison followed to complete a one-two in what was, by far, the best performance for an American driver in Formula One since Mario Andretti's championship winning year in 1978. As for us, Tommy finished the race in sixth, one minute and five seconds behind the leaders. Jyri was a further second back from my teammate, the Renault driving finishing in seventh, and I was about three seconds behind Jyri, finishing the race 1:09.126 behind the leader. I finished on the lead lap and in the points, which at a relatively short, fast track like Monza where laps are only 83 seconds long, give or take, wasn't a bad result at all. This also marked Williams' second double-points finish in a row, and our third this season. I hope Sir Frank will be happy with that one.
The points-paying results of the 2007 Italian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
4: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber.
6: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota.
7: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault.
8: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota.
So, McLaren take maximum points from the race on Ferrari's home soil. This isn't exactly something that would sit well with the Italian press, especially given that Ferrari now had a lot of work to do if it wanted to take the constructors' championship from the boys at Woking. The fact that Henrique de Matteo had a car failure is also not going to sit well, and it means that Matti is the best placed Ferrari driver in the championship with just a few races remaining. That being said, even Matti is eighteen points off of Anthony Harrison who still leads the World Championship. Considering that Felipe is now just three points behind the American thanks to his good form, that makes it even harder for Matti, since he has to worry about Harrison, and he has to worry about Alvarez. If he focuses too much on taking points off of Harrison, he might give Alvarez a third-consecutive title, whereas if he spends too much time focusing on the Spaniard, both of them might just lose out to the American rookie. It's a very interesting fight brewing between the two silver cars and their red challenger. As for the gang of us down here, Tommy has down well for himself to now be on 12 points thanks to his sixth place in this race and two consecutive seventh places in the races leading up to it. I was now on 17 points, having scored in the last two races, but my immediate rivals were in the same boat, as Jyri's quiet good run of form has him on 21 points, keeping him ahead of me. I was, however, now level on points with Umberto Petronelli, and eeking ahead of him on quality of points, so I was still personally competitive with the Renaults, even if I didn't expect it to last at all. Still though, for us as a team, it's positive to see us so competitive with the Renaults, and to see us having a good run of races without technical issues. We seem to be going in the right direction in every respect as a team, and that's really good news for the Williams team in this day and age.
There was a week between the Italian Grand Prix on the 9th and the Belgian Grand Prix on the 16th, but, because of the nature of the F1 weekend and all the commits to the media and the team before the cars even went out on track on Friday, I had to be in Spa by Wednesday afternoon. So, what to do with a couple of days between having to be in Italy and having to be in Belgium? Well, go somewhere in between. That's why on Monday, I found myself in Stuttgart doing an interview for German television. I was having a run of good form, I was the only female driver in the sport, and the Germans were looking for content to show before the Belgian GP, so they asked for me. I sent the team an email and they approved it, so, I found myself in Williams team gear walking down a hallway of a German television studio with Mariana Petrova walking alongside me. My Russo-British media handler was accompanying me on this interview, just like every other.
"They do know that I can't speak German, right?" I asked a bit sheepishly as Mariana and I were about to walk through the double doors to their studio.
"Yes. The interview is going to be conducted in English and edit it and add German subtitles in time for the broadcast." the woman the team hired for me responded, handling the situation professionally, even if my question was, admittedly, a bit of a dumb one. Of course, they'll figure this kind of stuff out before putting anything on the air, they're not complete amateurs. So, we walked inside, we made introductions, and we gave some polite smiles before the Germans, wasting no time, set me up on a stool in front of a camera, the interviewer sitting next to it in a little director's chair like an old Hollywood set.
"So, Tamara, we're going to start off with some fun, easy questions, just to get an idea of what you're like. Are you ready?" the man asked, sitting with his legs crossed, a notebook in his lap, and little glasses sitting on his nose. I nodded and we started, the man gesturing to the camera, and I saw that they started rolling. I kept my eyes focused on Mariana, as instructed, so that I was looking at the audience but not directly at the camera "Alright, favorite F1 team?"
"Williams," I answered, and they laughed, as if to say that of course I would choose my current employer "No really, there's three top F1 teams as far as I'm concerned: Ferrari, McLaren, and Williams. These three have the best pedigree of anyone left in the sport, they have the most championships, and they've outlasted such historic teams like Lotus and Brabham and all that. I like all of them, but Williams is the one that gave me a chance and I'll forever be grateful for that."
"Alright, alright. That's as good a reason as any other." the interviewer accepted, having been convinced by my answer, he then continued with the questions like this "Favorite driver of all time?"
"Senna. He was champion when I was born. He drove for Williams too." I responded, trying not to dwell too much on the fact that Senna's Williams career was cut short tragically, and rather focusing on the fact that he was the best driver in the world when I was born and one of the main inspirations I had for getting into karting when I was a child in Monaco. That being said, I'm not sure if he's necessarily the most influential to my driving style, because Senna was this aggressive, uncompromising driver with a ton of natural speed, and that's not exactly me. I'm not a pushover on track, don't get me wrong, but I'm not going to crash out to disadvantage a rival. As for natural speed, well, I think the results I've achieved in F1 so far are pretty clear: I'm not the fastest driver in qualifying, Tommy's got me beat there, often by a couple of tenths, but I'm a lot stronger in the race than i am in quali. This might be a bit sacrilegious for a Senna fan to say, but my driving style might actually be more comparable to Prost. Still though, I don't need to be exactly like a driver to like them.
"Favorite F1 circuit?"
"Monaco. It might not be the best place for racing but there's no experience like driving an F1 car around your neighborhood." I answered, naming my adopted homeland. In terms of places to drive, Canada will always hold a special memory for that first podium, Silverstone and Monza are other venues just dripping with history, and I'm looking forward to Spa as well. I'll have to get back to you on that one, but Monaco is special for a number of reasons, so I have to say it.
"Favorite football club?" the interviewer transitioned to some more general questions, so i decided to give some rapid-fire answers.
"AC Milan." I responded with one of the biggest clubs in the world, so a bit of a hacky answer I suppose, but what can I say, I'm more interested in the world of motorsport than football, even if our sport is downright niche in comparison.
"Chocolate or vanilla?"
"Vanilla."
"Dogs or cats?"
"Cats."
"The city or the countryside?"
"Uhh...the city." This one I actually considered a bit, because in some ways, I like the idea of wide-open space and some quiet roads to drive on all by myself, but on the other hand, I've spent my whole life in a dense, rather vertical city, and I'm quite happy in Monaco. That being said, if I were to live in a different country, I'm not quite sure which choice I would make, because I could never imagine myself living in the middle of Rome or Paris, for instance. Too many tourists, too many people, I think it would drive me crazy to be honest.
"Wonderful, now, let's get into some more F1 focused questions. How would you say your season is going?" the interviewer changed gears, satisfied with my answers to his basic get-to-know-you questions.
"Quite well I think, I didn't expect to be matching Tommy but I'm ahead of him right now, so I think that's an excellent place to be in right now. We have four races left to go and we're both having a good run of form. I'm excited to see how the season is going to end and I hope to finish strongly." I responded, telling the truth, but also leaving out one key part. There was that performance review coming at the end of the season, where Williams would decide whether or not to extend my contract for another year, and, while I cannot be sure, I think I've done well enough that the team will have no choice but to keep me for 2008. If I can really knock it out of the park in these last few races, then that'll basically guarantee it for me. Not only have I broken into F1 and gotten onto the podium twice, but I seem to be on the verge of ensuring I'll stay in Formula One...to sound like Roksana for a moment, that's more than any other woman has accomplished in this sport.
"That's right, and we do hope you get that strong finish. Now, Spa was absent from the F1 calendar last season and returns this year reprofiled and with some layout changes in sector three. How do you think that'll affect the race?" the next question quickly followed the first.
"Well, we won't know for sure until we actually get around to the circuit, but it seems to be an interesting change. They've changed the layout of the bus stop and they've sped up the approach to the corner, so I actually think the biggest difference for the fans will be seeing some tremendous, Monza type speeds through Blanchimont and into this final chicane. That's an assumption though. All I can say for certain is that I'm glad to see Spa is back." I answered. This whole question was referring to the fact that Spa had missed the 2006 season due to renovations, and now was returning for the first time since 2005 with a new end to the lap. I was eager to see what this new end to the lap looked like, though unlike most of the drivers, I didn't have previous F1 experience here to compare it to. Neither did Tommy for that matter, as his rookie year was the very same year that Spa-Francorchamps was off the calendar.
"Who do you think will win?"
"Roland." I answered immediately and got a laugh from the staff. It was a German studio, so I decided to cater to that by name-dropping a German driver. Roland Ziegler was by no means a bad driver, he's a race winner after all, but he had some impressive form at Jordan and BMW Williams, a form which has yet to translate into positive performance for Toyota. Right now, Ivan Tripoli is comprehensively outperforming his older teammate. A laugh later I smiled "No, no. No offense to Roland but I don't think we're going to see a German winner this year. I think both Felipe and Anthony have to be up for consideration, McLaren is the top team right now and I would be surprised to see that changed. Then there's also Matti, he's won here twice, and Ferrari need results right now. None of them would surprise me, and Henrique can't completely be discounted either. Though the beauty of Spa is that nobody really knows what the race result is going to be."
"Indeed, indeed. That's why we love these classic circuits so much. So, just one more question for you Tamara: why doesn't Tommy race under a German license?" the interviewer asked and most people in the studio laughed, myself included. In the middle of the laughter the German piled on "He was born in Germany he should race under a German license! We want the next Wilhelm!"
"Well, I can't say for sure why Tommy does what he does, but there is something to be said about a father-son dynamic. The Koskinen name in F1 is associated with Finland and Tommy doesn't want to change that. Beyond that, you'd have to ask him. But you guys shouldn't worry, between Victor and Roland and Maximilian Renner, there are some very talented German faces on the grid. You guys will be hearing your anthem again sooner rather than later." I responded, knowing that the motivating factor behind this question was the fact that Tommy was doing a good job in F1 and these people knew he could've raced under a German license, so obviously they're upset to have seen a top driver from their country flying a blue and white cross rather than the German eagle.
"Well, maybe we'll just have to get him on the show and ask him. Everyone, this has been Tamara Shchegolyayeva, Formula One driver for Williams Grand Prix Engineering and a wonderful guest. We wish her well at the 2007 Belgian Grand Prix and, on behalf of all Germans, we say auf wiedersehen." the interviewer signed off with a respectful plug and a little bit of German that I could understand. I smiled as I got up and shook hands with the crew once again, glad to see that it went well. Overall, Mariana and I felt Stuttgart feeling accomplished, like we had just done some good TV. This was a good thing for my public image going into the Belgian Grand Prix.
Unfortunately for my public image, any news that might have come out of that German TV interview was swept under the rug as the Spa weekend approached, because an infinitely bigger bombshell hit the F1 world. Due to the aforementioned Spygate scandal, where McLaren was found to be in position of Ferrari car data - and inter-team emails now reveal they were using that data - McLaren has been stripped of its constructors' championship points and fined $100,000,000, the largest fine in sporting history. McLaren's drivers, Felipe and Anthony, will still be allowed to earn drivers' championship points, but if they win a race, McLaren is not permitted to send a team representative up to the podium, and those points won't count in the teams' battle. So, the long and short of this is that Scuderia Ferrari is going to win the constructors' world championship, BMW Sauber is elevated to second, Renault in third, and we're now fourth, having achieved the impossible. Red Bull is now currently in fifth, Toyota in sixth, Super Aguri in seventh, Honda in eighth, Toro Rosso and Spyker have yet to score, but McLaren takes the unfortunate eleventh place. The interesting aspect of all this is that McLaren getting excluded might just have saved Spyker, as the minnow team is in financial ruin and the prize money from 10th is infinitely larger than 11th. This also means that the damage for McLaren is two-fold, because not only do they have to pay a $100 million fine, but they lose out on the money from winning the constructors' championship. McLaren is a proud and historic team, and they have strong partners in the form of Vodafone and Mercedes, so they won't suffer because of this, but there is no way to ignore the fact that this is a setback.
It's not a good place to be mentally, there's no sugar coating that, but Felipe and Anthony are fighters, and they're both going for the championship. Nevertheless, Ferrari had the pace here at Spa, and they locked out the front row - Matti ahead of Henrique. Felipe led Anthony for an all-McLaren second row. Tommy took the best of the rest slot thanks to penalties for Piotr Kaminski and Umberto Petronelli. There were penalties helping him, but it shouldn't be discounted that Tommy was one place ahead of Victor Hartmann, who lined up sixth. Martin Weaver was seventh for Red Bull, Ivan Tripoli was eighth for Toyota, Jyri Kaasalainen was ninth for Renault, and I lined up in tenth. Roland Ziegler, Daniel MacGowan and James Buxton were directly behind me, but I suspected the main threat would come from Piotr Kaminski, who was lining up in fourteenth. Umberto was all the way down in twenty-second so I didn't expect him to be a threat this race, but the Belgian Grand Prix always has the potential to cause chaos, the layout has changed, and anything can happen in Formula One.
I got my first taste of a pack of cars going through the new bus stop on the formation lap. Practice and qualifying is one thing, and traffic can cause problems at times, but you never know quite how a corner will be until a whole grid of cars goes through one. It was a tight right and then a left onto the short start-finish straight, lining up on the grid and seeing a very short run to La Source. It was a tight hairpin almost immediately at this track, but the amount of road available on exit ensured that this was an action spot despite that. We would see what's going to happen shortly, because the lights came on one after the other until twenty-two F1 drivers were staring down five red lights. Then, in the blink of an eye, the lights came off and we all blasted off towards the first corner. I pulled past Jyri almost instantly and then took advantage of my inside position to dive inside of Ivan Tripoli in La Source, keeping it off the inside kerb but also keeping it clean vis-a-vis my Italian rival. The two cars pulled alongside side on corner exit and it was Toyota power against Toyota power heading down to Eau Rouge, the star corner of Spa-Francorchamps. The nature of the track meant that the inside line from La Source put me on the opportune line for the corners over the stream. Ivan, not brave enough to let it be two cars alongside through the fastest corner on the circuit in lap one, let me pass. A flick to the left, right up the hill flat-out, and then a blind flick back to the left cresting the top of the hill and emerging onto the Kemmel straight. Now it was two-hundred miles per hour in the draft of Martin Weaver down the longest straight on the track. The trees of the Ardennes flanking the straight as we barreled down towards Les Combes.
I pulled to the right out of the draft as I closed in on Weaver. My speed carried me past the Red Bull and, as we hit the brakes for the first part of Les Combes, Martin had no answer for me. I turned right through the first element - turn 7, left through turn 8, and then right through turn nine, riding out onto the kerb and speeding down hill to the Bruxelles hairpin. I hit the brakes and held the car together as I turned it around, but I put the power back down through the right-hander and sped down towards the no-name left-hander. It was left through turn eleven and taking just a bit of the exit kerb before continuing the way down the hill. Eau Rouge had been the most obvious incline, but the whole Kemmel straight was going uphill, so now, in the fast and tremendous sector two, we were coming back down. At the bottom of the hill, it was time for bravery. I lifted my foot off the throttle for the shortest amount of time possible and downshifted, before trusting the downforce and throwing the car into the first apex of Pouhon. Wings, winglets, canards, turning vanes, bargeboards, chimneys, and all the other aerodynamic devices on these spaceship cars tore through the air in such a way that forced the car down into the tarmac as I hit the second apex of Pouhon, finally straightening the car out with a smile on my face, thrilled with this corner, thrilled with this track.
It was a short shoot between Pouhon and turn thirteen. It was right and then almost immediately left into the turn fourteen Campus. I rode onto the exit kerb before straightening the car out and braking for Stavelot. I tried to keep as much speed in it as possible, once again riding out onto the exit kerb, coming to the end of sector two. It was the second right-hander in a row at turn sixteen, not taking too much exit kerb this time due to a black, yellow, and red tyre wall jutting out towards the track. From here all the way down to the bus stop, it was flat-out. Turn seventeen wasn't too bad, but Blanchimont required some bravery, believing that the car will stay onto the track as we align with the new final chicane. I started this lap in tenth, but as I negotiated turns nineteen and twenty, I was now up to seventh, and directly behind my teammate. I crossed the line to finish my first lap of Spa-Francorchamps as a Formula One driver. Monaco was home, Monza was a legendary experience, but Spa...Spa is the driver's track.
"Tremendous lap Tamara, tremendous. Be careful with Tommy but know that you are free to fight, and if this kind of pace continues, we will ask Tommy to let you by." Peter cheered through the radio, more than satisfied with my lap. Now, Tommy was still contractually the first driver, and, while I think it has been more like equal treatment for us both lately, I didn't see this coming. Nevertheless, Peter was true to his word, and the team did eventually call for him to let me by, which happened on the Kemmel straight on perhaps lap seven. On lap seventeen, I made my stop, turning right into the bus stop but keeping right, only turning left once I was behind the armco. I headed down to my pit stall, stopped on the marks, and watched as the team changed the tyres and filled the fuel tank. Seven seconds later, the car was back down on its wheels and released, driving down the rest of the pitlane before turning through a hairpin to the right, taking me through the inside of La Source and then releasing me. Koskinen pitted two laps earlier but I stayed ahead of him. A first pitstop strategy well executed, but there was one stop left in the race. This was a really good place to be as we hit the middle of the race, me in sixth, Tommy in seventh, and we'd bring five points back to Grove at this rate. A lot could still change though, especially as we neared lap thirty and the second pit window.
Tommy Koskinen pit on lap thirty and I pit on lap thirty-two, preserving the order from the first pit sequence. All was well, we were both still on the lead lap, the top five was out of reach, but we had about three seconds to the cars behind as well, and Weaver wasn't gaining on us either. We also had about two seconds between the two of us as well, ensuring that neither of us could cause problems for the other. We were getting close to the final ten laps and Williams didn't want to take any chances on what could be a very good day. Renault wasn't scoring points today, as Umberto Petronelli had already retired with a suspension problem, and Jyri Kaasalainen was down in ninth, with Piotr Kaminski in tenth gaining on him fast. Renault was on 38 points, we were 29 points, add five from here with Renault not scoring, and it would be 38 to 34. We could, in the space of one race, go from having been in fifth in the constructors' championship to legitimately fighting for third. Now, McLaren's disqualification is a big part of that, but the point remains, tens of millions of dollars of prize money is on the line. I was also glad to be ahead of Tommy again, because he had a good run of form, and I was scared that he might be regaining dominance in the team. With this, having started behind Tommy just to finish ahead of him, I would be stamping my authority on this team. So, of course this was when things went against us.
"What's going on? I got no drive!" I yelled through the radio as, all of a sudden, coming out of La Source to start lap thirty-four, I heard an awful sound and then the car just lost drive completely. I was tapping my foot on the accelerator, trying to get something going, but nothing happened.
"I'm sorry Tamara, we've lost fuel pressure. We don't know why yet but the problem seems to be terminal...dammit." Peter radio'd in, sounding utterly devastated himself, and even giving a rare - from him anyway - curse at the end. I pulled the car off to the side, stopping my a barrier, and just rested hands on the top of the steering wheel for a moment. Tommy was long gone, Weaver drove past, and even Jyri Kaasalainen and Piotr Kaminski drove past my stricken car as all the dreams I had about this race evaporated. We haven't had many terminal issues this year - I haven't had a technical issue since qualifying for the Malaysian Grand Prix - but we had this one right here, and this one hurt. I got out of the car and tried to find a way to the team garage, a points-paying position went down the toilet, Renault was on track to score a point and do some damage limitation, and Tommy further narrowed the gap to me.
The points-paying results for the 2007 Belgian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
2: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
4: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
5: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
6: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota.
7: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault.
8: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault.
So, with McLaren out of the constructors' championship, Scuderia Ferrari clinched the title with three races to go. Matti was within thirteen points of Anthony Harrison, who still led the drivers' championship, but Felipe Alvarez was now just two points behind the American. As for Renault, well, thanks to my retirement, Jyri scored a single point to bring them up to 39 points, whereas Tommy's three points only brought us up to 32 points. Third place was still theoretically possible, but I liked our odds better when the gap was going to be four points rather than the real seven point gap. Piotr Kaminski was just outside of the points, only four tenths behind the Renault, in what was a pretty good recovery drive considering his penalty. This meant that Hartmann was pretty much guaranteed to beat his teammate this year, but Piotr has been a hugely impressive driver regardless, especially considering this is his first full season in Formula One and that he suffered what would have been a career ending accident in any other era of F1. Maximilian Renner was also performing well for Toro Rosso, matching Giuseppino Leone almost instantly, even if the German did retire this race.
So, the European season was over, and we had three flyaway races remaining. First of all, there was the Japanese Grand Prix, now being held in the refurbished Fuji Speedway, in the shadow of the famous Japanese mountain. Next, it would be the Chinese Grand Prix, held at the Shanghai International Circuit, hosting its fourth Formula One race. Finally, the season would end at the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos. A classic venue to end a classic season. I had to imagine that, with how close this title fight has been, it would have to go down to the wire. We'll just have to wait and see though, but Anthony Harrison, Felipe Alvarez, Matti Hamalainen? Any one of them could win. So could Henrique de Matteo, mathematically anyway, but he would need some miracle results to do so at this point. Still, it's Formula One, and stranger things have happened.
Notes:
Alright guys, we're getting close to wrapping up the 2007 season and we'll be moving into 2008 in chapter eleven I believe. Hope you enjoyed!
Ciao!
Chapter 9: Transfers and Acquisitions
Notes:
Hello everyone, here is chapter nine of LatSoF1.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter IX.
Transfers and Acquisitions.
"...hey dad, I know you're busy, but I really need you to call me back as soon as possible. It's important." I spoke into the cell phone, leaving a message before sighing deeply and collapsing onto my couch. I understood that my father was a busy man, and he didn't have much interest in my F1 career at that point, but he's still acting as my agent, and until and unless he gives up that job, I'm going to need to work with him. I don't like the fact that he's not involved in my career, but I could live with it, at least, I could live with it, if not for the fact that it was now actively impacting my racing career. I was going into the last few races of the 2007 season, it was the second half of September, and my performance review from Williams was coming up in December. My father knew all of that, or at least, he was supposed to know all that. What he didn't know - because I didn't know this until just now - is that there is serious interest from elsewhere.
Shortly after the Belgian Grand Prix, I received an email from Renault team principal and high-profile manager, Bernardo Fulvia, who proposed a casual meeting between him, high level Renault team member Simon Horton, and myself, in Monaco. Now, there is no such thing as a casual meeting between two high level executives from one Formula One team and a driver from another. I don't need to be a genius to see that this is an informal inquiry, perhaps one that might lead to a handshake deal, perhaps one that may evolve into formal contract negotiations. A move to Renault would be a move forward, full stop, and Renault is a top team that won a drivers' and constructors' double in 2006, their slump in 2007 doesn't change that. I'm being offered a chance to drive for what could be a race winning team in 2008, I'm being offered the chance to go from a fresh rookie to a highly rated young driver. I know I have a deal with Williams and I have a certain loyalty to this team, but I would be a fool if I didn't at least consider this - not to mention blowing off this meeting could burn a few bridges for the future - and this would be the perfect time to get some advice from my manager. Even beyond that, this would be the perfect time to get some advice from my father. Renault has a clear oil provider in the form of Elf, and Renault is healthily sponsored by the ING Group, as well as others. This could be my chance to move away from Kazakhoil and being a paydriver.
I sighed, got up, and grabbed a jacket before heading out of the apartment. I rushed down the stairs and out of the building before heading for the Tsirinskys' apartment. If my dad was going to be a disappointment - again - then I was going to go talk to the family I did have. A few moments later, I found myself knocking on the door - I had a key, but I did try to respect their privacy when I could - and I saw Natasha open the door. My young cousin dressed elegantly in a tank top and sweatpants, dirty blonde colored hair frizzy, looking like she just woke up. I grinned at the antics of the girl I thought of like a younger sister before entering the apartment, Nat closing the door behind me and letting me sit down.
"How did Varano go?" I asked, referring to her races at the track near Parma, the sixth round in the 2007 Italian Formula Three Championship.
"Good, fourth and fourth, a solid ten points in the bag." she answered. This was exactly the kind of performance Natasha needed. She was a rookie driver, she was younger than most of her rivals, and she has a lot less experience in Formula Three machinery to begin with, so, often enough, finishing fourth behind her championship rivals is about the best she can do, with those moments of exceptional excellence leading to her podiums and, indeed, her win. As of now, she has yet to retire from a race and she was finished in the points in all but one of her races - and even then, she finished 10th, just outside of the points, which isn't a bad performance at all, especially given this was during her first race weekend in the series - a very strong, very consistent performance. Now she just needed to keep that performance going in the last two rounds at Vallelunga and Monza to finish the season strongly. She's an outside bet for the championship and she's too good to stay in this series for another year, so I imagine she'll be moving on elsewhere, perhaps to Formula 3 Euro series, the traditional next step on the ladder, or maybe to one of the various new Formula series that have popped up over the years, such as GP2 Asia or A1GP.
"That's great. Have you gotten any offers for next year yet?" I asked, bringing us to the subject I wanted to talk about, but also having genuine curiosity as to what was going on with Natasha's racing career.
"Well, you know how Giorgio was having talks with Trident earlier this year?" Natasha asked, I nodded "Well, they put him in charge of their new GP2 Asia program for 2008 and he wants me to be their Asian driver. He's told me straight away they don't expect to be the fastest team and there will probably be teething issues, so he understands if I want to go somewhere else, but I like working with him and I know I can trust him. What do you think?"
"Giorgio has always been good to us and, if he wants you in the team, I think you should take him up on it. It's a spec series so even if they don't have the car completely dialed in or lack a little bit of experience, you can still punch above your team's weight if you have the talent. And even if it doesn't go perfectly, it's what, January to April? You can do GP2 Asia in the spring and then jump to something else in the summer and fall. Maybe even the Macau Grand Prix." I answered. I was excited to see that Natasha would potentially be following in my footsteps, though in a slightly different manner. I won the GP2 Asia title on my first attempt, being champion by April 2006, and then I spent the rest of the year testing for Williams and getting used to the car. I think Nat, being a bit younger - and I was already exceptionally young to get picked up by an F1 team when I did - and going to a new team in this series, a team which doesn't even have all that much experience in the main GP2 championship, is going to be a bit behind. Still though, it's a good leap forward and, combined with something in the second half of the year, it could make a decent resume.
"Okay...wow, thank you Tamara. I'll uh...I'll keep that in mind." Nat responded, processing the information, glad to see that I was siding with her and giving her validation. A few moments later, the conversation turned to my situation "What about you, how is it going for you?"
"Well, up until just now, I assumed I had a pretty basic path ahead of me. Finish this season strong, pass my performance evaluation from Williams, and get that contract extension, then maybe after a good start to 2008, I could negotiate a more favorable contract and spend the first few years of my career building Williams up, taking them back to where they're supposed to be. After that, I hoped to be in a position where I could move to a winning team, or maybe Williams would be a winning team by then, the point remains I imagined my career going in such a way where I would be at Williams for the foreseeable future. The thing is, I've been doing really well so far this season, I have two podiums to my name, and I'm still beating my teammate despite the fact that he's got a lot more experience than I do and he's having a really good run of form right now. That's put some attention on me, and Renault wants to meet with me." I explained, trying to illustrate the fact that I didn't expect such an offer to come, nor do I know what the appropriate way to react to it would be.
"Oh," Nat responded.
"Yeah, oh." I sighed before continuing "Renault isn't as good as the frontrunners this year but they won both championships last year and the year before. They're a really good team and I think that, if I went there, I could be fighting for wins under the right circumstances. On the other hand, Williams gave me my chance in Formula One and I signed a contract with them, giving them exclusivity, at least until the evaluation, and I owe them my loyalty. I want to rebuild Williams and I want to see them become the team they deserve to be, but Renault is a move forward right now. We had half a chance of catching up to them at Belgium but who knows if we would have been able to stay with them even if I hadn't retired. Renault is a better team than Williams is right now, so regardless of my feelings towards Williams, I have to at least consider it, right? That's what it means to be a racing driver, isn't it?"
"Would you be moving because you want to or because you feel like it's the thing to do?" Natasha asked.
"Well, I feel like it could be a faster way of achieving the things I want to achieve, and I think that, if my goal is to win an F1 race as soon as possible, then going to Renault is the thing to do." I explained. I didn't expect to take a podium this season, but I did, twice in fact, so it's only natural that the next thing I want to do is win a race. Furthermore, who even knows if Tommy and I can actually rebuild Williams at all? We took a step forward compared to 2006, yes, but we're still miles off the leaders, and can we really make up that gap the way the team is run now? Ferrari does everything in-house, the car designed in tandem with the engine and gearbox and everything, it's all one cohesive unit that fits together perfectly. McLaren has a similar arrangement with Mercedes where they are, for all intents and purposes, a factory backed effort with Mercedes owning about half of the company on top of that. Williams meanwhile, well, Toyota designs the engines for both us and their own team, we design the gearboxes for both us and Toyota, and that whole package has to fit both Toyota's plan for their car and our plan for our car. This is absolutely a step forward from Cosworth engines last year, but it is not a return to what Williams once had with BMW. We still suffer the disadvantages of being a privateer team and we still lack the colossal budgets of massive corporations like Ferrari, Mercedes, Renault, and even Toyota. We're ahead of Toyota, yes, but that has more to do with Toyota's incompetence than it does with us. Renault, meanwhile, is a factory operation, makes their own engines, and has title-winning pedigree as recently as last year.
"I don't know what you should do Tamara, but, as far as I can tell, it can't hurt to talk to Renault, can it?" Nat asked. I didn't blame her for not giving me advice, it was a hard situation to judge, because right now we're just behind Renault and nobody really knows how that'll translate into 2008. Yes, on paper, Renault absolutely should be stronger than us next year, F1 is, by its very nature, unpredictable. Renault might be in the middle of a rapid decline from the heights of 2005 and 2006, it might be the case where there is no saving the team after Felipe Alvarez left, or it might be the case that 2007 is a fluke and Renault will be back at the front next year, fighting McLaren and Ferrari every step of the way. Maybe Williams will move forward and be an outside bet for wins, maybe Williams will screw up and plummet to the back of the grid, nobody knows what exactly will happen and I won't know which place would be the proper place to be until the end of 2008. Hell, maybe not even then, because what is a good 2008 worth if it doesn't continue into 2009 and 2010 and so on and so forth? I'm a young driver and I'm looking forward to having a long career, I need to be thinking of more than just the short term, and what do these teams look like in the long term? Well, pretty positive I would imagine. It's 2007, the economy is good, F1 is in a good place, and both Renault and Toyota seem like they're in F1 to stay. Williams' fortunes right now are tied to Toyota, they're our engine partner and our engineering team is intertwined with theirs, but that is both a gift and a curse. A gift because Toyota makes good engines and I enjoy the power they give me, but a curse because I'm not an idiot, I know that Toyota wants Hideki Kitagawa in the car, and they see me as more vulnerable than Tommy.
I'm performing well and I think that Sir Frank and Michael both want me in this team for the long-term, but money talks in Formula One. Toyota would be willing to offer a lot of money to get one of their drivers in F1 - especially if they don't have to bear the risk of that driving not working out - whereas I would like nothing more than to be able to move away from Kazakhoil and truly be in Formula One on my own merit. Meanwhile, if I were to go to Renault, I would probably shake off my dependence on Kazakhoil and be my own driver, but how do their prospects look? Well, as I said, I imagine that they're in F1 to stay. Sure, they're likely upset that their performance this year is a drop-off compared to where they should be, but they're a passionate and well-funded team that wants to get back up there as soon as possible. Well, I think I know what I'm going to do: I'm going to take Natasha's advice and at least speak to Renault, but unless they can do something very specific for me, I'm not going to agree to anything without first talking to my father and my agent. The one thing that could get me to sign for Renault right now and figure the rest out later would be if they offered me a long-term deal with equal status and no sponsorship required. I would never recommend signing a contract without getting all the details worked out, but if Renault is willing to offer me exactly what I want out of F1, I would find a way to make it happen regardless.
"No, guess it can't hurt." I answered, having made my mind up. I feel loyalty to Williams and I want to see them become the team they were when I was growing up, but, at the same time, when I was growing up, that team was Williams-Renault. A car made by the massively impressive minds at Grove paired with a Renault V10 from the team in France. Now that team in France has its own team in F1, having acquired the Enstone-based Benetton team and turned it into its own factory effort. I'm loyal to Williams, but Renault is a prestigious name too, and they represent the chance to move forward as quickly as possible. I don't know what exactly is the right option between those teams, but I know what the right thing for me is: I will go with whatever team I feel offers me the best long-term future in F1.
It was a quiet, relatively secluded spot in a Monaco cafe. Bernardo Fulvia and Simon Horton sat together, Fulvia in a white button-up shirt, navy blue pants, and shiny black loathers, his navy black sport coat hung on the chair behind him. Fulvia had salt-and-pepper graying hair with a matching goatee, the Italian wearing aviator sunglasses over his tanned face. Horton was likewise dressed pretty casually, wearing brown loathers, tan suit pants, a white shirt, and an open tan suit jacket. There was a bottle of wine, some bread, some butter, and a handful of glasses and plates on the table in front of them. It was all about being rather discrete - no teamwear in sight - and a pretty safe location to go with it. The implication was clear: Renault wanted to keep this private, and they weren't ready for the press to know about it. I was actually happy about that, because I was by no means certain what I wanted to do, and even if I did decide to move to Renault, I don't want Williams to find out from a magazine. No, if I'm going to move away from the team that gave me my chance in Formula One, I'm going to let them know in person and I'm going to leave properly. Fortunately for me, there don't seem to be many rumors about me at all so far, and I think that may have to do with my contract situation. Williams is supposed to have a period of exclusivity with me, at least until the winter performance appraisal, so I really shouldn't be having this conversation at all. That being said, if I had an informal meeting here, made sure Renault knew not to sign anyone before December, and then began formal contract talks after Williams reviewed me, I believe that would technically be legal. Of course, I wouldn't have to worry about such things if my agent, who helped draft that contract, was here to talk to me about this.
"Ciao Tamara!" Bernardo greeted, getting up, hugging me, and kissing me on both cheeks. Fortunately, Simon was more restrained and British in his greeting, just shaking hands, but I suppose that is to be expected. Fulvia has a reputation for being a rather exuberant figure in the F1 paddock, famously responding to Felipe's wins with Renault with a radio call of "bravissimo, bravissimo Felipe," and this is probably just his idea of a warm and platonic way to greet a woman. In any case, we all sat down, me on one end of the table, the Renault duo on the other: the heavy-set Italian team principal, manager, and even one-time engine manufacturer - long story - on the left, and his balding English colleague on the right. Bernardo uncorked the wine bottle and poured three glasses while asking me "So, how is the season going?"
"Pretty good, I think. We're up to fourth in the championship - higher than we thought possible - third would be difficult at this point but it's not strictly impossible, and I'm still ahead of my teammate at this point, so it's a pretty good place to be in right now." I responded, smiling a bit as I received my glass of red wine. I took a small sip for now and waited to see how the two Renault men will respond.
"Well, we'll try and look third down before you can take it." Simon joked from his side of the table "In all seriousness though, we're very impressed with your performance so far Tamara. I don't think that I'm telling you anything new when I say you've exceeded everyone's expectations. It's rare enough for a rookie to immediately match their highly rated teammate, but to be beating them with three races to go? That is massively impressive."
"I've watched your performances in F1, I've talked to the leadership from your DAMS team, and I've talked to some of the other team principals. Everyone is at very least intrigued by what you've managed to accomplish, and many are looking at you as an option for the future. Tamara, we're here today because we think it'll be impossible to sign you come 2010, 2011. We want you in our team and we're prepared to do it the difficult way. We'll take a chance on you, we won't wait and see how 2008 goes, we're willing to offer you a three-year contract right now. 2008, 2009, 2010." Bernardo announced, clearly trying to butter me up but also legitimately telling me things that I want to hear. A three-year contract is perhaps a little bit shorter than I would like, but if Bernardo is right, I won't have a problem getting a drive for 2011. Furthermore, Renault is probably a better platform than Williams in the long-term: Williams has a good vision and great history, but Renault has just as much ambition, far more money, and is a full constructors' operation. I know I love Williams, but is it the right thing for my career come the 2009 regulation change? What about 2010? What about 2011? I don't know, but at least on paper, Renault seems to be the stronger option.
"Well, the thing is Williams took a chance on me too, and that means that they were able to sign a pretty advantageous contract with me. The way it goes is that this year is for certain, but they have an exclusive first choice option to extend me for 2008 or not, and if they do extend me for 2008, then it's like my contract was a two-year deal all along." I explained, sharing the situation with the Renault men. Bernardo and Simon shared a glance before the Italian responded.
"You worry about the driving, let me worry about the contract. Every deal has its price." Bernardo responded. I know that the Renault team principal was trying to reassure me, but I couldn't help but think about some of the messy contract situations that James Buxton has had to go through. The Briton began his career at Williams but only spent a year there before moving to Enstone for two years - the first of which the team was still Benetton, the second of which the team assumed its current guise as Renault - then moving to Brackley, the BAR team. The BAR team has since become Honda due to British-American Tobacco getting forced out of the sport with stricter and stricter advertising laws. but James' stay at that team has been far from certain. First, for the 2005 season, Buxton tried to move to BMW Williams, believing they would be the stronger team, but BAR insisted they had the right to exercise a contract extension - a situation that seems rather familiar to my circumstances - and eventually, a contract review board decided that Buxton was under contract with BAR for 2005. Williams went ahead and signed Buxton for 2006, effectively confirming their deal, just pushed back a year. Of course, by now BMW Williams had broken up and Honda bought out BAR, so when it finally came time for 2006, Buxton remained with Honda after all, paying Williams $20 million in compensation for the whole ordeal. I certainly hope my situation won't end up quite as chaotic as that, but the point is that F1 contracts can get very, very messy, and I see myself as too young and vulnerable to be at the center of a messy dispute. Of course, Bernardo would say that I'm too highly rated for that to happen to me, but I still find myself doubting that many teams would want me after a toxic contractual court battle.
"Look, I know it's a lot for you. You're a young driver and you never expected to be in this situation so early, but I want you to know that this offer is real, and we're prepared to do everything we can to make this transition as painless as possible. Remember that and take the next few races to think about it. We're not going to sign anyone until the situation is resolved." Simon responded. Now, I knew this was probably a negotiating technique too, making him seem warm and understanding, like a friend, like somebody that I should trust, but it did work to an extent, because I found his words to be a relief.
"I think I will. I need to talk with my agent and everything as well. I do have one question though, who would be my teammate if I were to go to Renault?" I asked. I knew it might be a bit of a hard question to answer because pieces were likely still moving, and Renault wouldn't like to leak any private information out just yet, but I wanted to know. I also thought this would be a good test of just how serious Renault is about me.
"Jyri. Umberto was good to us over the years but...it's fine. He's showing his age and he's not as fast as the rookies anymore. Umberto was winning races for us last year, now he hasn't scored in the last five races." Bernardo answered truthfully. I suppose this was to be expected, because while Umberto had a pretty strong start to the season, his pace has evaporated, and more costly, his pace has evaporated just as Jyri Kaasalainen has finally found his footing and gone on a tremendous run of races, having scored in every race since - and including - the British Grand Prix. There was a bit more to this information though: mainly the revelation that Bernardo could and would be ruthless when it comes to drivers. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising, after all, this is the guy who forced both James Buxton and then Ivan Tripoli out of the team so as to build the team around his greatest young find, Felipe Alvarez. Now Alvarez's trusty teammate, Umberto Petronelli, seemed to be getting the boot as well. I'm not sure if this is the message that Fulvia was trying to send, but the message I got out of that was that Renault could and would drop me if I had a bad run of races and a shiny new option presented itself. I had some good results this year, but I haven't quite yet achieved consistent points-finishes. I mean, twice this year I've gone three races without scoring points, one of those times I don't even have the excuse of having a retirement. This is in contrast to consecutive points finishes, which I've only achieved twice: my 7th at Monaco followed by my podium at Canada, and my back-to-back 8th places at Turkey and Italy. Granted the Renault is a stronger car, so it'll probably be easier to score consistent points there, but this is something I need to think about. One of plenty of things to consider as the Japanese Grand Prix drew nearer and nearer.
"Thanks for the ride." I leaned over the center console of the Peugeot wagon to give Roksana a kiss on the cheek before getting out of the car. My backpack hung off my right shoulder as I came over to the back of the car and grabbed my suitcase. I was off to Japan and then China was just a week later so I wasn't going to fly all the way back to Europe just to leave again two days later. That also meant that I was packing a bit more heavily than I usually did, hence I had both my backpack and this big suitcase with the wheels on the bottom. I was usually the type to take a backpack and a small suitcase, but when you're halfway across the world compared to your apartment, these are the types of things you need to do.
"I'll be back here Tuesday the 9th, right?" Roksana asked, her passenger window down.
"Yeah, thank you." I smiled, glad that I wasn't going to have to drive after a long flight home from Shanghai. Roksana Yurasova was going significantly out of her way for this, being all the way in Nice, but the journalist turned girlfriend didn't seem to mind. I had to admit I was appreciative of this, and I'll have to look for ways to pay her back over the winter when I finally have some time to myself and don't have to jet across the world.
"It's nothing, good luck!" Roksana said before giving a wave and rolling up the window, pulling away. So, a few ID checks and a quick scan of my bags later, I was making my way over to the Koskinen's jet, once again flying with the 1982 World Champion and his son. Flying to and from Malaysia at the beginning of the season was a pretty brutal experience, but now, I was going to be flying to Japan on a private jet with people I trust, so at least I'll be able to relax a little bit. Of course, due to the nature of private jets and the distances involved, I believe we'll be stopping twice for fuel and all of that. Still, I wasn't about to complain about traveling anywhere on a private jet: I may be a Formula One driver from Monaco, but I'm not completely detached from the real world.
"Hey Tamara, how're you doing?" Tommy asked as I boarded the plane, setting my backpack down and rolling my suitcase into the storage area of the plane. I sat down in the deep, plush chair and took a look around. Tommy was in the chair across the aisle from me, Johannes was up front talking to the pilots, and the closet next to the bathroom was loaded up with various blankets and pillows for the long trip.
"I'm doing pretty good, you?" I asked.
"I'm good, pretty good. I got three races left and I want to finish this season strong, really get some momentum going into next year." Tommy answered, getting excited as he talked about the future "I think we can have a really good year next year, I'll be more experienced, you'll be more experienced, and so long as the team can give us a car to work with, I think we could be the best of the rest."
"You sound sure that the team will keep me for next year." I responded, surprised that Tommy is so confident in our team's future. Best of the rest, to me, means the best team behind Ferrari and McLaren. Assuming that Tommy is working off of the same definition, that means that he thinks we'll be able to take the fight to not just Renault, but BMW Sauber as well. It was a bold claim to make, especially before any of the 2008 cars have set the gauntlet - not to mention we don't know how the lack of traction control will affect anything quite yet - but he certainly seems confident. He also seems confident in my performance review, which, to be fair, I am too at this stage, but Koskinen is talking as if it's a done deal.
"Of course you will. The team would be stupid not to keep you at this point, and Sir Frank definitely isn't stupid." the German-born, Monegasque-raised Finn responded with finality. So, I rate Renault for the future, my teammate rates Williams for the future, and it seems both teams are interesting in my services for the 2008 season. Plenty to think about on this long, long flight. Plenty to think about indeed.
After years and years at Honda's Suzuka Circuit - home to such iconic events as Prost and Senna's infamous crashes in 1989 and 1990 - the Japanese Grand Prix was returning to its original home. Fuji Speedway was the site of the infamous 1976 championship decider where Niki Lauda retired in the rain to allow James Hunt to win his one and only title, but just a year later, the circuit hosted its last Formula One race in 1977, with two spectators dying in the process. Now though, a renovated, Toyota-owned Fuji Speedway was about to host its first Formula One race in thirty years. The fastest cars on the planet would once again be racing in the shadow of Mount Fuji...not that anyone could tell today, because, much like that 1976 title decider, the rain had yet again come. Today wasn't going to be a title decider, as Felipe Alvarez was just two points behind his teammate with two races remaining, but it could seal the drivers' championship for McLaren, as both Ferraris are vulnerable to being knocked out of the championship fight this season. It was a strange time for McLaren, because while they were disqualified from the constructors' championship, they were on course to finish 1-2 in the drivers' championship. It's not exactly common to see a situation where a team will either be running the numbers 1 and 2 next year, or the numbers 22 and 23. As for numbers 16 and 17, are Japanese weekend so far has been defined by mixed fortunes.
Yesterday in the wet qualifying Tommy managed fifth and, incredibly, I was right up there with him, in eighth. That should mean Williams is going to have its best start of the season, however, on Friday both cars underwent an unscheduled engine change, an emergency to get us through the rest of the season, but one that ensured we both had to cope with a ten second penalty. So now, Tommy was starting fifteen, and I had the small consolation of starting seventeenth rather than eighteenth, thanks to Giuseppino Leone taking a pit-lane start. The Toro Rosso driver made the unfortunate decision to set the car up for the dry, yet conditions were anything but. So, in a race that could've brought us a ton of points, we were starting deep in the middle of the pack. It was wet, it's going to be chaotic, and it's at a track which is new territory for all of us, so nobody really knows what to expect, but we'll have to work miracles if we want to score points today.
Staring down at the extreme wet tyres on the car with the knowledge that the race would start under safety car, I couldn't help but think what Niki Lauda was thinking. The three-time champion - one-time at the time - sacrificed a potential championship because he felt racing in the rain was too risky at Fuji. Now, we know it's too risky to race, hence the safety car to open, but we are holding a Grand Prix regardless. We know it's too wet to race under these conditions, yet we are going out with the goal of racing eventually. Sure, the goal is to have twenty-two cars out there, even at slow speed, displacing a lot of water, but it still felt a little bit ominous to be taking risks at a track known for being dangerous in the wet. Everyone else was driving though, so that meant that I had to start as well. Car #17 in 17th place as we pulled away from the grid, water spraying all over even at low speed. It wasn't okay to race in these conditions: the drivers knew it, the teams knew it, and race control knew it, but, just like that fateful day in 1976, there were multiple considerations to consider.
First of all, there was the fact that the fans were already angry with the event. There was little to no parking available at the circuit itself and most people ended up having to take shuttle buses some distance into the race, shuttle buses which failed to make it on time for qualifying. This comes after Toyota, who owns the circuit, banning flags and banners from other teams, which caused significant uproar with the passionate Japanese fanbase who support a wide variety of teams, not just the domestic ones. Furthermore, and this was probably unavoidable regardless of the quality of the race, but there are those who automatically dismiss this event because they feel the Japanese Grand Prix should only ever be hosted by Suzuka. Second of all, there was a championship battle on the line. If all of a sudden, this race where cancelled, that means there are only two races left this season and only twenty points on the field. What this ultimately means is that Henrique de Matteo will be unable to do anything about being disqualified from the championship fight. It was unlikely that Henrique would be in mathematical contention after this race anyway, but at least with this race going ahead, he still has a mathematical chance of being 2007 champion. Finally, there is the same problem there was in 1976: the TV broadcasters. F1 is broadcast around the world on a huge variety of channels, some free-to-air, some cable, some subscription based, a handful even online, and all of that means that there are a lot of people to keep happy. It would be basically impossible to reschedule this race for another day, especially with China coming up next weekend. I mean think about it, say we raced on Monday, that would mean we had Tuesday to fly everything over to Shanghai and get set up for the Wednesday deadline. A race has to be held and this is the only time we could realistically hold the race; therefore, we're going ahead despite the weather. The only consolation for me is that, based on my performance in the Nürburgring, I can handle myself in extreme conditions. Hopefully this holds true here in the Far East as well.
The safety car ended up leading the race for a monumental nineteen laps, during which, Ferrari's title aspirations took a bit of a nosedive. Ferrari, realizing that the safety car was going to be out for a long time, at least until the track dried up enough that it was deemed safe, decided to be clever and ran the ordinary wet Bridgestone compound tyres rather than the extreme wets which everyone else was running. Well, the FIA caught on and ordered both Ferraris to pit under safety car and switch onto the same tyres as everyone else, citing safety grounds. The end result of this is, with the race about to begin, I had two scarlet cars behind me. I didn't have to be a genius to tell you they were going to be starting fast. Fortunately, I had one final lap to prepare myself as the SC turned off its yellow lightbar and began its drive back to the pits, Anthony Harrison becoming the effective SC in the meantime.
First it was turn one, twenty-two cars negotiating the hairpin in calm order before heading through the slightest of kinks in the form of turn two. Turn three was another fast corner, but a more substantial one, especially here in the wet, where the left-hander heading out into the first of the circuit's two humps was actually a bit of a treacherous and trickery corner. Turns four and five, both to the right, formed the hump itself, with the exit of five plunging us down into the second hairpin on the track: turn six. The kink at turn seven straightened the cars back up, before the fast right-hand kinks at turns eight and nine brought us to the top of the circuit's second hump. It was then a heavy braking zone - in these wet safety conditions as well, mainly to avoid running into the car ahead and running both of your races - which immediately led into a chicane formed by turns eleven and twelve. The exit of twelve pointed us towards the final corner, but there was one final detour to negotiate first. It was right at turn thirteen into a tiny little infield section. Then it was left through turns fourteen and fifteen, forming the corner called Netz, before finally returning to the main circuit at the final corner: turn sixteen. A hairpin to the right, the final corner deposited us onto the main straight. It was a long main straight too, taking up the whole length of the track, and that meant I was both vulnerable to cars behind and a threat to cars ahead as the safety car pulled into the pitlane and we began the long drive down to the first corner. Everyone was waiting to see when Harrison would punch it, but the American was a smart kid, and in the style of another American, Mario Andretti, he was going to orchestrate the restart with intelligence as well as raw speed. Anthony wanted to give himself the shortest run to turn one as possible while also catching the cars behind off-guard and wreaking havoc on the competition. Unfortunately for us, that's exactly what he did.
Anthony started late and caught the chasing cars off-guard. Here at the back of the grid, the results were chaotic, with reactions ranging to preemptive to just on time to delayed, and we had more of the straight to deal with than anyone else. My reaction was pretty good overall, but I took it cautious into turn one. I figured that there were a lot of cars around me, there was a lot of spray in the air, and there was still a significant amount of race left, so the best thing to do for now would be to survive and, once conditions start looking better, I could figure out what to do next. I would never get the chance though, because Louis Sanderson tagged me from behind and spun me out. The Super Aguri was able to continue, but I found myself beached on the outside kerb of turn one facing the track, with disastrous results. Henrique de Matteo came through, blinding by the spray, and his left front wheel struck by front wing. This left Matteo with some minor damage and a few panicked radio messages about the state of his tyres, but I found myself stuck with a broken wing and no way of continuing the race.
"I'm stuck and there's damage to the car. I think I need to shut it off...sorry guys." I said holding the radio button, sure that I was coming across as sad and a bit breathless, a rather understandable state of being, given the circumstances.
"Right, right. Not your fault. Turn the engine off and get out of the car. Get behind the barrier as soon as you can, and the marshals will find a way for you to get back to the pits." Peter responded, sounding just as sad as well, but also understanding my condition. Really, what could I do here? Even if I could get a push to get off the kerb, I would have to get all the way around to the pits for a front wing change, and at that point, I'll probably be two laps down. I think I probably could've been fairly competitive in the wet once I got some rhythm going, but I doubt I would be able to overcome a two-lap deficit. So, for only the third time this year, but, concerningly, for the second race in succession, I had to retire from the race. Furthermore, I had to deal with the guilt that I indirectly ruined a championship contender's chances of staying in the fight. I know it's not my fault - I wouldn't necessarily fall it Louis' fault either, the conditions were crazy, the circumstances were crazy, and I did probably brake a bit early to be cautious while Louis was on the attack, hoping to get something out of Super Aguri's home race - but still, it's not a good feeling when my car is the one that the championship underdog crashes into on his last possible opportunity to stay in the mix.
In any case, the points-paying results of the 2007 Japanese Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
2: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
4: Daniel MacGowan - United Kingdom - Red Bull-Renault.
5: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Renault.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
7: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber.
8: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Spyker-Ferrari.
So, Anthony Harrison took yet another tremendous win, the American clearly eager to end any rumblings of him having a slump in the second half of the season. True to their word, the FIA did not allow any McLaren team staff on the podium, nor did present a trophy to the winning constructor. Anthony now had a 12-point lead over Felipe Alvarez and a massive 17-point lead over Matti Hamalainen with just two races remaining, meaning the maximum number of points a driver could score was twenty. This meant that, barring catastrophe, Harrison will win the title in China, taking the championship in his rookie year. Even if he doesn't, it would take an awful race at Interlagos to open the door to either of his rivals at this stage. Alvarez had no one to blame but himself, aquaplaning off the track and bringing out a second safety car. Henrique de Matteo could blame me or Sanderson, truly, but he was a longshot for the championship to begin with, and now, it's not even possible for him to win it. Thus, four became two as we went into the Chinese and Brazilian Grand Prix. More on Henrique in a moment, but elsewhere on the grid, Renault had a tremendous race, scoring a huge haul of points that pretty much makes it impossible for us to take third off of them. Renault has, to thank, an Umberto Petronelli who has finally cracked his pointless streak, an honor which he shares with Daniel MacGowan, who has also scored for the first time in awhile. Conversely, Victor Hartmann failed to score - and actually retired - for the first time in a very long time. His BMW Sauber teammate, meanwhile, had the unfortunate honor of being overtaken by Matteo in the last corner on the very last lap. Unlucky for the talented Pole, but a small blessing for the Brazilian after a chaotic weekend. I approached Henrique after the race, as the teams were packing up.
"Hey Henrique, I know we don't really talk much, but I have to apologize for what happened in turn one. I couldn't move anywhere, and I couldn't do anything other than cringe as I saw your car barge into mine. Sorry." I told the Brazilian, rambling just a bit as I dealt with this awkward apology.
"Eh, don't worry about it. The championship...I probably wouldn't have been champion anyway." Henrique responded, the Brazilian showing some maturity as he revealed that he wasn't particularly optimistic about his chances to begin with. I did appreciate the fact that the Ferrari man was trying to be pretty positive about all of this. Henrique took his hat off and swept his hair back with his hand, some exhaustion and disappointment showing on his face. It should be noted that Matteo survived our incident in turn one and even overtook Piotr Kaminski in the final corner of the final lap. This means that, for the entire race, Henrique has been throwing around a damaged car and doing it at tremendous speed too, climbing all the way up to sixth. Combine this with the fact that Matteo had twenty less laps to do this compared with a usual race, and I could see why he felt the way that he did. Henrique de Matteo did everything he could, he gave a champion's drive this race, and even though it didn't work out this time, I think it's safe to say his time will come. Satisfied that the Brazilian wasn't blaming me for what happened, I decided that I was going to go find Lorenzo and congratulate him. The Uruguayan took advantage of a crazy race and scored Spyker's first point. I had a bad race, Tommy had a bad race, but my friend in the orange and black team had a pretty good race, the best race of us three certainly.
"...so, I finished fourth in the first race." Natasha told me over the phone as I was laying down in my hotel room in Shanghai, having flown out of Japan last night after the race, I then slept half the day here, and now it was Monday afternoon. That was a rather substantial time difference compared to midday Monday in Monaco, where my cousin was. She was telling me about her races in the penultimate weekend of Italian Formula Three.
"And the second race?" I asked, realizing that this was going to be big. There was a reason why Nat wasn't telling me both results at once, no, I knew how her brain worked, and that meant that she must have done something pretty tremendous.
"Well...pole and win." I could practically hear her smirking. The Kyrgyzstani seventeen-year-old was on a great run of form in the national series: she finished fourth and fourth in both races at Varano - held while I was racing in Belgium - and followed that up with a third consecutive third place at Vallelunga, before taking a dominant pole position and win at the track north of Rome. She has already won once in this series, winning the second race at the first Mugello weekend, but what she has done since then has just been on another level. Second Mugello weekend: 3rd and 3rd with a bonus point for fastest lap, 4th and 4th at Varano, and then 4th and 1st at Vallelunga with a bonus point for a pole position. Nat was on top of the world right now and I could tell that she was excited about the prospect of jumping up to GP2 Asia, getting to race in the same series where I had my breakout year, and getting to race for a team run by someone we know and trust. It was a good place to be right now: she would be safe and supported, and she would be given every opportunity to present herself in the best light possible.
"Nat that's amazing!" was my eloquent response. I admit it was a bit of unchecked happiness, but I was allowed to be happy for my family.
"Yeah...I watched the F1 race too. Sorry that it went that way." Nat sounded a little bit guilty over bragging about her own results while I've had, for all intents and purposes, a nightmare weekend. I really did put together my best qualifying performance of the year only for an unscheduled engine change to take that away from me, and then I got taken out in turn one anyway. I suppose it's better to have the fresh engine for China and Brazil rather than to potentially retire while running well in one of those races thanks to a dodgy engine, but I won't deny that it hurts. That being said, none of that is Natasha's fault, and she is allowed to be happy, furthermore, I'm happy for her. She was nothing to be guilty over.
"Don't be, celebrate your result. I've had more than enough good luck this year, I can't get too upset over a little bit of bad luck." I responded, referring to the fact that I've managed to luck my way into two podiums this year, one of which I only got on the last corner thanks to Martin Weaver catching a bit of wet tarmac off of the racing line. I have plenty to celebrate and plenty to feel happy about, I'm not going to let one unfortunate retirement get me down, even if it did come on the back of another issue. I am slightly concerned that I had a terminal gearbox issue at Belgium and then had to change the engine in practice at the very next race, but we've been rock solid for the entire middle bit of the season, so maybe it's not too bad, just two unfortunate events that happened to strike in rapid succession.
"What does this mean in terms of the Renault situation though?" Natasha asked, adding a dimension to this failure that I hadn't even thought about.
"Well...they've definitely proven that they're faster than us, they're nineteen points ahead of us and, realistically, they're going to clinch third in China. It's not a great moment for Williams, but it also doesn't take away from the great moments I've had with Williams. It's also a thing where...I can't imagine looking at Peter, Michael, and Frank and telling them that I'm going to break my contract and go to Renault. I don't think I have to heart to do that, but I know now that Renault is better, and everything suggests that they're going to have a better 2008 too...in short, the situation is exactly the same. I don't know what to do and I feel there is a really good case for both. I feel like I should be loyal to Williams but I also think that, as an ambitious racing driver, I should be targeting Renault. It's a frustrating place to be." I responded, spelling out my situation and the turmoil I was feeling right now. I don't want to be insulting, but quite frankly, there is a certain scummy feeling that Bernardo Fulvia gives off, and I can't help but think that going with him and leaving Williams would be a scummy move. A turn to the Dark Side, if you will. I know it's probably just judging someone unfairly and that I don't really know enough about him to make a proper judgement, but that's the emotional feeling I have about it. On the other hand, objectively, Renault seems to be the better team right now. I don't know what the right answer is and I'm not sure what I can do here without the benefit of hindsight. Like I keep getting back to: nobody knows what will really happen in Formula One.
"It's just Williams and Renault right now, right?" Natasha asked, trying to get a full grasp of the situation.
"As far as I know, yes. Bernardo did mention that some teams might be interested to me but it sounds like something for the future rather than something imminent." I answered. Fulvia did say that a lot of teams would be interested in my services come 2010, 2011, but for 2008? It seemed like it was either going to be here or over in Enstone. Now, it could be that Bernardo is trying to make himself seem like the most appealing option, but I did think there was at least some truth to that. The fact of the matter is that most F1 teams aren't well placed to imminently respond to young talent: the most obvious obstacle is long-term contracts, but you also have to consider sponsorship agreements of even nationality demands. One example of the latter category is Super Aguri, which was created with the express purpose of being a Japanese-owned team with Japanese engines and Japanese drivers. Now, due to some shocking performances from Japanese drivers, Honda eventually decided on Louis Sanderson as a second driver, but even now, he's still partnering Haruki Tanaka, the popular BAR Honda driver who Honda dropped, but wanted to keep in the sport. Needless to say, there isn't exactly a huge demand for Kazakh drivers in Formula One. In fact, the only sponsor that seems interested in that is Kazakhoil, which gets me to the awkward and uncomfortable contract situation that I'm trying to get out of.
"Well, you are young, why rush it? Maybe stay with Williams for 2008, maybe even 2009, and then take advantage of the interest on you then? You might even be able to get a chance with Renault then." Natasha pointed out. Hmm. I wonder if that would work. She does have a point in that I'm nineteen, I have plenty of career ahead of me, so even if my next goal is to take a win, am I really losing out if I don't throw myself into a potentially race winning car at the earliest opportunity? Hell, if I wait a few years, I might be able to impress more teams and potentially even get interest from a better team than Renault. If Bernardo is as interested in me as he says he is, I wonder if he would accept running Umberto Petronelli for another year as a stopgap while I see out my deal with Williams. I think I would feel better and more honest about the whole situation that way. Of course, it is a big ask, and if Renault don't want me quite as much as they say they do, it could blow up in my face. Alternatively, they might see the next rising star and lose interest in me. Though, if I don't have my heart set on a move to Renault, does it really matter? Nat's words are a small comfort, but all they really do is produce more questions for me to grapple with.
"I mean, I think I could - hang on, I'll call you back." I was responding to Natasha when I heard the sound of someone else calling. I checked the caller ID and saw it was my dad finally calling me back, so I hung up on Nat for the time being and switched to his call "Dad?"
"Hello 'Mara, I got your message, what do you - " my father, Anatoliy began before I interrupted him.
"Where have you been?!" I demanded. I called my dad over a week ago, I was in Monaco when I called him, and he was acting nonchalant about the fact that he was just responding to my call now, when I was in China, after I've already raced the Japanese Grand Prix.
"Tamara I've been busy. A business associate of mine, Vito Francese, died, and now his brother wants to sell the company. They were one of the biggest shipping companies in the Italian industrial triangle. I can double the size of the company with this." my father explained, revealing end goal. My father has done some business in Italy, of course, but Genoa has tended to be the limit of his business, with the Francese brothers often being the ones to pick up my father's cargo and take it to Torino or Milano, the other two cities in the Italian industrial triangle. These three cities are the heart and soul of the Italian economy and yeah, I can see how this can be important to my father's company, but is it really so important that he ignored me, ignored my career? I've finally got to Formula One and now I'm attracting major interest from a team that just won the championship, I need my agent at my side, and if my father can't do that for me, he needs to step aside.
"So that makes it okay to ignore me?" I challenged, making it clear that I wasn't buying the idea that this deal kept him from helping me through all this.
"Look, the point is that I'm here now. What do you need to know?" my father asked, trying to skip the argument and get right to the point. For a moment I thought about bringing us back down into the mud of this argument, but I dismissed that thought, figuring it wouldn't do much for me other than to serve as a cathartic release, and I needed something a bit more practical than that right now.
"What does my contractual situation with Williams look like?" I asked, getting down to the specifics of the issue, knowing that this whole will I, won't I? thing with Renault only really begins if it is possible to get me out of this contract. Bernardo seems to think the contract won't be an obstacle at all, but I would prefer it to be the case that I got out of the deal peacefully and harmoniously rather than tearing up a legitimate deal or having Renault do a hostile buyout of my contract. Even if I was going to leave Williams, which I am by no means certain of right now, I wasn't going to to do so belligerently. I wouldn't leave Williams in such a way that results in any bruised egos or hurt feelings. Actually living up to those values is easier said than done, but that's what I want out of this potential transfer situation.
"Well, that's a bit of a problem Tamara. If you remember, you didn't feel confident about the Williams deal at all and you instructed me to accept whatever deal got your foot in the door. You didn't want to do anything that would potentially scare them off with difficult negotiations or anything like that. All of that is to say that we agreed to a pretty strong deal with Williams, and there aren't very many ways for you to break out of it unless you want to pay Williams for the damages. There's also the fact that we have Kazakhoil to consider, and they might demand damages too if we try and break out of their arrangement with Williams. In short, from what I see, there really isn't a way to keep this as clean as you might like." my father explained, clearly looking over a copy of my contract by now. Hmm, so he at least does care about my career enough to keep a copy of my contract in his office, but if that's the case, why doesn't he show it better? I also wasn't crazy with what he was saying to me. That being said, I couldn't exactly get angry with him, because I knew that he was right: I was the one that agreed to this deal, and I wanted this deal in particular because I felt like Williams was taking out a chance on a young kid. I didn't want to do anything that might offend Williams because I felt like that might be the type of thing that could bury my contract. Of course, now, when I'm more comfortable in Formula One and have developed confidence, the deal I once made now felt like a dumb mistake and a significant hindrance. I sat there thinking with a mopey expression while my dad added "I'm assuming you're asking because someone's interested, can I ask who?"
"What? Oh...right. Bernardo Fulvia and Simon Horton. They're from Renault. They want me for 2008 on a three-year deal. I wouldn't need Kazakhoil anymore either." I snapped back to focus and gave my father the information he needed to know. A resentful part of me still wanted to make a quip about how he would know all this if he were simply there for me when it mattered, but I held my tongue for now, because at least he was starting to help me. A few moments of listening to paper rustling and pen scribbling later, I heard my dad again "Okay, do you have Bernardo's number?"
"Yup," I responded and then read the number off from the business card I received at our little Monaco sit-down.
"Okay good. I'm going to call Bernardo and find out what he wants to do with all of this. Do you want me to call Williams too or are you planning something else with that team?" my father asked, revealing that he was going to have his own business-focused, more financial conversation with the Renault man as well, before asking what I was going to do when it comes to the team I'm with right now, which also happens to be the team I'm supposed to be with for 2008.
"Nothing for now, I don't want Williams to know yet. I don't want to cause problems with Williams unless we know that we're going to go ahead with this. Keep focused on Renault for now and we'll figure out the Williams side of things if we need to." I decided. I didn't want to be in a situation where Williams found out that I was being courted by Renault and actually talked to them, only to decide to stay with Williams and have to deal with that for the entirety of 2008. It would be immensely awkward to have to go back to Williams with everyone thinking that I tried to leave and don't want to be there anymore. That's why this situation is so stressful for me, because I want to be with the team that gave me my chance and I want to show how grateful I am to Williams for bringing me into F1, but I also want to win races soon and I want to be able to escape being a Kazakhoil paydriver. Renault is offering me the chance to escape Kazakhoil, they're more likely to be a winning team, and they're giving me a long and safe deal that won't have me wondering whether or not I'll still be in F1 next year. Up until Canada, there was no guarantee that I was going to pass that performance evaluation, and really it wasn't until the end of the European season that I started feeling safe in my own skin in this sport. I now feel confident that I'm going to be able to stay with Williams for 2008 regardless of what happens, but I didn't have that confidence earlier this year. I don't want any more possible deals after this, I want something concrete, and I never again want to be in a position like I was in 2006 where I sign a deal that is so heavily weighted for the team.
"Very well. I talk to Renault and see what the situation is. You're in China right now, right?" my father asked once he knew what was going on, trying to reach out to me in a more casual way. I raised an eyebrow over the phone, silently questioning the fact that my dad felt now was the best time to try and reinsert himself into my career, after I've made clear that I'm upset with him for not being a part of it. It seemed like my dad didn't really want to address the fact that what he did was wrong and that he could have done better, but he was here now trying to do better. Once again though, I decided that the best thing to do for now was to accept the fact he was giving me help and to answer his question. I was well aware of the fact that I could still fight him and be perfectly justified in doing so, I was also well aware of the fact that we may still have plenty of blow-out arguments over this, but for now, it seemed like the path of least resistance was to just work with my dad and figure out what to do for 2008.
"Yes, I'm in Shanghai. Two races left on the calendar after I had my little incident at Fuji. I'm hoping that I get to finish strong." I explained, now seriously making an effort to talk to my father. We weren't good, not yet anyway, but if he was going to give me an olive branch, I might as well give him a chance. Even if I wanted to keep arguing with him or distance myself from him, he's still my father, so it's not like I could ever really cut him out of my life. I could never talk to my father again, but he'd still be my father. Hell, in Russian, my full name is Tamara Anatoliyevna Shchegolyayeva, meaning that in an entire part of the world, it's impossible to escape the fact that he's my dad. Yes, he left me feeling alone and without guidance during that acquisition process, yes, I do not feel like a business deal is a valid excuse for his actions, but he's making an effort now to fix things, and I could at very least appreciate that.
"Well, good luck in the race. I'll make time to watch it, I promise." my father responded. I've heard these kinds of things before, I believe I've even heard those exact words before and been disappointed, but for some reason, I felt like it was genuine this time. Maybe I'm being misguided about this, maybe not, only time will tell. I'm in a hotel room in China talking to someone in Europe on a phone, the only thing I can go off of is the sound of his voice and my perception of that.
"Thank you." I responded, hoping that he really did find the time to make the race. It sounds like the deal is just about over, Goliath Logistics will be expanding into northern Italy and buying up the Francese's company, and hopefully the result of that is that my dad won't be so busy anymore, he won't be dumping all of his time into something which doesn't involve me. Of course, it's entirely possible that things will remain exactly the same, but I can't guarantee that any more than I could guarantee that things are going to get any better. For now, I had to be satisfied with the fact that my father was inserting himself into the situation again while turning my focus to the Chinese Grand Prix. We would race at the Shanghai International Circuit and then, two weeks later, it would be time for the season finale in Brazil.
It was another wet and cloudy day as the cars gathered on the grid for the Chinese Grand Prix, but conditions weren't nearly as bad as they were at Fuji Speedway. Hence, rather than my car sitting there on the jacks with wet tyres on them, it was just the immediate compound, which could handle a little bit of water but, in reality, was the tyre to use as the track was drying out. That should tell you enough about what we thought was going to happen: we left like dry weather was right around the corner. There was another thing which set the Chinese Grand Prix apart from the Japanese Grand Prix, and indeed most of the races I've had this season. The fact that I've outqualified Tommy Koskinen today, starting in fourteenth to his fifteenth. I was barely ahead of him, but when I've outqualified Tommy a grand total of once this year, the fact that I was lining up just a place ahead of Tommy meant I quite literally doubled my tally. I have no shame in admitting that I'm better in the race than I am in qualifying, but it still feels shameful to have been outqualified fourteen times out of sixteen, so yeah, I was going to be happy about being a place ahead. That being said, I would have loved it if these positions were a bit higher up the grid, because these starting positions meant that we had a little bit more work to do before we could score points. Work which was only really going to grow more dangerous and more difficult here in the wet conditions.
Further up the grid, it was Anthony Harrison on pole, coming closer to taking a champion than any American other than Phil Hill and Mario Andretti, the two Americans who have actually won the title. All Anthony had to do was finish within one point of Felipe and within six points of Matti and he'd be champion, because if he would accomplish both of those, he'd have an eleven-point lead with ten points left on the board. Anthony already had one hand on the championship and, with him on pole, his rivals would be fighting to stay in mathematical contention, let alone winning it. The McLaren man was followed by the two Ferraris, Matti Hamalainen ahead of Henrique de Matteo, with Felipe Alvarez lining up in fourth. The Spaniard, who was also known as more of a racer than a qualifier, had a knack for keeping himself in this championship battle, but, at the same time, he also seemed to have a knack for making it as hard for himself as possible. The Renaults were out of position, which should have been a good thing for us, but we had to look behind us rather than forward thanks to the fact that the Red Bulls managed to lineup fifth and seventh. The Red Bulls were the best placed of the midfield contending teams, and that meant that, rather than trying to focus on doing the impossible and closing up to Renault, we were now more concerned with making sure that Red Bull stayed behind us. It was perhaps more important to maintain fourth in the constructors', than it was to desperately compete for third. Renault basically put themselves out of reach in Japan, and now Red Bull was threatening to put us back into their reach. It was defense rather than offense on the agenda as twenty-two cars rolled off the grid to start the 2007 Chinese Grand Prix.
It was an orderly start at the very front of the grid and it was an orderly start for us, but in between, there was some significant action. Giuseppino Leone of all people got a brilliant start from eleventh and overtook Buxton, Kaminski, and Weaver by the time we entered the snail section. The first corner at China started out as a relatively fast right-hander but progressively ground to a halt as the corner continued and continued, curving in of itself like a snail, and then dropping downhill in such a way that turn three was a hairpin coming out of the snail. Turns four and five were simple kinks heading down to the hairpin at turn six, and that is where Leone made yet another move, passing Victor Hartmann. The Toro Rosso driver was playing the role of giant killer today and that was helping our race, since it meant that Weaver was dropping points. Coming out of the hairpin it was a short straight to open sector two as we entered the best section of this track. Turn seven was a fast left-hander sweeping through the infield of the circuit, then it was just a dab of the brakes as we swung back through turn eight to complete the S, dabbing the brakes again in these wet conditions to makes sure that I hit the second apex. Turn nine slowed things right down as we turned to the left, but slowing down here was actually the right decision, since that meant that we could go quickly through turn ten, unleashing the speed as we emerged onto the infield straight, completing sector two.
Turn eleven was a hard braking zone, almost hairpin like in some ways, that took us to the left, then it was to the right through turn twelve as we entered the second snail section. Turn thirteen was an exciting corner in the dry, since it was a test of putting down as much speed as possible to slingshot onto the massively long back straight, but in these wet conditions, it was treacherous, and everyone around me seemed to be negotiating it carefully. In these conditions, the back straight was a breather, since it was really the only place where you could relax on a slippery track like this. That being said, knowing what was coming, I was sure that I wasn't the only one worried about aquaplaning. There was a little bit of fear as I hit the brakes for the turn fifteen hairpin, but the tyres found some grip in the wetness and managed to get me stopped, so I negotiated the corner as well as the slightest bit of a kink that was turn fifteen. The pitlane entry was directly ahead but twenty-two cars instead turned fast to the left, getting as close to the kerb as we dared, flinging the car back onto the start-finish straight and driving beneath the monumental grandstand structure here at the Shanghai International Circuit. One lap down, fifty-five to go.
The track really started to dry up around lap twenty, and on lap twenty-two, the team called me into the pitlane for my first stop, switching me onto the prime tyres for what we were hoping would be a long middle stint - wet conditions meant that we wouldn't have to use both dry compounds, so theoretically, we would only need to stop for fuel if conditions stayed as they were - and while I lost positions due to the stop, I exited the pitlane with the fastest tyres out of anyone on the circuit. I immediately started regaining positions as I overtook slow cars which were still on the intermediates, and cars ahead of me started to cut their losses and stop as well. By the start of lap twenty-six, I was running as high as eleventh, having already regained what I lost with my stop and then some. There was, however, the elephant in the room: all our speed right now was down to being on the right tyre at the right time, our real pace is still only really good enough for the area around fourteenth and fifteenth, right where we qualified. That fact became very evident at the end of that lap when James Buxton overtook me into the hairpin.
I tried to fight the Honda, braking late, then coming off the brake for a second for position, and then braking again to properly slow down, but it was no use, Buxton had me. I tucked in behind the Earth-painted car and tried to see what I could do to regain the position, but my hands were tied at the end of the lap, since there were double-waved yellows here thanks to the fact that Lorenzo, who spun out trying to enter the pitlane, sliding backwards into the wall. I was stopped from regaining eleventh, and after that, all I could do was watch as Buxton slowly but surely pulled away from me. I hate to say it because Lorenzo is my friend, but his crash stopped me from possibly retaking my position in the draft down the main straight. Of course there is no guarantee that I would've succeeded in that anyway, but the chance to fight for it was taken away from me by those yellow flags. Well, much more consequentially, Lorenzo wasn't the only one to crash on pit entry, because on lap thirty-one, the championship battle was turned upside down. Lorenzo's one time Formula 3 Euro teammate, Anthony Harrison, beached his McLaren in the gravel trap after the corner in the pit entrance. Anthony has had a tremendous, tremendous first season, but here in Shanghai, he faced his first retirement of the season. The American could have won the championship today, but instead, for the first time in Formula One, Anthony wasn't going to see the checkered flag.
It was a position gain for me - albeit not one I necessarily wanted, since it's hard to see a championship contender, a good guy who I genuinely like, retire like that - but not one that helped me out much. I would have to pit again for fuel and, indeed, tyres, because I just wasn't getting the pace I needed out of these worn out option tyres, and that meant I yet again lost positions. Only this time, I didn't have the perfect combination of tyres and timing to propel me beyond the limits of the car. So, at the end of the day, I only managed to finish twelfth. Now, twelfth was still an improvement from where I started, and it's a good place to be when my teammate is down in sixteenth and two laps down from the leaders, but it still hurts to fail to score points in a race with so many retirements from cars ahead of me. Fortunately for us though, Red Bull bottled this race too, only managing to convert their fifth and seventh place starts into a single point. Somehow though, I don't think the energy company will be too upset about that, because surprising everyone, Toro Rosso took a downright massive points haul from the Chinese Grand Prix.
That brings us to the points-paying results of the 2007 Chinese Grand Prix, which read as follows:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
2: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
3: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari.
5: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda.
6: Giuseppino Leone - Italy - Toro Rosso-Ferrari.
7: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
8: Daniel MacGowan - Great Britain - Red Bull-Renault.
So, at a race where Anthony Harrison could've sealed the championship, instead, it was effectively the worst-case scenario for him: Matti and Felipe finishing first and second. Anthony came into this race with a twelve-point lead over Felipe and a seventeen-point over Matti, those leads were now down to four points and seven points, respectively. Harrison still had a good chance of winning the 2007 World Championship, but Felipe and Matti have really good momentum. The fact that Henrique de Matteo took a rather dominant pole and win at Interlagos last year would also suggest that Ferrari should be rather strong at the Brazilian Grand Prix, which might give Matti a fighting chance, but he would need to win with Anthony scoring three points or less. Three points would result in a tie, but Matti has more wins, so he would win on countback. As for Felipe, with a four-point gap to Anthony, the clearest route to victory I can see for him would be for him to win, the Ferraris to take second and third, and for Anthony to be down in fourth or lower. It's six points for third so I believe that Felipe and Anthony would be tied in the event that Felipe won, and Anthony finished third, and Brazil would be a fifth win to Anthony's four wins, so theoretically, Felipe could also win on countback.
The BMW Saubers could also be a factor in the title decider, because, despite same bad luck lately, their pace has been very impressive. Piotr Kaminski was briefly in the lead after Harrison retired, only for the Pole to be denied a maiden win for himself, his team, and his country by a technical failure. The Pole didn't win and that opened the way up for Hamalainen to take his fifth win of the season, but the fact that someone other than McLaren or Ferrari was able to lead a race - in far more legitimately circumstances than Andreas Wilhelmus' brief lead at the Nürburgring - should be a warning shot going into the 2008 season. This has been a very tight title battle, but it's been a season dominated by McLaren and Ferrari, so what the 2008 season really could use is some other teams getting involved in the title-fight. No one is complaining about three drivers going into a title-decider, but hey, it could be nice to get some more variety up there. Of course, it would be nice if Williams was up there, making it a battle between F1's historic big three teams: Ferrari, McLaren, and Williams, but that doesn't seem too likely to happen for 2008. I'd love to be wrong, of course, but I'd be rather surprised if we had anything to do with the 2008 title fight.
"So Tamara," asked George Tarantano of Speed Channel USA as I found myself in the media pen after the race "How do you feel about your rookie season in F1 with just one race remaining?"
"Pretty good actually. I have some good results on the board, I'm two points ahead of my teammate, and even if we didn't score points today, I'm glad to have at least finished the race after a pair of retirements. Going into Brazil, it would be nice to finish the season with some points but, even if we can't do that, I think we can be pretty happy with our performance and start working towards 2008." I answered, smiling as I spoke. I really did feel good about my season and, even though I didn't score points today, I was back in the consistent area I should be at. If I'm not in the points, I'm just a couple of places off of them, so yeah, not too bad. Tommy had a really good, really consistent run to open the second half of the season and I do wish I had a run like that, but I've also done well enough during that period to still be ahead of him at the end of it. Ideally, I'd like to do well enough in Brazil to finish out the season ahead of him, giving the team no choice but to keep me around for 2008. What I would really like is to put myself in a first driver position, so that suddenly, when Toyota pushes for Hideki Kitagawa to get a drive, they aren't aiming to put him in my seat, rather, they'll be aiming to put him in Tommy's seat.
"Alright, thank you Tamara. Good luck in Brazil." George responded, the American reporter concluding the interview. Some TV crews traveled out to the races, some did not, in the case of the Americans, they commentated the races from their studio in Connecticut, I believe, with Tarantano being the only member of the team actually on site, traveling to each of the races. Their whole team did come out for the race at Indianapolis, but that was a unique thing, being the only American F1 race at America's most famous motorsport venue. I guess the coverage was a result of the fact that Formula One wasn't as big in the US as it was in Europe, so the TV coverage wasn't as extensive, but who knows, maybe the presence of Anthony Harrison can change that.
"Thank you." I responded, enjoying his interviews. Most interviews I had to deal with were rather dry and boring, but I tended to enjoy the ones from George and from Katherine Symmons for whatever reason, and well, of course, from Roksana as well. Speaking of the Portuguese-born Ukrainian, I have two weeks until the Brazilian Grand Prix, so I'll finally have the chance to get back to Europe and see her again. Furthermore, with my dad mostly down with the acquisition and finally talking to me again, I might see him again as well. It wasn't my best run of races here on the late season flyaway rounds, but there were still some positives to take out of it, and I felt pretty good about myself as I began the long flight home.
Notes:
One more chapter for the 2007 season. I hope you're excited!
Ciao!
Chapter 10: Grande Premio do Brasil 2007
Notes:
Alright everyone, here we go, the end of the 2007 season!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter X.
Grande Premio do Brasil 2007.
"So, does Toyota know you drive an Alfa?" Roksana asked as we drove down the Cote d'Azur with the roof down in my little blue Alfa Spider. It was mid-October, but there is a reason why this part of the world is so popular: the weather stays pretty nice for a long while. Sure, there are definitely days where there's a cold sea breeze and the mountains are covered in snow in such a way that reminds you that they really are an arm of the Alps, but right on the coast near Monaco? The weather tends to be nice. Hence the two of us cruising down the coastal road with the Mediterranean wind in our hair.
"Well, they didn't offer me a company car, so I figure they don't need me in one of their cars." I responded with an arrogant smirk, jokingly trying to appear bigger than I really am. There is an element of truth to it though. Toyota never gave me a car - other than a rental at some of the flyaway races - nor did they make it clear that there was some sort of expectation that I drive one of their cars. Therefore, I took it upon myself to buy my first car, and I decided that I wanted a little Italian sports car with a V6 engine and all-wheel drive. Toyota doesn't make one of those. So, I wasn't giving much love to the Toyota end of the Williams-Toyota partnership with my car, but I was giving a subtle nod to Williams, with the blue color of the car deliberately chosen to match up with my team.
"Did you ask for one?" Roksana asked, more out of curiosity than anything.
"I didn't. I dunno, maybe it's just me but I don't feel comfortable going up to one of the few Toyota guys I know and asking them to give me a car. Truth be told, I don't even know if they provide cars to their own drivers, let alone us Williams drivers." I responded. I saw Ivan Tripoli and Roland Ziegler on track quite a bit, but they weren't necessarily people I was close to. Ziegler is an older guy, like a generation or two of drivers separated from me, and the only way we really interact is when it comes to some of the Grand Prix Drivers' Association stuff, and that's mostly because he's the President and I opted to become a member. As for Tripoli, while not quite as old as Roland, he's still not really part of my generation. Formula One is seeing a whole new generation of drivers coming in, symbolized by guys like Anthony Harrison, Jyri Kaasalainen, Maximilian Renner, and Lorenzo Barbaro. I consider myself to be part of this new generation - mainly since a lot of us were on the very same F3 Euro grid in 2005 - and Tommy is probably part of this generation too. Generational gaps aren't that extreme in a sport where the oldest drivers tend to be under-40, and they are by no means insurmountable, but they are very much a thing. A big dividing line lately is the whole V10 thing, since 2005 was the last season with those engines before the switch to V8s in 2006. Drivers in my generation never drove a V10 car, whereas Roland spent the bulk of his career with V10 machinery, and Ivan Tripoli famously took his one and only career win with a V10 Renault at the 2004 Monaco Grand Prix. Anyway, the point is that I respect those guys and I'll give them a polite greeting every once in awhile, but they aren't really guys I talk to enough to know whether or not they get company cars. Besides, the both of them have been in F1 for long enough that I sincerely doubt they'll need them, so even if they do get cars, it's solely a promotion for Toyota thing.
"Well, if you had to pick a Toyota, what would you get?" Roksana asked, the blonde smirking at me with her sunglasses over her gray eyes.
"Why are you asking? Does the wagon have an issue I don't know about?" I teased, wondering if she wanted a company car less for me and more for herself. I doubted it was true, Roksana seemed happy with her Peugeot, but come on, I had to tease her.
"Oh, come on, don't be like that. I'm just curious. You're a race car driver, don't you like talking about cars?" Roksana countered with some teasing of her own, pointing out that trying to get the best car was kind of part of my job, now perhaps more than ever before.
"Huh...I don't know. Toyota isn't exactly a flashy, desirable brand, is it? Can I count Lexus?" I asked, finding it hard to get excited about the idea of picking out my own Toyota when I was already in a position where I could drive my comfortable Alfa down the French Riviera with my girlfriend at my side. That is, quite frankly, what most people on the planet would consider the good life, whereas Toyota occupies more of the economical, sensible segment.
"I don't know how that works. I mean, as far as I can tell, there's isn't a single Lexus logo on either your team or the actual Toyota team. So I guess if the point is promoting the brand, it would have to be a Toyota, no?" Roksana pointed out. Maybe it was a bit of a boring topic to some but I didn't quite know why Toyota wasn't promoting its Lexus brand in Formula One. Maybe Lexus was still too small in the early 2000s when Toyota made the team, maybe Toyota was more interested in promoting its volume sellers than trying to compare its luxury brand to the BMWs, Mercedes, and Ferraris of the world, or maybe it has something to do with Lexus not really having a presence in Japan, where Toyota's shareholders ultimately come from. Then again, there's always the possibility that I'm overthinking this and it's simply because the corporate marketing people within the giant corporation decided not to promote Lexus here.
"I guess so. Do they still make the Celica?" I asked, really not having much Toyota knowledge for someone that puts on a Toyota helmet every other weekend.
"I'm sure that's a question your employers would love to hear." Roksana mocked. I rolled my eyes under my sunglasses but smiled, enjoying this conversation. We were alone, there weren't any cameras or pressure on me - or her for that matter - and I had a beautiful, empty road ahead of me. This might sound a little bit underwhelming coming from a racing driver, but I get enough speeding and cornering from my actual job. When it comes to a casual drive, I like a comfy car, a smooth road with no traffic, and a quiet engine with some hidden depths. To make a long story short, I suppose when it comes to the daily driver, I'd rather have an old-school grand tourer than a track toy. This Alfa doesn't exactly qualify as either, but, for whatever reason, it fits my mold as well.
"Eh, who knows, they might not even be my employers for that much longer." I pointed out. I ignored the fact that Toyota weren't exactly my employers - in fact, I think most of Toyota would rather see Williams drop me so they can place Hideki Kitagawa in my seat - and got the idea of what Roksana was trying to say. I also took the opportunity to push the conversation in a bit more serious of a direction, with the fact that I was still very much in talks with Renault about maybe breaking out of my deal with Williams and going with them for 2008. I didn't want to leave Williams this way and I felt like I would be violating the spirit of the contract even if I don't officially have a two-year deal if I were to leave, however, on the other hand, it seemed like a move to Renault would solve a lot of my problems, beyond just the maybe winning a race thing. First of all, there is the aforementioned fact that I could finally shake Kazakhoil as a sponsor. Second of all, Bernardo Fulvia already seems like he wants to get rid of Umberto Petronelli, so Jyri is going to need a teammate at Renault anyway. I go over there and fill that gap, and that nicely leaves a place at Williams for Hideki Kitagawa. Toyota finally gets the driver they want at Williams while I get to remain in Formula One. It seemed like the neater option for everyone involved, but, of course, Bernardo could have a bit of a slick tongue, so I had my father trying to figure out how exactly Renault thinks they can break my Williams contract smoothly. On top of that, I'm left considering what Tommy Koskinen said to me during the Chinese Grand Prix. Toyota might not want me here, but it sounds like he does, and perhaps more consequentially, I'm getting the idea that Williams also wants me in the seat. Sir Frank Williams has had a few disagreements over drivers with his engine suppliers, which famously led to him losing Honda to McLaren in the late 1980s, and I couldn't help but wonder if I was on the verge of being at the center of one if I remained at Williams like i want to.
"You're still thinking about Renault?" Roksana asked.
"Yes...maybe...I don't know. I want to stay at Williams and there are people that want me to stay here too, but Renault does want me, and they could help me solve a lot of my problems...but is that worth hurting my relationship with the team that gave me my first chance at F1? I'm a teenager and a girl on top of that, Williams didn't need to give me a chance, I certainly wasn't the safest investment, but they did it anyway, it doesn't feel right to betray that. Natasha also seems to think that, based on what Bernardo has said, Renault would still be interested in the future. But what if they take me staying with Williams as a sign that I'm not interested and sign someone else on a long-term deal? I don't know what the right thing to do is." I filled her in on the situation.
"For what it's worth, I'm inclined to agree with Nat. You should tell Renault you'd rather wait a year and if they're not willing to do that, I guess that just means they didn't really want you as much as they said they did afterwards. You shouldn't do something that makes you uncomfortable just because it seems like the thing a racing driver should do. You're your own driver. You don't have to do it the Senna way or the Bernardo Fulvia way, just do things the Tamara way." Roksana reasoned. I thought about teasing her over how cheesy it all sounded, but there was a certain genuine spark to it, and there was good advice at the heart of it.
"Maybe you're right. Natasha ended up telling me something pretty similar."
"Just remember, at the end of the day, it's your choice." she emphasized, making sure that I didn't think she was trying to influence my thinking. I knew she wasn't though, Roksana was a good person and I liked having her in my life.
"Thank you," I smiled, another genuine spark in the conversation.
"Don't mention it. Now...the real question is...what Renault would you have?" Roksana faced me, smirk on her lips, effortlessly sinking back into the jokey mood.
"You're impossible." I laughed. It was a good laugh though, because this was a calm moment, a good moment. The kind of moment I needed before I would gather with twenty-one other drivers on the grid in Sao Paulo for one final race in the 2007 championship. Three drivers vying for the title, me trying to finish strong and stay ahead of my teammate, and plenty of drama between the teams behind us as they all fought for higher positions and more money than they thought was possible, thanks to the fact that McLaren was excluded from the constructors' championship.
The Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace, popularly known as Interlagos, is, for all intents and purposes, a high-speed depression between a pair of artificial lakes. That doesn't sound particularly glamorous, and it probably isn't the grand, Carnaval vision of Brazil that most westerners have, but the circuit really is an amazing thing. The start-finish line lies on the top of a hill, then the Senna S plunges us downhill and Curva do Sol spits us out onto Reta Oposta, heading out to the perimeter of the circuit. Turns four and five, to the left, bring us to the inside of the circuit, heading down on a straight before the fast turns six and seven to the right bring us to the local hills. Turn eight is a hairpin, then turn nine - Pinheirinho - sweeps to the left with the curvature of the land. Another hairpin comes at turn ten and then it's a plunge back downhill to the bottom of the circuit through turn eleven, called Mergulho. A short shoot ends sector two and brings us to Juncao, the last braking zone. After Juncao, it's a full speed blast up the hill to the line, turning left all along as you crest the very earth. From there, it's just a short run to the Senna S to start it all over again. It's a lovely little circuit, a gem on the Formula One calendar, and a natural choice for the finale. The circuit is dramatic, it's the kind of place where you can overtake, but it's also the kind of place where you can really make a car battle. It's the kind of place that's good in the dry and good in the wet, a circuit that can deliver regardless of the conditions, regardless of the cars, and regardless of the drivers involved. All that being said, with three of the very top drivers in the world in the title fight, I doubt they'll disappoint.
In the top seat, there's Anthony Harrison. The young American rookie is looking to do the impossible and win the title in his very first year in Formula One. I say it's impossible, but Anthony has made it the reality, not only that, but he's put himself in the best position possible by coming into this race with a points advantage: four points ahead of Felipe Alvarez, seven points ahead of Matti Hamalainen. Anthony had a nightmare race at China and that's really made this harder for him than it has to be, but he still has the numerical advantage to such a point where all he really needs to do is finish in the upper half of the points.
Things are somewhat harder for Felipe Alvarez, but the Spaniard is the reigning champion for a reason. This is the man who ended the dominance of Wilhelm Ziegler in 2005, holding him back for the entire race on Ferrari's home soil at the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola. This is the man who knew that the McLaren of Matti Hamalainen was the faster car in 2005 but used consistency and reliability to beat the young Finn and put his name in the history books. Not only that, but Alvarez did it again in 2006, holding off a resurgent Ferrari and a Wilhelm Ziegler aiming to win the title in his final season in the sport. Alvarez denied the most successful driver in the sport with the biggest team behind him, and he did all of that with a Renault. Felipe is with McLaren now, a team so giant it pales only to Ferrari itself, and that is the kind of deadly combination that can never, ever be discounted. On the other hand, neither is his 2005 championship rival.
Matias Hamalainen, the Flying Finn. A driver so naturally fast, so absolutely gifted that he was picked up by Sauber after just a couple of car races. McLaren picked him up after just a single year at Sauber, filling the shoes of his countryman in one of the largest teams of the sport. That didn't phase Matti in the slightest, because in 2003, only his third year in the sport, his second with McLaren-Mercedes, he challenged Wilhelm Ziegler for the title, taking it all the way to the final race of the year. Matti challenged again in 2005, taking the fight to Felipe Alvarez only to be let down by the reliability of the McLaren package and especially the Mercedes V10 engine. Now, Hamalainen has signed on to be Ziegler's successor at Ferrari, and he's not going to lose a third time. Matti has the biggest hurdle to overcome, being seven points behind Anthony, but the Finnish driver has made a career out of doing the impossible. I'm not brave enough to count Matti out, even with such a massive deficit to overcome.
So, all of that is to say this: 2007 is going to have a thrilling title-decider, and Interlagos, a venue like no other, will be the host of it.
Henrique de Matteo picked up right from where he left off last year, taking pole position at his home race, the site of his second Grand Prix victory. Anthony Harrison, meanwhile, was doing everything he needed to do to seal the title and then some, qualifying in second, taking a front-row start, and putting himself right ahead of his championship rivals. Felipe Alvarez made sure his teammate had zero breathing room by lining up third, and Matti Hamalainen decided that things were going to be super, super tight by qualifying in fourth. Matti was right there and making sure the two McLaren title-contenders were locked in the middle of a Ferrari sandwich. Perhaps somewhat concerningly, Martin Weaver put his Red Bull-Renault up into fifth, lining up alongside the BMW-Sauber of Victor Hartmann. The German's Polish teammate, Piotr Kaminski was in seventh, Ivan Tripoli put his Toyota up into the final points-paying position of the race in eighth, and Daniel MacGowan put the second Red Bull up into ninth. Tommy Koskinen was lining up alongside the Scotsman in tenth, while I was right behind them in eleventh, not quite outqualifying my teammate but doing the next best thing by being right there with him. Rudolfo Goncalves, Umberto Petronelli, Maximilian Renner, Giuseppino Leone, and Roland Ziegler were the cars that joined me in Q2. Jyri Kaasalainen, uncharacteristically, was knocked out in Q1, alongside James Buxton, Haruki Tanaka, Louis Sanderson, Lorenzo Barbaro, and Hideyoshi Ikeda. Ikeda would, however, be elevated one place, thanks to Lorenzo opting to start from the pitlane.
This was how the grid shaped up in time for the final race of the 2007 season. We had three practice sessions for the last time this season, he qualified for the last time this season, and we completed the formation lap for the last time this season. All there was left to do was race for the last time this season, and as the five lights went out, that final race began. Goncalves jumped the start behind me but braked immediately, likely cursing himself over the penalty that was about to come. The craziness behind me did have a bright side though, because it permitted me to focus on the cars ahead rather than behind. MacGowan got a poor getaway, and my teammate instantly took advantage of that, while I pulled to the outside on the right and tried to out brake the Red Bull into the Senna S. Daniel kept his position for now, but, as we went through turn three and swung onto the straight, I tucked in right behind him, preparing myself for a move through turn four. I inched to the right, making the old veteran think that I was trying to lure him to the outside so that I could swing back to the left, so he kept his position, but that allowed me to double-bluff and overtake him on the outside, keeping it on the track just barely. The same, however, could not be said about Anthony Harrison. The American was trying to hold off his teammate only to lock-up and go off track, rejoining behind me. This also meant that the Ferraris were able to slip past the both of them, taking a one-two. I hate to say it, but this has been a catastrophic first lap for Harrison, and he's effectively handing the title over to Felipe at this stage.
Going up the hill and across the line to start lap two, I clung to the inside and allowed Harrison to pass me. I did this for two reasons: first of all, I didn't want to get involved in the championship fight, and second of all, I knew his McLaren was faster than mine, so fighting him would only lead to the two of us losing time. In the very same corner behind me, some chaos broke out, because Petronelli locked up, went off, and got hit by Ikeda who was coming through behind him. They managed to cover it under double-waved yellows, so a safety car was avoided, but this showed the kind of chaos that Interlagos could offer. Meanwhile, Harrison and I were heading through turn five, and I decided I was going to try and follow him, using his superior pace to pull me forward and hopefully past some faster cars. Harrison was certainly going for it, overtaking Victor Hartmann a few laps later, meaning the BMW became my new target, and I had to start wondering just how far I could go this race. Koskinen was certainly going far this race, already ahead of both BMW Saubers, so, as far as I could tell, there was no reason why I couldn't do the same.
Victor wasn't the next car I overtook though, rather, that dubious honor went to Anthony Harrison, whose day was going from bad to worse. This time, it was a technical issue, some sort of computer failure that shorted out his gearbox. For thirty seconds, it seemed like Anthony's title bid was over, he couldn't get going, his gearbox was done, and he was going to have to pull over and retire the car. Then, however, somehow, Harrison got the car going again, resetting the computer and getting the gearbox into working shape again. By this point though, Harrison had fallen down to eighteenth, and he had a world to climb. Meanwhile, I was still trying to chase the BMW Saubers. At this point though, it was becoming clear that our best bet of getting ahead of them was on pit strategy.
"We're going to go contrary to BMW. Contrary to BMW. ETA plus ten. ETA plus ten." Malmedy spelled out the strategy over the team radio, speaking loudly and clearly over the roar of the Toyota engine as I powered up the hill. It was lap twenty-one at this point, Kaminski had already pitted, it seemed like my teammate was going to pit soon, and it seemed like Hartmann was going to pit not long after that, but I was now going to go longer than any of them. The plan was to do a long first stint so that I could go short on fuel for the last two stints, effectively making myself the fastest car in the midfield at the end of the race. It was half-decent thinking, but I was going to have to work to make sure that I didn't lose out too much during this long stint, and I would need to be ready to do a lot of passing come the end of the race. It was the last race of the season: no more conserving the engine for the next race, no more leaving risky points on the table for next time, and nothing more to wait for. It was the last race of the season, and we were going to drive like it. I like this.
Harrison was also driving like it, because he switched to a three-stop strategy, meaning he was absolutely flying. Anthony would get closer and closer to me each stint, but then he'd give up positions in the pitlane, which was really long in this track due to the winding nature of the pit exit, meaning he'd drop back a few and have to regain it. Anthony was gaining overall though, and that was important, because I was in a pretty critical position for him championship wise. You see, by the time we got to the final stint in the race, the order went as follows: Hamalainen was in the lead, Matteo was second, having just lost the lead to his teammate on pit rotation, Kaminski was third for the moment, but that was because he hadn't stopped yet. Felipe Alvarez was running in fourth, Victor Hartmann was fifth, Tommy Koskinen was sixth, I was seventh, and Harrison was eighth. Anthony needed to get past me as soon as possible because he now needed to finish at least fifth to take the title. That was because, with Hamalainen about to take his sixth win compared to Harrison's four wins, he would win any countback situation. That meant that sixth wasn't good enough, since Matti would win a tie, meaning that the outside bet going into this race now held all the chips. In terms of gambling, I'm sure a lot of people were about to lose money on this race, but a handful of people who made the unlikely bet are going to fall into a lot of money. Not that I condone sports betting or anything like that.
Rolling down into turn one with ten laps to go, I let Anthony pass without putting up too much of a fight. I'm fighting for points, and I want to score as many as I can for my team, but Anthony is fighting for the championship, and I can recognize that's a little bit more important. That's not to say that I'm obligated to let the championship contenders through, merely that, in this case, at this track, at this time, I decided to let Anthony pass me and see how things would play out for him. It still wasn't going to make a massive difference though, since BMW Sauber executed their pit strategy well, so Piotr Kaminski was still in the top six even after his stop. Anthony and I were both quick cars giving chase to the BMWs and my teammate ahead, but Piotr was that little bit quicker right now, and that meant we weren't really making much headway in terms of passing him. We were, however, all making progress on Hartmann and Koskinen ahead, who were beginning to battle.
Kaminski was the first on the scene, and when Koskinen and Hartmann both went off at turn one, he swung past the both of them to take fourth. This was exactly the type of move that Harrison wanted to do - and I certainly wouldn't complain about following him through either - but, by the time we had gotten there, both cars had recovered, and they weren't letting us back through. Nor was their pace slowing down one bit, because Koskinen immediately started reeling in Kaminski, knowing that the Pole had taken the edge out of his tyres and wanting to hit back at him. Hartmann, meanwhile, was none too pleased about having fallen from fourth to sixth in the space of a single corner, so he was also rushing to reclaim the position. Anthony was fighting for the championship, I was fighting for a strong end to the season, but the BMWs and Tommy? Well, they're fighting for the chance at a podium if something bad happens to one of the leaders, so they aren't going to give that up easily.
"Blue flag, blue flag. Leader coming through, let him pass." Peter instructed over the radio, so I found myself lifting on lap sixty-nine to let Hamalainen pass me. Harrison, reluctantly, had to do the same, going a lap down to his championship rival. Unfortunately for us though, our rivals managed to stay on the lead lap, if only just barely, so this strung our group out and ensured we lost out. Tommy, however, took full advantage of the opportunity presented to him, forcing himself to the front of the group by overtaking Kaminski at the start of lap seventy. Seventy is also the total number of laps Anthony and I managed to do, because when Matti Hamalainen crossed the line to win the race, followed a second and a half later by Henrique de Matteo for a one-two finish, we were the next cars to cross the line, a lap down, in seventh and eighth. On the last day, in the last race, Anthony Harrison had lost out on the Formula One World Championship by a single point.
"I'm sorry," I told Anthony as we pulled into the pitlane and got out of our cars. A Williams and a McLaren gathered in a pack with the rest of the cars as the top three took a special spot ahead of all of us. The team personnel, particularly from Ferrari and from Alvarez's side of the McLaren garage, gathered over there to get the best spot for the podium celebrations, but we were outside of that special circle.
"I had a bad day, there's no way around that. You tried to help though, and for that, I'm more grateful than you can possibly imagine. Thank you Tamara." Anthony responded, clearly disappointed with the result, but also showing remarkable maturity as he shook my hand and thanked me for not making him work too hard when he got past me. I'm sure the team will have something to say about letting a position get away from me that easily, but I still took home a point, and taking one more point wouldn't have made a difference. Tommy Koskinen still would've taken enough points from this race to get ahead of me in the standings and we'll still be fourth in the championship, faster than Red Bull and Toyota behind us, but not quite fast enough to compete with the likes of Renault or BMW Sauber. In any case, it was a pretty good day for us as a team, because, in a race where only four teams scored, we were one of the four. A strong end to the season considering we couldn't have really done anything to take third from Renault at this stage.
Anyway, enough hinting at it. The points paying results for the 2007 Brazilian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari.
2: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes.
4: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber.
6: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber.
7: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes.
8: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota.
So, Ferrari takes a one-two finish to ensure they win a double in a season where they weren't necessarily the fastest car. Now, the fact of the matter is that McLaren would have won the constructors' championship if they weren't disqualified, but, well...they got themselves disqualified. Furthermore, the fact that Matti Hamalainen was able to slip into title contention on the very last day is indicative of a larger problem with McLaren this season: their driver rivalry got out of hand. Felipe Alvarez did not react well to Anthony Harrison coming into a team he saw as his, whereas Anthony, for better or worse, didn't give any respect or preferential treatment to his reigning double world champion teammate. I'm not sure if I can say Alvarez is in the wrong because I'm sure his contract says he has number one status because, all year, Alvarez's actions have indicated that he doesn't expect this kind of competition from his own teammate. As for Anthony, I can't say he's wrong either, because what's the point of racing if you're just going to let the older, more decorated guy win? Anthony did what racing drivers do while Felipe was left feeling like McLaren lied to him and promised a certain vision only to deliver something very different. Both of them have reasons to be upset, but this rivalry meant they were constantly taking points off of each other while, after a certain point in the season, Ferrari had Henrique on full-on support duty for Matti's title bid this season. That much can be seen in this very race, where, if they let Henrique keep the lead, Matti wouldn't have been champion, so instead, they executed a pit strategy to get Hamalainen ahead. That is one of the reasons why Matti was able to win, along with the fact that, quite frankly, Matti has been the best driver of the lot in the second half of the season.
Matias has won three of the last four races and finished on the podium in the one race he didn't win. Hell, if you ignore the fact that he retired at the Nürburgring, Matti has been on the podium in every race since the French Grand Prix, which was the first in a pair of back-to-back victories. In short, yes, Matti won the title by one point at the last possible opportunity, and he was able to do that thanks to some bad luck for Anthony Harrison, but all of that does not change the fact that Matias has been simply tremendous here in the second half of the season. Anyway, closer to home, as I mentioned, Tommy Koskinen managed to slip by me at the last race of the season as well, which is annoying, I have to admit, but also not by any means disastrous. First of all, there is the fact that Tommy was always expected to beat me in 2007, so to be just two points behind him at the end of the year is an accomplishment in of itself. Second of all, considering my qualifying record this season, you would think I would be nowhere near Tommy in the races, instead, I've been competitive, and I was ahead of him in the standings all the way until today. Third of all, while I have scored a lot of points, I do need to acknowledge that Tommy has been the more consistent points scorer out of the two of us in the last couple of races this year. I managed to luck into some big results relatively early on in the season, and to my credit, I did execute those jobs rather well, but the facts are the facts: there was a lot of luck involved and these are, for the most part, fluke results which represent very extraordinary events in the 2007 season. All of that is to say this: yes, I wish Tommy hadn't leaped ahead of me at the last race of the season, I do, but I also can't be mad at my performance. I was good all year long and I think the team recognizes that.
So, the 2007 Formula One World Championship standings ended up like this:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 110 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 109 points.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - McLaren-Mercedes - 109 points.
4: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 94 points.
5: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 61 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 38 points.
7: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - Renault - 30 points.
8: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Renault - 21 points.
9: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 20 points.
10: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 18 points.
11: Daniel MacGowan - Great Britain - Red Bull-Renault - 14 points.
12: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 9 points.
13: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 7 points.
14: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Unemployed/BMW Sauber/Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 6 points.
15: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 5 points.
16: Roland Ziegler - Germany - Toyota - 4 points.
17: Haruki Tanaka - Japan - Super Aguri-Honda - 4 points.
18: Giuseppino Leone - Italy - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 3 points.
19: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Spyker-Ferrari - 1 point.
20: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 0 points.
21: Max Marcus - New Zealand - Toro Rosso-Ferrari/Unemployed - 0 points.
22: Louis Sanderson - Great Britain - Super Aguri-Honda - 0 points.
23: Hideyoshi Ikeda - Japan - Unemployed/Spyker-Ferrari - 0 points.
24: Martijn van der Berg - Netherlands - Spyker-Ferrari/Unemployed - 0 points.
25: Andreas Wilhelmus - Netherlands - Unemployed/Spyker-Ferrari - 0 points.
The constructors' championship, meanwhile, reads like this:
1: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 204 points.
2: BMW Sauber - Germany - Hinwil, Switzerland - 101 points.
3: Renault - France - Enstone, Great Britain - 51 points.
4: Williams-Toyota - Great Britain - Grove, Great Britain - 38 points.
5: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 23 points.
6: Toyota - Japan - Cologne, Germany - 11 points.
7: Toro Rosso-Ferrari - Italy - Faenza, Italy - 8 points.
8: Honda - Japan - Brackley, Great Britain - 5 points.
9: Super Aguri - Japan - Leafield, Great Britain - 4 points.
10: Spyker-Ferrari - Netherlands - Silverstone, Great Britain - 1 point.
11: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - Disqualified.
So, what to take away from this? Well, in some ways, the numbers at the end almost make this year seem less chaotic than it really was. This does not seem like the kind of season where, for the most part, teammates lined up right next to each other. Furthermore, the fact that Rudolfo Goncalves didn't actually score any points this season is shocking to me, because it felt like he was a constant thorn in my side this season. Third of all, McLaren scored 218 points, but they went and got themselves disqualified so they're on the bottom, and Spyker is going to get a potentially lifesaving cash injections because of it. Finally, racing for one of the few British-based teams to actually race under a British license, it is amusing to see all these teams, which are all clustered in this tiny little Motorsport Valley in south-central England, flying Japanese or Austrian or French flags. Ferrari, BMW Sauber, Toyota, and Toro Rosso are the only teams which aren't based in the UK, and half of those teams don't even run with the license of the country that they're actually based in. Super Aguri, meanwhile, is nominally based in Japan and has a design team in Japan, but in practice, the team is run out of the Leafield Technology Center in England, which was once the home of Arrows. This is perhaps fitting, as they very first Super Aguri car from 2006 was actually a modified 2002 Arrows chassis paired with a V8 Honda. Anyway, the point is that the F1 grid is made up of a diverse variety of teams this year, but it is perhaps not as diverse as the simple flags may imply.
Williams has overachieved this year. We figured that we would be fighting for fifth with Red Bull and Toyota, instead, we finished in fourth, comfortably ahead of our rivals and we even had aspirations of challenging Renault for third across some brief moments this season. Now, a part of that overachieving is that McLaren's disqualification essentially gave us a free space, but we were the ones that took advantage of that to finish fourth, not Toyota, not Red Bull, therefore, I think it is still worthy of commendation. This next part is going to sound arrogant, but Williams would not have been so comfortable and so challenging without me, because I surpassed all expectations, and I was right up there with my teammate. We also proved we were far superior to Toyota, who uses the same engine and gearbox as us, so the fact that we scored over three times as many points as they did should be a point of pride for our aerodynamics and chassis crews. It is, however, also a sign that Toyota really, really underachieved this season, as did Red Bull to an extent, but the biggest underachiever this year, by far, is Honda. Honda last year in the British American Tobacco colors won a race and finished fourth in the championship, now they're barely ahead of their B-team.
For just one final statistic, lets analyze the head-to-head pair-up at Williams:
In qualifying, the results read as follows, with Tommy first, myself second: Australia: 12th and 15th, Malaysia: 6th and 20th, Bahrain: 10th and 11th, Spain: 11th and 13th, Monaco: 5th and 11th, Canada: 7th and 10th, USA: 14th and 16th, France: 9th and 15th, Britain: 17th and 13th, Europe: 11th and 12th, Hungary: 5th and 13th, Turkey: 8th and 11th, Italy: 8th and 10th, Belgium: 6th and 11th, Japan: 5th and 8th before penalties, China: 15th and 14th, and Brazil: 10th and 11th. So, the record is 15-2 Tommy, which doesn't look particularly good for me, but again, I was never expected to be just as fast as Tommy immediately. Furthermore, my worst qualifying performance, in Malaysia, was influenced in penalties, so it really is more of a 14-2 situation, not that the situation is all that much better that way.
As for the races, that looks better for me. Once again, Tommy's results first, mine second: Australia: 7th and 8th, Malaysia: RET and 9th, Bahrain: 11th and 10th, Spain: 6th and RET, Monaco: 12th and 7th, Canada: RET and 3rd, USA: RET and 10th, France: 9th and 14th, Britain: 13th and 12th, Europe: RET and 3rd, Hungary: 7th and 9th, Turkey: 7th and 8th, Italy: 6th and 8th, Belgium: 6th and RET, Japan: RET and RET, China: 16th and 12th, and Brazil: 4th and 8th. In terms of races that we both finished, the record is 6-4 Tommy, the vast majority of that is down to the fact that Tommy had a very strong late season run. Furthermore, the results are also offset by the fact that my best results came when Tommy retired, albeit there is also the fact that Tommy took some decent results when I retired as well, particularly in Spain and Belgium. There is some concern because Tommy has been more consistent than me, at least in the second half of the season, while I've leaned rather heavily on a handful of big points finishes. Now, I will never not be proud of the fact that I scored two podiums, but it perhaps would have been worth more points if I could somehow trade my two podiums for a handful of 5th and 6th place finishes. Anyway, that is more than enough math for one day: the point is that I performed rather well in comparison to my teammate and the quality of my results ensured that I was only two points behind him at the end.
As the paddock was packing up and getting ready to return to Europe, I approached Bernardo Fulvia on a concrete overlook positioned above the circuit, with a good view of both the plunging valleys of the track and the surrounding area. The Renault boss was pushing hard to get me and, with the season coming to an end, I felt that it was time for another face-to-face meeting. Only this time, I was coming into the meeting prepared, because I had just gotten off of the phone with my father and gotten an insight into what Renault truly intends to do with me. My father made it very clear that the only way Renault seems to have of getting me out of my Williams contract is to initiate a hostile buyout of my contract, effectively admitting they're wrongfully severing it and paying Williams the damages for it. Now, my father also indicated that, by all accounts, Renault would be paying out this contract on their own, so it's a price they're willing to pay, and we wouldn't have to worry about it at all, but I've made it clear that I want to keep things amicable with Williams. Williams is the team that gave me my chance in Formula One and I think they deserve respect for that. Beyond that, based on some of the conversations I've had with Tommy, with Natasha, and with Roksana, I believe the evidence suggests that I can wait for it. Fulvia himself admitted that, a few years down the line, multiple teams are likely to be interested in me, so even if Renault is no longer an option, then I'll have other options, potentially even better options. Of course, on the other hand, the teams as good or better than Renault at the moment consist of BMW Sauber, Ferrari, and McLaren. These are the very top of the top teams, so impressing them will take something special. Furthermore, F1 teams have a short memory, so all of this is assuming that I can keep this kind of performance going into 2008. I am aware of all these risks though, and these are risks that I'm willing to take.
"I've come to a decision," I announced right away, deciding that the best way to do this would be to cut to the chase.
"And what would that decision be?" Fulvia asked, tone implying that he already knew how this was going to go.
"With all due respect Mr. Fulvia, I'm going to stay with Williams. I signed this contract with the view that I was signing on for a long-term vision and I should see that vision through." I answered, explaining why I was going to do what I was going to do. I signed onto a two-year deal so I should live up to that arrangement, I feel like I owed that to Williams. Maybe Renault would seem more appealing if Williams wasn't really working out or I had some reason to believe that the order in 2008 would be dramatically different than the order in 2007, but, as far as I can tell, Renault is still going to be some distance behind the top three while Williams is still going to be at the sharp end of the midfield, not that far off from the Renaults. I'm happy here, I know this team, and I know my place in it. I've begun to feel appreciated here, and I feel like I belong, so, with all that being said, why should I take such a chance out with Renault on the assumption that they'll be better in the future because they had some great seasons in the past? Williams has had plenty of great seasons and those aren't helping us much today.
"You realize that you don't owe anything to Frank Williams, right?" Bernardo began, hoping that he could still convince me otherwise.
"Bernardo, I know that. This isn't some sort of sense of obligation, this is about living up to my word and doing what I feel is best for my career long term. I don't want to be seen as a driver who can't be depended on for a lengthy contract. I want team principals to know they can trust me when they plan for the future." I countered, spelling out just why I feel so uncomfortable about the idea of breaking a contract so early in my F1 career when my reputation is still being formed.
"Trust, duty, living up to your world. You have a naive idea of Formula One, little girl." Bernardo changed tactics, deciding that the best idea now was to diminish my perspective and act like he could explain everything to me "Frank Williams is no saint. Believe me, I supplied engines for him in 1998. Frank is just as selfish and ruthless as anyone else in this business, perhaps more so. He didn't sign you because he thinks you're the very best option or that you were a talent he spotted before anyone else, quite the opposite in fact. Frank saw the talent you had and the sponsorship you could bring, and he knew that other teams were going to be interested. Frank knew that other teams were planning on picking you up for a GP2 program or otherwise developing you for the future, so, he decided that he was going to win you by offering what the other teams weren't willing to offer. He offered you a Formula One drive in 2007. This isn't the work of a magnanimous figure, this is the work of an opportunist who undemands what his advantages are, and what is disadvantages are. That is the beginning and the end of the story."
"That is a rather cynical perspective on one of F1's greatest team principals." I pointed out.
"There are no heroes or villains in this sport, everyone is on the same moral footing, for better or worse." Bernardo answered. I got the impression that, in his own little way, Bernardo was being genuine: he really thought that's how F1 worked. Maybe he was right to an extent, but he's clearly a jaded man, and his own experiences in F1 color how he'll see every action or reaction in this sport. Perhaps Bernardo is right that I am looking at F1 with too much idealism, but I would argue that, at the same time, Bernardo is looking at this sport with too little. Without idealism or the belief that you can do the impossible, there is no sport.
"And that gives you the right to break any contract?" I asked, questioning Fulvia's logic here.
"It gives me the right to try. Besides, I think you can agree there was a degree of entrapment to the contract Williams gave to you. They knew you wanted to get to F1, so they were able to get the most favorable contract possible out of you. Your sponsors pay them, you get second driver status, and they become the master of your destiny. I think there are courts that would declare that contract illegal." Bernardo challenged, accusing Williams of signing me on some sort of predatory detail, using my desperation to get me to sign an objectively bad detail. Perhaps we could have done better in the negotiations and perhaps my contract does place too much power on the team's end, but to say that it's outright illegal or some kind of entrapment? I think Bernardo is just being ridiculous and provocative in a last-ditch attempt to get me to reconsider. I wasn't going to budge though, so I figured that it was time to get to the heart of the issue and give a bit of an ultimatum.
"Look, the point is I'm staying for Williams for 2008. Are you willing to wait for me for 2009 or are we done?" I asked, but I think I knew the answer. I think it was pretty clear that this deal wasn't going to materialize at this point. Bernardo is upset in such a way that implies, for all his promises and hyping me up, he isn't willing to wait for me and, if I'm not going to go to Renault for 2008, he's going to capture someone else on a long-term contract. Also, on my end of things, I really don't like the way that Fulvia is speaking to me now that things didn't work out the way he intended. I had a bad feeling from him to begin with, but I was willing to dismiss that as just the product of a reputation, but now I'm willing to think that there is some validity to it. Bernardo is opportunistic and greedy, he wants the best drivers in his team and he'll throw away whoever isn't useful to him at the moment. He's dumping Umberto Petronelli and, now that he can't get me, he's going to find someone else to take my place. I'm not sure if I even want to be in his team at this point.
"Tamara, the regulations are going to change for 2009, the FIA has a massive calendar expansion planned for 2010, I need to get drivers under contract now and I need to incorporate them into the team now before these big shifts. I cannot afford to wait for you. If you are going to stay with Williams, then I can't do anything for you. I hope for your sake Frank will stick with you." Bernardo answered as I expected. I will begrudgingly admit this though, he does raise a good point with the 2009 and 2010 stuff: big changes are coming for Formula One and the teams are going to want to know where the drivers are at before the change so that, if a slump happens in 2009, they'll know whether or not the car alone is to blame. As for 2010, when new races are being added to the calendar, that introduces new elements, and it brings up new questions. Some would argue that, on a new track, everyone is a rookie so experience doesn't really matter, others, however, would argue that experience is the key to getting to grips with new tracks. What isn't up for debate is the fact that, with so many new opportunities to score on the table and F1 getting stricter and stricter with the parts limits, you're going to want drivers who you know and trust. Nobody is going to want a rookie prone to crashes when you only have a handful of gearboxes to last a season with twenty-something races. All of that is to say this: F1 is set for an interesting future, but it looks like Renault and I won't be experiencing that future together. At one point, it seemed like Renault would be my home for 2008, now I don't think I'll ever wind up at Enstone.
"Well, good luck next year Mr. Fulvia, I'll see your drivers on track." I responded, trying to be respectful despite everything.
"I'll see you on track. Enjoy the winter, Ms. Shchegolyayeva." Bernardo responded. Now, I just have to face the Williams performance review and hope it goes the way I think that it's going to go. I don't see any reason why Williams wouldn't retain me after the season I've had but having just given some a definitive no to Renault, I do have to admit I'm a bit nervous. I'm just hoping I haven't just committed a terrible mistake. If Williams say no, I really don't have any options at this point.
It was a snowy December day in the UK when I went to meet Michael and Frank at Grove. I parked my little hatchback rental car outside, took a deep breath, and entered the factory, shooting polite smiles at the people I've worked with all year, even in a lesser capacity the year before, hoping that I would still be working with them come the end of this meeting. As for Renault, that door was fully closed when it was announced that Felipe Alvarez had left McLaren - a mutual termination decision based on how messy things got in that partnership after the Hungarian Grand Prix - and returned to Renault. Bernardo Fulvia and his star driver were reunited, and I'm sure Fulvia is thrilled with this, Felipe maybe less so, but he certainly didn't want to stay at McLaren, and this seemed like the best option available. I half-considered applying to McLaren but that gap was quickly filled when McLaren announced that Jyri Kaasalainen would partner Anthony Harrison on a two-year deal. So, Renault was suddenly open to me again, but Renault quickly filled that gap with half-Brazilian, half-French driver Filipe Yannick, coincidentally enough, also on a two-year deal. In short, there was a bit of a game of musical chairs going on at the moment, but doors were being closed as soon as they were being opened. Ferrari had their drivers, McLaren had their drivers, Renault had their drivers, even Red Bull and Toyota did, so, Williams is the best option left on the table. I have to hope that they see my performances this year the same way that I do.
"Good to see you Tamara," Michael greeted me with a smile as soon as I entered Sir Frank Williams' office. Frank himself was sit behind the desk while Michael stood at his right side. I saw Claire leave the room while I was coming, going back to her own office, so it seemed like they consulted her prior to the meeting but would be handling it themselves. I honestly wasn't sure if that was a good sign or bad, but I did think that Michael's greeting was. Michael wasn't the type of man to smile before delivering bad news, that just wasn't his style.
"Good morning," Sir Frank Williams greeted as well, but the old bulldog of Formula One was harder to read.
"Morning Michael, Sir Frank." I responded before taking a seat. Michael was dressed in a white button-up shirt with a blue W over the left breast indicating the team he was part of. Meanwhile, Frank was dressed in a similar button-up shirt beneath his gray wool sweater. I was dressed in jeans, black boots, a white turtleneck, and a black leather jacket. I hoped that I was dressed in the right way for this type of thing, I didn't want my clothes to be the kind of thing to hurt me after everything else seemed to be going well in terms of this performance review.
"Well Tamara, you have impressed us this season. We are very happy with your podiums at Canada and Europe, and we're very satisfied with your role in the team performance in Australia, Turkey, Italy, and Brazil. That is the kind of thing we are looking for from you next season: we want to see you and Tommy scoring points in the same races and bringing home good team results. We think that if we can do that, we'll be able to close the gap to Renault and BMW." Michael began, lifting a massive weight off of my shoulders by starting with praise - praise about the result of multiple races, no less - and the fact that he told me what he wants from me next season all-but confirmed that I passed my performance review with flying colors. I wanted to hear it though, just to get rid of any stress or doubt.
"Does that mean I'm staying for 2008?" I asked, perhaps a bit too excited.
"If," Frank began, bringing me right back down to reality "If the checks from Kazakhoil clear, then I'll gladly keep this lineup going for as long as possible. You're an excellent driver and you're providing us with the financial resources to continue to build the team forward."
"Thank you," I responded, grateful that I finally had the confirmation for my future. I've been confident in this for a little while, I've had good results after all, and I was ahead of my teammate until the very last day of the season, but there is nothing quite like finally having that assurance that yes, I'm good enough, and yes, I have a seat. There was a bit of disappointment deep within me though, because Frank made it sound like Williams needed the financial support, implying that as long as I'll be with the team, I'll be locked in this unfortunate marriage with Kazakhstan's state-owned oil company. Of course, I could try to find another sponsor, but it would be massively difficult to try and scrape up $30 million or so a year from other sources. There's also the fact that most people willing to pay $30 million a year to sponsor a Formula One team aren't exactly morally clean to begin with, so it really is a game of degrees here. This isn't just me justifying my actions either, let's take a look at some of the biggest F1 sponsors at the moment. The most obvious example is Marlboro, still sponsoring Scuderia Ferrari in the form of a subliminal barcode meant to resemble the Marlboro packaging at high speed, despite the fact that tobacco advertising is illegal in almost every market Formula One goes to at this point. Then you have Etihad Airways, sponsor of Spyker, which is essentially an arm of the government of the UAE, a homophobic and sexist government built off the back of extracting oil. Which brings us to our next set of morally dubious sponsors, the oil companies. Shell, ExxonMobil, Petrobras, BP, Total, take your pick, there's plenty of them in the sport and there's plenty of ecological disasters associated with each of them. Anyway, the point is that not only am I stuck with Kazakhoil for the moment, but all the alternatives seem just as bad, if not worse.
"You're welcome, Tamara, I'm glad to have you in the team." Michael finished off the meeting with another smile. I got the impression that he would actually try and find a way to keep me on the team regardless of the sponsorship situation, but it wasn't entirely up to Michael. At the end of the day, the team bears Frank Williams' name and he is still the official team principal. Frank is going to do what he must to ensure the survival of the team, and right now, that means the team getting an extra $30 million a year, even if it must come with a government that really should be spending its money on more important causes. There were always going to be immoral sponsors in Formula One, and there were always going to be Presidents-for-life spending their money immorally while their people suffer, the world can be a terrible place and F1 can be a terrible reflection of that world, but it is also a great and beautiful sport. Drivers from all across the planet in teams representing countries all across the world with engines coming from Britain, Italy, Japan, Germany, or France, all competing for the very best trophy in all of motorsport: the Formula One World Championship. The current champion is Matti Hamalainen of Finland, the third Finnish champion and nineteenth champion from Europe. Nineteen out of the thirty champions that have won F1 titles are European, the others come from Brazil, Argentina, Australia, the United States, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. There has been no Asian world champion, not even a world champion who was born in Asia. Maybe, just maybe, I could help change that. In order to do it though, I need to be on a level playing field, and I guess that means I have to take this dirty money and hope that, one day, my performances will be good enough that I won't need it anymore.
The season was over, I had my contract for next year, and I figured I could at least give it until after Christmas before I started training for the next season. That meant that, for the first time all year really, I could finally relax. I had nothing to do, nobody asking my questions, and nobody expecting me to meet any sort of deadlines. I suppose that's how I found myself laying in my bed looking up at my apartment ceiling with Roksana's arm loosely wrapped around my stomach. It was about nine in the morning on a Monday, but that didn't mind, and Roksana didn't mind either. Lately, she's been spending more and more time at my apartment anyway, sick of driving all the way to Marseille and back, so she's just been writing her articles from here. That was certainly fine with me too. Lots of things were fine in life. I may have been beaten by my teammate in the standings at the very end, but I also scored points that day, bringing my total up to eighteen points. Not a bad number for a rookie, not at all. I was beginning to talk to my father more and I think that, with the merger over, he's at least trying to do better. I also had a good relationship going, for the first time in my life I may add, so yeah, life is pretty good right now. I can't complain.
"What are you thinking about?" Roksana asked as she woke up, propping her head up on her elbow and looking down on me. Meanwhile, with her free hand, she slowly dragged it over my stomach and started doodling on the bare skin, absent-mindedly drawing patterns. I felt flutters in my stomach all over again.
"About life...I'm in a really good place right now. I'm happy." I responded, looking up at the grey-eyed blonde.
"I'm happy too baby," Roksana answered before leaning in and kissing me on the cheek. I closed my eyes and sighed happily, enjoying this. There was one small thing I was concerned about though, something I just did last night that I never did before, and I have no idea how I did or not.
"So...tell the truth. How was it?" I asked straight away, wanting to know if I did something bad or hurt her or just left her unsatisfied. To make a long story short, Roksana and I had sex for the first time last night. She did me first. I don't know how to describe it other than simply amazing, she made me feel things I've never felt before and she was so gentle with it too, even cradling me as I came out of it. I did her after that and, well, she told me to take things at my pace and that everything would be fine, but the truth is I was one: exhausted, and two: had no idea what I was doing. Roksana seemed to enjoy it last night but I really have no idea, and I basically passed out not long after I finished her off, so can I really know how it went?
"It was good, really. You're a smart and beautiful woman Tamara, that's already a good start for me and you're a quick learner on top of that. You'll be a natural in no time, assuming you get in regular and enthusiastic practice, of course." Roksana said with a smirk. I did get the sense that she was serious though. I know I'm not experienced at sex, she knows that too, but she's also wanted to have sex with me for a long time and I apparently did a good job of trying to mimic what she did to me, because it seemed like she enjoyed it. I know she's had girlfriends in the past that are better at this than I am, I'm not an idiot, but that doesn't seem to bother her, and she seems to think I'll be good at this one day. I hope she's right, because I had a really good time last night and I don't want this to end.
"Are you sure?" I asked, still a bit nervous.
"Don't overthink it Tamara, it's not a competition. All that matters is that you feel good, and I feel good." Roksana responded. I was getting better at this stuff, I think, but there were still times where Roksana needed to coach me through even the basic couple things. I was self-conscious about it at first, but time after time, Roksana responds to it maturely and sweetly. I really can't complain about her at all.
"So...what are you doing today?" I asked a few moments later, wondering what my girlfriend was going to do with her day.
"Well, I'm doing a piece about the Ligue 1 season so far for a French sport magazine, hopefully I can knock that out this morning, then in the afternoon I want to spend some time working on that article about the Russian women." Roksana answered. Thanks to the article she wrote about me, as well as some other stuff she did, both before and after we met, she's been getting more recognition as a sports journalist, so, even though it's not exactly the direction she saw her career going in, it's been bringing in most of her money lately. At the same time, Roksana hasn't abandoned her magazine, and she's still writing in her little niche even if that's not necessarily what she's known for anymore. In this case, a few months ago she started talking with some women living independently in provincial Russia, and she's telling their story to the Russian diaspora. In a society that tends to be rather conservative and stilted, despite women being in the majority, Roksana wanted to explore the lives of women who buck the trend and live independently. So, she found a group of women willing to talk to her, albeit anonymously, and she is putting their stories together into a big feature she wants to feature in her magazine. It was a very Roksana thing to do from my perspective, but I was supporting her on this, since it seemed like a good cause.
"Sounds fun," I responded.
"It depends, you know? I love writing but it can be a weird thing. Sometimes it comes naturally, sometimes it's a bit of a slog, and I'm never sure which it's going to be this time. It might even be in the same article where the first half comes super easily but I exhaust myself with a page and a half left to write. Sometimes the things I'm passionate about are the things that come easily to me, sometimes they're the worst because I can't figure out how to express myself correctly. Sometimes I can blow through the sports stuff like it's nothing, other times I stare at a 0-0 score wondering what I could possibly write about this. I guess what I'm trying to say is that, while it's my favorite thing in the world and I'm glad I get to make a living this way, it's still a job, and sometimes work is going to feel like work no matter how much you love it." Roksana explained, not exactly venting a specific frustration, more just sharing her views of how writing can be in general.
"I think I had a day like that last season, at Malaysia. I had an objectively good drive and gained a ton of positions. I enjoy the track and I've done well there in the past, but then I see that I finished just outside the points, and I felt awful. All that work, all those impressive moves and good strategy, but at the end of the day it was for nothing. That was also at a point early in the season where I really didn't know how often we could expect good results or where our pace really was compared to Red Bull and Toyota. I know now that I didn't need to be so frustrated, since more points came later that year, and I know I didn't need to make such a big deal about the reliability thing, since we were so solid over so much of the rest of the season, Belgium notwithstanding, but at that point, all I could see is that it was the second race weekend, and both of our cars were having issues. It was definitely a weird day." I brought up the example of my second race in Formula One, a race weekend where I went from nineteenth to ninth, which is a mighty drive, but it was a mighty drive that didn't bring any points. I was doing what I loved, and I was doing it well, but it still turned into the kind of frustrating thing that left me wondering. I know I scored points in Australia and nearly did it again in my second race in Formula One, but when you give one of your best drives of the season and you don't get points at the end, it can bring out some illogical and emotional reactions.
"Well, you'll do better next year, I know it." Roksana pulled me in for a hug.
"Thanks...were you intending on leaving bed or...?" I asked, making fun of the fact that Roksana, who just said she has one article to write and another, larger piece to work on, was nuzzling my shoulder in bed rather than making any effort to get up or get dressed.
"I will, I will...in a few minutes..." Roksana responded and I laughed but relaxed against the pillow, enjoying the contact and the warmth for a few more moments. Like I said, life was good.
The 2008 GP2 Asia season would be the third season of the eastern companion series to the primary Formula One feeder series, GP2. Similar to 2006, the series will run from January to April, beginning and ending in the Dubai Autodrome. The Dubai bookends are just two of the six weekends the series will have, with races in Sentul, Indonesia, the Kari Motor Speedway in Coimbatore, India, as well as support races for the Malaysian and Chinese Grand Prix. The GP2 Asia series was growing and that was reflected in the entry list, which was going to be the largest it's ever been for the new season. There was one entry that interested me above all others though: born in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan in 1990, her name is Natasha Tsirinskaya and she will be driving the #19 Trident Racing entry, lining up alongside her teammate, Heinrich Schwarzer of Austria, in the #18. It was a diverse grid, with talent from Europe, Asia, and South America, and plenty of competition too, with highly rated talents driving for the likes of ART, Arden, and even my former team in the former of DAMS, but Natasha has shown real talent this year. At the same time though, this is her first foray into international motorsports and it's a bit of a leap in terms of machinery too, going from Italian F3 cars to GP2 cars, so I couldn't help but be a little bit nervous. As for Natasha herself though? Well, that girl was anything but. This whole unveiling ceremony she's been smiling and confident, we'll see if the reasoning was good though, because the cars were about to be unveiled.
"Well, without further ado, I present to you our 2008 GP2 Asia challengers...the #18 and...the #19!" Giorgio Arezzi announced as the tarps were pulled off to reveal the two white, metallic blue, and red cars. The base livery of both cars was basically identical, the way it is in Formula One, but GP2 and GP2 Asia also kind of borrowed from other series like NASCAR, Indycar, or even endurance racing, because the sponsors and even some livery details on each car could differ. For instance, Natasha's car carried the logos of Bridgestone and Renault, which were common to the team, but also, surprisingly, wore logos for Goliath Italia. I looked over at my dad, who accompanied me to this unveiling, and suddenly I realized why he really came along.
"You're sponsoring Natasha?" I asked, surprised that he was doing this. I wasn't necessarily offended that he was doing this for her when he hadn't done it for me, but I was surprised to see him doing so at all, since my understanding always has been that he didn't have the resources to sponsor at the GP2 level.
"Well, the company is bigger now, I've doubled the size of the company and heavily bought into the Italian market, so it makes sense to partner with an Italian team, especially when that team is fielding someone I consider to be part of my family." he answered, I raised an eyebrow, indicating that I was expecting more, and that's what got him to say the next part "And, I suppose, I'm also trying to do better. I know I wasn't able to support you as much as I would've liked the last few years of your career so, now that I can, I'm hoping I can support her all the way to Formula One."
"I don't suppose you'd be willing to sponsor Williams, would you?" I asked, not even thinking at that point that my father's company could potentially replace Kazakhoil as my sponsors, rather, I was thinking smaller, in the respect that my father could be a smaller sponsor on the team that could give us that little extra bit of money and maybe bring us forward.
"Formula One is still a bit out of my price range I'm afraid. Besides, I don't think FedEx would take too kindly to a comparative minnow in the industry having our logo next to theirs." my father pointed out. I suppose he was right about that, still, it was worth a shot. I'm not mad at him about any of this though, because hopefully this means that Natasha won't have to do what I did and take on a sponsor like Kazakhoil. Hopefully she'll be able to make it to the top her own way. In any case, my father and I stopped whispering back and forth to each other when we saw they started taking questions from the press, one of which was directed at Nat.
"So Natasha, you find yourself as a Central Asian woman in GP2 Asia, presumably you want to follow in the footsteps of your friend Tamara Shchegolyayeva, who was in your position not too long ago?" a reporter asked. I suppose it was exactly the type of question Natasha could expect, because she was so closely associated with me, so similar in age, and following such a similar career trajectory, so the comparisons are natural. That being said, the last thing I wanted was for Natasha to feel like she's in my shadow, she's a better driver than that.
"Well, first of all, hello Tamara," Natasha began the question on a funny note by waving to me in the audience, getting a few laughs from the press "Second of all, obvious what Tamara did in 2006 was very impressive and showed exactly how talented of a driver she is. What I want to do is show exactly how talented of a driver I am, whatever comes from that will come. Hopefully it's good but, well, we won't know until we know. It's a new team in a pretty young series so I'm excited to figure out where we are, where everyone else is, and what can be done."
I smiled, it was a good answer from Natasha and showed that my little cousin was well equipped to deal with the press. First of all, she instantly crushed any pressure in the question by lampshading the absurdity of asking about me at an event I'm attending, second of all, she put the focus back on herself and how her mission is to simply show what she can do. Third of all, in the process of doing that, she also eased expectations by pointing out that we don't know how good Trident is going to be, they're kinda in the middle of the pack in GP2 and they're just starting the GP2 Asia team, so who knows if they'll be any good? The thing is though, she worded that diplomatically, in a way that won't hurt the team, but also won't give unreasonable expectations about her performance. Her performances on the track in Italian F3 this year have hinted at the fact that she's ready for the next step, but her handling the media here? That's proved it. I can't wait to see what she'll be able to do going into the new season, her first season in the GP2 Asian Championship.
"Kicking off the New Years' festivities in Monte Carlo, the FIA has organized a gala on the harbor to announce a massive new initiative aimed at growing Formula One in the next few years. Everyone who is everyone in Formula One is in attendance, from the team principals to management executives to each and every confirmed driver for the 2008 season. We're here with one of those drivers, Tamara Shchegolyayeva of FedEx Williams Grand Prix Engineering-Toyota. Tamara, what do you think about all this? It's certainly grand, isn't it?" Katherine Symmons of the BBC asked on the night of New Years' Eve, 2007 where the FIA decided to open up 2008 with a big, fancy press event right before the countdown to midnight. It was my second big event of the month, but I didn't mind this one too much, since it was home, I had my family and loved ones around me, and I wasn't the center of attention anyway. I just had to deal with this one interview with a journalist I tended to like.
"Oh, it certainly is. It's Monaco and everyone knows it such a grand city, and F1 has been coming here for so long, they've been part of the grandeur for so long, that I guess it's only natural that they know how to put on a show like this. They've really outdone themselves." I answered, playing the company line like I was supposed to. Now, it is actually a fairly impressive setup they have here, because what the FIA have done is clear away the yachts to set up a floating stage on the harbor, with the audience sat on the surface just in front of it, lights behind us to make sure the stage is completely bright. They even brought out the Rolex race clock and had it set up in the corner of the stage counting down to midnight.
"Yes, they have, and so have the drivers too. That's a beautiful dress Tamara, enjoy the show." the redhead finished off.
"Umm...thank you, you too." I laughed nervously. I was wearing a black dress - the FIA didn't tell us much about what they were going to do, but they did make it clear that this was going to be a formal event - but I didn't actually think that it was going to get commented on. Nevertheless, I think I handled it rather well, and I made it over to my seat as Katherine moved on to some other drivers. I was sat with Natasha on my left and Roksana on my right, with my father and Nat's parents also sitting us nearby. I caught my father giving us a sideways glance, not knowing the exact details of my relationship with Ms. Yurasova, but I think he was beginning to suspect that something was going on here. Nevertheless, he didn't get a change to comment on it, because the event began.
"Introducing FIA President Max Mosley," the announcement came through the on-stage intercom before Max walked into view, his long-time business partner and FOM supremo Bernie Ecclestone shaking hands with him before the Brit with a questionable family connection came onto the mic.
"Good evening, everybody, Happy New Year." Max began "First of all, I would like to congratulate Matti Hamalainen on his first Drivers' World Championship and Ferrari on their fifteenth Constructors' World Championship. May we all hope for a competitive 2008 untainted by controversy. Now, we've organized this little event for a number of reasons. First of all, Monaco is the home of Formula One and I think we can all agree on that, second of all, as we are about to enter a new year, I feel this is the best moment to announce Formula One's plans to enter a new era."
"The Formula One World Championship began in 1950 with the British Grand Prix, followed by the Monaco Grand Prix eight days later. There were only seven races in that first championship, one of which, the Indianapolis 500, was not even run to Formula One regulations. 2010 will mark sixty years since that first championship and, suffice to say, things have changed quite a bit. Drivers from all around the world have competed and won in this sport, races have been held on every populated continent, and interest in hosting new races is at an all time high. To take advantage of that record interest, and to celebrate sixty years of this wonderful sport, I hereby announce the beginning of F1 Vision60." So, it seemed like Max and Bernie had come up with an ambitious new plan for F1, so, here was the FIA boss running through the history of the very first Formula One season so as to bring in his new ambition.
"Vision60 marks our initiative to make sure that 2010 is the biggest, grandest, and most competitive season of Formula One yet. New regulations are coming in for 2009 with the aim of improving racing, F1 has three exciting new races on the horizon, an exciting new street race around the America's Cup marina in Valencia for the 2008 European Grand Prix, the first ever night race at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix followed by the day-to-night race at the 2009 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. These are just the beginning as far as we are concerned though. We are beginning the search for new teams with the goal of having a full grid of twenty-six cars for the 2010 season. We are planning on a calendar expansion to bring the calendar up to twenty-five races. These races will be a mixture of historic European venues, some of which were part of that very first F1 season, many from the current season, and even a few new additions aimed at emerging markets. There will be three races in South America, with plans for a second race in Brazil as well as a race in either Argentina or Uruguay. There will be a rapid and authoritative return to the United States There will be a substantial expansion into Asia as well, with South Korea and India in particular serving as untapped markets for Formula One. Vision60 aims to celebrate 60 years of Formula One with the finest F1 product in history!" Mosley finished strong, getting a large amount of applause from the assembled crowd.
I clapped too, but I had to admit I was somewhat skeptical of those whole idea. Quite frankly, twenty-five races is a lot, and who knows if all the pit crew and support staff will be able to handle that? Furthermore, a lot of these plans for races seemed ambitious, I'm sure some of these races will materialize, perhaps even most of them, but I would be quite surprised to see all of them. The same could be said about the teams, because F1 hasn't had a grid that big since 1995. Formula One is an expensive sport and is only getting more expensive, so I don't see how a thirteen team grid would be possible without a budget cap. At the same time, the teams and manufacturers in F1 are very powerful right now, so they're unlikely to ever accept any sort of limiting measure. It is an ambitious set of goals though, many of those goals I agree with, so I suppose it can only be a good thing. It is also another thing to look forward to as we enter 2008 and the new season looms closer and closer.
Notes:
Alright everyone, this has been chapter ten of LatSoF1 and we've finished the 2007 season.
Ciao!
Chapter 11: The Beginning of the End of an Era
Notes:
Alright everyone, here, we begin the 2008 season. This is going to be a pretty important place for this story because this is where stuff if really going to start branching off from reality. Real events that happened in 2008 are also going to send shockwaves through the sport. How is all of this going to affect Tamara Shchegolyayeva in her second season of Formula One? We shall see.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter XI.
The Beginning of the End of an Era.
"Hello everyone. My name is Tamara Shchegolyayeva and I am a Formula One driver for Williams Grand Prix Engineering." I spoke into the camera as I recorded, of all things, a youtube video. It was a bit awkward for me, but it was also something I wanted to try. Best case scenario, it'll be something interesting for fans as they wait for winter testing to kick off in a few weeks, worst case scenario, it won't even get noticed. Either way, I felt there was no harm in trying this "So, today is January 3rd, I'm going to be in Jerez on the 14th for the first preseason test. I don't know yet if I'll be driving on the first day, we'll have to see, but I will be driving at some point during the first test. So, all of that means that the 2008 season is coming. I want to talk a little bit about my goals for the season. First and foremost, I want to be more consistent. I had some really good results last year, but I never got a run or three or four good races, I hope we can change that. Second of all, this is going to be a contract year for me, so I want to make sure that I present myself in the best way possible and really secure my future in Formula One. Finally, I want to do better in qualifying. I know that's where I'm losing out the most to my teammate and I want to be doing better. So yeah, that's what I'm targeting for 2008 and I hope you guys can be on this journey with me. It's my second season in Formula One and I can't wait to see where we are."
"...and we're good!" Roksana gave me a thumbs up as she stopped recording, the brief video recorded, ready for us to upload and see how this was going to go.
"Alright, thank you." I smiled. I do have to admit Roksana was a big part of the reason why I did this to begin with. I was musing about the idea one morning and then, my girlfriend turned housemate was there to persuade me to actually do it. I think most of the time, I would've had the idea, but I would've been too nervous to actually do it, but with the blonde? With her, I actually did it. It's part of a larger trend in my life right now. I've been trying some new things lately, sex being one of them, but arguably more significant, are things like having Roksana move in with me, like holding hands in public, or even going on a few dates lately. I'm not so scared of being seen with her in public. I'm not brave enough to kiss her or do any other type of public action that is irrefutably romantic, but I'm comfortable being affectionate with her, and I haven't faced any consequences because of it. That's not to say that I'm not scared of it, that's why I don't want to go further, but I think I've found a place where, at least for now, I'm comfortable in a public setting. I still don't want two things to happen though: I don't want to experience homophobia and I don't want certain people in my life to definitively find out about my sexuality: my father and my employers in particular.
That is not to say that I know for sure that either of them would have a bad reaction, far from it. Rather, the problem is that I don't know how they would react. On a career and business level, I need them with me, because my dad is still my agent and, because of his better behavior as of late, I'm going to stick with him for 2008, where Williams obviously is my employer. The situation is a bit more complicated than that I suppose, because I also have to worry about Kazakhoil and FedEx and Saudia and RBS and all these other sponsors. Not to mention Toyota, who already wants Hideki Kitagawa in the car and would love any reason to discredit me. That's not to say that Toyota would immediately try to use my sexuality to dump me out of my seat, simply that I don't know how they would react, all I know for sure is that their motivation is to get their drivers in a Formula One seat.
Of course, Toyota also could have given Hideki Kitagawa their seat, since Roland Ziegler was not kept on for 2008. Instead, however, Toyota decided to sign German rookie Fabian Schmidt, the reigning GP2 Series champion. I think this gets to a larger problem with Toyota's F1 program: they want to have their cake and eat it too. Toyota expects to see their Japanese drivers in F1, hence they're pushing for Hideki to get a seat - and I suspect that problem is only going to get worse with Toyota affiliated Yoshikazu Higashiyama driving for DAMS in GP2 Asia - but aren't willing to give chances to those Japanese drivers themselves. It's effectively the same reason why Honda helped set up Super Aguri - there was political pressure in Japan to keep Haruki Tanaka in F1, but Honda wanted to drop him to bring Rudolfo Goncalves in as James Buxton's teammate - these teams represent Japan and want Japanese drivers in F1, but don't want to be the ones taking chances on these Japanese drivers. Now, obviously there are some very talented Japanese drivers and I think some of them would make it to F1 regardless of whether or not Toyota or Honda was pushing for them to get here, but that political pressure also resulted in the likes of Yuji Ide and Taki Inoue.
This is perhaps a bit hypocritical to say, considering that Kazakhoil is sponsoring me for the sole reason that I fly the Kazakh flag, but you're never going to get the best drivers possible if you specifically look for drivers from just one country. That alone is proven in the fact that neither Honda nor Toyota have a Japanese driver in their lineup, yet they put whatever pressure they can to get other teams to run their drivers. Toyota will not run Hideki Kitagawa in their cars, but they constantly put pressure on Williams to run him, and that pressure affects me because I don't have a contract for 2009 and I got slapped with the burden to pay for my seat. Williams pinned their futures on Tommy Koskinen, and that means my position is the more fragile one, so every time Toyota push for Hideki, it puts my position at risk. I need to provide funding and I need to be doing well enough to look better than Kitagawa, so that just adds more and more pressure to this situation. That is the dark side to the cute little video I did early, because I need to be doing better, to be matching Tommy, to increase my chances of staying in this team. Sir Frank Williams said it himself at my performance review: as long as my performance keeps up and I provide the funding, I stay in this seat. So, above all, my target in 2008 is to do just that.
The sound of screaming V8 engines filled the air at the Jerez circuit as winter testing began yet again. I wasn't driving this day, that honor going to Tommy Koskinen, but I would be driving tomorrow. There are two slight issues with this test though: first of all, being so early in the year, we didn't have our new car yet, rather, we were using a modified version of our 2007 Williams FW29. Second of all, the team decided that they were going to take the entire preseason testing schedule, and split it into thirds, meaning that Koskinen, Kitagawa, and I were all going to get the same amount of driving time. Not only does that mean that Kitagawa is going to be familiar with our machinery if Toyota ever finds a way to wedge him into our cars, but it also ensures that Koskinen and I have less driving time than our rivals. I do have to admit I'm upset about this, but I'm not upset at anyone in particular. The cold heart truth is that Williams' entire existence is as an F1 team - we have an engineering arm too, Williams Advanced Engineering, which mostly does stuff for other racing series around the world - and we are up against utter giants of the automotive industry like Honda, Toyota, Renault, and Ferrari. On the other end, we have Red Bull, an energy drinks company with virtually limitless money and a commitment to F1 so strong that they've managed to steal Adrian Newey away from McLaren. Newey, the man who designed championship winning cars for both Williams and McLaren, is now the chief designer for our main rivals. All of that is to say that Williams is a hell of an underdog.
Williams was on top of the world in the 1990s with Renault engines, coming off of a period in the mid-1980s where Williams and Honda won a number of titles. Williams was the team to beat and the team attracting the biggest drivers, but then Renault pulled out of the sport. Williams was stuck using 1997 spec Renault engines provided by Bernardo Fulvia's Supertec brand - the 1999 Williams FW21 I drove in Astana last year was one such car - but Sir Frank Williams found a new partner in the form of BMW. BMW Williams were able to produce some of fastest and most powerful F1 cars in existence, taking the all-time record average lap speed at Monza, but the problem was the BMW partnership came at the exact same time as Ferrari's reign of dominance with Wilhelm Ziegler. Tensions grew, with Frank and BMW both blaming each other, so despite taking ten wins in an era dominated by Ferrari, the partnership came to an end after 2005. BMW bought Sauber instead, and Williams began a path that led to its current situation, going from BMW power to Cosworth to Toyota. This marks the first year of continuity for Williams in a long time, keeping the same drivers and the same engines, and hopefully that stability will give us a chance to fight back. Nevertheless, the point remains, we have a lot less money that our rivals, we don't have a factory engine deal like the teams ahead of us do, and the tobacco money is long gone. Those 1990s championships? Well, you can thank Camel and Rothmans for that, because their funding is what funded those titles. That source of money is gone; hence Williams has now had to reach out to the likes of Saudi Arabian airlines, Brazilian and Kazakh state oil companies, and this special arrangement with Toyota. This means that Frank Williams has a lot of different groups to keep happy and a lot less freedom than our competitors do, so he is doing everything possible to continue running an old school team in a new school age of F1. That means we all have to deal with certain sacrifices, and I guess one of those sacrifices is giving driving time to Hideki. Anyway, this isn't the time for that.
"So," I spoke to the media as I did my little bit for a feature the British media was doing during preseason testing. They wanted each driver to show off their 2008 helmets and explain the design, why its significant, and all of that. I guess it's something for them to talk about during some of the more boring, less active days of preseason testing. Anyway, I had some fairly significant changes to my helmet this year, so I was glad to do it "I've done some tweaks to my helmet design for this year. I've kept the blue-white-blue horizontal stripes on the side, but I've sharpened up the design and I've brought it in line with the visor. This means that there is a lot more cyan on the helmet as I've made it the new base color, and I've kept the Kazakh sun and eagle on the top. That's not all though. You can see these new gold pinstripes, right? Well, I've added them in to divide up the colors and I really like how they came out. Plus, I have something special planned for the Singapore Grand Prix which is really going to make this helmet pop under the lights. Other than that, I'm glad to see all our sponsors and partners represented here. Reuters, Philips, and RBS on the side stripes, Toyota in the back corner, this big FedEx logo on the chin, and then on the visor strip, we have these two dark blue RBS boxes on the sides, and then the cyan and gold Kazakhoil across the middle. I'm really happy with this design, I think it looks a lot sharper than my old helmet, and I think the cyan makes for more of a unique and distinctive design. I can only hope I'm just as successful with this design as I was with my last one."
"Alright, thank you for that Tamara. Good luck in the car tomorrow." the producer thanked me.
"Of course, no problem." I responded, slowly starting to feel more comfortable in the F1 paddock. Cars were running again, the media circus was in full swing, and the teams were burning money in the name of competition. Three teams brought new 2008 cars to the test here at Jerez: that being Ferrari, McLaren, and Toyota - coincidentally also the three teams with, by far, the highest budgets in Formula One - while another three teams had their 2007 cars here. Those teams were Williams, who were running our modified FW29, as well as Renault and Red Bull, who brought their 2007 cars wholesale. These teams, also tellingly, were the top midfield teams from last season. A number of other teams were in attendance but didn't actually bring a car to this first test, those being: Honda - who also had a massive budget - their much smaller, poorer sister team Super Aguri, Red Bull's sister team Scuderia Toro Rosso, and the newly christened Force India team were also in attendance. Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya had completed his buyout of Spyker late last year, now the team representing a Dutch supercar maker was now representing the second most populated nation in the world. Finally, BMW Sauber was absent all together, instead doing a high-profile launch event for their car in Munich. They'll be in Valencia for the next test session, which is also where we will be debuting our 2008 challenger.
There had been four days of winter testing at Jerez, which meant that Tommy drove twice, on the first day and the last day. The knock-on effect of that is that, when we moved to Valencia the next week, I was going to be the first one to drive the Williams FW30. A bit of explanation first though. The 2008 season will see a number of calendar changes: the first is rather procedural, the return of the German Grand Prix at the Hockenheimring, due to the two German tracks having agreed to alternate, with the Nürburgring having hosted the European Grand Prix last year. The second change though, is that there is still a 2008 European Grand Prix in spite of that, and that race will be held at the new Valencia Street Circuit on the city's marina. That Valencia circuit is completely distinct from the Circuit Ricardo Tormo which is hosting preseason testing this year. The final calendar change is the long-anticipated Formula One night race in Singapore, which will be held between the Italian and Japanese Grand Prix. The 2008 calendar will only be one race longer than the 2007 calendar though, because the United States Grand Prix is gone. America now has a top driver competing for the world championship, but even that is not enough to wash away the stink from the 2005 USGP and the Michelin tyre controversy that happened there. This means that Anthony Harrison might just win the title this year and not get a home race.
I felt that was a bit of a tragedy, for a country that, at one point in the early 1980s, hosted three Grand Prix, to not have a race at all just as it seems that America finally has a top-level talent in the sport. That wasn't my problem though because I had something a lot more important to focus on: mainly the fact that I was about to debut a Formula One car on track. Unlike BMW or some of the big teams, Williams wasn't doing any big launch event - instead, Tommy and I pulled the cover off the car in the pitlane in front of the media and let them take a whole bunch of pictures - so the pressure was on me to make a strong impression. I drove out the pitlane and did my warm-up lap, getting heat into the tyres, getting used to the new car, all while preparing for my first lap at speed.
The Toyota RVX-08 engine behind me roared to life as I deployed all eight cylinders of the car for the first time in 2008. I blasted down the relatively short main-straight at this track before a dab of the brakes, a few downshifts - being cognizant of the fact that we no longer had traction control for this season - and I threw the car into the left-hander to begin my first proper lap of the counter-clockwise circuit. Another, even shorter straight followed before the hairpin at turn two, bringing the car back down to speed and diving down into the infield loop. Turn three was a flat-out left-hander but turn four was slower, tighter, and to the right, bringing us to the bottom of the loop, just a short distance away from the main straight. Turn five was a bit faster, but still to the right as we broke away from this section parallel to the main straight and started climbing towards the top of the circuit. Hitting the brakes and turning left at turn six, I started down the straight at the top of the circuit, with the flat-out turn seven about two-thirds of the way down the straight beginning a series of left-hand corners. Turn eight was up next, bringing us 180 degrees around and shooting us into turn nine, a quick corner followed by the equally quick turn ten, which got us moving to the right just in time for the right-hand hairpin at turn eleven.
Coming out of turn eleven, I was progressive on the throttle, putting speed into the car, but knowing that I couldn't be as aggressive on the throttle as I was last year when I knew that traction control could help me out. Once I got to speed and escaped the last vestiges of wheelspin though, flat-out running felt very much the same as it did last year, and that was exemplified through the right-hander at turn twelve, which, thanks to the spaceship aerodynamics on these cars, was taken damn-near flat. There was no damn-near about it through turn thirteen though, as the long, continuous corner to the left brought us to the end of the circuit, tightening into the hairpin at turn fourteen which deposited me onto the back straight, letting me power down to the line.
"That was good, really good. The car feels good, I think it's an improvement last year. I'll say more in the garage." I spoke over the radio as I started an in-lap. The team sent me out on an installation lap effectively, they wanted to see how the car would behave at speed around the track and, with that established, we'll probably get into some long runs and set-up work. We had a baseline to work from, so now we had to refine that, make the car faster, and see what our competition was doing. Unfortunately, there wasn't much competition to base it against, since so far today, the only cars that have been on track have been the Williams and the Renault. Our pace compared to the Renault seems roughly comparable to last year, but this isn't a circuit we actually race at, nor is either car particularly dialed in, so I'm not sure how true that gap actually is. Only with more testing and more comparison points will we know where we really are. Fortunately, by the time that Hideki was in the car for day two, things got a lot more active, with every time except Super Aguri coming out on track, and by now, 2008 cars were the clear majority.
Going into February, testing moved to Barcelona, which was a rather ugly test for a number of reasons. The first reason is that Spanish fans - perhaps fans of Felipe Alvarez, but the Spaniard driver had nothing to do with their actions - put on blackface and made monkey noises whenever Anthony Harrison was on track. Anthony is the only mixed-race driver on the Formula One grid, having a black American father and a white English mother. That mixed-race kid from Florida came to McLaren, where Alvarez was coming in as the reigning champion, and matched him on points. Considering that Anthony is still at McLaren while Alvarez has left the team and gone back to Renault, it's easy to say that the battle might have been a tie, but Anthony clearly won the war. It is then, perhaps understandable that Spanish fans are angry, seeing their hero beat, but that anger does not justify downright racist behavior. Those fans gave Formula One a bad name and the FIA is investigating this with the power to impose harsh penalties on Spain as a whole, including the two Grand Prix it's supposed to have this year. That putrid incident aside, the second ugly part of the test is the fact that we experienced a major issue on the first day of the test. Hideki Kitagawa experienced a catastrophic failure at speed and the car launched into the barrier. Hideki was okay, and I had initially assumed it was driver error, but the team had found it was indeed a problem, so we ended up pulling out of the test to fix it. Meanwhile, Ferrari and Toyota left the test to conduct a high temperature test in Bahrain, seeing how the new cars would behave there.
Testing returned to Jerez on the 12th, and we returned to track. Super Aguri was present as well, albeit in a modified 2007 car - which led to FIA President Max Mosley predicting that the team wouldn't last long enough to see the end of the season - with Haruki Tanaka at the wheel. Ferrari and Bahrain were still in Bahrain, so this second Jerez test got off to a slow start. Red Bull was the only other team running but that didn't faze us at all - the other teams could do whatever they wanted, our priority was on making up for lost time after the first Barcelona test. So we were on track heavily, and that continued into the next week at Barcelona. On the 19th, at the Catalan circuit, Tommy Koskinen topped the timing sheets in a wet weather test with Red Bull, Renault, Toyota, and ourselves present. Those weren't all the teams, but those were our direct rivals, and the fact that we were the fastest of them, at least in the wet, was a good sign. The second day was another wet day, and Ferrari turned up at this test, so they were on top with Henrique de Matteo. McLaren joined in on day three and Anthony Harrison put his car on top. The fourth and final day of that week's testing at Barcelona was another good day for us, and I put my car on top of the timing sheets.
The final three days at Barcelona came next week and those days were largely the McLaren show. There was the spectacle of Ferrari splitting duties between Matti Hamalainen and Wilhelm Ziegler, but neither of them could beat Anthony Harrison's time. McLaren dominance continued on the second day and Super Aguri were once again absent from a multi-team test, but this time, the Japanese team announced that their 2008 car would be unveiled in Australia just in time for the opening race weekend. I wasn't going to lie, things weren't looking great for them, and I fear Mosley might be right about them not surviving the season. Another Japanese team was doing better, because Ivan Tripoli topped the very last day of testing for Toyota. I wasn't too concerned though, because Tommy and I still topped a day each, and Toyota only got to that position on a day where the top teams weren't really pushing too hard. Toyota has a good car, probably more competitive than their TF107 from last year, but we have a good car too, and I think we'll be able to have a good fight with them this year. Nevertheless, after tests at three Spanish tracks spread across two months, Formula One was ready to race, and eleven Formula One teams would meet on the streets of Albert Park in Melbourne to kick off a new season of world-class motorsport.
Three drivers went into the title-decider at Interlagos and they all finished one point apart, now each of those drivers has something to prove. Matti Hamalainen has become Ferrari's first world champion since Wilhelm Ziegler in 2004, so can he go on a run of consecutive titles like his predecessor did? Anthony Harrison finished second in his rookie year, beating his teammate on countback, so, can the American go one better in his second season? Felipe Alvarez, meanwhile, has left McLaren in disgrace but he has returned to Renault, the team that brought him his two world championships. Can Felipe reignite that partnership that overthrew Wilhelm Ziegler and redeem his 2007 shortcomings? Not to mention Henrique de Matteo, who was unlucky to be just a step behind the frontrunners last year. Can the young Brazilian close the gap and bring the South American country its first champion since the great Ayrton Senna? 2007 was a season for the ages, and pre-season testing would suggest that 2008 is going to be just as great. I can't wait until it kicks off in Australia and I get to be a part of it all.
As is tradition in Formula One, the driver numbers were changed for the new season according to the results of the constructors' championship. There is one exception to that rule, and that is, regardless of where their team finished, the champion gets to run the #1 and their teammate runs the #2, with #3 and #4 going to the top constructors' team. The order then continues as normal from then on. There is a little bit of weirdness coming off of 2007, mainly the fact that McLaren is at the bottom due to their disqualification, so they'll be running the very last numbers possible. Anyway, explanations out of the way, the driver numbers for the 2008 Formula One World Championship read as follows: Matias Hamalainen, as champion, runs the #1, his teammate Henrique de Matteo runs #2. Thanks to the fact that McLaren was disqualified, this means that Ferrari were also the clear constructors' champions, so that is all neat and orderly. Victor Hartmann is #3 and Piotr Kaminski is #4 for BMW Sauber, Felipe Alvarez is #5 for Renault and his rookie teammate, Filipe Yannick of Brazil, is running #6. I'm sure that won't get confusing for anyone at Renault. Anyway, that brings us to Williams, where Tommy Koskinen is #7 and I'm running the #8. I've gone from #17 to #8, that's indicative of a rather good first season, I think.
Red Bull racing finished fifth in the constructors' championship, therefore, Daniel MacGowan is #9 and Martin Weaver is #10. Next up is Toyota, where Italian Ivan Tripoli is #11 and German rookie Fabian Schmidt is #12. As this is a top level, highly technical, highly strategic no-nonsense form of professional competition, it should be noted that there is a healthy amount of superstition, therefore, the #13 is traditionally skipped. That means that, once we reached 2007's seventh place team, Toro Rosso, the numbering took off from #14. That #14 for the 2008 season was Maximilien Lecroix, four-time Champ Car champion given the chance to come over to Europe by Red Bull. The second seat at Red Bull's Junior team was #15, Maximilian Renner, the highly rated German rookie from the end of last year. It should also be said that other than the champion, there is no obligation for teams to give the lower number to the higher placed driver, hence rookie Lecroix was numbered below Renner, who had half a season of Formula One under his belt. Then there was Honda - now running a revised Earth livery, but more on that later - with #16 James Buxton of Britain partnering the experienced Rudolfo Goncalves of Brazil, who was running #17, my old number from last year.
Honda was only just ahead of their own affiliate team, Super Aguri, so the third Japanese team in Formula One was running the numbers #18 and #19. The former of which went to Haruki Tanaka, and the latter of which went to Louis Sanderson. Lorenzo Barbaro of Uruguay was #20 for the newly rechristened Force India team, and Vijay Mallya brought in the experienced Umberto Petronelli to be his teammate. The Italian ex-Renault driver took the #21. This left us with the final two numbers, going to the lowest placed team from 2007. Naturally, these bunch of back of the grid amateurs were Vodafone McLaren-Mercedes and their drivers were #22, Anthony Harrison of the United States, and #23, Jyri Kaasalainen, F1's latest talented Finn fresh off a very successful debut season at Renault. Jokes about the repercussions of the Spygate scandal aside, I very much doubted that McLaren, with all the resources at their disposal, were going to come out of 2008 with the same numbers they're entering the year with. in fact, I could very much see McLaren taking the #1 this year. Of course, I assume that honor is going to go to Anthony Harrison, but it certainly isn't impossible for Jyri Kaasalainen to take it either. I will be very interested to see if the Finn sinks or swims now that he is in a truly top team with a world class teammate.
Besides the procedural change of the driver numbers, the only real changes went as follows: after having been around since 2001, traction control was banned for Formula One while several cost-cutting measures were implemented. An engine freeze was brought in, gearboxes were mandated to last four races and, if they were changed beforehand, the car would be given a grid-place penalty for the race, testing mileage was limited, and, to help monitor all of this, a standardized ECU was introduced. This particular ECU unit was manufactured by McLaren in collaboration with Microsoft. Otherwise, the cars in Australia were very much the same as in 2007. So, on Wednesday evening before the race when I took my first look at the 2008 FedEx Williams-Toyota FW30, I wasn't particularly surprised, but I was still eager to see it. Kazakhoil was present on the back of the rear wing and on the front wing endplates, FedEx put their logos on the front wing mainplane as well as on the sidepods, and a smaller logo on the roll hoop as well. RBS took a large spot on the engine cover, just like last year, while Lenovo took a new place on the front of the rear wing. Petrobras was still on the sides of the nose, but they also added a Brazilian flag to the turning vanes, Scania continued on the bargeboards, Saudia had a place on the bottom right corner of the engine cover, just beneath the RBS logo, as well as on the rear wing endfences. Philips, Reuters, Bridgestone, and Oris Watches all had smaller logos on the car, particularly on the nose, and all of this combined to form a car that was predominantly a very dark blue and white, with a few splashes of cyan and even a tiny bit of red in the Scania logo. It maybe wasn't the most exciting color palette, but it did form a sharp looking car, and I hoped I could do it justice this season.
So, testing was done, we all understood the changes going into 2008, and all twenty-two cars were in Australia ready to go. There would be three practice sessions: two on Friday, one on Saturday, with the Saturday session followed closely by an hour of qualifying. Qualifying was divided into three sessions: in Q1, twenty-two cars would go out and positions 22 through 17 would be decided, in Q2, sixteen cars would go out to decide positions 16 through 11, and finally, in Q3, the top ten cars would compete to decide the starting grid. After qualifying, there was nothing left to do but the race. It could take an hour and a half, it could take two hours, it could take as long as it takes, nobody was ever really sure, it all depended on how the race went. All we knew for sure though is that, once we reached full distance and crossed the checkered line for the final time, the winner would get 10 points, second place 8 points, third place 6, fourth place 5, fifth place 4, sixth place 3, seventh place 2, and just 1 point for eighth place. The first race of the season could be a chaotic one: this was when reliability was at its most uncertain, when cars were at their least dialed in, and when drivers were the least race fit, so for a team like us, the goal was simple: score as many points as possible while we still can.
"And it is race day at the Australian Grand Prix! After a long winter break when F1 teams were hard at work developing their new challengers, they're finally going to be fighting on track for everything that its worth! So, going into the race, the question everyone is asking is how are they lining up? Well, I'll tell you how, and we'll go from bottom to top. At the very back of the grid is Lorenzo Barbaro for the new Force India team, taking a pitlane start after a costly spin damaged his chassis in qualifying. This means that Louis Sanderson for Super Aguri lines up alone on the final row. Ahead of him we have Filipe Yannick in 20th in his Renault debut, Fabian Schmidt lining up in 19th after a ten-place grid penalty, Haruki Tanaka in the lead Super Aguri in 18th, Maximilien Lecroix in 17th for Toro Rosso, and Umberto Petronelli in 16th for Force India. Reigning world champion Matti Hamalainen is down in 15th thanks to a fuel pressure issue in qualifying, and Martin Weaver who lines up in 14th ahead of him also failed to set a time in Q2 in his Red Bull. Daniel MacGowan did set a time in his Red Bull, but lining up in 13th place, it's not much better for the Scotsman. James Buxton lines up 12th for Honda, Felipe Alvarez 11th for Renault, and Rudolfo Goncalves' Honda is elevated to 10th thanks to Schmidt's penalty. Likewise, Maximilian Renner starts a brilliant 9th for Scuderia Toro Rosso thanks to his countryman's misfortune. Ahead of all the penalties, it is an all-Williams fourth row with Tommy Koskinen in 7th just ahead of Tamara Shchegolyayeva in 8th. Ivan Tripoli is 6th for Toyota, lining up alongside the BMW Sauber of Victor Hartmann in 5th. Henrique de Matteo is a disappointing 4th for Ferrari but he is also their lead car at the minute! Jyri Kaasalainen is in 3rd in his very first race for McLaren, a brilliant performance for the Finn, but it is the BMW Sauber of Piotr Kaminski splitting the McLarens! A front row start for the Polish driver, lining up alongside our polesitter, Anthony Harrison of the United States driving for Vodafone McLaren-Mercedes. Right on time too, because we need to get off the grid now, as the dawn of the 2008 Formula One World Championship is just minutes away!" I gave a bemused look at the Australian TV presenter as he made his way up the grid, announcing each and every driver on his way. I didn't keep looking for long though, because he was right: the start was only a few minutes away. So, I put on the balaclava, the helmet, and both my racing gloves as I got into the car.
As we circulated around the track for the formation lap, I thought about what the grid looked like after the first qualifying session. Now, Ferrari's results are slightly skewed by the fact that Matti had a reliability issue before he could even get to Q3, but Henrique de Matteo is behind both McLarens in a way that simply hasn't been the case before. I am obviously working with a limited amount of data, having only this one qualifying session to work off of, but from what I'm seeing right now, I would say there are three front-runners this year: McLaren, Ferrari, and BMW Sauber, with McLaren having a slight edge, at least at the moment. Then I think, in the race for fourth, Toyota and us are neck-and-neck, given that Tripoli and Schmidt had us in a Toyota sandwich before Fabian got his penalty. Toro Rosso is difficult to pinpoint with Renner and Lecroix being so far apart, but Honda seems rather consistent, so perhaps I could say they are the fifth-best car at this circuit. Renault is also hard to predict, with Felipe Alvarez being so far ahead of Filipe Yannick, but I have to assume that Yannick's poor result is a bit of a fluke. If not, then I think Bernardo Fulvia is going to have some serious regrets about how he conducted himself with me in Brazil. Red Bull had a properly miserable qualifying session and I'm sure that's concerning for them, while Force India seems to have taken a set ahead of Super Aguri, albeit a step forward that is somewhat blunted by Lorenzo's pitlane start. Which, speaking of, as the rest of us pulled onto the grid to begin the race, Barbaro pulled into the pitlane and drove all the way down to the exit, having to sit at the red light until each and every car passed him.
The 2008 season will begin in earnest in five...four...three...two...one...zero. Tommy and I took off with blistering starts, passing the Toyota ahead and even challenging the BMW of Hartmann, but Maximilian Renner behind had a terrible start, and that set the stage for a chaotic series of events. Before that could kick off though, there was completely unrelated chaos up front, with Henrique de Matteo and Jyri Kaasalainen made contact in turn one, sending the Brazilian into a spin and forcing the Finn to take to the grass with damage, allowing us to sail past him. Behind us though, that's where the chaos really took off. Thanks to Renner nearly stalling it on the start, the Toro Rosso driver went three-wide through turn three with Buxton and Weaver, ending tragically for all three cars involved, and to add insult to injury, two other cars hit the aftermath of that - Louis Sanderson and Daniel MacGowan. The younger Briton retired on the spot, turning the three-car wreck into a four-car wreck, whereas the elder Briton shattered his front wing, sending him right to the back, and needing to crawl back to the pitlane for repairs. Three corners into the race and there was already multiple cars out, multiple cars damaged, and carbon fiber all over the place. Needless to say, the ensuing radio message from Peter was little surprise.
"Safety car, safety car. We think this might be a long one." my horseshoe-bald British race engineer reported.
"Copy that. What's the order now?" I asked, looking for some clarification on the aftermath of that incident. We had an awful lot of cars, some ahead of us, some behind, who suffered in those turn one incidents, a lot of which were out, some were still in the race, and in all of that, it wasn't very clear who exactly was where.
"One second...okay. We have Harrison in the lead, Kaminski is second, Tommy is third, Hartmann is fourth, you are fifth. I repeat, you are fifth. Tripoli is sixth, Goncalves is seventh, Hamalainen eighth, Kaasalainen ninth, and Schmidt is tenth. Petronelli, Weaver, Buxton, Renner, and Sanderson are out. MacGowan and Matteo are still in the race, I'll let you know where exactly they are once everything shakes out." Peter Malmedy read out the top ten - beyond that it was still hard to tell at this stage - and even mentioned a retirement I didn't know about. I would later learn that Petronelli retired due to turn one contact with Yannick, so he was out before the big pile-up in turn three even happened. Hamalainen and, to a lesser extent, Schmidt took full advantage of the chaos to gain some serious places, though, then again, so did we. We may not have gained as many positions as the Finn and the German, but in terms of positions that matter? Tommy and I moved mountains on the first lap. We were running in third and fifth, that could be a massive points haul for us. If things were to finish as they are now, BMW Sauber would take the constructors' lead with 13 points, McLaren would be second with 10, and we would be tied on 10, but behind as McLaren has the better quality of points. Ten points from the first race of the season could prove to be an amazing buffer to our rivals and the perfect way to start our season.
It is a bit too early to get ahead of ourselves, after all, the race had only just begun. We did, however, end up burning a lot of time under the SC, since the yellow lights on the Mercedes-Benz SL-Class safety car didn't go out until lap eight - fairly understandable considering just how many cars needed to be removed and all the various bits of carbon fiber and front wing strewn across turns one, two, and three. As well as the fact that the cars were still circulating around the track during all of this. That all meant that the race was going to restart on lap nine, and I would hopefully get my first unobstructed race lap of the Albert Park circuit in the 2008 season. I tucked right behind Hartmann on the restart and followed his tow down the start-finish straight and into the first two corners. Turn one was a left-hand ninety-degree corner followed immediately by the faster turn two to the left, which spit us out onto the second straight. It was a full-blown dash with Toyota power against BMW power, but as I broke out of the slipstream and went to the inside for turn three, I had a bit of an opening. Turn three was essentially a hairpin to the right with how tight it was, and Hartmann tried to defend through it, but that just gave me the better line down the short blast down to the fast turn four to the left. It was a fast blast in front of the facade of the cricket field, but one with treacherous kerbs if one went too far off. I kept it on track though, now up to fourth and just behind my teammate.
This was a good place to be through the very fast right-hander of turn five. The resulting straight finished sector one and deposited us in the hard braking zone of turn six. A ninety-degree corner to the right followed by a gentle sweeper to the left in the form of turn seven. Turn eight was then a sweeper back to the right, but it was taken at such a flat-out speed that our simulator even treated it as a straight. In a dry race like this, it was barely a thought in a driver's mind. Turns nine and ten formed the Clark chicane, with a slow right-hander followed by a sweeper to the left, and then began the long, fast arc along the lake which I loved so much. The sector line came right before the braking zone for turn eleven. Braking only as much as strictly necessary before throwing the car the left, and then a moment later to the right for turn eleven, taking a ride on the exit kerb if necessary, but back onto the straight to maximize speed as sector three begins. It was a flat-out run all the way to the end of the lake here at Albert Park, before a hard braking zone and a turn to the right for Ascari, followed, after a short shoot, with another right-hander at Stewart corner. Stewart was a little faster, with a kerb there on exit to carry you out of the corner, but gravel just beyond it should a driver get too greedy. Turn fifteen was a tight, hairpin like corner to the left followed by the more generous final corner to the right, shooting us onto the start-finish straight to begin lap ten.
As the first stint of the race was now properly underway, Anthony Harrison was leading but Piotr Kaminski was preventing him from getting more than a few seconds ahead of him, and all five of us were within ten seconds of the leader, as Hartmann stayed with us even after I passed him. The Toyota and Honda behind us, however, were not sticky as well to us, and that meant that reigning world champion Matias Hamalainen was growing rather impatient as he was still stuck behind Rudolfo Goncalves in eighth place. I imagine that Jyri Kaasalainen feels the same way, as his teammate is winning the race while the younger Finn isn't even in the points at the moment. So yeah, not good news for either of the frontrunning Finnish drivers, but it was good for us though, because that meant that Tommy and I were still running in third and fourth, and we were also building a gap to some of the cars that could compete with us. I might even dare say we have a chance of finishing this way, with 11 points compared to BMW's 12 and McLaren's 10, which would put us in a sensational second place in the constructors' championship. Good for BMW Sauber too, because I believe the last time either BMW or Williams could even think of leading the championship, the two of us were partners. So, needless to say, it was all going very well. There was, however, one thing I would change about the current arrangement: I would put myself on the podium rather than my teammate.
"What are we thinking strategy wise?" I asked Malmedy over the radio, hinting at the fact that I wanted to use pit strategy to get the jump on my teammate and, with any luck, be in a position to attack Kaminski ahead.
"We are fueled to go longer than Tommy, longer than Tommy. We expect this will make us faster at the end of the race." Peter answered. Perfect. This will give me track position after Tommy stops and, while I will most likely lose out in the middle stint, shorter, faster middle and final stints should put me in a position to be much faster than my teammate later in the year, giving me the chance to finish ahead of him and on the podium. All I had to do was make sure it happened. Meanwhile, Malmedy kept me posted the whole way, letting me know on lap sixteen when Kaminski was the first one to pit, on lap seventeen when Harrison saw him off and pitted as well. On lap twenty-one when Hartmann tried to do the same thing to us, and a lap later when Koskinen pitted to cover off the BMW Sauber. As well as on lap nineteen when nineteen when Hamalainen made it past Goncalves. I realized something at this point too: I was now leading the Australian Grand Prix.
I led four laps before pulling into the pitlane on lap twenty-six. This is perhaps a little bit earlier than we had intended, but we heard that Henrique de Matteo and Daniel MacGowan had a big accident, so they pulled me into the pitlane before the SC came out. The way the current regulations are, once the safety car is out, the pitlane is closed and remains closed until the whole queue forms and the entire grid passes the start-finish line, at which point pitting means losing out dramatically. Pitting now, however, gives me the chance to minimize damage. I pulled into the box, the car went up on the jacks, Bridgestone prime tyres came off in favor of option tyres, and the car was fueled up for the middle stint. I tapped my fingers on the top of the steering wheel before gripping the wheel tightly when the car was lowered to the ground. The fuel hose came off, the lollipop went up, and I was released into the pitlane. Harrison passed me, Kaminski passed me, but, crucially, I came out in third, ahead of my teammate. I may not have built up as much of a lap buffer as I had wanted to, but I can still go four laps deeper than my teammate, I'll be on softer tyres than him for the rest of the race, and I have track position over him. It wasn't what we had planned, no, but it was even better. The pitlane was now closed, the lead pack caught up to the safety car, and I was now officially running in third, my teammate behind me, and on course for a third career podium. Furthermore, with both Henrique de Matteo and Daniel MacGowan having joined a growing list of retirements from the race, we had fewer and fewer things to worry about.
"Great work guys, thank you." I thanked the team over the radio as, once again, the removal of cars ate away at the number of remaining laps. The race did restart on lap thirty, and it seemed like the racing gods were smiling down favorably upon Williams, because Jyri Kaasalainen attempted an overtake on Matti Hamalainen in turn three, causing the Ferrari driver to brake late in response. Perhaps Matti simply overcooked it, or perhaps in the heat of the moment, Matti forgot we weren't running traction control anymore, because he slid off the track and into the gravel trap. The reigning world champion kept it going and avoided getting beached, but he did lose a couple of places in the process and was now even further back behind us. Furthermore, this all seemed to be upsetting the Finn, who seemed to get used to winning after a tremendous run of form at the end of the last season, so Matti was properly on a charge trying to get back to position. So, two laps later, he spun trying to overtake Fabian Schmidt in what was turning out to be a nightmare day for Ferrari.
Little did Schmidt know that it was a nightmare day for Toyota too, because, not only did Ivan Tripoli retire around lap twenty due to an electrical fault on his car, but Fabian retired as well. On lap forty-two, completely unrelated to the incident with Matti about ten laps earlier, Schmidt ran wide into the grass and went airborne on a bump, coming crashing down in such a way that it snapped the suspension, sliding into the wall in the process. To add insult to injury, Fabian shattered his front wing as well. Anthony is leading, a BMW Sauber is in second, and I'm in third; cars are breaking down everywhere, many in dramatic crashes, and Ferrari is having a miserable day. This is starting to look a lot like the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix to me. And much like that Canadian race, the safety car came out for a third time. This one lasted five laps, and it was possibly lengthened by the fact that, at the same time as Schmidt's crash, Rudolfo Goncalves had been in the pitlane and, thanks to a lighting glitch - Honda, like Ferrari, use an electronic lighting system rather than a lollipop man on their pitstops - he sped off with the fuel hose attached, tearing it apart and dousing his pit crew in race fuel. Thankfully, there hadn't been a fire, but Rudolfo still retired from the race thanks to the fact he had half a fuel hose sticking out of his car. It's a scary incident, but, fundamentally, the driver's job in a pitstop is to wait for the signal and then throttle it to get out of the pitlane as soon as possible. The team has to make sure the right signal is being sent, and that's part of the reason why McLaren, Williams, and many other teams feel more comfortable with a real lollipop man there, fully prepared to make a judgement call at any moment. I didn't see exactly what happened in the Honda pit box though, since I was circulating around track behind the safety car.
So, it was the end of lap forty-six and we were about to restart the race on lap forty-seven. Anthony slowly creeped into the penultimate corner, closing the grid up and making us all grow with anticipation, wondering what exactly he'd do, when he'd start, and how exactly it would affect us. Well, he weaved in the distance between the two corners, getting some more heat into his tyres, and also bringing more uncertainty into the situation. Piotr Kaminski decided to follow him, weaving as well, but this is exactly what the American wanted, because he gunned the throttle and blasted onto the straight, catching the Pole completely off-guard and building a gap immediately. Piotr reacted fairly well, all things considered, but it was still an opening for me, so I was all over the back of his car going down the straight. I could've made a move down into turn one, but I knew it wasn't the best opportunity, so I just followed him through that corner and turn two, getting a run on him down the second straight. I tried to bait Piotr into going for the inside, but the Pole remained resolutely on the racing line, so instead, I went inside. The BMW Sauber driver knew the stakes and he knew that braking from the inside was more awkward, so he simply aggressively cut across me, forcing me to back out, and kept the position. I gave up a few tenths because of that, but I spent the rest of that lap rebuilding, so, when it was time for lap forty-eight, I was chasing the Pole yet again.
I was more patient this time, again following him through turns one and two, but also through turn three. It was a good overtaking spot, sure, but I had the pace advantage, so for now, I was going to keep the pressure on him and wait for the right time to pass. I knew that Piotr was an incredibly good driver, and I knew that he had masterful race craft, so I wasn't going to have much luck with a textbook pass that he'd see coming from a mile away. No, I needed to bide my time and get creative. So, I followed him through turn three - though I did pull to the inside to take a look, just to fill his mirrors, make sure he knew I was right behind, and also making sure he was spending more time looking at his mirrors than the track ahead. Formula One is just as much about mind games as it is about driving. This continued through turns four and five, where overtakes simply don't happen, but I took another look through turn six. Again, six wasn't really an overtaking spot, so it was more about keeping the pressure up than actually attempting a move. I cut the theatrics through seven, eight, nine, and ten, because these were fast, flowing corners where it was imperative to avoid catching too much dirty air, as the turbulence from the car ahead could really interfere with the aerodynamics through corners like this.
I threw the car into the turn eleven-twelve chicane, just behind the BMW. It was a bit of a straight, so with the draft from the car ahead, I pulled alongside, really putting the pressure on now. I knew, however, that turn thirteen wasn't really the best corner to overtake, and the BMW still had his nose ahead, so I was expecting him to remain ahead, but...that was when everything changed. I saw Piotr lock-up his front left tyre, I saw him going straight on - it looked like he was sliding off into the escape road where he'd have to spin the car around and rejoin the race a few places down the order - so I turned into the corner to take second place. That's not entirely what happened through, because somewhere in there, Kaminski regained control of his tyre and turned the car into the corner on a wider line. I saw Piotr driving past me on the outside on the corner exit, halfway on the exit kerb, but I was also on the racing line, meaning I was going for that exit kerb, and I hadn't anticipated Piotr recovering in that way. Even if he did recover, I didn't expect him to get back ahead of me in the corner. I tried to turn out of it, but it was too late. My front wing hit his right rear tyre hard, the BMW jerked to the left with the left rear slamming into the wall and the front left following into the wall, while I was now weaving to the right with a broken front wing and a punctured front left tyre, punctured by my own carbon fiber.
"No! No no no! I have damage! I have damage!" I radioed in as I eased the car through Stewart and Prost on my way to the pitlane, Tommy Koskinen and Victor Hartmann both passing me on the way. I managed to get my car into the pitlane and on the limiter, taking the long drive of shame to my pit box. I had been third, I had been fighting for second, and I had even led a few laps during the race, but now, my car was up on jacks, my tyres were being replaced, and my nosecone had to come off to be replaced entirely. The team was fueling the car up along the same time and putting me onto my final stint, but I was still losing time, losing a podium, and losing a whole lot of positions. I was still in the race though, with ten laps left, and I had to focus on damage limitation at this point.
"Okay, we're in seventh, we are in seventh. Lecroix is in front. You've been faster than him all day. Go get him." Peter responded as I came out of the pitlane, negotiated the first two corners, and sped onto the second straight. Malmedy was keeping me focused and motivated, doing exactly what I wanted him to do. The thing is though, it's not exactly that simple: the thing is, when you crash a Formula One car, it's never quite the same anymore. You can replace the wing, you can get new tyres, but that front wing is never quite as dialed in as the one you've been setting up all weekend, and the front wing shattering means carbon fiber likely shred up the bargeboards and the floor a little bit too, so the race car might still be fast, the damage might be insignificant, but it's not the same. That makes it hard to be as confident as you were before, that makes it hard to be as aggressive as you were before, and all of that can make it very hard to recover from where you've been. In my case, while I was faster than Lecroix and I was catching the Toro Rosso, I wasn't as fast as the leading pack anymore, so my chances of getting back onto the podium disappeared altogether. In hindsight, it's easy to say I shouldn't have turned into the corner like that: I should have relied on the fact that Kaminski had compromised himself in that corner and take him back later, but, in the moment, I truly did believe the lock-up was worse than it was and that he was going off the track.
Enough of that overtake though, rather, I should focus on the next one. Lap fifty, I was four seconds behind Lecroix, by lap fifty-one, that was down to just over three seconds as I took nine-tenths out of him in a single lap. 3.4 seconds on lap fifty-two, 2.9 seconds on lap fifty-three, then 1.5 seconds on lap fifty-four. A massive gain again, but this time, it wasn't down to me, in fact, it was more down to the fact that Lecroix was heading very slowly. On lap fifty-five, I figured out why, because I saw the Toro Rosso pulling off the track with a smoking engine, having suffered a failure. It was a brief moment of happiness, as the failure elevated me to sixth, but it was the last thing I could celebrate that race. The top five were too far ahead and my car didn't have the speed in it anymore. I even went a lap down, meaning that I only completed fifty-seven laps of this fifty-eight-lap race, and I was the last car running at the end of the race. Which, speaking of...
The points paying results for the 2008 Australian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
2: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 8 points.
3: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 6 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 5 points.
5: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 4 points.
6: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 3 points.
7: Maximilien Lecroix - France - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 2 points.
8: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 1 point.
So, Anthony Harrison and McLaren go to the top of both championships as McLaren looks to bounce back strongly from 2007, Ferrari suffers a terrible day with just one car scoring points, and even that is just barely, and Williams once again scores a double-points finish. Tommy scores his first podium in his third season of Formula One, while Lecroix and Hamalainen were classified despite late retirements as they completed 90% of the race distance. So, only six cars crossed the line and only eight cars were classified at the end of the race, meaning this was a truly, truly chaotic season opener. I'm obviously upset that I went from a podium position to barely in the points, especially because my teammate profited in my place, but, well, a lot of people have much bigger things to be mad about going out of this race. This meant that, after the race, when I found myself in the media pen, I wasn't too downbeat on myself.
"Well Tamara, it's been a rollercoaster of a race for you, can you tell us a little bit about it?" Katherine Symmons asked.
"Well...obviously I wish we could have kept that podium and I'm sorry that Piotr had to retire, but ultimately, I'm glad to have scored points. The team took a podium, and a double-points finish, and it has us second in the constructors' championship right now. When McLaren is the only other team with both cars in the points, you can't really be too upset with a sixth place finish. There is a lot of season left and, well, hopefully my time will come later on." I responded, trying to keep things on a positive note. McLaren took 14 points from this race, we were on 9, BMW Sauber was on 8, and Renault was on 5. We have to be positive with that considering every other team has something to complain about: even McLaren, had cause to be upset, because Jyri Kaasalainen started third and the car that qualified second crashed out. That means McLaren should be celebrating a one-two finish, but instead, the Finn was behind a BMW Sauber, a Williams, and a Renault. Not the best debut for the highly rated Finn, but hopefully he'll bounce back with a long season left to go. Felipe Alvarez, however, will be satisfied to finish ahead of his McLaren replacement.
"Let's talk about that incident with Piotr Kaminski, could you describe what happened from your perspective?" she asked next.
"Well, I wish it didn't happen. Piotr and I were fighting for a really good place and it's a shame he's out and a shame I fell down the order. As for who is at fault? I took a regular line through that corner, Piotr, meanwhile, locked up. I guess he managed to recover at some point and got a surprisingly good exit, quite frankly, I'm not sure how he managed to take that line and still stay ahead of me. Obviously, I'm going to say I was in the right and Piotr is going to say he's in the right, and, as a driver, it's easy to want to see a driver get punished after something like this, but really...it was a racing incident." I explained, going through an incident where I think both drivers are clearly upset over the incident, but neither driver is actually predominantly at fault. Quite frankly, I didn't expect Kaminski to recover and still be there on the outside, much less still ahead of me, while Piotr probably didn't expect me to be in a position to make the move after such a small mistake. I'm sure he also really didn't like the fact that he made a mistake and locked up, so the Pole was desperately scrambling to get back on track and defend his position, perhaps in that, that little extra bit of forethought, that little extra bit of situational awareness that sets F1 drivers apart from ordinary people, went away.
"Alright Tamara, thank you and we'll let you go now because we're hearing that you have been summoned to the steward's office." Katherine informed me, ending the interview prematurely. So, it seems the crash went to the steward's office, and that meant that my sixth-place finish was under review. As upsetting as losing out a podium was, I could still be satisfied with a sixth, but if I get that taken away from me? That would make this weekend really hurt. That being said, what could they really do? I doubt there is any argument for an outright disqualification, while a five or even ten second penalty wouldn't do anything because Lecroix and Hamalainen didn't actually finish. So what were they going to do? Give me a grid penalty for the next race? Even that seemed far-fetched to me. It's not like the accident was a malicious overreaction or going for a desperate move, it was simply the result of a miscalculation after the car ahead of me made a mistake. So, I made my way to the garage, talked to the team for a moment, and then went to the stewards' office as instructed. I did, however, pass Piotr Kaminski on the way.
"Hello Piotr, sorry about the accident. I didn't realize you kept it on the track." I greeted him somewhat awkwardly, well aware of the fact that he was probably making his way back from the stewards' office, having given his perspective on the incident.
"Hello Tamara." he greeted in response, just a bit clipped, which I figured what more about being mad at the accident than actually being mad at me "It's up to the stewards now, they decided to review the incident and they'll make a judgement. Either way, it doesn't affect me anymore."
"No, I suppose it doesn't. Well, I'm going to go make my case. I'll see you in Malaysia." I responded, still somewhat awkward, but a bit relieved. Piotr seemed more aloof than upset about all this, probably because whether or not I got a penalty, he would still be disqualified. I could respect that; a lot of drivers get vindictive and want the other driver punished regardless of whether or not it would mean anything for them or their team, but Piotr doesn't seem to be the type. Right now, I get the impression that he just wants to get to the next race and redeem himself on track. That being said, the aloofness kind of went both ways, because while Kaminski didn't think it mattered whether or not I got a penalty, he also didn't think it mattered whether or not I stayed in the points. Therefore, when Piotr was summoned to the stewards to give his side of the story, he wasn't going to be doing me any favors. Now that's fine, because one: I didn't ask for any sort of special treatment, and two: I didn't think I needed him to in order for me to keep my position. I still don't think there is grounds for a penalty.
"See you in Malaysia," Piotr responded before continuing down to the BMW Sauber garage. Meanwhile, I headed up to the steward's office. For the first time in my Formula One career - which I suppose means I've been a pretty good girl after all - I found myself in the stewards' office. Four men sat on either side of the table, with an open seat at the bottom of it, and opposite of that, there were two big TVs at the head of the table. At the moment, one of those TVs was showing the aerial footage of the turn thirteen incident over and over again, while the over TV was paused on the onboard T-cam view of my car at the moment of the accident. From this overhead angle, they could see that I now saw Piotr on my left and was starting to steer towards the right, trying to avoid the accident, but it had been too late at that point. That particular TV shot, and the fact that the stewards have been looking at it for the past few minutes, should be enough to exonerate me.
"Hello Tamara, take a seat." one of the stewards, a man I'm not familiar with, but I'm sure he is some prestigious Australian driver brought in as a guest steward for this event. I may not be familiar with him, but for all I know, he's some kind of national legend that's won the Bathurst 12 hours half a dozen times and was offered a Formula One drive in the 1990s. Anyway, the point is, he was the first to speak to me.
"Hello," I smiled and greeted them rather nervously as I took the seat.
"First things first, explain the turn thirteen incident, in detail, to the best of your ability." another steward, this time an Englishman with graying hair, asked. They wanted an impartial, unguided description of the incident first and foremost. They knew how drivers were and they knew drivers would hear a question then try to give the right answer rather than correct answer. Thus, the stewards wanted as neutral and uncurated description as they could get to begin with.
"I was following Kaminski closely. He got caught out by Harrison on the restart and that gave me a chance into turn three on lap forty-seven. I was unable to execute the move, so I kept following and kept trying to pile the pressure on, hoping to force him into a mistake. That mistake eventually came in turn thirteen on lap forty-eight. I saw Piotr lock up and I saw my opportunity. I thought that he was going to go off and take to the escape road. I took my eyes off of him for a moment and turned my attention to the apex to take the corner. I was moving to the exit kerb, taking the racing line through that corner, but just as I was looking in my mirror to see where Kaminski ended up, I saw him passing me again on the outside. I tried to react and avoid contact but it was too late. We made contact, Piotr was worse off and retired, but I had massive front wing damage and had to pit. I lost a lot of positions and the car felt off for the whole rest of the race." I explained as matter of factly as I could. I was justifying my actions, yes, but not because I felt like I needed to cover for myself, rather, because I felt I was in the right.
"So you lost track of Piotr in a corner despite the fact that he started ahead of you and ended up ahead of you?" one of the stewards asked, now getting into the interrogation phase of the summons.
"In fairness, I was taking a look into the corner anyway, so it was more like alongside rather than fully behind, but, essentially, yes." I responded, pointing out that it wasn't so simple as Piotr was directly ahead of me but I tried the overtake anyway, rather, he was to my left and had the nose ahead, whereas the apex of the corner was to the right, so I needed to turn my attention to the right at some point. Obviously spatial awareness is important in Formula One but that applies to the corners as well, so I can't just keep looking at Piotr forever.
"Were you influenced into a desperate move by the chance of getting a podium?" the same steward asked, giving me the sense that he was the one most hostile to me, the one most likely to push for a penalty.
"With all due respect, I already have two podiums to my name. I think that shows I'm not desperately driving for one." I responded. I wanted podiums, obviously, but it wasn't like I was at a point in my career where I was desperately trying to score a podium at any cross. I've already proven I can drive at that level, and I already have good results to my name. I made the move on Kaminski because I saw an opening and I legitimately believed I could safely make the move. I've never finished second and that is something I would like to start doing, yes, but I think the suggestion that I caused a crash in a stupid and desperate move to gain positions is just completely unwarranted. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I think I've done enough in the machinery given to me to be considered a good driver.
"Alright, enough of this." the Englishman who asked me to describe the incident stopped this interrogation before it got too heated "In light of the evidence presented, along with the fact that you have a clean disciplinary record in your career, we declare this a racing incident. Your result is preserved, don't let it happen again."
"Thank you," I thanked the stewards, smiled, and left the office. I was satisfied with the verdict; I think it's an accurate description of the incident, and I'm proud of the fact that a good disciplinary record helped me out here. The stewards are supposed to view incidents in insolation, but obviously things don't always happen that way, and a lot of the time things like championship position or reputation matter. Quite frankly, if you are a reckless or penalty-prone driver, the stewards are more likely to assume fault in incidents, whereas if you have a clean reputation, you are more likely to get away when an incident is borderline. There is also the fact that some incidents kind of solve themselves, with both drivers facing consequences for their actions, and I think that also holds true of this accident. Kaminski was knocked out of the race, yes, but, as I pointed out, I suffered as well, and that led to me going from potentially second to being the last real finisher.
With all the business with the stewards being over with, it was back to the garage to go celebrate with the team. Frank Williams sat in the center, the third-place trophy in front of him, Tommy Koskinen squatting on his left and me on the right, Michael Coronet and Claire stood behind Frank, while the team gathered in a few rows on either side, every member gathered in for the picture. On Tommy's side, some of his guys held up a pit board reading "Tommy P3 Podium!" while some of my guys held up a board reading "Tamara P6, 9 points!" with the 9 points referring to the team total, not my individual result. That illustrated what my part in all of this was: I contributed to a team result. I had been in a really good position, and at one point it looked like we might score a double-podium and take an amazing result for the teams and for us as individuals as well, but for now, it was more of a team deal. Tommy was the one getting to celebrate more than me. It was a good race for the young Finn, with him not only scoring his first podium, but getting to share it with Anthony Harrison, his longtime karting teammate from the Team Koskinen days. I could be happy for him for that, it was an impressive result after all, it's just that, having lost out on a podium and having had to go to the stewards' office to defend the few scraps I did score, it was getting a bit harder to be happy about this team performance. Quite frankly, at this point, I wanted to be able to stop thinking about this race and start turning my attention over to Malaysia, see if I can finally redeem myself from last year and score some points.
Formula One wasn't the only thing I was looking forward to going into the Malaysian Grand Prix though. No, because alongside the main show that is Formula One, there will be a GP2 Asia support race at Sepang, as well as one two weeks later in Sakhir for the Bahrain Grand Prix. This means that, for the first time in her life, Natasha Tsirinskaya is going to be in the same paddock as Formula One, driving on the same track, and subject to nearly as much attention as the Formula One race itself. So, how is my adopted cousin doing in GP2 Asia going into these important races? Well, pretty damn good actually. The GP2 Asia series kicked off at the Dubai Autodrome, much like it had in the 2006 season when I had raced it, and this late January round of the championship composed of two races. The feature race featured the same points system as F1, with it going 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1, while the shorter sprint race awarded points in a 6-5-4-3-2-1 allocation. The polesitter of the feature race was also awarded two points, which marked a difference from F1, but, much like the senior series, there were no points awarded for fastest lap.
So, with all that being said, this is how the season was shaping up so far. The Dubai Autodrome opening saw Japanese driver Yoshikazu Higashiyama - a Toyota affiliated driver - absolutely dominate. Higashiyama took pole position and won both the feature race and the sprint race to take the maximum number of points possible from the weekend. Yoshikazu did it all in a DAMS too, so, having driven that exact car two years ago, it was easy to feel pride. As for Natasha, well, she finished 8th in the first race which translated into a pole position for the sprint race. Higashiyama passed her in the sprint race, being on the dominant weekend that he was, but she held on to finish second, in a very, very positive opening weekend for her. Well, Natasha and Trident were drop back down to Earth in the second race weekend at the Sentul International Circuit in Indonesia. This race weekend was more competitive, with Russian driver Vladimir Alexandrov take pole position for ART and Maximilien Longpre of Luxembourg taking the feature race win for Trust Team Arden. Natasha retired in this race with a mechanical problem, perhaps just bad luck with the car, or perhaps indicative of the rookie Trident team not quite being able to run the spec car as well as the likes of DAMS and ART. Natasha bounced back from this strongly though, charging through the field to take her maiden win in GP2 Asia. I was so proud when she did this, she proved that she could instantly adjust to these cars, and she proved she could handle adversity, having retired in one race but taken victory in the next.
These were a really good first two weekends for her, but, unfortunately, they did also represent a handful of flaws. The first is apparent in her qualifying pace, where she and Trident simply weren't able to reach the very peak times that Higashiyama and Alexandrov were able to reach. The second flaw is, quite frankly, just a bit of bad luck: Natasha's best results were coming from the sprint races, which meant that she was scoring less points that her rivals who were doing well in the feature races. So, with Higashiyama having finished fourth in both Indonesian races, he was leading the championship with 26 points. Alexandrov had 16, and she had 12. Naturally, I advised her to try and get some better results out of the feature races, and boy, did she take my advice to heart at Kari. Going into the third round at Kari Motor Speedway, Alexandrov again took pole and added two points to his tally but could only manage second in the race thanks to Natasha taking her first feature race win. Higashiyama kept control of the situation by charging to third despite a bad qualifying by his standards. In the Indian sprint race, it was none of the title protagonists taking the win, but rather it was Alexandrov's ART teammate, Bernard Audinet. Bernard had been my teammate at DAMS two years prior and had now returned to the series, using it as a winter warm-up session to his campaign in the main GP2 series. Taking a win, even if it was just a sprint race, was good preparation in my book. Longpre took second in what was only his second points finish of the season, Alexandrov made it a double ART podium, Natasha was fifth, and Higashiyama was sixth, taking the last sprint race point, but a point nonetheless. So, three races down, three to go.
Going into the F1 support races - followed by a finale event at Dubai a week after the Bahrain Grand Prix - the GP2 Asia standings looked like this: Yoshikazu Higashiyama for DAMS was on 33 points, ART driver Vladimir Alexandrov was on 30 points thanks two points for pole at Kari, a second, and a third, and Natasha was on 24 points for Trident Racing. Maximilien Longpre was on 15 points thanks to a feature race win and a sprint race second, but those were his only points, and similarly, Bernard Audinet was on 12 points as his only points came from a third-place finish at the Sentul feature and later that win at the Kari sprint race. Higashiyama, Tsirinskaya, and Longpre were all destroying their teammates at DAMS, Trident, and Arden, respectively, while the two ART drivers were demonstrating just why ART is one of the top junior formula teams in the world. Third at the Dubai feature race for 6 points, pole position at Sentul for 2 points, dropped to fifth in the feature race for 4 points and took 4 from the sprint race thanks to a podium, then pole, second and third from Kari in a near-perfect weekend made it little wonder why Alexandrov closed up to Higashiyama so quickly despite having yet to score his first win. That was a question of when, not if for the Russian though. So, Higashiyama and Alexandrov were proving to be high level competition, while Longpre and Audinet were proving to be no slouches either. Higashiyama is a Toyota project, Alexandrov is linked to some very powerful people in Russia that want to see their driver in F1, and Longpre is a Red Bull junior driver, so all of them have a lot riding on these upcoming F1 weekends. Meanwhile, people like Natasha and Bernard are going to want to prove that they deserve to be affiliated with F1 teams as well.
I do think that all of this cements something I've been thinking since at least halfway through last year: Natasha is an exceptional driver who has finally bloomed and bloomed with amazing results to back it up. Natasha is just about to turn eighteen, she was just racing Formula Three cars in Italy last year, but now she's flying over Asia to race for a high-level championship, and she gets to do it with Formula One eyes watching her. When I was in GP2 Asia, I thought of it as a sort of third tier of open wheel motorsport, but that's probably just indicative of the fact that I raced in the series in its infancy, before the drivers that were already there developed into real talents and before the new talents arrived. When I was in GP2 Asia, it was called a gimmick, an attempt to force teams to take on drivers from emerging markets when those drivers weren't good enough for regular GP2. Now though, with a golden generation of drivers. and think about who they are. Yoshikazu Higashiyama? Japanese, and perhaps the most impressive Japanese driver since Haruki Tanaka. Vladimir Alexandrov? Russian and shaping up to be Russia's first Formula One driver, joining a wave of eastern European talent that includes Piotr Kaminski and, well, myself. Natasha Tsirinskaya? Well, I don't think anyone expected to see a Kyrgyzstani driver anywhere near F1, especially not a woman, but, here we are. In the near future, F1 might have two women racing under Central Asian flags, their first Russian driver, and an emerging Japanese talent. Toyota may want to outsource Hideki Kitagawa to us, but I doubt they'll be wanting to do the same to Higashiyama.
So, after a chaotic Australian Grand Prix, onto Malaysia and Bahrain, where excitement awaits both F1 and GP2 Asia.
Notes:
Alright everyone, hope you enjoyed the start of the season!
Chapter 12: The Next Generation
Notes:
Hello, hello everyone. I hope you enjoyed the last chapter. Two races per chapter is still the norm for this story but there are some races I like to flesh out. In this case, looking at the real 2008 Australian Grand Prix and combining it with my own original ideas, I felt the race was too action-packed not to warrant its own chapter. That did lead to me finishing off with a bit of filler in the last chapter about GP2 Asia, but with this chapter including Malaysia and Bahrain - along with their support races, I think that last break of chapter eleven actually serves as a really good lead-in for this. Enjoy!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter XII.
The Next Generation.
"Five places for the both of them. You'll be starting in seventh. Weaver ahead, Kaasalainen behind." Johannes Koskinen updated me on the results as we took up a vantage point to watch the GP2 Asia race. The feature race followed not long after Formula One qualifying had concluded, while the sprint race would happen shortly before the Formula One race. The fact of the matter is that, at these flyaway races, you couldn't really hold an event after the Formula One race. That's when everyone wanted to just pack up and head home, not stick around and watch what is, for all intents and purposes, a side show. That's not to demean GP2 Asia, obviously I enjoyed my time in that series in its first season and I'm very much enjoying the title battle here in the third season, but it is a feeder series. It just makes more sense to have it be a part of the lead-in to Formula One rather than trying to come after the main show. For the feature race though, the situation was a bit different, because one: the people haven't seen an actual race today, and two: GP2 Asia found it easier to fit the session after qualifying than trying to slot it between FP3 and quali on Saturday morning.
So, after two races of Vladimir Alexandrov getting pole, Yoshikazu Higashiyama was back on top in his DAMS. The dominant Japanese driver was likely hoping this weekend would go just like that first weekend at Dubai, while Alexandrov, who was starting alongside, was likely getting sick of losing these races, so I'm excited to see how this battle will go. As for Natasha, she was starting in sixth, lining up on the third row alongside the ART of Bernard Audinet. The overall situation, as a reminder, is that Higashiyama and Alexandrov are in a tight battle for the championship, Natasha was third with a sprint race win at Sentul and a feature race win at Kari, while, thanks to the fact that the second drivers for DAMS, Trident, and Arden having been rather anonymous this season, ART is in a good position for the teams' championship. Speaking of Arden, their lead driver, the Red Bull protege Maximilien Longpre, could be a threat to Natasha this season, as could Audinet that matter, so third place is far from certain...though I did believe in her abilities to the fullest. I also think this is the best chance yet that she's going to have to showcase them.
The eyes and ears of Formula One were firmly on this race. To start with, there's me and Johannes, watching from our spot up here over the garages - I'm watching because I'm supporting Natasha and, to a lesser extent, Higashiyama, while Johannes is watching because some of these drivers have gone through his junior team, so he has a personal investment in them - but we are far from the only ones. Dr. Helmut Marko of the Red Bull junior program is watching as well, likely with an eye on his driver Longpre in particular, but open to other drivers as well. Similarly, Force India driver Umberto Petronelli is watching as well. The Italian bought into the struggling Scuderia Coloni team to save it a few years ago, and the team currently competes as Coloni PASS International. PASS standing for Petronelli Auto Sport Systems...admittedly not the most elegant name from Umberto but I suppose it makes for a marketable acronym. Anyway, Coloni PASS not only fields one of the GP2 Asia teams, but also a team in the main GP2 series, so Umberto is likely playing manager, driver coach, and driver scout in addition to race himself this weekend. These were just some of the many, many eyes on the series, with every team having at least someone keeping an eye on this support race.
Tommy Koskinen was the first GP2 champion, Anthony Harrison was the second, and Fabian Schmidt was the third. Filipe Yannick came second to Harrison in that 2006 GP2 season before becoming Renault's test and reserve driver last year. I won the first GP2 Asia season while Fabian Schmidt nearly did the double last year, narrowly losing out the 2007 GP2 Asia series to Brazilian Lukas Casemiro. Looking at all that, the only one of us without a current Formula One seat is Lukas, and even then, that can be attributed more to the fact that Renault has too many junior drivers to manage at the moment. Add to the mix current junior drivers like Higashiyama, Alexandrov, Tsirinskaya, Audinet, Longpre, and even Ayrton Senna II, and it's little wonder why so many of us believe we're witnessing the next generation of Formula One drivers in the two GP2 series this year. A huge amount of talent has already graduated from GP2 and GP2 Asia to F1 and its only natural to assume more will graduate in the near future. The fact so many of these drivers are already linked to F1 teams only adds fuel to the fire.
Higashiyama is a Toyota junior, Audinet is a full Renault junior, Longpre is a Red Bull product, Alexandrov has been courted by both Renault and BMW, though he is not committed to either at the moment. Natasha isn't formally part of any junior program but I'm sure Bernardo Fulvia is not oblivious to the fact that she drives for Trident, which as a whole is affiliated with Renault. I wouldn't recommend her going with Renault though, not just because of my soured relationship with Fulvia as of the Brazilian Grand Prix, but also because, as I just alluded to, Renault is affiliated with an awful lot of junior drivers. Bernardo has a reputation as a talent scout and that's on full display here where he practically seems to be hoarding as many junior drivers as he can, knowing full well that he'll never be able to give them a seat. That being said, I don't see any gaping openings in Formula One to begin with. Ayrton Senna II has one of the most emotionally loaded and important names in motorsport, named after his late, great uncle. He is currently affiliated with Honda, has that name, and has some decent results to his name, including two podiums in the current GP2 Asia season, meaning he has a chance to join the championship fight if he can take his results to the next level. Ayrton has all this going for him, but I don't see an easy place for him to slot into Formula One given that Rudolfo Goncalves is showing no signs of slowing down. If a driver literally named Ayrton Senna can't get a seat easily, what chance does Natasha have? That's the double-edged aspect of being part of a golden generation: the competition.
And the competition got underway here in Sepang for the fourth of six GP2 Asia rounds. Yoshikazu Higashiyama and Vladimir Alexandrov fighting at the sharp end of the points, Bernard Audinet and Natasha Tsirinskaya doing the same at the sharp end of the midfield. All four of them got away safely, but the same could not be said for Maximilien Longpre, as the Red Bull junior was involved in first corner contact with Ayrton Senna II while squabbling over seventh. A feature of the Sepang track is that the track is very wide in places, particularly on the main straight, which can cause a lot of cars to pull alongside going down into turn one, which is a problem, since the optimal racing line for that corner allows maybe two cars to go alongside, certainly not more than that. Someone had to back out, but when you're someone like Longpre, carrying the cutthroat reputation of the Red Bull junior program, or someone like Ayrton Senna II carrying all the pressure of that world famous name, backing out isn't really an option for you. So, two cars out and the race had barely even started.
It wasn't the best news for Longpre. The Luxembourgian driver had a win to his name, but it was the sprint race at Sentul, and his second place came from the sprint race at Kari. This means that, in effect, Longpre is falling into the same trap that Natasha was earlier this season, where his best results are coming from the races that pay less points. This is especially painful for Maximilien as, at the moment, Yoshikazu and Vladimir are both set to score big points. Bernard and Natasha are also on course for good races, meaning he could be slipping behind a lot of drivers here. The same could be said about Ayrton Senna II, who has two second place finishes to his name, but poor results elsewhere are preventing him from really competing for the title this year at all. In any case, the wreckage was soon cleared up and the safety car came in, allowing the race to restart. A race of differing fortunes for those involved.
Yoshikazu Higashiyama's great luck from the start of the season seemed to dissipate here in the later stages, as he lost the lead to Vladimir Alexandrov and then plummeted down the order thanks to a slow puncture. This briefly elevated Audinet to fourth and Tsirinskaya to fifth, but they were back in fifth and sixth, respectively, not long after that, due to Shandar Khan of all people being on a charge. The Pakistani driver filled the Asian slot for Trust Team Arden, and he has so far failed to make much of an impression on the points. That, however, appears to be changing. So, the race went on with Alexandrov leading, Khan on a charge forward, and Bernard defending fifth with Natasha, but Higashiyama emerged from the pitlane on new tyres, so, while he was a long way behind the readers, he was on an absolute charge as well. Vladimir Alexandrov looked set to take the championship lead while the Japanese driver was doing everything in his power to get back into the points and keep it. He was running out of laps though, because even in the feature race, GP2 Asia races were fairly short. I watched the DAMs driver overtake his way up to eleventh, then tenth, and then ninth, but he didn't get the honor of the last major position change of the race. Rather, that honor went to Natasha Tsirinskaya, who slipstreamed past Bernard Audinet on the back straight to take fifth place going into the final corner.
Vladimir Alexandrov finally broke through and took his first win for ART, Shandar Khan was a surprise second place in Arden, picking up the pieces after Maximilien Longpre was taken out in turn one, and third place went to Belgium's Alfonse Jauffret, Higashiyama's DAMS teammate. Vittorio De Filippis was fourth for Durango, Natasha Tsirinskaya was fifth for Trident, Bernard Audinet was sixth in the second ART, Dragomir Milanovic was seventh for BCN, while Heinrich Schwarzer finished eighth to give Trident their first double points finish. Excluding ART and Trident, who both scored double-points finishes with their lead driver ahead, today was very much the day of the second drivers, with Shandar Khan and Alfonse Jauffret outscoring their teammates for the first time. Higashiyama did score two points thanks to the fact that he scored pole position for the race, so he was now on 35 points. That wasn't good enough for the Japanese driver though, since Alexandrov took a full ten points from a win, propelling him up into the lead with 40 points. Alexandrov took a second and a third from Kari and now a win from the feature race at Sepang, illustrating the amazing run of form that the Russian was having at the moment. Natasha's fifth place brought her up to 28 points, Longpre, Senna, and now Audinet were tied on 15 points, but Longpre and Audinet edge out the Brazilian thanks to their win outweighing his two second places. Meanwhile, on the teams' side, obviously there were a lot of races left in the season, but it was becoming a bit of a foregone conclusion that ART was going to win the championship.
"I'm thinking Higashiyama, Alexandrov, Tsirinskaya, and Longpre are the ones to watch." I told Johannes, still putting Higashiyama ahead of Alexandrov because I think this was a uniquely unlucky race for the Japanese driver. The puncture is what prevented Higashiyama from keeping his championship lead, and the pace he had after getting his tyres changed was downright monstrous: if the race had been any longer, Higashiyama would have scored points, and the plural is very much intentional there. I think he might have even been a threat to Audinet and Natasha if he had another three laps or so. As it stands now, he finished just about a second down the road from Schwarzer despite running last when he came out of the pitlane. That is the kind of pace that can't be discounted, nor can the fact that this is the same man who won the feature race at Dubai and thus had to start eighth for the sprint race but managed to win it anyway. Alexandrov is impressive, and I do think that he'll find his way to Formula One sooner rather than later, but he doesn't have the sheer race pace of Higashiyama. The fact that Alexandrov scored two poles and failed to convert those into wins is indicative of someone who is really quick over one lap but doesn't quite have the consistency to do it over a race, at least not yet. One should not forget the fact that these are all very young drivers with plenty of team left to blossom into Formula One caliber talents.
"I can't help but notice you left out Audinet and Senna." the elder Koskinen pointed out, picking up on my omissions instantly.
"I like Bernard, I do, and he was a good teammate to me, but it should be said he's in his third season in GP2 Asia and he's with a top team. He really should be doing better at this stage than having one win and being 25 points behind his teammate. As for Senna, well...I was born in 1988, I understand the romanticism over that name as much as anyone else, but if he wasn't named Ayrton Senna II, would his results be talked about this much? I mean, he's sixth in the championship, he's not exactly setting the world alight." I explained, having a logical reason for rating the drivers the way I rate them. The four I put at the top are all very young and are all showing immense talent in spite of their youth, whereas Bernard, and Ayrton Senna II for that matter, are both on the older side for this championship and aren't quite at the same level as these young guys - and girl - who are blowing the sport out of the water.
"Hmm...maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. Shall we watch tomorrow's race too?" Johannes mused for a moment before asking if we'll do this again.
"I'll be there." I agreed, both of us interested to see how my predictions will develop as we watch the sprint race, the two support races at Bahrain, and finally the 2008 GP2 Asia Series finale at the Dubai Autodrome. We've passed the halfway point and entered the stage where every point matters, every decision could decide the championship, and, at the end of the day, it's either going to be Higashiyama or Alexandrov who realistically emerges at the top at the end of this.
It had perhaps seemed like she had kicked the habit after the race at Kari Motor Speedway, but once again, Natasha had scored her best result in the sprint race of the weekend. Now, logically I knew that it was only six points, and logically I knew that those six points didn't make much difference when Higashiyama had finished in second and Alexandrov in sixth, but Natasha Tsirinskaya won her third race of the season at Sepang, the most wins of any driver involved, and she did it with all of Formula One watching her. Johannes Koskinen, Umberto Petronelli, and I watched as the Kyrgyz flag flew over the same podium where the top three of the Formula One race will be standing today, and we all listened to that anthem being played out mere hours before the F1 race. I actually let myself imagine for the first time that Natasha could one day be winning races in Formula One. Could you imagine that? Natasha and I fighting for wins at the highest level imaginable? Perhaps she could be in a McLaren, and I could be in a Ferrari, just like when the two of us would be playing against each other on the Playstation when we were growing up. It was just a fantasy for now, and lord knows neither of us are anywhere near the top two teams in F1 right now, but it is a fantasy that seems to be becoming more and more believable by the day. I'm racing for Williams in the Formula One race and she's winning the support race leading up to the main event, life is good, and life is full of promise.
As for the rest of the GP2 Asia field, Vittorio De Filippis was once again in fourth, turning this into by far the best weekend of his season. Bernard Audinet was fifth in a solid weekend for the Frenchman, doing his part to help ART win the teams' championship. Kyrgyzstan was not the only stan country having a good weekend, as Shandar Khan finished sixth. Maximilien Longpre once again retired, hurting his championship hopes, whereas Ayrton Senna II finished eighth and took fastest lap. It was a good race for the Brazilian, who was only really held back by the fact that the sprint race only rewards points to the top six, still, with yet another missed opportunity, and iSport seemingly lacking the pace to win, the Brazilian is running out of ways to close the gap to the frontrunners. Which brings us to the championship protagonists: Vladimir Alexandrov retains his lead with 44 points, Yoshikazu Higashiyama goes up to 40 points which ensures that the Russian has no margin for error, and Natasha is on 34 points, still in reach of the championship, but unlikely to win it unless Yoshikazu and Vladimir have a horrible run of form. Bernard Audinet sits on 17 points, emerging as the fourth-place man for the moment, while Maximilien Longpre and Ayrton Senna II are still tied on 15 points.
So, the race before the race was over, but there was still plenty of action left to go in Malaysia. The GP2 Asia cars were cleared from the pitlane and rolled to the support pits, making room for the Formula One show to begin. The cars were fired up and prepared, pre-race festivities began, and I made my way over to sign a few autographs before getting on the driver's parade truck. McLaren had the edge over Ferrari at Australia, taking a first and a fifth while Ferrari could only muster a single point, but the team from Maranello seemed intent on bouncing back immediately. Henrique de Matteo took pole position, Matias Hamalainen will start second, lining up alongside his teammate. Ivan Tripoli starts a somewhat concerning third for Toyota, but with Piotr Kaminski alongside and Victor Hartmann in fifth, the Italian will have a hard time defending that position against the BMW Saubers. Martin Weaver starts in sixth, I start in seventh, while Jyri Kaasalainen and Anthony Harrison line up behind us. The McLarens were due to start on the second row, but thanks to both of them getting completely separate five-place penalties for impeding drivers during qualifying. Felipe Alvarez, in his Renault, will start tenth, lining up alongside Anthony in what could be a rather tense pairing given the history between the two. On a final note, Jyri Kaasalainen likely feels relieved to have outqualified his highly rated teammate, especially considering that the Finn was already getting some criticism in the media for finishing so far behind his teammate in that chaotic Australian race. Of course, Jyri had to be cursed with outqualifying his teammate the weekend both McLarens get penalized, but that is neither here nor there. There are always obstacles in motorsport, and I hope that he can rise above them, because he showed some serious promise last year.
"Alright Tamara, it's always a good day when you qualify ninth and start seventh, so let's make it count." Malmedy spoke before the grid cleared out for the formation lap, trying to give some last second encouragement. The cars took off, weaving down the wide straight to get heat into their tyres, then putting some heat into the brakes for turn one, the long right-hander all the way around before turn two, a hairpin to the right, points us up the track. Turn three is a flat-out slightly uphill turn in the race, but it was taken at a rather orderly pace on the formation lap, after all, no one wanted to risk anything before the race had even begun. Turn four was a ninety-degree right-hander with a nice bit of exit kerb, but the real treasure was turns five and six, which form a long S section requiring just a dab of the brakes and a downshift as drivers kept the throttle open for as long as they dare. A short straight followed and then it was on the brakes for turns seven and eight, effectively two corners doing the job of one. The run to turn nine was a bit of a longer straight, but then turn nine was a tight, uphill corner. The exit of turn nine completed sector two, and it was followed by the flat-out turn ten, a corner to the right. Turn eleven was also to the right, but tighter and slower, unleashing the cars on a short straight to turn twelve. Twelve was a corner just slightly too tight to be flat-out as it swung the cars out to the left before turn fourteen brought us back to the right and launched us out onto the back straight.
If I had to describe the shape of the Sepang International Circuit, I would describe it as a misshapen Pac-Man, with the two straights forming the mouth. Turn fifteen was the final corner, a hairpin to the left on the inside of the circuit, and it deposited cars back onto the start-finish straight. To continue the Pac-Man analogy, the back straight was the bottom of the mouth, turn fifteen was the end, and then the start-finish straight was the top of the mouth. So, at the top of the mouth, the cars slowed down, did their burnout to heat up the tyres, and slotted their cars into their grid slots. Henrique and Matti formed row one, Ivan and Piotr row two, Victor and Martin row three, while I was on row four with Jyri. Anthony and Felipe formed row five. So, these were the top five rows as the five lights went out to begin the 2008 Malaysian Grand Prix. Henrique de Matteo cut across the track to defend his lead from his teammate, while I went to the center of the track in an attempt to cover off the fast McLaren of Jyri was still trying to set myself up to be able to go on the racing line to overtake Weaver ahead. Unfortunately, that just exposed a gap on the left which Anthony Harrison used to overtake me. In the braking zone of turn one, I was left with no choice but to back out as Harrison tried to take Weaver on the outside.
The American had an excellent start and was on the racing line, but the Australian held firm, keeping his position. The same could not be said for Ivan Tripoli and Victor Hartmann, who both lost a lot of positions in that first complex of corners. By the time we were coming out of turn four, Matteo was in the lead followed by Hamalainen, Kaminski, Weaver, Harrison, Hartmann, myself, and Kaasalainen. Hartmann seemed to be nursing a serious issue off the start though, because a slow exit from turn six allowed me to overtake him in the run down to turn seven. Elsewhere on the grid, my teammate Tommy Koskinen had an incident with Fabian Schmidt, ending with the Finn having to do almost the entire first lap with a broken front wing while the German retired on the spot. Maximilien Lecroix also spun out of the race in his Toyota, meaning we were down to twenty cars by the end of the first lap. The race continued like this for some time, with Kaasalainen getting past Hartmann on lap two, followed by the Red Bull of Daniel MacGowan also swallowing up the BMW Sauber towards the end of that lap. I had begun to think that the German driver was well on his way to a retirement, having fallen from fifth to not even in the top eight, but things finally began to change around lap four.
"Alright, Hartmann is beginning to recover, he is up to eighth and Alvarez is back up to ninth. I suspect Tripoli will be past MacGowan in a little while as well." Peter informed me over the radio, so, the BMW was beginning to recover, as were the Renault and the Toyota, while MacGowan, who profited from their misfortune at the start, was now getting cycled back to where his pace really is. Indeed, true pace seemed to be dominating the first stint of the race, with the Ferraris trading fastest laps as they built a gap over the rest of the field, Harrison filling the mirrors of Martin Weaver, and me struggling to keep Kaasalainen behind. I was a good driver and I had faith in the car at my disposal, but Jyri was also a good driver, and the McLaren he had was better than the Williams I had. I was managing to keep him behind for now, but the pace difference was clear to the both of us. In the end though, the Finnish driver would leave it to strategy, diving into the pitlane along with Martin Weaver on lap sixteen, becoming the first pitstops of the day. Malmedy came on the radio as I continued down the main straight "Alright Tamara, I want to see a good in-lap from you, we're going to pit this lap and go for the overcut on Weaver, going for the overcut on Weaver."
"Copy that, understood," I responded as the team set out an ambitious target for me: we expected the McLarens to be ahead of us this race, so we knew that we were going to lose places to them, but we were going to do everything in our power to get ahead of the Toyota and the Red Bull ahead of us. Ivan Tripoli's bad start essentially put him out of the equation, while we were going to hope that the Australian Red Bull driver pit just a bit too early, allowing me to come out ahead of him. Thus, I lapped Sepang the way I did in 2006, on route to my GP2 Asia series sprint race victory there, and like I did in 2007, in my nineteenth to ninth drive, before finally taking a wide line through turn fifteen before straightening out and heading down the pit entrance. The entrance turn the right before finally presenting me with the pit lane speed limiter line, which I hit without issue, before beginning my drive to the box, Henrique de Matteo some distance ahead of me but also in the pitlane here on lap seventeen. I stopped on my marks, went up on the jacks, and watched Henrique be released as my team changed my tyres, filled me up on fuel, and then released me too, driving down the pitlane, getting off the limiter, and accelerating down on pit exit before hitting the brakes into turn one, taking the opportunity to put the first little bit of heat into the tyres.
"You are ahead of Weaver, ahead of Weaver. Hamalainen, Kaminski, Harrison, Hartmann, Alvarez, and Tripoli yet to stop. Kaasalainen is a second a half ahead of you." Malmedy informed me, so, we had leaped ahead of Weaver, but Kaasalainen managed to leapfrog the both of us, and a lot of cars had yet to stop, so it wasn't clear how exactly everything would shake out. Well, Hamalainen pit on lap eighteen and came out in second, ahead of his teammate and in the provisional race lead, leading some credence to the theory that the overcut might be the way to go here. On the other hand, Kaasalainen managed to undercut me and overtake Weaver on track, so who knows if that is a point for the undercut or simply the pace of the McLaren showing itself. Harrison would pit on lap nineteen, but thanks to a problem with his left front wheel, he actually came out a few seconds behind Weaver, meaning that our group had a bit of a buffer. Kaminski was leading at this stage, but that was thanks to the fact that he was going long in his front stint. Most likely, he will fall to third when he makes his stop. Another driver going long was Ivan Tripoli, as the Toyota driver was trying to regain some positions and make up for his awful first few laps. Ivan might be a bit more of a problem, since I legitimately didn't know where he was going to cycle out compared to the likes of me, Weaver, Harrison, an Alvarez. The three of us midfielders were effectively forming a second group behind the lead four, and, thanks to his bad stop, Harrison was in the midst of this group, losing ground to the cars ahead.
"You'll be fighting Tripoli on pit exit!" Malmedy called out suddenly at the beginning of lap twenty when he realized that the Toyota driver one: took his stop, and two: that it was going to be close on pit exit. Ivan had his nose ahead when the white dividing line ended but I had warmed up, race-ready tyres compared to his completely green tyres, so I was able to overtake him through turn one. This also had the side effect of ensuring that I now had two cars between me and Harrison, giving me some more breathing room. Thus began the second stint of the race. Once Kaminski made his stop, the running order read as Hamalainen, Matteo, Kaminski, Kaasalainen, Shchegolyayeva, Tripoli, Weaver, and Harrison, meaning I was on course for some really good points, but I had a McLaren behind me. Kaasalainen showed the superior pace of the McLaren earlier in the race and Harrison has shown himself to be a generational talent, so even though he was some distance behind me right now, I could not count out his ability to catch back up. If Anthony manages to get within two seconds of me before the next stops, he'll be putting us in a very difficult situation. I do have superior pace to Tripoli and Weaver right now though, so what I have to do is build up as much of a buffer as I can while the McLaren is stuck behind them. I know Anthony Harrison is going to be fast as hell once he's in clean air and I know he is going to eviscerate whatever gap I build, so the game right now is to maximize that gap and hope he is stuck behind those cars for as long as possible, hoping to make it to the chequered flag before I get passed.
So, thus the middle of the race developed with me being in somewhat of a no man's land. I was faster than the Toyota and the Red Bull behind, so I was building a gap to them, while, at the same time, I wasn't as fast as the McLaren, the BMW Sauber, and the Ferraris ahead, so they were building a gap to me as well. I did, however, gain a place on lap thirty-one when Henrique de Matteo spun out, got beached in the gravel trap, and was forced to retire from the race. So, Hamalainen leads, Kaminski second, Kaasalainen back up to a podium position, and myself running in fourth. I had two podiums to my name thanks to keeping my nose clean in some chaotic races in 2007, but now in 2008, I seem to be within touching distance of a podium on raw pace. What a start of the season that would be for Williams? A podium from Koskinen in Australia and a podium from me in Malaysia? It would be amazing. It was, however, a bit fantastical, since the top three were all currently lapping faster than me, meaning I would have to hope for some kind of issue for them, whether it be a reliability problem or a crash, neither of which seemed very likely at the moment. Still, fourth place, if I could hold onto it, would be a very good position for us, and it would represent an excellent start of the season for me when combined with my sixth place from Australia. So, while not quite a podium, everything was looking good right now.
"Any updates?" I asked Malmedy over the radio as I came onto the back straight, finishing up lap forty-one.
"Harrison is closing on Tripoli, Weaver has pitted, and Hartmann is entering the picture as well now, so be aware. We are going to pit soon so be ready. Also, we have yellow flags in sector two, Renner has retired with an engine failure, so be aware." Malmedy reported. So, Weaver pitted and thus released Harrison to chase after the Toyota, while Hartmann was closing in on the group of cars behind me as well. There were yellow flags in turn four thanks to the fact that Renner's broken car was being wheeled off the track, but there seemed to be no threat of a safety car, as the marshals could handle it under yellow. This was the state of affairs as I started lap forty-two. I made my way all the way around the Sepang International Circuit for the lap and then almost all the way around again for lap forty-three before getting the call to pit, coming in at the end of lap forty-three. I had done everything in my power, now it was the mechanics' job. The car went up, the fuel went in, and option tyres went on the car for the final twelve laps of the race. They dropped the car, the fuel hose came off, and the lollipop went up, releasing me to return to the track.
I raced down the pit exit and towards turn one, winding through the corner and through turn two before finally unleashing the power of the Toyota engine down the straights and through turn three, not truly braking until it was time for turn four. It was full speed ahead through turns five and six as well, but I lifted through turn seven and dabbed the brakes a bit for turn eight, not wasting much time until I got on the throttle again for the run down to turn nine. The turn nine hairpin was probably the most awkward part of the track, but I survived it yet again, and I sped through the lower loop of the circuit before dabbing the brakes for turn twelve, swinging the car through turn thirteen, and then on the brakes again for turn fourteen as I brought the car onto the back straight. Three laps ago, this had been where Malmedy sent me that update, now though, it would be where I begin to find out where I've cycled out vis-a-vis Harrison. I knew that McLaren was already wrapping up their stop as I was exiting the final corner of turn fifteen, but I also knew that he would be stationary for a few more tenths, and even after that, he would be on the pit limiter, while I was releasing the full power of my Williams-Toyota FW30 down the straight. I came out ahead of him, tore through the first few corners while he was still on cold tyres, and built a few seconds worth of gap, hoping that it would be enough.
"Four seconds, four seconds to Harrison. He got past Tripoli on pit rotation; he is the car directly behind. You are racing him." Malmedy informed me on the radio, spelling out the situation: no distractions, no obstacles, just a few more laps to go and a championship-worthy car directly behind me chasing with all of his might. I lapped around the Sepang International Circuit as fast as I could, driving the car as aggressively as I reasonably could without throwing it off track, but despite my best efforts, Anthony Harrison was taking three tenths a lap here, a tenth a lap there, and two tenths there, just eating away at my gap while I literally had no way of defending myself. There wasn't a backmarker to put in between me and Harrison, there wasn't anyone chasing Harrison from behind that he might need to worry about, and there were no tyre concerns for either of us, so I couldn't hope for strategy to bail me out of this one. No, all I go do was drive as fast as possible, avoid mistakes, and hope that the flag flies before Anthony flies past me.
Three laps from the end Anthony was closing on me through sector three. My car was throwing up all kinds of dirty air but it wasn't affecting the McLaren very much at all as it just neared closer and closer to my tail. Two Formula One car, a Williams and a McLaren, tore through turn fourteen and onto the back straight. It was Toyota power versus Mercedes power as we raced past the unique, canopy-like structures covering the grandstands at this circuit. I moved to the left, covering the inside line while Anthony moved to the right, attempting to overtake me on the outside. Fortunately for me though, Anthony had an inside front lock up and slid off the racing line while I took the corner normally, keeping my position and gaining a bit of breathing room. I took a massive sigh of relief while Anthony gathered the car up behind me and tried to resume his charge, but with that lockup and his tyres now covered in all the clag and marbles that accumulate at the edges of the track, I was able to put two seconds in between me and Anthony. Harrison worked the marbles clean relatively quickly though, and resumed his charge in such a way that, when I crossed the line to finish the race in fourth, Anthony Harrison was just nine tenths behind me, having erased that gap. If he had not locked up, or even if he had a few more laps with which to attack, I'm not sure how I could have possibly held onto my position. A huge, huge result then.
Speaking of results, the points-paying results for the 2008 Malaysian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 8 points.
3: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 6 points.
4: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 5 points.
5: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 4 points.
6: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 3 points.
7: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 2 points.
8: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 1 point.
So, after a rather disappointing Australian Grand Prix, all things considered, Matti Hamalainen finally got his title defense going, taking home a sweet ten points to increase his overall tally to 11. Anthony Harrison, however, was able to retain his lead by bringing his points total up to 14 points. Jyri Kaasalainen redeemed himself in Malaysia and was now fourth in the championship on 10 points, tied with Victor Hartmann but the German's second place gives him the edge over the Finn's third place. Piotr Kaminski is fifth in the championship, sitting on eight points, all of which came from this race, while I also sit on eight points, occupying the dizzying heights of sixth place in the championship. I know that perhaps doesn't sound very impressive but think about who is ahead of me: McLarens, a Ferrari, and the BMW Saubers, the only people ahead of me are frontrunners. Add to the fact that Tommy is sitting on six points, and Williams is third in the constructors' championship, ahead of Ferrari. We aren't a frontrunning team, we don't have the pace to consistently fight for wins or even podiums, so to be in sixth and third right now? It is a tremendous achievement for driver and team alike. Considering where our pace is, right now, we're on top of the world.
"Hip hip!" I called out to the garage.
"Hooray!" my crew called back, celebrating after the race.
"Hip hip!" I wrapped an arm around Peter Malmedy as my engineer came over to me.
"Hooray!" Peter and the rest of the crew responded. One of my guys, Mikkel, even pumping his fist in the air at that, making me laugh.
"Hip hip!" one more.
"Hooray!" this was the loudest one and a way to end on, and it was more than just Mikkel pumping his fists into the air. It wasn't quite a podium, but fourth place in Malaysia coming off of a very strong double-points finish in Australia? I think we'll take it. To illustrate how much of a team effort this really was, Tommy and some of his guys were hanging out on their side of the garage and they applauded at the end of our celebrations. Tommy didn't manage to score points today, but he had six points following his third-place finish in Melbourne, so this really has been one of the strongest starts to the season that Williams has had in a long time. Even in the BMW era, Williams was able to win races with those monster V10s, but those monster V10s also had a habit of breaking down, so there were an awful lot of retirements as well. In fact, in 2001, Williams didn't see both cars finishing the race until the European Grand Prix at the end of June. The BMW era was a tremendous period of time for Williams, but there are reasons why that partnership never materialized into a championship, and unreliability is a big one. Fortunately, after a somewhat concerning start in the first few races of 2007, the Toyota partnership has proven to be more reliable. My untimely retirement in Belgium being the unfortunate exception to the rule.
"Alright everyone!" Michael Coronet entered the garage, voice light and happy, but presence still demanding attention, since he was our boss after all "I just got off the phone with Frank. He is very happy with the result, he sends his congratulations to Tamara and for Tommy, he says 'chin up, young lad, you'll be back in the points before you know it.' He's happy, our partners are happy, and we're happy, so, let's get working on packing this all up. We need a quick rotation this weekend."
"On it, sir," Malmedy responded with a jovial pursuit, getting his side of the garage working, Tommy and I helping out when we could. So, Sir Frank Williams obviously gave his name to this team, and he was, ultimately, in charge, with the title of team principal too, so it's not like he's some anonymous board member. No, Frank Williams is an integral part of this time and its identity. Frank would attend each and every race if it were solely up to him, but age and mobility can complicate that sometimes, so, with Claire working hard to keep her dad in good health and alive for as long as possible, along with Michael Coronet being more than capable of running the race team on a day-to-day basis, Frank has begun staying at Grove for some of the more distant races. When it comes to the races in Europe though, that is a guaranteed appearance from Frank Williams, so i expect to see him in Spain. I might see him before then too, because if the conditions are good and Frank can make it happen, his preference is to always be there, always be with the team. It's not a trust thing either, because Frank does trust Michael with this, it's just that, for Sir Frank Williams, it's more than just his name on the side of a car, all of this Formula One stuff means the world to him. I obviously don't presume to know too much about the accident, but this is a man who was paralyzed from the waist down in a car crash leaving a Formula One test, but he still wants to be all over this sport: Frank loves this sport so much that he's continued racing despite almost losing his life because of his involvement in Formula One. That is a deep, deep dedication.
Anyway, the reason for the quick turnaround is that right now, it's Sunday evening in Sepang, Malaysia. The next Formula One race is two weeks from today in Sakhir, Bahrain and, as the weekend structure goes, we need to be set up there on the Wednesday before the race weekend. That leaves us with around ten days, and in those ten days, we don't plan on going straight to Bahrain, rather, we want to get back to our base in Grove and work on the development of the car before its next race. So yeah, while the cars can just go to Bahrain by freight, crew members need to go from Malaysia to England and then from England to Bahrain, and, potentially, new parts will have to get from England to Bahrain as well. With weekly and biweekly F1 races becoming the norm nowadays, such tight schedules are going to become commonplace. F1 is as global as its every been and, pretty soon, we'll be at a point where teams will be moving their cars around Asia as frequently as they're moving their cars around Europe. Europe, a small continent to begin with, has all of its F1 tracks concentrated in the western part of the continent, with Austria being as far east as F1 ever goes, and even that hasn't been on the calendar since 2003. It's a lot easier to move an F1 car from Barcelona to Monaco than it is to move that same car from Shanghai to the United Arab Emirates. I don't think I'm surprising anyone when I say that Asia is a very big place.
"And good job Tamara, I mean it. You're a massive asset to the team and I'd mean it just as fervently if you didn't bring a dollar to this organization." Michael Coronet later added in private as we were moving one of the spare front wings into the crate where it'll be transported to the next race. I didn't respond to Coronet's voice, but I truly did appreciate them, because honestly, while it hasn't been much of an issue lately, Kazakhoil feels like somewhat of a prison for me. I'm doing good in this sport, I've scored two podiums in my rookie year, and I already have a fourth place right at the beginning of my second season, but no matter what I do, there will always be those who dismiss me as merely that girl who brought a bit of money to Williams and fluked some good results. I don't want that to be the case, I want to disprove that and prove that I belong here, so it feels good to know that someone as powerful in the team as Michael is on my side. Of course, how much does that matter when, as we discussed, ultimately, Frank is the one that calls the shots, and Frank Williams has made it clear that the money I bring is essential for Williams' efforts.
"Thank you," I responded. I knew that it fundamentally meant little, as Frank had the real power, but it feels good to know that I have a friend at such a high level in this team. I also think that it's indicative of a management issue beginning to develop in this team. For the longest time, even with figures like Adrian Newey and Paddy Lowe at the team, Sir Frank Williams and Patrick Head have always been the premier figures at this team, despite what BMW or anyone else had to say about it. Now though, Patrick Head has moved over to Williams Advanced Engineering, keeping him in the overall organization, but taking him off of the F1 team. As for Frank Williams, due to a number of factors, including age, he is being pushed to take a more secondary role with the team. Michael Coronet, like Adrian Newey and Paddy Lowe before him, has risen to be a desirable figure within the organization and one that many within the team would accept as team principal - I mean, he already does so much of the job on a day-to-day basis - so, pressure is building for Frank to either evolve the Williams team, or to potentially lose Michael just like the team lost Lowe and Newey before him. It's not that Michael Coronet is actively pushing out Frank Williams either, the situation is simply that he knows he's ready to be a team principal, everyone else knows it too, and he doesn't want to leave Williams in order to do it. I'm sure everyone would be perfect happy to see Sir Frank Williams stay on in an executive role, retaining ownership of the team, but stepping back from the direct team principal role.
"So yeah, there is no formal dress code or anything, just be respectful. Don't wear anything too short and don't walk around town in a stringy tank top." I explained to Natasha as we arrived in our hotel room for the Bahrain Grand Prix weekend. I decided to book a room with my cousin, knowing that this is, by far, the most international level she has raced at. This is her first time in Bahrain too, so, being in a Muslim country, Natasha decided to ask me how to dress. She's raced in the UAE and Malaysia before, sure, but Malaysia seems to be rather relaxed in comparison, whereas the Dubai Autodrome is in, well, Dubai. Dubai is the type of place where westerners are commonplace and where our customs tend to be accepted. When it comes to the Bahrain Grand Prix, the story is generally the same as in Dubai, but the track is some distance away from the big, shiny capital city, so things feel a bit different. In my experience, I've walked around in a polo, jean shorts just a bit longer than usual, and knee-high socks. This might not be strictly necessary, it might be fine to wear regular shorts and no-show socks beneath my sneakers, but I've taken an abundance of caution and it seems to have worked out for me. This is the Arabian Peninsula, yes, but it's also not quite Saudi Arabia either.
"You don't get judged or anything here, do you?" she asked, still just a bit concerned.
"Honestly? No. I've been coming here since 2006 and I haven't experienced any issues. I don't know what the situation is politically or if my experience is an outlier, but when I walk around the city its fine, and when I'm in the paddock it's like any other F1 race." I explained. It is also somewhat of a factor that, depending on what the country is, how much F1 drivers really know about the country can vary greatly. I know that for races like Bahrain, China, and Turkey - all of which have joined the calendar in the last few years - there are drivers that really only know the track, their hotel room, and whatever they see out of the car window in between. Now, obviously there are exceptions, drivers who try to experience every destination to its fullest, but yeah, there are drivers that breeze through these exotic destinations. Depending on what each driver demands comfort wise, there are a handful of drivers that only see the airport and a bed somewhere in the paddock. Personally, I try to see at least a little bit of every country we visit, and I think it would be a bit of a shame to travel to all these places without at least trying to experience each one, but it should also be noted that we're all here to work and we have rather hectic schedules. Between driving, sponsor engagements, team meetings, media, and all the rest, I might only have a few hours total to experience a certain country during my stay there.
"That's good to know." Natasha accepted, sitting down on her bed while I was standing next to mine.
"You survived Dubai on your own, you'll be fine here." I reassured her. I admit that places like Bahrain aren't exactly the traditional idea of what Formula One is, but if you look at the distant precursors of Formula One, Italian and French racers held rounds in places like Algiers and Tripoli in the 1930s. In fact, the 1940 Tripoli Grand Prix was the first significant open wheel victory for Giuseppe Farina, who would become the first Formula One World Champion. Now, Algeria and Libya are very far away from Bahrain and those races were held in a colonial context, but the point remains, there is a history of Grand Prix racing in the Arab world, and even Bahrain has been on the calendar since 2004 - with no signs of leaving either - so there is plenty of precedent. Bahrain may not a super historic venue with tons of Grand Prix history, but the same could be sai about the Valencia street circuit we'll be going to later this year. As long as the country is safe and stable, I think expanding motorsport to new audiences is a good thing. Now, when it comes to giving legitimacy and exposure to their regimes, that becomes a more complicated thing.
There are rumors that Russia wants to host a Grand Prix as part of the Vision60 thing that F1 is working towards. The idea is that Putin and Medvedev want to see a Russian Grand Prix and a Russian driver at the highest level by the new decade - Vladimir Alexandrov is seemingly on course to do that, so now they just need the circuit - and that might be something difficult for me to cope with. My ancestors came from Russia - well, the Russian Empire at least, because I believe some of my ancestors come from eastern Ukraine and Belarus as well - and were part of a relatively large Russian population in Kazakhstan. Some of these Russians date to the Imperial period, some to the Soviet period, but the point remains, I am an ethnic Russian, I speak Russian, and I was raised in a Russian culture, so yeah, part of me would love to see a Formula One race in Russia. Part of me also feels like, maybe, if the October Revolution never happened, Russia would already have a rich tradition in motorsport. On the other hand, it is April 2008, and in the last few days Russia has made threats in response to the American President George W. Bush proposing NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. With tensions building in South Ossetia and Abkhazia within the borders of Georgia, now might not be the best time for a Russian Grand Prix. I feel a deep affection for the Russian people and what Russia could be, but I am very uncomfortable when it comes to the political situation within Russia, especially since claims of Russians living abroad - which applies to my family - have been used to push irredentist claims.
These are the same kinds of things that can be said about Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates or Singapore, or even the United States and Great Britain considering what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Politics are a messy thing and lord knows that F1 loves to involve itself with messy politics, whether they come in the form of sponsors or races or political figures. As a general rule, I feel more comfortable as a gay woman racing in European and western countries, but there are plenty of exceptions in Europe and the west too. Bahrain is a bit of a weird place for someone like me, and now I'm effectively bringing Natasha into this world as well, but I also mean it when I say I've always been safe and never faced any issues in this country. I do change the way I behave here, but it is a minor thing, and part of it is about being respectful to their culture as well as trying to be safe for my own sake. I wouldn't want to be told to wear a headscarf in Monaco so I shouldn't be wearing a tight, short dress in Bahrain, that would be unfair to them. Basically, when it comes to politics, customs, and all this complicated stuff, the important thing is nuance. I may not feel the best about the Bahraini regime, but I enjoy driving the track and I love being a Formula One driver, so it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
Dress, politics, and Dmitry Medvedev aside, there's racing going on this weekend. and the GP2 Asia series was once again acting in support of Formula One. So, as mentioned, Vladimir Alexandrov currently leads on 44 points, Yoshikazu Higashiyama follows closely behind on 40 points, Natasha sits somewhat behind the lead pack on 34 points, Bernard Audinet on 17, Maximilien Longpre and Ayrton Senna II both on 15. Well, Yoshikazu wasted no time adding to his points tally, taking pole position and another two points in qualifying, and the Japanese driver didn't let up after that, going on to win the feature race. Longpre finished second for Arden while Natasha completed the podium. Senna in fourth, Spaniard Ezequiel Martinez in fifth for Coloni, Vittorio De Filippis in sixth, Diogo Neves in seventh for Campos, and Indian iSport driver Vijaya Biradar was the last points finisher. So, Vladimir Alexandrov failed to score, meaning Higashiyama takes the championship lead, 52 to 44, while Natasha moves up to 40 points, surprisingly closing the gap to the Russian. It wasn't a very good day for ART at all actually, with Audinet getting taken out in contact early in the race, so Maximilien Longpre, now on 23 points, and Ayrton Senna II, now on 20 points, jumping ahead of the French driver.
Then came the sprint race, with the top eight finishers from the feature starting in reverse order, meaning Biradar was on pole while Yoshikazu was starting in the middle of the pack. The race came to be defined by two things: Natasha Tsirinskaya and Maximilien Longpre driving forward, while Higashiyama got caught up in an incident behind them, leading to the championship leader retiring. Now the Japanese driver's lead was such that he would retain the championship lead regardless of what happened in this race, but Alexandrov did manage to narrow the gap a little bit with a strong finish. Which brings us to the finishing order: Natasha took yet another big spring race result with a win - again in front of a big Formula One audience - while Maximilien Longpre finished second. The Luxembourger driver retired from both races in Sepang but recovered well by taking a big 13 points from the Bahrain weekend. Alexandrov finished third, a good recovery from having failed to score in the feature race, but he was likely helped by the fact that Higashiyama retired this time. Qi-Meritus Mahara driver Hiroshi Yamamoto finished fourth, Heinrich Schwarzer was in fifth, and Vittorio De Filippis took the final points paying position in his fourth consecutive points finish.
So, championship wise, Yoshikazu Higashiyama remained on 52 points, Alexandrov kept himself in the hunt with 48 points, Natasha was just two points behind him on 46 points, while Maximilien Longpre was now out of championship contention with 28 points. Between pole, the feature race, and the sprint race, there were a maximum of 18 points left on offer in the GP2 Asia series, so the Arden driver could no longer win the championship. The same applied to Ayrton Senna II and Bernard Audinet, who failed to increase their tally in the sprint race. They will race one last time at the Dubai Autodrome's Grand Prix layout next weekend. It is the same track that Yoshikazu Higashiyama dominated at the beginning of the year, yes, but it is also a different layout, and the year has seen drivers like Natasha Tsirinskaya, Vladimir Alexandrov, Maximilien Longpre, and others really come into their own since the first round. I still think that Yoshikazu Higashiyama will win the championship, but I think the level of competition now present in GP2 Asia will make a repeat performance of what he did in January unlikely. I also think that Natasha can build on her strong performances and overtake Vladimir Alexandrov for second in the championship. I certainly hope she can keep it going, especially because, based on how I did in Malaysia, she's a bit of a good luck charm for me. Of course, this was the last GP2 Asia support race, which brought us to the second issue.
Natasha does not yet have a drive for the rest of the year. Having done so well in GP2 Asia, the natural next step seemed to be the main GP2 series, but again, there are problems there. Being contracted to Trident, it would make sense for her to stay in the family, but the GP2 squad is already filled with Honda test driver Charles Michaels in the main seat and Heinrich Schwarzer in the second seat. Now, Natasha has outperformed Schwarzer comprehensively in the Asian series, but that doesn't erase the contract that the Austrian has signed, so she can't just hop into the GP2 team. At the same time, Trident doesn't want one of their drivers going to a competing team, so that pretty much rules out a move to GP2 this year unless Natasha wants to potentially hurt her relationship with the team that gave her this chance. Now, it isn't necessarily unheard of for drivers to race in GP2 Asia and a theoretically lower series such as Formula 3 Euro in the same year, and that might be the appropriate move considering Natasha's age, but how much does her age matter when her talent level clearly should have her moving forward inside of sideways or backwards or anything like that? And besides, even if Formula 3 Euro was the best move, we'd have to find her a seat. So, here I was, getting onboard the open-top driver's parade trailer, thinking of what I could do to help Natasha with the career.
"Hey, Tsirinskaya is your cousin, right?" Force India driver Umberto Petronelli asked, having approached me.
"That's correct," I answered, deciding it was simpler to just accept that then explain the whole thing where we weren't related, but we've always been close.
"She's really quick," he pointed out, reminding me of the fact that the Italian with a stake in the Coloni team had been one of the many Formula One figures watching the support races.
"She is. I think she can be in Formula One before long. I think she has a solid chance of staying with Trident for the 2009 GP2 Asia series but I don't know what seat she can get into for the rest of this year." I pointed out the problem, wondering if he could help.
"Well, I can't give her a GP2 seat, it's too late for that, but I think there are high level options available to her later this year. Give me her agent's number and I'll see what I can do." Umberto responded, not giving any concrete promises and lowering expectations, but seeing the potential in her and willing to help her make the next step towards Formula One.
"Thank you." I responded the only way I knew how, a little but surprised, but certainly relieved. It seemed like I wasn't the only one seeing her potential after all. In any case, as excited as I am about Natasha's career prospects, I also have to consider my own, and the Formula One race is only getting closer.
Piotr Kaminski, Henrique de Matteo, and Anthony Harrison: three different teams and three different continents represented in the top three grid slots. Yes, you read thar right, Piotr Kaminski in his BMW Sauber put his car in pole position, ahead of the Ferraris and the McLarens alike. I guess the resources and the ingenuity of BMW is finally beginning to show. Matti Hamalainen was fourth and his countryman Jyri Kaasalainen was fifth, while Victor Hartmann was the last of the frontrunners in sixth, effectively engulfing the Ferraris and the McLarens in a BMW sandwich. Ivan Tripoli was in seventh, Tommy Koskinen outqualified me in eighth, but it was a pretty even performance with me starting in ninth. 2005 and 2006 World Champion Felipe Alvarez completed the top ten as he took his grid slot in row five, right next to me. The Red Bull of Weaver, the Honda of Goncalves, the Toyota of Schmidt, and the other Honda of James Buxton weren't far behind either. Personally though, I was intent on focusing on the cars ahead, rather than those behind.
And boy did I get that chance when the lights went out, having to cut to the outside to avoid the slow-starting Tripoli and then gaining another position thanks to the fact that Harrison damn-near stalled on the grid. Up ahead though, Henrique de Matteo overtook Kaminski into the Ziegler hairpin, defending his position through the left-hander of turn two and the right-hand kink of turn three to take the lead. Kaminski was still in second, followed by Hamalainen, Kaasalainen, Hartmann, Koskinen, myself, Alvarez, and Harrison. It was a good start to the race and I kept the good pace going into turn four, braking hard, turning right, and then riding the kerb as we descended down into the fun part of the track: turn five kinks to the left just for turn six to plunge back to the right, turn seven straightening us back up to the left just in time to spit us into the turn eight hairpin. A 180 degree turn to the right and then a straight shoot to the turn left-hand corners coming up. Turn nine was a fairly standard left-hand sweeper but it immediately tightened into turn ten which was almost a hairpin, making for a somewhat awkward but essential exit, as turn ten deposited us onto the infield straight. I was right behind my teammate at this stage and Tommy, seeing that I had the better pace and was his teammate, deciding not to put up too much of a fight as I passed him going into turn eleven.
Some hard braking, mostly due to the speeds coming off the straight, but then onto the throttle for the fun and fast run up the hill, lifting slightly as turn twelve crested the hill to the right, then really braking again for turn thirteen as we reached the top of the circuit. Once again, riding the kerb to maximize the exit, turn thirteen released me onto the back straight, just two more corners left to go in the first lap, and those corners tended to bleed together anyway. Braking hard for turn fourteen, swinging the far to the right, and then a little bit more to the right through turn fifteen to leave us back on the main straight, crossing the line to begin lap two. I admit that my opinions on this country are a bit complicated, but my opinions on the track are very positive. If it wasn't for the sandy track and the triple-digit temperatures, I could almost mistake the Bahrain International Circuit for a modern European track.
"Excellent start, we are P6, P6." Peter Malmedy called through the team radio, praising me on the start and the three positions we gained during it. I settled into the race at this point, knowing that the cars ahead of me were faster and hoping that I had enough pace left in the car to defend from Anthony Harrison again later in the race, just like I had in Malaysia. Though this time, I did have the benefit of my teammate behind me to help hold him up for a little while. In the end though, we wouldn't need to, because eon lap two, Anthony crashed into the back of Alvarez, breaking his own front wing in the process. The McLaren needed to pit for repairs, while the Renault lost two places to Weaver and Tripoli in the immediate aftermath of the incident. The Spaniard was, however, able to keep going in the race, so he did recover faster than his American ex-teammate. Lap four would be a lap of mixed fortunes for BMW Sauber, because Piotr Kaminski lost second place to Matti Hamalainen, but Victor Hartmann overtook Kaasalainen for fourth place, meaning the BMWs were now running line-and-stern behind the Ferraris. Elsewhere in the field, Renner, Buxton, MacGowan, and Barbaro would all join Harrison in the pits for repairs within the first few laps, decreasing the amount of cars that could conceivably be threats to us as we ran well, sixth and seventh, on course for our second double-points finish of the race.
Kaminski, having fallen from first to third in the first stint, would be the first of the frontrunners to pit, hoping that a change of tyres would also mean a change of fortunes. Hamalainen followed into the pits on lap twenty to cover him off, and I happened to stop at the exact same time, retaining my net position in the process. It seemed like we were unknowingly shadowing Ferrari in terms of strategy, because on lap twenty-one, Matteo and Koskinen both pit, returning to the track without issue. Henrique de Matteo emerged about five seconds ahead of his teammate, while Koskinen emerged about nine tenths behind me: still behind me, but he had gained on pit rotation. I thought about complaining to the team for a moment, saying that I was in the lead so I should have better strategy, but once I realized that I was able to build about a 1.2 second gap over Tommy and keep that stable, I decided I was happy with the result after all. It would be a quiet second stint for us, all things considered, and the team would call Tommy in on lap thirty-nine, followed by me on lap forty, coming out about three seconds ahead of my teammate this time. The overcut seemed to be the way to go at this circuit for whatever reason. I couldn't explain why it was like that - I'd think that it would be easy to heat up your tyres here on such a hot track - but it seemed fairly uniform across the teams. Perhaps the strategists have an answer, but I don't.
So, we were now running in this order: Henrique de Matteo, Matti Hamalainen, Piotr Kaminski, Victor Hartmann, Jyri Kaasalainen, Tamara Shchegolyayeva, Tommy Koskinen, and Martin Weaver. We were running well in sixth and seventh right now, but Martin Weaver was gaining on us, as were the Toyotas of Ivan Tripoli - recovering after his bad start - and Fabian Schmidt just behind. I was hoping that Tommy would be able to close up to me and use a tow off of my car to remain ahead, but instead of gaining on me, my teammate was dropping back, dropping into the clutches of the cars behind. I wasn't about to slow down and join him though, so I decided that the best thing I could do in this situation is speed ahead, bring home a sixth place for the team, and hope that Tommy will be able to hold onto seventh, and if not that, at least finish eighth so that we can still score points with both cars. In the end though, Tommy Koskinen couldn't hold onto everything, so he fell to eighth place, finishing the race just under a second ahead of Ivan Tripoli as he nearly fell out of the points altogether.
Speaking of points, the points-paying results for the 2008 Bahrain Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 8 points.
3: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 6 points.
4: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 5 points.
5: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 4 points.
6: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 3 points.
7: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 2 points.
8: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 1 point.
So, after having retired in the first two races, Henrique de Matteo finally got his season going with a win at the Bahrain International Circuit, repeating his performance at this track from last year. Similarly, after a dominant performance from Anthony Harrison in the opening race of the year, Matti Hamalainen now took the championship lead on 19 points. Piotr Kaminski, meanwhile, took a podium from his pole position: probably not the result he wanted, but also a result that put BMW Sauber at the top of the constructors' championship, tied with Ferrari on 29 points. McLaren dropped to third thanks to the fact that Harrison failed to score, whereas Williams now stood on 18 points, 11 of which came from me, 7 of which came from Koskinen. I knew that the good times couldn't keep going forever, but right now, we were closer to the top teams than we were to the midfield, and that felt absolutely amazing.
In other news, thanks to Alvarez having finished fourth in Australia and challenged for the points in the races since, Renault was fifth in the championship on five points, Toyota and Red Bull were both on three points, Toro Rosso sat on two points, while Honda, Force India, and Super Aguri were all yet to score. It was a tight season, to be sure, and that was especially the case at the front of the field, where we've seen a North American winner, a European winner, and a South American winner, three different drivers from three different teams. It was a good start and reflected well on F1's increasingly international nature, though, at the same time, if another driver was to win a race, it would most likely be a European. Realistically, Jyri Kaasalainen, Piotr Kaminski, and Victor Hartmann are the only other drivers that could be expected to win a race, and that's assuming that Ferrari, McLaren, and BMW Sauber stay at the same general level of performance as they are now, which is unlikely given the high rate of development that occurs in Formula One.
As crazy as it is to say, if somebody else from outside of Europe is going to score a win this year, it's going to be me. I know it sounds crazy to say, but I'm the highest placed non-European when you ignore Anthony Harrison and Henrique de Matteo, both of whom already won races. Of course, the likes of Martin Weaver, Filipe Yannick, Rudolfo Goncalves, and Haruki Tanaka may prove me wrong, but let's face it, any of them winning a race seems even less likely than me winning a race. I love the progress F1 is making, and I like the ambition F1 has with Vision60, even if I am skeptical as to whether or not that will actually happen, but somewhere where F1 still needs to make some progress is in diversity of drivers. Where are all the Brazilian racing heroes? Where is Argentina's next Juan Manuel Fangio? Where is the first South African driver since Jody Scheckter? When is China going to get their first F1 driver? We've had American and Canadian world champions, but what about Mexico? Formula One is in a good place right now, but it could be better, and I hope that I could be a part of that positive change. Hell, I'd like to see Natasha become Kyrgyzstan's first Formula One driver in the near future. It's not all bad though, with Anthony Harrison and Henrique de Matteo both among the championship protagonists, we may see the first world champion from the Americas since Jacques Villeneuve in 1997.
Speaking of Natasha Tsirinskaya and her prospects of getting to Formula One, the 2008 GP2 Asia Series finale happened a week later at the Dubai Autodrome, the Emirati track now in its Grand Prix layout, compared to the shorter international layout used in January. At the same time, Formula One begins a sort of spring break, with a three-week gap between the Bahrain Grand Prix and the Spanish Grand Prix. The next run of races is a bit strange for F1, with races in Spain, then Turkey, then Monaco, followed traditionally by the June date for Canada, then it's a two week break before the French Grand Prix. A lot of that is down to the fact that, despite an American driver challenging for the championship, there will not be a United States Grand Prix this year, or next year for that matter. Formula One does say that they have plans to return to America for the 2010 season as part of the Vision60 initiative, though, again, with everything relating to Vision60, I'll believe it when I see it. Another reason for weirdness is the creation of a proper European Grand Prix, separate from the rotating German race scheme. The Valencia race has taken Turkey's August slot, leading to the transcontinental race being dropped in this rather odd spot in the calendar. Anyway, all of that is beside the point, the point is that GP2 Asia is about to end while Formula One has a bit of a gap before the next races.
So, my attention was firmly on the Dubai Autodrome race, where Japanese DAMS driver Yoshikazu Higashiyama scored another pole position and another two points, filling everyone with fears that, despite the rise in talent across the field, it would be another dominant performance by the Toyota junior. The fact that Higashiyama would go on to win the race - also taking fastest lap to add insult to injury - did nothing to assuage those fears. Maximilien Longpre would continue his second-place finishing streak in the Arden, while Bernard Audinet put his ART on the podium. Teammate Vladimir Alexandrov was just behind in fourth, Hiroshi Yamamoto was fifth thanks to his surprising late season run of form, Ayrton Senna II was sixth, Alfonse Jauffret was seventh, and Dragomir Milanovic was the final points finisher. Natasha would be an unfortunate mechanical retirement in the race, meaning she would also be starting dead last in the sprint race...it's going to be difficult to do anything from there. That being said, what if there for her to do? Higashiyama is on 64 points after this race with a maximum of six points remaining, he's already champion. Likewise, Vladimir Alexandrov was on 53 points, which is seven points ahead of Nat, who still sits on 46. Maximilien Longpre, on 36 points, was no threat to her either. Bernard Audinet was on 23 points, as was Ayrton Senna II, but the Brazilian driver still didn't have a win to his name so was counted behind him.
The sprint race was an interesting story, with Yoshikazu and Vladimir coming together in a first corner collision. Perhaps the DAMS and ART drivers were taking advantage of the fact they were both locked into their championship positions, perhaps tensions had finally flared after a long season, or perhaps the two men simply wanted to go home since they had nothing left to play for, but the point remains, they took each other out and caused a safety car. This resulting safety car actually really hurt Natasha's race, since she was doing an aggressive comeback drive in a sprint race, which meant she needed to be super fast and she needed to take advantage of every lap, something which was hard to do when an SC was taking laps away from her. This basically crippled her charge before it began, but she still gave it everything she could, setting fastest lap on her way up from twenty-sixth and last on the grid all the way up to fourteenth. There weren't any points for it, not even close, but it was absolutely, positively, an amazing drive that saw her carving through the field. With only the top six scoring points in the sprint race, I'm not sure if she would have been able to score with those extra laps she lost under the safety car anyway, but we'll never find out now, will we?
Well, let's talk about who did score, and since it's the final race of the season, let's do something special and list it from sixth up to first, shall we? Well, starting in the final points-paying position, delivering just a single point, we have Shandar Khan, the Pakistani driver for Arden, building off of his solid weekend in Malaysia and scoring another point on top of that here in the final round. In fifth, scoring two points, we have my old teammate, Bernard Audinet, capping off his season with a solid result on a day when his teammate failed to finish. Bernard perhaps isn't quite as fast as the young guns coming into this season, but he's a dependable driver, Renault clearly sees something in him to continue on with him, and he has shone at times this season, nobody can take any of that away from him. Scoring three points in fourth place, we have Vittorio De Filippis, who has quietly amassed a total of 17 points this season via good and consistent results. Not bad at all for the Italian driver, especially given that Durango isn't exactly a household name in motorsport.
That brings us to the podium. DAMS second driver, Alfonse Jauffret took his second podium of the season. Not a bad result for the Belgian driver at all, especially given he's been confirmed as DAMS' lead driver for the 2009 GP2 Asia series, while Higashiyama graduates to the GP2 team. Hopefully the beginning of good things for the promising young prospect. Maximilien Longpre finished second in his Arden, having taken his fourth consecutive second-place finish, meaning that he has scored a combined 26 points in the last two races. A very good run of form for the Luxembourger and hopefully one that will impress the notoriously cutthroat leadership at the Red Bull driver academy. Finally, there is the top spot, going to Ayrton Senna II. Yes, the Brazilian with all the pressure of that world-famous name finally broke through and scored his first win of the season, albeit in a sprint race. Still, it was a good result for the Brazilian and hopefully puts some strong momentum behind him going into his campaign with iSport in the main GP2 season, which kicks off in just a few weeks.
So, that brings us to the final standings: the top three remain unchanged - Higashiyama on 64 points, Alexandrov on 53 points, and Natasha on 46 points - but Longpre came essentially as close as he could to the top three, finishing the season on 41 points. Ayrton Senna II leaps ahead of Audinet, bringing his total up to 29 points, while Bernard Audinet himself was back on 25 points. Spaniard Ezequiel Martinez, on 19 points, and Vittorio De Filippis, on 17 points, weren't very far behind either, driving for Coloni PASS and Durango respectively. De Filippis, at least, will be returning to the GP2 Asia series in 2009, along with Shandar Khan, Alfonse Jauffret, and championship contenders Vladimir Alexandrov and Natasha Tsirinskaya. The Russophone drivers are both expected to be among the championship contenders, likely joined by a variety of talented new drivers who will be entering the series for the first time. So, Natasha is not exactly alone in being one of the drivers remaining in this series for the foreseeable future, but she is somewhat unique in that she doesn't have a drive for the rest of the year, at least not yet anyway. There are a number of reasons for this: first of all, Natasha was in Italian Formula 3 last year, not exactly the highest level of competition, and nobody was expecting her to leap into GP2 Asia and be this successful, so nobody is really prepared to take her right now. Second of all, Natasha is not affiliated with a junior program right now: Yoshikazu Higashiyama was a Toyota product, Vladimir Alexandrov has offers floating around from BMW Sauber and Renault, Bernard Audinet was a Renault product, Ayrton Senna II has ties to Honda, and I believe that he will be testing their car later this year...the list goes on and on. So many drivers already have links to Formula One teams, but Natasha does not.
At the same time, what team can she be affiliated with? Certainly not Williams, where I'm barely holding onto a seat due to financial demands, Tommy Koskinen is relatively young and seems set to stay, and Toyota is clamoring to put Hideki Kitagawa into a seat. Renault has links to Trident, but they have a crowded junior program with the likes of Bernard Audinet and Lukas Casemiro waiting to get a chance in Formula One, and numerous other drivers in various stages of development. Honda? In theory that could be a decent option, with four seats available between Honda and Super Aguri, while Rudolfo Goncalves is getting up there in years, but Super Aguri is barely holding on at this point, and Ayrton Senna II seems to be Honda's choice. I mean, the McLaren-Honda partnership of the late 1980s and early 1990s was defined by Ayrton Senna and now Honda has the chance to take his nephew, a man with the same name, into their own team, rejuvenating a team which has somewhat lost its way since losing the British-American Tobacco sponsorship. So that's not an option either. Toyota just brought in Fabian Schmidt and has the likes of Hideki Kitagawa and now Yoshikazu Higashiyama waiting for seats, so not an option either. BMW Sauber seems quite happy with their drivers and Vladimir Alexandrov might be taking their reserve driver slot anyway. Red Bull and Toro Rosso seem to operate as a closed system and Natasha seems a bit old and advanced to enter that scheme. I could go on and on, but the point remains, there isn't an easy path for Natasha to enter F1. A lot of drivers are on long-term contracts as well, so who knows when the situation will change.
Notes:
Alright then, that's the GP2 Asia stuff done for now.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 13: The Corners of the Mediterranean
Notes:
Hello hello everyone. Last time I was pretty happy to wrap up the GP2 Asia stuff at the end of the chapter because it felt like that was becoming a pretty major side plot. Now, obviously it's important and it'll play out later, but for now, we're done with the junior series stuff, and we'll move onto a few other things before getting back to it in a few chapters' time.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter XIII.
The Corners of the Mediterranean.
"Finally," I sighed as Roksana and I pulled up in front of our apartment. The Portuguese-born Ukrainian woman helped me grab one of my bags while I grabbed the other, the two of us heading towards the door. I turned around for a moment to see Natasha and her parents pulling up in front of their building, the second car of the group having also made it home. Satisfied with that, Roksana and I lugged my bags up to the apartment before I finally collapsed down on the couch, arm above my head, happy sigh escaping my lips, and my legs feeling downright hollow. The beginning of the season has been rather hectic, with Australia and Malaysia being among the furthest races from Europe, Malaysia bringing that tropical humidity, and Bahrain bringing the hot desert heat. Combine the actual racing with the travel and the hotel rooms and exhausting sponsor and media engagements, and I came home rather drained. There is also the physical element of this: F1 cars have power steering and semi-automatic paddle-shift gearboxes today, but it's a physical experience in a different way, with the G-forces being at their highest levels ever. Quite frankly, the only people that face higher G-force loads than F1 drivers are fighter jet pilots, and they wear pressurized suits to cope with it.
Needless to say, I was very satisfied to have some time off before the Spanish and Turkish Grand Prix, then it was a two week break up until the Monaco Grand Prix, which fell on my birthday. I was going to turn twenty, and it would be nice to bring home a good result as a birthday present. It was also going to be my first birthday as Roksana's girlfriend, so i was curious to see how that was going to go. Our one-year anniversary is also coming up. We met in May in the lead-up to the Monaco Grand Prix, when she was doing that article in her magazine, but I consider our anniversary to be in mid-June when I returned from the North American races and the two of us went on our first proper date. Oh, and as I mentioned, there is only one North American round this season, with the United States Grand Prix at Indianapolis off of the calendar. So it was just Canada dividing up the European season, followed by France kicking off the main European summer.
"So, how was it?" Roksana asked, sitting down on the other couch.
"Well, 6th, 4th, and 6th is a really good start to the season, I'm on 11 points. Tommy is on 7 points, Ivan and Martin are each on 3, Fabian and Daniel have yet to score, so I'm closer to the cars ahead than the cars behind. It's all looking really good, I'm really tired, but I'm happy." I answered, looking on the bright side of the first three races and seeing where we are relative to our rivals. Assuming that Red Bull and Toyota are still going to be our chief rivals, we're ahead of them now. In fact, we're even well ahead of Renault, who has only scored points once so far - Felipe Alvarez's fourth place in Australia, though he has been close with a ninth and a tenth in the next two races - so we might actually have a chance of repeating our fourth-place finish from last year. Now, going further than that is going to be next to impossible, unless McLaren gets itself disqualified again, but it feels good to be at the head of the midfield and it feels good to be the lead driver for Williams after falling behind Tommy Koskinen rather significantly in the second half of last year.
"Well, now you're going to spend a few weeks at home, get rested, then you're going to get back out there and be an international superstar again." Roksana responded, trying to reassure me and hype me up, taking a greater interest in my accomplishments than I perhaps was. I was well aware of the fact that I'm in a privileged position, getting to live my dream, racing around the world, and living quite comfortably while doing it, and yeah, I could probably be described as an international superstar, at least by the standards of Formula One. I was also aware of the fact that, yes, I am the most successful female driver in Formula One, and that margin has grown quite a bit - but I think that has a lot more to do my predecessors having had bad luck and poor machinery than anything all that impressive about me - and that some people will support me over that fact alone. There is a lot more demand for a successful female driver than there is for a successful Kazakh driver. At the same time, that is mostly on the fan side of things, internally, Formula One tends to like known quantities and familiarity. I mean, look at Toyota replacing its German driver Roland Ziegler with German driver Fabian Schmidt, or the Red Bull junior program's recent fascination with drivers named Maximilian.
The name Tamara Shchegolyayeva isn't exactly an established name in Formula One, so I'm the one proving that names like Tamara Shchegolyayeva can be considered the names of Formula One drivers, I'm the only proving that women can be considered Formula One drivers, and I'm the only proving that Kazakhstanis can be considered Formula One drivers. I'm aware that is all happening around me, and I know that is part of what draws Roksana to me, but it's not my focus. I know it sounds selfish, but I'm less concerned with the potential breakthroughs I'm making and the walls I'm busting down or whatever, and more concerned with the individual accomplishments. When I'm in the midst of competition, I let go of the fact that I'm a woman competing against men, I let go of the fact that I was born in Kazakhstan whereas most of my rivals have been born in Europe, and I let go of the fact that I'm probably the only lesbian in the paddock, all of the fades away, I just think of myself as a driver competing against other drivers. And I think that, for the most part, that's how my rivals see me too. Any idea of protecting the fragile girl or being courteous or whatever went away as soon as they realized I was a legitimate threat in the race.
"Still, it would be nice if I could lay down on a warm bed while a beautiful girl massaged my back." I smirked, getting my mind off of who I am and what I'm doing in the sport right now, and instead thinking about something else entirely.
"Hmm, that does sound nice, somebody should do that." Roksana teased, but she did get up and started heading towards the bedroom. That was more than enough to motivate me to get up and follow her, ignoring the two travel bags still standing next to the door. That could wait.
"Tamara, wake up...wake up honey your phone is ringing." Roksana lightly shook me awake the next morning. She had already gotten up to write an article for a Francophone Belgian magazine, but I had slept in, still recovering from a string of races and from the recent flight back from the Middle East. I sat up on the bed as Roksana handed me my cell phone, answering a call.
"Tamara! Congratulations on a strong start to season!" Makhmud Abdullayev, the President of Kazakhoil, spoke, congratulating me on the start to the season. I glanced at my clock, but upon realizing that it was 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday and the time difference between Monaco and Astana, I decided to bite my tongue. Makhmud was a really powerful man from the kind of country where ego and personal connections dominate government affairs. If I said the wrong thing to Mr. Abdullayev, it could potentially break my relationship with Kazakhoil, which would in turn seriously complicate my relationship with Williams. Especially when you consider the facts that, one: Toyota is relentlessly pushing Hideki Kitagawa on us, and two: Sir Frank Williams has made it rather clear that my sponsorship is required. Kazakhoil is providing Williams with $30 million a year to raise awareness for Kazakhstan, for its energy sector, and present a good face for its authoritarian government, that is one of the most significant chunks of money going to the team, which might prove to be important with the grim financial market in the United States, which was beginning to affect the rest of the world as well, thanks to how heavily intertwined the modern markets are.
"Thank you, Mr. Abdullayev, it's good to hear from you." I responded, being polite, and also shooting a glance to Roksana as I spoke, making her realize that I was talking to some very important people. Roksana quietly sat down next to me, being there for me, but not making a sound either. Perfect.
"Malaysia was very good! You got a strong position, and your cars was always on the TV in the last few laps when it was you and Harrison. That was very good for us. But Tamara, when are you going to get on the podium next, eh? Canada is coming up you know; can we get a repeat performance?" Abdullayev asked, clearly excited over the recent results. I imagined that one: Abdullayev was very happy to see his company getting exposure on international television like this, and two: I get the impression that Abdullayev is a Formula One fan, and this is somewhat of a passion project for him. Nursultan Nazarbayev certainly appreciates the exposure and is pleased with the novelty of this experiment, but Nursultan would also be satisfied with Kazakhoil sponsoring a big football club or something like that, so he is wondering why Formula One specifically and why this level of investment considering the global situation. I think that's why Abdullayev is asking for a podium specifically, so he has one big result to point at and present to his Premier, in addition to just wanting good results in general.
"Well, I think we got close in Malaysia and my teammate got on the podium the race before in Australia, so it might happen soon. I'm certainly trying my hardest to make it happen." I answered, remaining positive and diplomatic, and also pointing out that Tommy Koskinen did get the Kazakhoil logo on the podium already this season. Now, a Finn doing that probably doesn't mean much to Nursultan Nazarbayev, not as much as a Kazakh driver doing it, because a Kazakh driver getting on the podium also means the Kazakh flag flying above the podium. I might not be an ethnic Kazakh like Nazarbayev and Abdullayev are, I might not even speak the language, but the flag is the same, and that is good enough for Kazakhoil.
"I hope it happens soon Tamara, we are all very interested in your results! You are going great things for this company!" Makhmud told me, speaking loudly into the phone in somewhat broken English, but I didn't dare mention anything, again not wanting to offend the person which is ultimately my paymaster. As for the great things for the company line, well, that's not nearly as comforting as Abdullayev thinks, because Kazakhoil and Kazakhgaz are fundamentally just the oil and natural gas arms of a corrupt, authoritarian dictatorship. I know Williams has Saudi sponsors too, and that also makes me somewhat uncomfortable, but that isn't directly attached to me the way that Kazakhoil is. Honestly, every day I dread some corruption scandal being exposed or some callous industrial accident occurring that puts Kazakhoil all over the western media and makes me and the team look bad.
"Thank you, Mr. Abdullayev. Hopefully we can do something special in the Spanish Grand Prix." I kept a polite face going despite my personal feelings about all this.
"Of course Tamara, of course. I will be watching with great interest!" Makhmud signed off, ending the call on a good note. I waited for the beep before releasing an exhale and physically relaxing my shoulders, having tensed up through that whole call. I'm also relieved that it was just a positive call about my results rather than anything which could be threatening my sponsorship and thus my career, but I still felt stressed out and under pressure whenever I was doing anything relating to Kazakhoil. This might just be the effect of my stressed out brain, but now I got myself thinking that Nursultan Nazarbayev is starting to have his doubts over the F1 sponsorship while Makhmud Abdullayev is trying to keep it alive and is expecting good results in order to do that. The good side of all this is that I want to have good results as well, so at least Kazakhoil isn't asking me to do anything that goes against what I'm trying to do in Formula One.
"Are you okay?" Roksana asked.
"Yeah, I'm fine, I'm fine. I just can't wait for the day that I don't have to deal with sponsors that make me sick to my stomach." I replied, sighing before laying back for a moment. I really didn't know what the path was going to be from here: I was happy with Williams, to the point where I've rejected a move to Renault to honor my contract here - which, to be fair, does seem to have been a pretty good decision, at least so far - but Sir Frank Williams has made it clear that my funding is necessary. I think that he wants me in this seat, I think he likes me, not as much as Coronet does, but still enough that he prefers me in the seat over Hideki Kitagawa, for instance, but there are commercial concerns he needs to consider. Williams is not a manufacturer; it has a privileged relationship with Toyota, sure, but the financial resources of Toyota are behind their own team rather than the Grove-based squad. Williams has some high-profile partners, such as FedEx, Saudia, Lenovo, RBS, and a few others, but they don't quite compare to the kind of sponsors the Ferraris, McLarens, and BMWs of the world have. In short, Williams needs a driver that brings funding, and the driver they've based their future on, Tommy Koskinen, does not bring any significant funding, nor is Finland a particularly valuable market. That means that the second seat has to provide funding for both drivers, so as long as I'm a Williams driver, I need to provide funding.
The fact of the matter is that I essentially need to be with Williams through 2009. A lot of drivers are under long term contracts right now, and those don't start to open up until 2010 at the earliest - while things with Bernardo Fulvia didn't end particularly nicely, I do think there was at least a grain of truth to him saying that a lot more teams will be willing to consider me coming 2010, 2011 than right now - so that means I need to survive Kazakhoil for another year and a half, at least. I do think I'm beginning to get at a point where I can get a high-level seat without sponsorship, but obviously a seat needs to be open first, and right now, I don't even think I could get a sideways move right now. Let's go down the list: Ferrari has Matias Hamalainen and Henrique de Matteo tied down for a few years at minimum, with Matti in particular I believe being contracted to stay through the end of 2010, likewise, McLaren has its star of the future, Anthony Harrison, tied down for the foreseeable future, whereas they just signed Jyri Kaasalainen, so it'll be a few years at minimum. BMW Sauber have Piotr Kaminski on a long-term deal and the performance of Victor Hartmann is such that it would take a very impressive driver to get him out of his seat. I don't think I'm at that level quite yet, and I think the fact that Victor Hartmann is a German driver racing for a German manufacturer also lends him security.
Then we get to the midfield teams: Toyota has an overabundance of drivers that I've already addressed, with Ivan Tripoli doing a good job and Fabian Schmidt being a fresh signing, on top of all their junior talents, Yoshikazu Higashiyama chief among them. Renault has new signing Filipe Yannick, an abundance of junior drivers, and Felipe Alvarez if they can hold onto him. Then there is Red Bull, where Daniel MacGowan is likely nearing retirement, but Maximilian Renner seems well placed to replace him at the energy drink giant's team. Once we get beyond Red Bull, it stops being a sideways move and starts looking like a backwards move. Honda might be a bit of an exception, as they really should be in a better place than where they are now, but one: they have a fairly handy pairing in the form of James Buxton and Rudolfo Goncalves, two: nobody knows how Honda is going to cope with the 2009 regulation change, especially considering they're barely managing to compete in the third year of the current formula, and, on somewhat of a facetious note, three: do I even want to race for a team whose car is half white and half an image of the Earth as Honda persists with their Earth Dreams gimmick? The possible exception of Honda aside, once we get to the last few teams, we start getting to really unappealing drivers for junior teams and teams which are barely hanging on. There is also the point that, with these bottom-tier teams, me moving to them for the sole purpose of getting away from Kazakhoil sponsorship might deny Natasha a seat in the near-future, and I'm not sure if that's something I want to do. No, I may seriously dislike Kazakhoil, but I want my next career move to be a forward move, not a sideways move, and certainly not a backwards move into the very territory that Natasha Tsirinskaya will soon be competing to find a seat of her own. A dream of mine is to see us both in Formula One racing against each other, and competing for the same type of seats won't help either of us.
Nat wasn't competing in the main GP2 series, so I wasn't paying as much attention to the support races in Spain as I was in Malaysia and Bahrain, but I did take note of one thing. For the 2008 GP2 Series, they introduced a new car: the Dallara GP2/08, to become the new spec car for all teams at that weekend, while the older GP2/05 chassis will continue to be used in GP2 Asia for the foreseeable future. This seemed like a strange move to me, because after a wave of talent in 2008 which made GP2 Asia seem like it was becoming a true equivalent to the main GP2 series, it was now back to being somewhat of a third-tier series, using older, simpler cars. This would also make it harder for drivers like Natasha Tsirinskaya to adjust to GP2 Asia, as they'll be going to a different car as well as different circuits and a different level of competition. I'm somewhat glad that Natasha isn't competing in GP2 right now because going from a national F3 series to GP2 Asia to GP2, using three different cars in the process, might be a rather chaotic way to advance up the ranks. Not everyone needs to get into F1 as a teenager, plenty of drivers can take a few more years to develop and then get into Formula One when they're ready. That being said, here I was, about to enjoy one of my last race weekends as a nineteen-year-old Formula One driver.
To race though, first you must qualify. Now, in the past, particularly in the early to mid 1990s, there was actually a chance that several cars would be sent home on Saturday, as there were more cars than grid slots, but that was also in an era where Formula One was a lot less regulated and a lot less streamlined. Nowadays, there are eleven Formula One teams, each run two cars, and each are expected to be more than a certain level of professional, hence, all twenty-one cars show up for every race and all are generally competitive with each other. Of course, a Super Aguri is never going to win a race and they're probably not going to finish on the lead lap, but they can lap within a few seconds a lap of the leaders regardless of the conditions. So, the way qualifying works now is that in Q1, cars 22-17 are eliminated, then cars 16-11 in Q2, and finally, in Q3, the final ten cars are loaded up with race fuel and the tyres they'll be starting the race on and are challenged to compete for the top ten slots. Here at Williams, we're confident of our ability to get out of Q1, and we expect to qualify in the top few positions of Q2 and the bottom few positions of Q3. We've been pretty good about getting into Q3 so far this season, but the Spanish Grand Prix, was the start of the European season, and that is when teams really start to begin bringing upgrades. This might be the race where our better funded rivals, such as Renault, Toyota, and Red Bull start to slip ahead of us.
Williams has brought upgrades of its own. In the Barcelona preseason test, Red Bull tested the so-called "sharkfin" engine cover, essentially a protrusion going off the end of the engine cover and ending up above the rear wing. Since then, various teams have been testing or adopting their own versions of the cover, now, Williams has brought its own, testing it on Tommy's car in FP1, my car in FP2, and then fitting it on both cars Saturday morning after seeing it perform well. This was part of the first significant upgrade package we've brought for our dark blue, white, and cyan little race car here, and hopefully it will help keep us at the level where we're at, but we'll have to see how exactly it compares to our rival teams, and that comparison begins here in qualifying. So, I sat in the cockpit wearing my white racing suit, my cyan, blue, and white helmet, and my cyan and dark blue racing gloves, listening to the sound of the Toyota V8 engine firing up behind me, with a set of option Bridgestone tyres fitted to the car, ready to give my all around the Circuit de Catalunya.
"Alright Tamara, we're going to send you out early. We want you to set a banker lap and then come into the pits, we'll see how things go after that and adjust accordingly." Peter Malmedy instructed over the radio. We knew that things got chaotic towards the end of sessions, when all the backmarker cars wanted to get the most rubbered-in track possible in an attempt to sneak into Q2, so we wanted to have the stability of an early banker lap before things got insane there.
"Copy," I responded as the team lowered the car off the jacks and released me out onto the pitlane, allowing me to circulate around the mostly clear track and prepare for my first qualifying lap of the weekend: hopefully the first of at least three. So, I made my way out of the new chicane - added for the 2007 event - and began my lap, unleashing 19,000 revs of power down the Catalan straight. Past the pitlane and the tall grandstand structure the track dipped along the pit exit before evening out in time for the right-hander of turn one. Effectively a ninety-degree corner followed by another ninety-degree corner in the form of turn two, this time to the left. This set us up for the fast, nearly flat-out right-hander of turn three: a long, endless corner going around 180-degrees before spitting us out on a straight at the top of the circuit. Passing beneath a sponsor bridge, I hit the sector one line, and at the same time, hitting the brakes for the right-hander of Repsol. The corner was named for the Spanish petro-giant and served as a slower 180-degree corner leading onto a short straight.
The short shoot led to turn five, somewhat of a hairpin to the right, with it throwing us downhill in the infield section of the circuit. The kink of turn six and then the fast left-hander of turn six were at the lowest elevation part of the circuit, and the right-hand kink of turn eight started a run back up hill, back to the top of the circuit. The fast, blind corner of turn nine crested the top of the hill and shot us onto the back straight, speeding down towards the end of sector two, crossing the line just as I began braking for turn ten. Turn ten, called La Caixa, was a hairpin to the left and followed by the left-hand kink of turn eleven, which led to the 180-degree right-hander of turn twelve. Another very short straight and it was braking for the right-hander of turn thirteen. This began the new section, which bypassed the long, sweeping final corner. Instead, thirteen was a tight right-hander leading to a short downhill run before braking for the left-hander of turn fourteen. It was left and then immediately right to get through the final chicane and into the remnants of New Holland, a sweeping run to the right, albeit a shorter one than the old final corner. It was still enjoyable, but it wasn't the corner that it once was, and I'm not sure if that sacrifice has actually done anything to improve the quality of racing here. The chicane certainly wasn't a particularly good overtaking zone, and it was clumsy to drive through, also making the run through the final corner less of a challenge, since it was easy to keep the throttle down when it was an acceleration zone. A pair of very fast corners though, on the limit of grip? That could be a challenge. Nevertheless, I was just a driver, it wasn't my place to design the circuits, rather it was my place to make it around said circuit as fast as possible, which brings us to...
"Alright Tamara, that was a 1:22.021. That's a good place to be right now and hopefully we can improve on that later in the session." Peter came through the radio again, revealing where we were at the moment. It was a decent lap, not the best lap obviously, but it was a good benchmark to set here within the first few moments of Q1, and it would give me the safety to allow me to push harder later in the session. So, I returned to the garage, gave it a few minutes to see how things developed, before heading out again and doing another lap, pushing a bit harder this time, using a bit more kerb, and braking just a bit later with the confidence created by experience, and the end result of that was getting up to a 1:21.566, putting me just about a tenth behind Tommy Koskinen and about eight tenths off of the leaders. This still wasn't the best lap, but it was nearly half a second faster than my first lap, and it was good enough to transfer into Q1. Meanwhile, from twenty-second to seventeenth, the Super Aguris of Haruki Tanaka and Louis Sanderson, the Force Indias of Lorenzo Barbaro and Umberto Petronelli, the Toro Rosso of Maximilian Renner, and the Red Bull of Daniel MacGowan all failed to transfer. So down to sixteen cars as we began Q2.
The second qualifying session started out with us following the same formula: set a banker lap early on when the track is relatively clear, and then set a more competitive lap later on when the track is at its fastest point. The first lap though, I set another 1:21.5, making me think that I was hitting the limit of my pace. If that was the limit of my pace, it wouldn't be particularly great, since the Toro Rosso of Maximilien Lecroix is the only car that was definitively slower than me, meaning at this pace, I could only really hope for a fourteenth or fifteenth, since my teammate was in roughly the same boat. That was a small relief, since at least that meant that the deficit wasn't on my part, at least not entirely, but then, all of that went out of my head because it became time for another lap. Any difficulties or pace issues had to disappear from my mind because it's my job to try again and try to go faster, so, at the end of my outlap, I tried again. I pushed harder, taking these grooved Bridgestone tyres as close to flat-out speed as they will through these corners, braking as late as I could without locking up the tyres, and driving right to the limit of the white lines around the track, pushing the boundaries but not quite crossing them. So, what was the end result of it? Well, a 1:21.107, good enough for twelfth. So, I did not transfer to Q3, but it wasn't all bad news, because, from slowest to fastest, the knocked-out cars go as follows: Maximilien Lecroix in 16th for Toro Rosso, my teammate Tommy Koskinen in 15th, Fabian Schmidt in 14th for Toyota, the Honda of James Buxton in 13th, myself in 12th, and then Rudolfo Goncalves in 11th, making sure that I was the Toyota-powered car in a Honda sandwich. It was relatively familiar territory for me, as I've fought with James and especially Rudolfo before, and it seemed to be the limit of the car right now, but I hope that our race pace will be stronger and, if not, I hope that these upgrades will pay off elsewhere.
So, I outqualified my teammate yet again - which meant I was already on course to have a better qualifying record compared to Tommy this season compared to last - but neither of the Williams cars advanced to the final qualifying session. So, at the end of all this, the order stands like this: the Brazilian rookie Filipe Yannick in tenth for Renault, German driver Victor Hartmann a somewhat disappointing ninth in his BMW Sauber, Italian Ivan Tripoli eighth in his Toyota, and Australian Martin Weaver in seventh for Red Bull racing. Getting into the top six, we have the McLarens, with Finnish driver Jyri Kaasalainen in sixth and American Anthony Harrison in fifth, the two of them lining up behind the lead BMW Sauber of Piotr Kaminski, who was enjoying a truly incredible run of form. Then the top three consist of the Ferrari of Brazilian Henrique de Matteo in third, the Renault of Felipe Alvarez a downright impressive second in qualifying for his home race, and then reigning world champion, Matias Hamalainen was lining up in pole position, representing Finland and Scuderia Ferrari. So, the Ferraris seem to have the edge over the McLarens, but the Renaults all of a sudden seem to be able to compete with the BMW Saubers, at least on this track, because their overall starting positions are better. Williams is a bit behind the curve, caught up with the Hondas and a few other midfield cars, but hopefully we can do better in the race.
"Safety car! Safety car! An incident involving Barbaro and Renner, both cars are out." Peter Malmedy came through the radio barely a moment into the race. All the anticipation of the lights and the tension of the run down into the first corner oddly melting away now that the race came to a bit of a screeching halt before we even got to turn three. Matti led the race, Henrique was now second after having overtaken Alvarez off the line, and similarly, Anthony was now ahead of Kaminski, having made his way fourth before the safety car came out. I was still in the same general area, and I didn't gain from the incident, as it occurred behind me. So, the running order now was Hamalainen, Matteo, Alvarez, Harrison, Kaminski, Kaasalainen, Weaver, Tripoli, Hartmann, Yannick, Goncalves, Shchegolyayeva, Buxton, Koskinen, Schmidt, Lecroix, Petronelli, MacGowan, Tanaka, Sanderson. Lorenzo Barbaro and Maximilian Renner were already out, as Malmedy had mentioned, and MacGowan had lost a couple of places as he was involved in that turn one incident as well. So, two cars out, one car involved but undamaged, and three laps under the safety car to recover all the cars and get the race running again. So, Matias took the green flag and crossed the line to start lap four, getting the race running properly.
I had intended to get after Rudolfo Goncalves on the start, but the way things are, I instead had to defend from James Buxton, with the British Honda driver getting a run at me from behind. I cut to the right, hoping to defend the inside, but that turned out to be somewhat of a mistake, as I just threw myself out of the slipstream train while allowing Buxton to get a tow off of his teammate ahead, so by the time we actually got to the corner, Buxton had a nose ahead and had the racing line, so I had no choice but to yield the position. Now I was behind both Hondas. I continued the chase after them, including on the back straight, but I couldn't overtake then, so I was once again waiting for a chance to pass at least one of them down the main straight. I wouldn't get that chance though, because the yellow flags came out in sector one due to Filipe Yannick spinning in turn two, which means that I did at least gain a position during all of that. The Renault would retire two laps later, since, while trying to recover places following his spin, he would slam into the Toro Rosso of Maximilien Lecroix. The Renault would retire on the spot, whereas the Toro Rosso would circulate around track with a smashed-up car before finally retire, ending Toro Rosso's day early. Louis Sanderson's Super Aguri would be caught up in the debris from this incident, which would eventually lead to him retiring as well due to radiator damage.
My charge was somewhat upset by all the various yellow flags popping up around the circuit thanks to these incidents, but a full safety car was avoided, so by lap nine, the Hondas ahead of me had swapped places, with James Buxton getting ahead of Rudolfo Goncalves, meaning the experienced Brazilian with nine race wins for Scuderia Ferrari to his name was now the car ahead of me. We negotiated sector three and attacked the kerbs through the final chicane before speeding through New Holland, Buxton already a few tenths ahead of us, and it being clear that I was going to lose time if I remained stuck behind the Brazilian. Rudolfo weaved a bit down the straight, trying to cut the slipstream, but not aggressively so, as the Brazilian made it be a point to be a respectful opponent, so by the end of the straight, I was able to peak out of the slipstream, out brake the Honda into turn one, and then consolidate my position in turn two before throwing the car through turn three. I now set my goal as closing up to James Buxton before I got the following message from Malmedy.
"Box this lap, box this lap." Peter ordered and I came into the pits at the end of lap twenty, Buxton coming in just ahead of me. Goncalves stayed out so perhaps his pace was down to the fact that he was carrying more fuel and therefore having to lug around a heavier car. At the time, we had no idea where Goncalves would cycle out compared to Buxton and I when he did finally make his stop, but, with hindsight, this decision to go long would be the decision that doomed Rudolfo's race. The reason for this was that, on lap twenty-two, all hell broke loose. First and foremost, Jyri Kaasalainen had a catastrophic tyre failure in turn nine, meaning he went straight on as he crested the hill and crashed into the barriers, slamming into the wall at 26g. The safety car was instantly called out as the track marshals sought to extract the Finnish driver from the McLaren that had buried itself in the barriers at the top of the hill.
"Is Jyri okay?" I asked when I arrived on the scene in the safety car queue, likely asking the same question that all the drivers were asking.
"He's out of the car and walking to the medical car. They're taking him to the medical center." Peter responded matter-of-factly. So, he was at very least alive and conscious, and the fact that he's walking on his own implies that his legs are totally fine, which is a real concern in accidents like this. Famously, Wilhelm Ziegler missed half the season in 1999 thanks to a crash at Silverstone where he broke his legs, and this kind of accident was concerningly similar in that it was the nose right into the barrier. I suppose we'll just have to see how his hands, brain, and all the rest looks after the medical checks, but with the forces involved, there is always the risk of a concussion or even just the steering wheel violently snapping back in your hands. Formula One has gotten a lot safer in the past fifteen years or so, with a whole slew of advancements coming after the 1994 deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger, and the introduction of the HANS device some years after that, but F1 accidents can still be very scary. I have no idea when I'll have my first big accident, but I am dreading that day.
In any case, Formula One is definitely a case of the show must go on, and the cars continued circulating around behind the safety car. The safety car was already out - unlike my cheeky little incident in Australia - but the pitlane had not been opened yet, nevertheless, Victor Hartmann had to pit or else he was going to run out of fuel, so not only did he fall behind me, but he earned a ten-second stop-go penalty, really putting himself out of contention. So, that was a place gained, and the next time around when the pitlane was opened, I would see some more rivals disappear, as Petronelli and Goncalves came together in the pits due to a rushed release. Much like Lecroix earlier in the race, Goncalves would circulate around the circuit in an attempt to continue, but in the end would have to pit and retire from the race. cars were dropping like flies from this race and it wasn't even all that early in the season, the European races are when things are supposed to start getting normal.
Hamalainen, Matteo, Harrison, Kaminski, Alvarez, Weaver, Tripoli, Buxton, myself, and Schmidt filled out the top ten. The Ferraris running first and second, Anthony Harrison having recovered to third in the sole remaining McLaren, Kaminski hanging on in the lead BMW, while Alvarez, much like his former teammate Harrison, was the last remaining Renault in the race. Weaver was the lead Red Bull with MacGowan also running fairly well in eleventh, the Toyotas were seventh and tenth, the sole remaining Honda of Buxton was in the final points-paying position of eighth, I was in ninth in the lead Williams, and, like I said, Fabian Schmidt was now the car behind me with Daniel MacGowan behind him. This was the state of the race when we got started again on lap twenty-nine, with Matti Hamalainen speeding off and creating a gap to his teammate, while Alvarez's race soon came to an end with a puff of smoke, his Renault engine giving way and his car pulling off to the side of the track. It was another position gained for me, and I was now running in the points, so this race is already looking quite a bit better than the Spanish Grand Prix was for me last year, but we're not quite done right, so I still have a job to finish, and hopefully I'll gain positions in the process.
Speaking of not quite being done yet, I did start to have concerns about making it through this race when, on lap forty-two, Tommy Koskinen also had an engine failure. Knowing that the cars were built the same way and that I was still on my first specification of engine, I naturally got a bit concerned, especially since, not long after that, the last set of stops began, meaning I still had a whole stint to do. Henrique de Matteo would pit on lap forty-six, going for the undercut, but with Matti Hamalainen setting the fastest lap that lap and then pitting the next lap, the Finn was able to protect his lead. Anthony Harrison and Piotr Kaminski would follow the race leader into the pits on lap forty-seven, while I would pit a lap later. James Buxton would remain ahead of me, and Ivan Tripoli would remain ahead of him, but the Toyota driver had a slow stop, so we were a lot closer to the Toyota ahead. We were both chasing down Tripoli while, behind us, Daniel MacGowan was doing the same thing to Fabian Schmidt, both Toyotas in danger of losing position in this final stint of the race.
"Buxton and you are closing in on Tripoli quickly. ETA five laps, ETA five laps. Try and close up to Buxton while you're behind the Toyota and hopefully you can pass them both." Malmedy reported, the two of us working together like a well-oiled machine after a season and a half together. The chaos in this race wasn't quite over yet, since Daniel MacGowan and Fabian Schmidt got together when the Red Bull tried to pass, resulting in a broken front wing for Schmidt and a rear left puncture for MacGowan, meaning both would have to go all the way around the track and then pit. My guess is that what happened is that MacGowan got ahead on the straight, perhaps outbraking Schmidt, but Schmidt was in a better position to take the corner, whereas MacGowan, perhaps not quite aware of where Schmidt was, or perhaps just not reacting quickly enough, stayed on his line which meant Schmidt had nowhere to go but into Daniel's rear left tyre. This did put some debris down into turn one and brought out the double-waved yellow flags, but that was behind us, and hopefully the flags would be subbed down by the time we got there on the next lap. In any case, James was taking three or four tenths out of Tripoli per lap, whereas I was about five tenths behind the British Honda driver, but I wasn't really closing in on him ahead. On the other hand, I wasn't exactly losing time to the Honda, so I guess I would have to wait until we caught up to Tripoli and see if I could get past the Toyota in a better way than Buxton would. If I could get within three tenths or so if James, I think I could pass him on the straight.
So, a white and red Toyota came out of New Holland and onto the main straight here in Barcelona, followed by the white, green, blue, and red Honda, and then the dark blue, white, and cyan Williams, all within six or seven tenths at this point. James Buxton was getting close to Ivan Tripoli and even took a peek to the inside, but he wasn't quite close enough yet, but they were going to start battling any second now. I kind of hoped that Buxton would try a move before we got back on the main straight, because then they would be battling for a few corners, and I could close up to them and maybe try and gain a pair of positions. Well, things didn't quite go to plan, since Tripoli had a wiggle coming out of turn nine and put a wheel into the gravel while cresting the hill, severely compromising his exit and letting Buxton chase him down and overtake into turn ten, moving into sixth place. It wasn't all bad news though, because having a car send it up the inside in a corner not known as a traditional overtaking spot, meant that I gained some time on Tripoli through sector three, meaning that I was only two tenths behind Tripoli down the main straight. It was Toyota power against Toyota power, but I had the momentum and the slipstream, so I was able to send it to the right, outbrake the Toyota, and move up to seventh place. I would spend the remaining eight laps of the race trying to gain on the Honda and the Red Bull of Martin Weaver ahead, but the laps kept counting down while I wasn't gaining on the cars ahead fast enough, so at the end of the day, the best we could do was seventh place.
The points-paying results of the 2008 Spanish Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 8 points.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 6 points.
4: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 5 points.
5: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 4 points.
6: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 3 points.
7: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 2 points.
8: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 1 point.
Victor Hartmann was ninth due to being penalized after pitting for emergency service under the safety car, Umberto Petronelli was close to scoring Force India's first points under its new name thanks to finishing tenth, while Fabian Schmidt and Daniel MacGowan were a lap down and in eleventh and twelfth after their coming together late in the race. Haruki Tanaka was the final finisher of the race in Super Aguri, down in thirteenth, bringing an end to the second massive attrition race of the season. Australia was a bad one, with only six real finishers and only eight classified finishers due to the 90% race distance rule, but that was the opening race of the season. There is always some expectation of attrition at the beginning of the season, but to lose this many cars in a dry race once we've gotten to the European season, That's a rarity. My teammate had his first retirement of the season, so that was somewhat of a sour note for Williams, but with me scoring my fourth-consecutive points finish of the season - fifth-consecutive if you count Brazil at the end of last season - so we could be proud of things on my side of the garage, at least. I was concerned to see that, despite bringing an upgrade package of our own, including the sharkfin, we could only manage seventh in a race where two of the top six cars failed to finish ahead of us, but I wasn't panicking quite yet, since we've only seen the car at one track. We'll have to see how our performance develops over the next few races.
As for the championship situation at large, Matti Hamalainen is on 29 points, Anthony Harrison on 20, Piotr Kaminski just a point behind the American on 19 points, and Henrique de Matteo just a point behind him on 18 points. Victor Hartmann was on 15 points, Jyri Kaasalainen was on 14 points, and I was on 13 points. This meant that Ferrari took over the championship lead with 47 points, McLaren was on 34 points, and BMW Sauber was also on 34 points but, without a win, they're not yet able to match McLaren on quality of results. As for Williams, well, with myself on 13 points and Tommy Koskinen on 7, we were secure in fourth at the moment on 20 points, well ahead of Toyota, Renault, and Red Bull, who seemed to be our primary competitors at the moment. Scuderia Toro Rosso was on two points and Honda was on a single point, so they're not really in a position to attack us quite yet, while Force India and Super Aguri were yet to score. So, at the moment it seems to be like a championship race between reigning world champion Matti Hamalainen and last year's championship runner-up Anthony Harrison, with the American likely having a more comfortable time this year since he doesn't have Felipe Alvarez taking points off of him.
So, that brings us to McLaren's new second driver. Jyri Kaasalainen has demonstrated speed but hasn't quite been able to challenge Anthony yet, meaning that the American is a comfortable team leader. The thing now is, with Jyri Kaasalainen having had this big accident this race, who knows if he is going to be cleared to race in Turkey? If he isn't, then the obvious choice is McLaren's prolific test and reserve driver, Josep Guerrero, with the Catalan last having sat in for Juan Pablo Montoya when the Colombian driver quit mid-season to switch to NASCAR over in America. I honestly don't know what the dynamic would be between Harrison and Guerrero, I have to assume that Harrison would have the edge and continue to be happy, but quite frankly, who knows how McLaren would adjust to their reserve driver needing to come in, even for a race. No, I imagine that McLaren is going to hope for Jyri Kaasalainen to be ready to race in two weeks' time at the Turkish Grand Prix. At the same time, Honda and Aguri Suzuki are likely going to have some concerns when it comes to the Super Aguri team, as due to a number of sponsors having pulled out or failed to pay, the rumor on the street is that FOM boss Bernie Ecclestone had to bankroll the Japanese team in order for them to race here in Barcelona. I understand that F1 and Formula One Management is willing to step in in case of emergencies, but are they really going to fund a whole team again? I consider that unlikely, so Super Aguri is going to need to find some sort of lifeline if they want to keep competing at this level.
"Ciao Tamara," Umberto Petronelli greeted as we met up in Monaco.
"Ciao Umberto, this is Natasha. Natasha, Umberto." I made the introduction, trying to help my younger cousin find a drive for the rest of 2008. Junior series are such that a driver can't really afford a break, they need to keep going, keep getting results, or else teams will turn their attention to the next hot young product. The exception to this is if they can get a test or reserve driver role, meaning the young driver in question may not be actively racing, but they're working for their team, forging relations, and making the team want to continue working with them. Natasha is not quite yet in that position, being loosely affiliated with Renault simply because of Trident having a partnership with Renault on the organizational level, but nowhere near the test driver position. No, Renault has somewhat of a queue waiting for drivers to get Formula One experience, so Natasha wouldn't really be doing herself all that many favors by signing on with Renault. In fact, I don't see much of an opening for Natasha at all for 2009, because if I can't even find a potential seat to move to, how is Natasha supposed to find a seat? So no, she's not quite going to make that particular leap, but she is hopefully going to find another series to augment her GP2 Asia series campaign, and Umberto Petronelli's Coloni PASS team could well help her do that.
"So, since 2005 the FIA, Sonangol Group, and representatives from 18 major Football Clubs have been working together to establish a championship that mixes the best properties of football and motorsport. Now, we have the Superleague Formula series ready to go in August, with six rounds across major European circuits with two races a piece, using a reverse grid format. The car is the Panoz DP09, it's a modified version of the last Champ Car chassis and uses a naturally aspirated V12 engine, so we expect to be just as fast as the turbo V8 Champ Cars were, and maybe 5-10 seconds a lap slower than Formula One. My organization is going to run the entry for AS Roma. I see you're quick, I understand you were racing in Italy last year, and I understand that you speak Italian fluently. I think all of that will convince Roma to sign off on you, and then you'll just need to wait a few months before you're racing some high-level drivers - including some former F1 drivers - on some very historic circuits. These cars are just as good as GP2, very likely better, and the series hopes to bring in fans from both the world of motorsport and the world of football. This is the best series I can offer, and I know that Trident is not involved, so you don't have to worry about offending your team." Umberto proposed, really giving his best pitch for this series. Now, to race in a modern V12 open wheeler is a rare opportunity, especially today, and paired to a Champ Car chassis? That seems like the real deal.
Champ Car is the successor to CART, an American open-wheel series which unfortunately went bankrupt in the early 2000s. Champ Car persisted for a few years, with Maximilien Lecroix winning all four titles, despite competition from a mixture of Americans and a very international field, before Champ Car too went bankrupt at the end of 2007, the very season when the Panoz DP01 was introduced. From my understanding, the Panoz DP09 is a DP01 with a new engine and a few of the particularly American features - such as the exposed roll hoop in place of a tall engine cover with intake - replaced with more traditional elements. After one year of competition, Panoz is trying to recoup their investment, and they see Superleague Formula as the means to do it. What this really means is that Superleague Formula is running a top-tier American open wheeler, from a series that once aspired to compete with Formula One. So, that's where the Champ Car chassis has ended up, but as for the teams and drivers? Well, for the most part, they have simply merged back into the IRL Indycar Series, finally bringing an end to a division in American open wheel racing that began in 1996 with the creation of the competing Championship Auto Racing Teams and the Indy Racing League. In the early 1990s American open-wheel racing was in a position to compete with Formula One, and even during the split, American open wheel racing went international for the very first time, but now? Well, it sort of seems like the wrong side won. America is now left with the slower, cheaper, more oval-oriented Dallara IR05 chassis compared to the sleek, fast Panoz DP01.
"Okay, so you're saying it's this really good car and that there are going to be ex-Formula One drivers here, but what about drivers at my level?" Natasha asked, picking up on what Umberto was saying, but also noting that his big selling point was ex-Formula One drivers. That wasn't necessarily a good thing, because he could just mean that Superleague Formula has managed to bring over a few thirty-five-year-old drivers who had a handful of prequalifying appearances in the early 1990s and are now looking for one final moment of fame before retiring. That's probably an exaggeration, all things considered, but the point remains, Natasha wants to know what this series is going to offer for young up-and-coming drivers, not just a handful of drivers who didn't quite make it in Formula One but can still be handy with a race car. Teams didn't necessarily care about how a highly rated 17-year-old did against a bunch of 26-year-olds who were already winding their careers down, they were much more concerned with how highly rated youngsters did against other highly rated youngsters, which is why GP2 has been the go-to destination for so long. Natasha doesn't quite know how Superleague Formula is going to look in terms of a series for junior drivers, so she wants to hear what Umberto can say about it.
"Well one of my drivers has already signed on for it. Ezequiel Martinez is going to race for Liverpool, Shandar Khan is signed up with PSV Eindhoven, and Andreas Blazek is coming over from DPR in GP2 to race for Atletico Madrid. Then we got young guys like Philippe Naviaux coming over from the Champ Car side of things. Sure, we have Robert Deschamps and some over guys I raced with, but there are plenty of young guys as well." Umberto answered the question with ease, instantly producing names from the world of GP2, GP2 Asia, and Champ Car, calming Natasha down, and easing my concerns as well. I was also pretty satisfied to learn about the level of clubs involved here: AS Roma, Liverpool, PSV Eindhoven, Atletico Madrid, and Borussia Dortmund - the team Naviaux is going to race for - were all major European clubs and unlikely to attach themselves to a series that wasn't going to do well. They expect Superleague Formula to be a worthwhile marketing scheme and they seem to have found some very legitimate names in the world of motorsport to partner with. AS Roma has partnered with Coloni PASS, so not only do they have former F1 credentials in the form of Coloni, but also the leadership of an active F1 driver, whereas Dortmund likewise has former F1 credentials thanks to them partnering with Zakspeed, and Liverpool has partnered with Hitech, who have been making a name for themselves in British Formula 3 since 2003. These are real clubs putting their names on these cars, and perhaps more importantly, these are real teams running them.
"Well, if I were to be interested, what's the next step?" Natasha asked, smartly not committing right away, but showing interest and wanting to know what the next step would be if she were to pursue this opportunity.
"We would meet with the club and see if they are willing to sign off on you. Be nice, be respectful, be confident in your abilities but not so much so as to seem arrogant, and bring your agent, because if everything looks good, we can begin looking at paperwork then and there." Umberto Petronelli proposed, making it clear that, while he is not asking her to commit quite yet, he would want her to commit pretty quickly. At the same time though, I wouldn't be part of that next step, since it sounds like that's more of a matter for Natasha and my father to deal with, since he is her agent as well as mine. It does sound like there shouldn't be too much problem at this point, since I fully believe that Nat has what it takes to impress Roma, and the fact that she has experience racing in Italy can only be a bonus. My understanding is that there is no requirement for AS Roma to field an Italian driver - Dutch club PSV Eindhoven is fielding a Pakistani driver in the form of Shandar Khan while Belgian driver Philippe Naviaux is driving for German club Borussia Dortmund - but considering they've partnered with an Italian team in the form of Coloni PASS, clearly some semblance of an Italian connection is important to them. Natasha races for an Italian team in the form of Trident, speaks Italian, and won races in Italian Formula 3 last year, including winning a race at Vallelunga, the track closest to Rome, so I think those are pretty good credentials in that department.
"Okay. Thank you, Mr. Petronelli, I'm honored to be considered and you've definitely painted a very attractive picture for me, but I hope you understand that I'm going to need some time to talk to my family, my agent, and everything." Natasha responded calmly and professionally, showing interest in this program and gratitude for having gotten this far, but again, keeping a healthy distance between her and anything that could be considered a verbal agreement.
"Of course. I hope to hear from you soon Natasha. Goodbye Tamara, I'll see you in Turkey." Umberto smiled and let us go without too much fuss, being very understanding.
"Goodbye Umberto, I'll see you then." I responded respectfully before the two of us left the Monegasque cafe and headed in the direction of our apartments. Natasha waiting until we were an appropriate distance away before speaking up.
"I think it sounds like a really good deal." the Kyrgyz teenager who will turn this eighteen this summer revealed, now letting some of her excitement show on her face.
"If you think so, I say go for it. I Know I would have loved the chance to race a V12 open wheeler when I was your age." I responded, giving her a shrug and a smile of my own. Formula One hasn't seen a V12 engine since 1995, after which even Ferrari saw the way that the winds were blowing and switched to a V10 motor. Soon enough the whole grid was made up of V10 engines and V12s were explicitly banned when a rumor came out that Toyota planned to introduce a V12 when they first entered the sport in 2002. So the highest level of motorsport was committed to V10s, de facto from the mid-1990s and de jure by the early 2000s, but even that was too much. For the 2006 season, V8s were mandated, and for 2007 - my first year in Formula One - those V8s were slapped with a 19,000-rpm limit. It seems like the FIA is on course to further reduce that rev-limit to 18,000 for 2009, and mandate a maximum of eight engines per season, with the goal of seeing reliability play more of a role. This is also further in line with the gearbox rules already present and also the penalties for mid-weekend changes. So, the trend is smaller engines and more of a focus on reliability, that means that, as far as I'm concerned, Natasha ought to enjoy these V12 engines while she can, because who knows how long they'll be around? These big, monster engines are a dying breed, with V12s only present in Superleague Formula, some Le Mans prototypes, and a handful of GT racers. For a kid that grew up listening to the sound of the mighty Honda V12 in the back of the McLarens or the Ferrari V12s that eked their way through 1995, it's a bit of a tragedy. I hate to say it, but the last V12 engined car, let alone race car, is probably going to hit sometime during my life, hopefully closer to the end than to now.
The tragic fate of the V12 aside, the V8s made damn good racing engines too, and it is in this V8 era that a record is going to be set. Rudolfo Goncalves, who debuted in 1993 when the grid consisted of V8s, V10s, and V12s alike, was going to be making his 257th Grand Prix start here at the Turkish Grand Prix, breaking a record that has been held by Riccardo Patrese since the end of 1993. There is a nice symmetry to that, with Patrese's last season being Rudolfo's first, and perhaps Rudolfo will one day pass the torch as well. For now though, the Brazilian has no intention of retiring, so he is not only going to break this record but set a new one. In any case, to mark this history in the making, all of us drivers have gathered at a bit of a party for the Brazilian elder statesman of F1 here before the Turkish Grand Prix. Well, all of us bar two, because Haruki Tanaka and Louis Sanderson will not be racing at the Turkish Grand Prix, nor any other Grand Prix this year.
Yes, it seems that Super Aguri's financial struggles have finally come to an end. With numerous sponsorship deals falling apart before pen could be put to paper, a buyout attempt dying out during the off-season, and now SS United, their main sponsor, falling behind on payments, Super Aguri couldn't keep going any longer. That means that, for the rest of the season, we're down to twenty cars. The twenty cars racing at Turkey will, however, be the same twenty cars that appeared in Spain as well, because Jyri Kaasalainen has recovered during the last two weeks and has been cleared to race. So then, I suppose it's not just a celebration for the Brazilian, it's a farewell to Super Aguri, but, thankfully, it is not a farewell for the young Finnish driver just getting his start with McLaren. I suppose that brings us to somewhat of an interesting topic: the cutthroat nature of Formula One drivers when it comes to seats. On some level, when drivers in better cars than you have incidents, no matter how much sympathy you might have for those individuals, your brain can't help but imagine yourself in that seat. I like Jyri, I want to see him continue the tradition of Flying Finn McLaren drivers exemplified by the likes of Johannes Koskinen in the mid-1980s, Mika Hakkinen in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and Matti Hamalainen earlier this decade, but at the same time, on some level, I want his seat.
The same can be said about every driver that isn't at Ferrari, McLaren, or BMW Sauber. It's a sort of dark and twisted part of all of us, but at the same time, you don't have to look much further than Daniel MacGowan in this very room to see a driver who got his debut - with a top team no less - as a direct result of the death of Ayrton Senna. Is Daniel MacGowan a bad guy for taking that opportunity? I don't think so, he simply took the opportunity available to him. None of us actually wish injury or God forbid death on another driver, and we do dread all these incidents when they happen, but anyone who says they don't entertain thoughts of what such incidents mean for their careers is lying. Perhaps if it was Haruki Tanaka crashing in the Super Aguri, nobody would care, since nobody in Formula One wants to take up a drive at the worst team - especially given that team no longer exists - but that just opens up the dark desires of the young drivers and juniors, where the expression of killing for an F1 seat isn't quite true, but the sentiment is strong. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I'm glad that Jyri Kaasalainen is okay, not just for his own sake, but for our sakes, because I think a really ugly side of all us drivers would reveal itself if one of the best seats in Formula One suddenly opened itself up.
"Eh, Tamara? What are you thinking about?" Lorenzo asked, him and the rest of our little group of drivers gathered in one corner as the celebrations for Rudolfo continued. All of us gathered around Goncalves as we took a picture in front of the honorary cake, along with some people from Honda, including his race engineer. Now some of us were eating cake, some of us won't, mainly because it was a race weekend and diet is a big part of the physical aspect of the short. Now, I'm relatively small and lightweight, even by F1 standards, but Lorenzo? Lorenzo is 185 centimeters tall and weighs 165 pounds, so he needs to watch every calorie because Formula One takes the weight of the car with the driver, so someone tall and relatively heavy like Lorenzo, in a less sophisticated backmarker car, is probably going to be in an overweight car, whereas myself, being lighter, and sitting in a more advanced car, will be able to use a strategically placed ballast to meet the minimum weight requirement. The engine and gearbox in the back, the driver in the middle, and a ballast somewhere low at the front of the car can produce better driver characteristics. This is all in the realm of percentages of a second per lap to be fair, but those percentages of a second are what F1 engineers spend their careers slaving over. Mental tangents about cake aside, the point is that the drivers sunk into their various cliques as the celebrations continued, and that resulted in me, Lorenzo Barbaro, Anthony Harrison, and Tommy Koskinen gathering in the front left corner of the Honda hospitality center, the place where the celebrations were taking place.
"What? I'm fine, I'm fine." I composed myself, shaking off these thoughts, then I looked over at Rudolfo Goncalves smiling and giving a hug to two guys from Ferrari, which he raced for from 2000 to 2005, the team which brought him nine race wins and twice saw him finish second to teammate Wilhelm Ziegler in the championship. Rudolfo never won a title, mainly because the prime of his career was shared with the best driver of his generation, but he was part of unprecedented success with what was the best team in the world at that time, so plenty of reason to celebrate with his former team. The fact that he broke a record for the most starts was just the icing on the cake. That got me thinking, the level of young talent exemplified in the four of us... "Do you think that'll ever be us? Setting records, celebrating with all the teams we've raced for before, all that kind of stuff?"
"I feel like I kind of had that experience already, getting to drive my father's championship winning car around Monaco? I think that's the best moment I'm going to have until and unless I win a title and then me and my dad get to do that again." Tommy pointed out, basically sharing how his experiences differed from the rest of us. I suppose that is special, I mean, if you're the son of a world champion driver, what can get better than knowing you've made it too, you've become a Formula One driver, and now you get to drive your father's world championship winning car? I think Tommy hit it on the head, the only thing that's going to get better than that is if he actually got to win the title himself and then the Koskinens could do a parade lap together, two world championship winning cars, ideally both made by Williams.
"We got to share the podium too, that was pretty cool." Harrison pointed out; the American having raced for Team Koskinen in karting some years ago, even having shared a trailer with the Finns as a teenager.
"I like the fact that you're trying to be humble as if you haven't won races on four different continents." I joked, pointing out that Anthony Harrison has had a lot of halo moments for his career than the rest of us, having won the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix and his home race the 2007 United States Grand Prix back-to-back for North America, the 2007 Hungarian Grand Prix for Europe, 2007 Japan for Asia, and 2008 Australia for, well, Australia, with many more to come. It wasn't jealousy though, I was happy for Anthony, but that didn't change the fact that I was going to tease him for his success.
"Okay, okay, you got me, yeah I'm proud of all of that. The thing is though, I won my home race in my first year but now it's off the calendar. I know they're planning on bringing it back but what if it doesn't work out? What if that one US Grand Prix win is all I'm going to get?" Anthony decided to share his concern. There is this idea that Formula One has failed to win over the US market, but really, that isn't true, the US has had a ton of different races at a ton of different venues, peeking with three races in the 1982 season, then decreasing to one in 1985 with just the Detroit Grand Prix, which was eventually replaced with the United States Grand Prix at the Phoenix Street Circuit before that, too, disappeared after 1991. This means that F1's mercurial presence in America has only really been a thing since the 1990s, and even then, the United States Grand Prix at Indianapolis was a smash hit from 2000 to 2004, being one of the most attended races on the calendar. What spelled doom for the USGP at Indy was the 2005 disaster, which was really more down to Michelin bringing the wrong tyres, the FIA mandating stupid no-tyre-change rules for the 2005 season, and then the FIA being uncompromising during the event, which, to be fair, was partially down to Indiana liability laws. The point is that it was a series of disasters at the same 2005 race that has led to no USGP on the 2008 calendar, despite having an American driver competing for the title.
"Look at this, even now he's being lucky, because the rest of us don't even have that!" Lorenzo teased in response, pointing out that Uruguay, Finland, and Kazakhstan do not have Grand Prix, nor have they had Grand Prix, nor are there any definitive plans to host a Grand Prix. Vision60 is targeting more races in South America, and theoretically Uruguay is better placed to host one than most nations on that continent, but Brazil already has a foot in the door by hosting one race and has an economy big enough to potentially host another, Argentina is the second biggest economy on the continent and has Formula One tradition, and Chile has recently emerged as the strongest economy per capita in all of South America. Uruguay is a small country, but it has heavy links to Europe, and it is the closest rival to Chile on the per capita basis, so while it isn't a sheer economic force like Brazil and Argentina can be, it's pretty well off for its size. Lorenzo's country is likely the most likely of the three of us to host a Grand Prix, but his remarks were still technically true, and it certainly was a valid ribbing of the championship contender.
"Hey, I'll gladly race in all your countries, just give me the opportunity." Anthony responded to the ribbing with a boast, implying he could win races in each of our countries, and considering the position he was in right now, he certainly could try.
"Maybe you should concentrate on trying to win Turkey first." I capped off the conversation with a rib of my own. I was pretty satisfied to be getting closer to Anthony Harrison, as I did think he was a good guy in addition to being a great driver, and I was glad for Rudolfo Goncalves as well. Not many people can say they've set a Formula One record, and with him being confident in his abilities, he may set a high bar for breaking that record too. I wonder if one day I could set my own record in Formula One, I know I probably hold all the records for women at this point, but I mean an undisputed record, a record that holds true for men and women, and a record that will outlast my time in Formula One. I certainly wasn't in a position to do any record-breaking right now, except perhaps a dubious record like the longest wait before a first Grand Prix win or something like that, but I don't intend to be with Williams forever, at least not Williams at this stage. I want to be in a top car eventually, and I think I can accomplish that as soon as 2010 or 2011 if I get the right contracts going. Williams can be that team by 2010 or 2011 if they plan their cards right, and if Williams become a top team I would be honored to stay and help them see out their vision, but if Williams cannot execute that vision, then I can't give them my entire career. I do feel a sense of loyalty to Williams for giving me this change in Formula One, but I also have a sense of loyalty to the idea of making this chance worth something.
So then, the Turkish Grand Prix, now with twenty cars instead of twenty-two. Accordingly, there was a change in qualifying formats, with Q1 now deciding places 20-16 and Q2 now deciding places 15-11, with each session deciding five places rather than the previous six. Q3 would still decide the top ten and that was still the goal that we, as a team, were targeting at this early stage of the season. Well, we didn't quite meet our target, because instead, the top ten was made up of the Ferraris, the McLarens, the BMW Saubers, the Red Bulls, the Renault of Felipe Alvarez, and the Toyota of Ivan Tripoli, while Tommy Koskinen lined up eleventh. Rudolfo Goncalves was the lead Honda in twelfth here at his record-breaking start, I was just behind in thirteenth, James Buxton was fourteenth, while Fabian Schmidt was fifteenth. Maximilian Renner, Filipe Yannick, Maximilien Lecroix, Umberto Petronelli, and Lorenzo Barbaro were the first drivers to be knocked out in Q1 in this new format. The Toro Rossos have yet to receive any upgrades because the Italian team is still running the STR2B, an updated version of their 2007 car, while the STR3, which was due to debut here, actually ended up getting delayed. Lecroix crashed it in testing before the Barcelona race and, because of that, the team doesn't have enough spare parts to make it through a weekend unless everything goes perfectly. Knowing nothing goes perfectly in Formula One, Scuderia Toro Rosso wasn't taking that chance.
Toro Rosso may be in need of their proper 2008 challenger, but that doesn't change the fact that Maximilian Renner is a really good young prospect and, while Maximilien Lecroix isn't quite as rated, he has been performing better so far this season, and the fact that he is a four-time Champ Car champion can't be taken away from him. They're lining up behind me though, and I would much rather focus on the cars ahead, Rudolfo Goncalves being my first target. It was nothing personal, but when you're a racing driver, you have to get used to ruining other drivers' day, otherwise you're not going to have a very successful career. So, target firmly in my sights, I watched the red lights coming on, like a clock ticking down to midnight, and just like the clock inevitably strikes midnight, the five lights went out and twenty Formula One cars were unleashed. Henrique de Matteo took off from pole and led, but Anthony Harrison got a good start from third and instantly overtook his teammate, leaving Jyri Kaasalainen in the clutches of his countryman Matti Hamalainen. This is when all hell broke loose.
The Finns came together in turn one, Matti's front wing going into Jyri's rear left tyre, leaving the younger Finn with a puncture, and the elder Finn with front wing damage. Jyri Kaasalainen would have to pit for a tyre change, while Matti would need to either change his front wing or have to carry on with downforce issues for the entire race. The Finn decided to chance it on the latter, but for now, he would have to make do with the fact that the BMW Sauber of Piotr Kaminski and the Renault of Felipe Alvarez got ahead of him, meaning that in the space of one corner, Matti went from fourth to third to fifth. The fact that the leaders were coming together in the first corner meant that the rest of the grid compressed behind them like a spring, all converging on one place with few places to go as we had to dodge shattered carbon, the slow-going Jyri Kaasalainen, and the third through fifth group of cars jostling for position as Henrique de Matteo and Anthony Harrison scampered off in the distance. So, cars converging in one place in a corner where chaos already broke out: the end result is that chaos breeds chaos.
Rudolfo Goncalves jerked to the left, dodging a piece of a flick-up from Hamalainen's front wing, but the end result of it is that the Brazilian cut me off. I had to slam the brakes and stay on the brakes because this opened the way for James Buxton to sweep past me as well, and then, just when I finally had the opportunity to get going and start trying to regain positions, I realized that Lecroix had his left front wheel in front of my right rear wheel. The end result was now unavoidable, and we made contact, with the cars coming together, my right wheel tyre going maybe a foot into the air, and then coming smashing back down. My car came to a rest in the paved run-off outside of turn one, while Maximilien Lecroix was able to keep going, at least for the time being, with minor front suspension damage. There was no chance for me to get going though, because my rear suspension was destroyed, and the floor was probably smashed up pretty good as well.
"I'm out, I'm out. I'm sorry. It was complete madness in that corner...dammit." I spoke over the radio, seeing the stricken car of Umberto Petronelli pull off the track as well, while Maximilian Renner and Lorenzo Barbaro both had to pit for repairs. The pair had an incident at the back that mirrored the coming together of the Finns at the front, hence Renner had a rear puncture while Barbaro had shattered his front wing, actually winding up worse off than Matti Hamalainen did. So, carbon fiber all over the track, two cars stricken on the outside of turn one, and what, four or five cars going to pit at the end of the lap? Yeah, needless to say, the safety car was called out right away, not that it was going to make a difference for me.
"Copy that Tamara, switch the car off and get out, switch the car off and get out. We'll get them next time." was Peter Malmedy's response, giving me clear instructions and then pumping me up to bounce back at the next race. Obviously, I wasn't happy with what happened, and it sucks to be out in the first corner, especially when it's at a track where I scored a point last year. So, I got out of the car, letting the marshals wheel it back behind the wall, while I made my way over to the team garage, forced to watch almost the entire race from the sidelines, just like I was during the 2007 Spanish Grand Prix about this time last year. Just like that 2007 race, our hopes for this race were now on Tommy Koskinen. The German-born, Monegasque-raised Finnish driver has had somewhat up-and-down results this year, with a podium, a fourteenth place, an eighth, and a retirement so far, but he was on fire this race, getting ahead of the Hondas, chasing down the Red Bulls, and even getting into a battle with Jyri Kaasalainen late in the race. Jyri got ahead but Tommy Koskinen stayed close to him and even overtook him again when Jyri's tyres ran down, eventually forcing the McLaren driver to come into the pits and take himself out of contention. It was an unlucky race for the Finn after his unlucky accident, but his misfortune ensured that, even with my retirement, Williams get its points-scoring streak alive, having scored in every race this season.
So, the points-paying results for the 2008 Turkish Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 8 points.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 5 points.
5: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 4 points.
6: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 3 points.
7: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 2 points.
8: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 1 point.
So, Anthony Harrison would chase down Henrique all race long and even lead the race during the middle stint, and Matti Hamalainen would be within a few seconds of victory despite having a damage front wing all race long, but no one could quite keep Henrique de Matteo from winning his third consecutive Turkish Grand Prix. There have been four races at Istanbul Park and, at the first one, Henrique drove for the Sauber team when it was still just a Ferrari customer team, so really, Henrique has won every Turkish Grand Prix that he has had a reasonable chance of winning. I don't think anyone expected to see a Brazilian driver at a Turkish track become the next definitive driver and track combination, but here it is. A fine performance for Henrique de Matteo and a fine performance for Ferrari overall, as they took full advantage of McLaren's woes to take the most commanding lead in the constructors' championship we've seen all season long.
Speaking of the championship, Matti Hamalainen remains in the lead, sitting on 35 points, while Henrique de Matteo's two wins put him ahead of Anthony Harrison, despite both drivers sitting on the same 28 points. Piotr Kaminski is fourth with 24 points, while Victor Hartmann was fifth on 19 points. So in the constructors' championship, Ferrari was emerging as a clear leader, as mentioned, with BMW Sauber still just barely eking out a second place ahead of McLaren, mostly down to the fact that, as mentioned, Jyri Kaasalainen has had some horrible luck in the last few races. It's a shame because everyone in the paddock knows that Jyri has some great speed, I mean, he outqualified Anthony Harrison at this very race, but at the same time, he lost that position in an instant once the race got started and got thrown out of contention a moment later. Everyone knows that Jyri has the speed to be in that car, but everyone also knows that the results aren't quite coming together. That's a problem when Ferrari is now firing on all cylinders and has two of the best drivers in the world in their arsenal.
Notes:
Alright everyone, hope you enjoyed chapter thirteen! Monaco and Canada are up next.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 14: The Knife's Edge
Notes:
Hello everyone! Also, fun fact, when I was planning this story, I was trying to decide between writing a work set in the late 2000s-early 2010s titled Life at the Speed of Formula One or a turbo era work called At the Knife's Edge. I obviously decided on the former, but with the two races for this week being Monaco and Canada - both known for their walls inches away from the action - I figured the title could reference the work that was supposed to play up the danger factor of 1500hp monsters swinging around tracks surrounded by these primitive armco barriers. Let me know if that sounds interesting, because I haven't completely abandoned that idea or anything. Anyway, that's more than enough out of me, here's the chapter.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter XIV.
The Knife's Edge.
"Alright...how do I look?" I asked Roksana nervously, knowing any moment now I'd be climbing onboard the boat to do a television feature in the lead-up to the Monaco Grand Prix.
"Hang on...there." Roksana stopped me for a moment, adjusting the collar of my dark blue and white Williams polo before brushing a few strands of my hair back into order, it loose and hanging behind my shoulders with the Kazakhoil cap topping the whole situation. The gray-eyed blonde took another look at me up and down before deciding that I looked ready, releasing me for the media circuit at F1's crown jewel "You're good to go, break a leg!"
"Thanks," I smiled at my girlfriend before heading down the dock and up the steps to the boat, smiling as I entered camera frame, and then sitting down on the left seat, a small table separating me from one-time Formula One and CART driver Mark Blundell. In Formula One, he raced for the likes of Brabham, Ligier, Tyrrell, and even McLaren, but he had the misfortune of racing for each team at a low point for the organization. Brabham, Ligier, and Tyrrell would all go bankrupt by the end of the 1990s, while McLaren's revival with Mercedes - who had only just signed on as a partner in Mark's final season of 1995 - would not come until after Blundell was replaced. As for his time in CART, well, he would compete rather well, even taking three wins in 1997, and surprisingly for someone from a European racing background, one of those wins was on an oval. Usually, the ovals tend to be the weak point for drivers switching over from Europe to North America, but Blundell and PacWest Racing broke through that. Nevertheless, CART was always a struggling series on the financial side of things, and it would go bankrupt shortly after Blundell's time in the series came to an end. It would cling on for a few more years under the guise of Champ War, but well, we all know how that went. Four titles for Maximilien Lecroix as a series went through its death throws, with Panoz repurposing their brand new 2007 chassis for use in the upcoming Superleague Formula series.
"Ready?" Mark asked, picking up his own microphone. I picked up my own microphone and then nodded, accepting I was ready for the interview "The stars, the glitz, the glamour, and the streets of Monte Carlo, it's the week of the Monaco Grand Prix and the Principality is out in support of the historic race at the heart of Formula One. Not only is Monaco home to one of Formula One's oldest and most prestigious races, but it is home to many of Formula One's star drivers. One of which is the young Tamara Shchegolyayeva, now entering her second season in Formula One. Hello Tamara,"
"Hello Mark, how're you?" I responded with a smile and a bit of a nervous laugh, speaking into the microphone.
"Getting a bit sun-burned but other than that, I'm quite alright." he joked in response.
"It's a bit sunnier than the British weather, isn't it?" I responded.
"Could've fooled me, I thought I was in High Barnet." Mark joked "But that brings up an interesting thing, a lot of drivers live in Monaco now, but you've grown up here, haven't you? Tell us what that was like."
"Well, in late 1991 the CCCP - the Soviet Union - was collapsing and my father had the money and the resources to get us out, so he moved us all the way from Almaty to Monaco. I've lived here ever since, I went to school here, I grew up here...everything. I could say this is my second home but, in many ways, it's my only home." I answered, wanting to add that I don't really remember what Kazakhstan was like at all, but deciding to leave that out because of my sponsors. That strange phone call I got from Makhmud Abdullayev, the President of Kazakhoil, still fresh in my memory.
"So at a very young age, you went from a place that has absolutely nothing to do with Formula One racing, to a place at the very heart and soul of Formula One." Mark observed.
"Indeed. I remember it was May 31, 1992, I had just turned four years old, and my father took me to see the race. There I was seeing all these beautiful cars - McLarens, Ferraris, Williams...all racing each other on the same streets my family had driven on for months. Suddenly I couldn't look at any road without thinking of how it could be a race track, I couldn't look at the badge of a car without wondering whether or not they were involved in Formula One. I had a very embarrassing moment one time when this girl I knew in school was talking about how her parents bought a new Audi, and one of the Ford-powered teams had just won a race, so I remember being this little know-it-all telling her that her family should have bought a Ford." I laughed off, reminiscing about a time a long time ago when I had only just begun understanding what Formula One was, and how I thought car companies were better just because they were involved "But yeah, I watched that race, I watched Senna holding off Mansell when he was so much faster, and then Formula One became everything to me."
"So is that when you started karting?" Mark Blundell asked, being a driver manager and thus well aware of the fact that, nowadays, kids were getting into a go-kart at younger and younger ages.
"If it was up to me I would have, but my mother was dead set against it. She thought it was too dangerous and that I wouldn't fit in, and now obviously I can see where she was coming from, but back then that was the last thing I wanted to hear. I remember begging her and begging her to at least let me try driving a go-kart and, finally, a year later when I turned five, they finally let me try out this little 50cc baby kart thing, and I fell in love with it." i answered with a bit of a bittersweet note, reminiscing about a simpler time in my life, but also bringing the absence of my mother to the forefront of my mind. My mother died when I was still pretty young, so she never really got to see what I did with this dream of mine. It's a shame and I miss her...but I can't dwell on that right now. Nobody needs to see me start crying in the middle of an interview.
"Was she right?" Mark asked.
"Well...to an extent she was. I mean, a lot of the time I was the only girl at the karting track, and when I wasn't, it was my little cousin. Add to the fact that I've seen my last name misspelled a thousand different ways on results sheets and yeah, you could say that was an outlier. At the same time though, once I set a lap time within the top ten, any idea of mocking me or babying me went away and they saw me as just another competitor. That's the funny thing, in the south of France there is such a competitive scene because I was coming up with all these kids who were inspired by Alain Prost and Jean Alesi, and all these kids who saw Ayrton's brilliant laps at Monaco, so it was a very cutthroat scene. Everyone saw everyone else as a rival because we knew that no matter how good we were, there were more of us than there were seats available. So every year there was a risk of getting weeded out and I got closer than I'd like to admit a few times." I answered, once again reiterating about how any special treatment over my gender seemed to fade away because me being a girl was secondary in everyone's minds to the idea that I was a threat. Every point I got was a point they weren't getting, every win I got was a win they weren't getting, and every title I got was a title they weren't getting.
"The danger factor though. I know in my experience everything seemed to change after the deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger in 1994, but how did that affect the karting scene? Because you must have only been a few years in at that point." Mark brought up the tragedies at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix and the tremendous effects that had on motorsport, with the most serious and immediate actions being taken in the name of safety since the famous crusade for driver safety spearheaded by Sir Jackie Stewart in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
"Well, there was definitely a momentary pause. A moment where everyone that came in with me seemed to lose a hero and wondered if this was really the thing we should be doing. I mean, if Ayrton Senna could die in a Formula One car, what chance did we have? We all seemed to think of it but I think only a few of us actually stopped because of it. The rest of us saw that tragedy, knew it happened, but wanted to keep racing in spite of it. Thankfully the FIA and CIK seemed to meet us halfway and things did get safer for us, especially going into the new millennium." I answered, thinking back to those uncertain days when all of motorsport seemed to have had the winds taken out of its sales when Rudolfo Goncalves suffered series injuries on a Friday, Roland Ratzenberger was killed on the Saturday, and Ayrton Senna died on impact on the Sunday. The 1994 San Marino Grand Prix is unquestionably one of the darkest days in motorsport.
"So, tell us about how you graduated to cars." Mark asked, seemingly content to just ask a few small questions every once in awhile while otherwise just letting me talk. I felt like I was rambling a bit, but Mark seemed to think it was good because he was letting me speak.
"Well, I graduated to French Formula Renault 2.0, and I won my very first race, so I felt like I was on top of the world and that Formula One was inevitable...but then I was brought back down to earth. The next few races were rough for me, including two retirements. I would recover by the end of the season, and I would challenge for the title, but it was definitely a learning experience for me. I won on my debut but then got to see just how hard a series could be. From there, I kept going through the ranks, getting in better machinery and racing in more countries, branching out to Italy and Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, all these countries. I got to race on these real Formula One circuits like Spa and Monza; it was a really good point in my career. I finished a close third in Italian Formula 3 in 2004 and that was enough for me to graduate to the 2005 Formula 3 Euro Series. I found myself lining up on the same grid as Anthony Harrison, Lorenzo Barbaro, Maximilian Renner, and all these other drivers who are so successful now. Anthony and Lorenzo drove for ART, and they dominated that year, while I was in my little Signatech fighting Max Renner for the rookie championship, and he would just edge out ahead of me." I explained, surprising myself with how quickly all that time seemed to flow together in retrospect. It seemed like so many milestones, so many first wins, and so many near-championships, but in reality, it was just a couple of years, and my brain seems to be recognizing that now, because what seemed like eternities of difference back then now blends together.
"Drivers which are now your friends and rivals." Mark noted.
"Exactly. So many talented drivers coming up at that time and I'm just proud to be one of them. You know with so many talented drivers, results can kinda get overshadowed, like people sometimes don't understand how impressive a fourth place can be. Fortunately for me though, some people seemed to be noticing, because my fourth place in the 2005 Macau Grand Prix is what caused Kazakhoil to notice me. I don't know if I could have done everything I've done since without their backing." I answered, feeling a bit ashamed of myself to be giving them that much credit, but at the same time, I did need their backing and their backing did help my career out a ton. Would I have eventually made it to Formula One without that backing? Maybe. But I definitely wouldn't have been in F1 at age eighteen, and i probably wouldn't have gotten the opportunity to race for one of the three teams that I grew up considering as the greats of Formula One.
"Right, because with Kazakhoil you got the backing to move from Formula 3 to the inaugural GP2 Asia series, which was actually your first championship in cars." Mark noted.
"That's correct. I had come plus a few times, Formula Renault 2.0 and Italian Formula 3 in 2004 having already been mentioned, but 2006 was probably my breakout year. I won GP2 Asia, I got to test for Williams for the first time, and at the end of that year, I was announced as their second driver. The rest, well, it's history." I answered with a bit of a laugh, not getting too much into the F1 history because I assume anyone that is going to watch this interview is interested enough in Formula One to be well aware of my results at this point.
"And that brings us up to today. You have two podiums to your name, you've finished in the points in four out of five races so far this year, you finished just behind your teammate in your rookie year and you're ahead of him right now. Tamara, between your performances in Formula One and Daniella Pieri having become the first woman to win an Indycar race at Motegi, Japan last month, what do you think about the state of women in motorsport right now?" Mark asked, bringing up something that I had heard about, but didn't really discuss. That being that, back in April, Daniella Pieri won the Indy Japan 300, thus denying me the chance to become the first woman to win a top-level open wheel race of any kind - i still have the chance to be the first woman to win a Formula One World Championship Grand Prix though - and cementing her status as a rising star in American motorsport. Now, obviously I'm happy for the American, but at the same time, I've never really known much about oval racing or paid attention to it, which is part of the reason why I've always tended to side with CART over the IRL whenever the American open-wheel split is brought up to me, so I don't really know how she did it or how impressed I should be, but the point is that she won the race.
"Well, congratulations to Daniella Pieri and I'm very glad to be seeing other women doing well in motorsport. Racing isn't like other sports, there's no distinction between male motorsports or female motorsports or anything like that, and there shouldn't be. Yes, strength matters, yes, endurance matters, but I'm glad to see I'm not the only woman proving we can compete at the highest levels. At the same time though, I'm not like an activist or anything, so I want to make sure it's the right women breaking out into these roles, and that might mean there are only four or five top female drivers for every one hundred top male drivers. I don't know what the ratio is and I don't think anyone knows what the ratio is, but the point remains, we've proven women can compete with men in motorsports so we should see more women getting to this level on merit. I think promoting drivers just because they are women or whatever might actively have a detrimental effect on women by giving us some sort of reputation." I responded, trying to make ti clear that I wanted more women in top level motorsport, but that I wanted those women to get there the right way. Time will only tell which Daniella Pieri is, but if she has won a race against the likes of the Penskes and Chip Ganassis - the highest of high names in American Open Wheel racing - then she can't be all that bad. Perhaps one day I'll have to see what her road course results look like, because oval results are a hard thing for me to comprehend. Oval racing, particularly pack racing like NASCAR seems to love, seems like such a crapshoot where you're lucky if you don't get taken out in a massive crash every fifty or so laps.
"Well Tamara, as a former driver, as a commentator, and as a fan, I can say you're developing quite a positive reputation for yourself. Good luck to you and the Williams team in the Monaco Grand Prix." Mark Blundell signed off, concluding the interview.
"Thank you, Mark." I responded, making sure to end on a polite note. I survived the first part of the Monaco media circus, just...countless more to go.
The race weekend at Monaco was such that FP1 and FP2 were held on Thursday, then FP3 and qualifying would be held on Saturday. The reason for this has been due to the Principality doesn't want to have three straight days of the main roads being closed, thus the roads are opened up on Friday to allow for traffic to flow freely - well, as freely as it can with armcos, temporary kerbs, and even grandstands set up around the track - and no track action occurs. So with no racing for us simple-minded drivers to do, what do we do on the Friday before the Monaco Grand Prix? Well, we throw a fashion show of course. Ridiculous I know, but at least it's for charity, so it's a good cause at the end of the day. Anyway, last time, I was still rather nervous at this point in the year, having scored points, but still not quite feeling like I belonged in Formula One, thus I wore a suit, hoping that I could stand out as little as possible among the crowd...which was easier said than done at an event where the whole purpose was to stand out. Well, since then, I've scored points fairly regularly, including taking two podiums, and not only have I impressed Williams, but I was also able to impress other teams as well, even being in consideration for a Renault seat. I stayed at Williams of course, but the point in this context is that I've proven that I belong here, and Williams isn't the only team that thinks so.
So, being more comfortable in Formula One and being more comfortable with myself, I decided to wear a dress. One thing led to another and, well, an Italian fashion house dressed me up in a sparkly blue floor-length strapless dress with a matching bow in my hair - they had me wearing an updo that I couldn't possibly hope to replicate on my own - so, I went from trying to minimize my femininity a year ago to taking advantage of it this year. It didn't exactly feel like me, dressed in garment that costs more than a house trying to smile at a bunch of faceless camera operators taking pictures of me, but it also made me feel powerful to an extent. I didn't always want to feel like this, but right now, I felt like I was really making a statement, like this might be the kind of thing that starts to cause changes in Formula One. I may never want to wear make-up, absurdly high heels, or get my hair done again after this, but right now, it felt like there was a purpose to it, and that was a purpose I could get behind...if only this once. Of course, I wasn't nearly exposed as the women doing swimsuit photos throughout this event, but I think I'll keep it that way. I'm not ashamed of my body or gender or anything, but there are certain parts of me I would rather keep private, and that applies to most of my body. I may be showing off my shoulder and back than I usually do today, and I may often be seen in the paddock wearing shorts, but I don't want to be seen as a sexual object in the paddock. I know other female athletes will do stuff like Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions, but that's not for me. I'm not comfortable showing off my body that way. Not to mention that, in the hyper-corporate world of Formula One, who knows what bikini shots would mean for Middle Eastern sponsors or even Kazakhoil? I'd rather not find out.
So, a strapless dress it is. My little moment of radical femininity in what is otherwise a stereotypically masculine job. A stereotypically butch job, if you will. But am I butch? I don't know. If you asked me a year ago to describe a lesbian, my idea would be a butch girl, but then I met Roksana, and then I discovered my own sexuality, so that quickly put to bed the idea that a lesbian automatically had to be butch. Then I did some research, some with the help of Roksana, some on my own, and I found out that the whole butch-femme thing seems to come from a movement in the gay scene in America in the 1940s and 1950s as a way to sort of mirror the dynamics of heterosexual relationships. Now, as someone completely ignorant of the American gay scene and even of the European gay scene, at least until recently, the question that came to my mind was wouldn't the point be to resist heterosexual dynamics? I mean, to oversimplify the issue, if you are attracted to women, wouldn't you want those women to be feminine? That is what seems to make sense to me, and I would describe both myself and Roksana as outwardly feminine, even if we may hold some or even a lot of stereotypically masculine interests. Then again, all I can say for certain is that I am a woman, I consider myself feminine, and I am attracted to a woman who considers herself feminine. I don't know what kind of discourse there is about lesbianism in the sphere of queer academics because that's not a sphere I'm a part of at all. I'm a racing driver, I haven't gone to college, and I was essentially ignorant about lesbianism entirely until about a year ago.
So then, I don't fit into the butch dynamic and my instinct seems to be to reject it entirely. At the same time however, I know this isn't me either. I don't wear dresses all that often, I don't wear makeup very much at all, at least not in any substantial amount, and I tend to just tuck my hair back behind my shoulders, comb out anything too out of place, and then call it a day at that. I'm not the type to wear bright pink and collect ponies either. So I'm not butch, but I'm not some super-feminine ideal either, or I must admit some of my interests, particularly motorsport, are very firmly on the masculine end of the spectrum. On the other hand, is anyone truly entirely feminine or entirely masculine? It's the 2000s, I thought we were moving away from established gender roles and into a world where women could do all the things men could and vice versa. I am a woman, I have a vagina, I've always had one, and I'll always have one, all of these things are true, but it's not like gender is a defining aspect of my existence. Perhaps I'm an outlier here, but I tend not to think too much about my gender or even my sexuality. I know who I am, and I know what I like, and for me, that's enough. Obviously, I'm proud to be breaking all these records for women, obviously I'm proud to be setting an example, and obviously I'll do some sort of statement like this dress every once in awhile, but that's all it is for me. Also, not for nothing, but one day, I hope to be breaking some of the records set by men as well.
In any case, soon enough, all of us F1 drivers were soon gathered together for the main pictures. Nineteen suits and one dress, all on display for the international media, as well as the Prince and Princess of Monaco, whose presence was a defining feature of this event. At the end of the Grand Prix, the top three receive their trophies at Prince Albert II's Royal Box, and maybe I'll be among those top three. Maybe at this event for my first podium of the year and the third of my career, maybe at a future event. Maybe, just maybe, one day I'll even be like Ayrton Senna all those years ago in 1992, taking a fifth Monaco Grand Prix win and equaling a record. Senna would go on to shatter that record in 1993, and who knows, maybe I'll be equaling that record as well. Like I said, I'm not here to just break female records, one day I want to be breaking overall records, and hopefully, my career will get to that point.
Fashion was one thing, but the main event in Monaco has always been, and always will be, the racing. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you want to look at it, this year, there has been a major wrench thrown into the works. It had been dry all weekend, through all three practice sessions and qualifying, but now on race day, it was raining. To compound the issues of rain at Monaco - which were far from insubstantial issues, mind you - I was also starting thirteenth after a bad qualifying session yesterday. I had started this season so strongly with a run of consecutive points finishes, but I was taken out early in Turkey, and now it was going to be difficult to score points from here. Nevertheless, attrition has been high this season and now we're about to race Monaco in the wet, so anything could happen, but I'm going to have a hard time keeping my nose clean here in the heart of the field where chaos is most likely to break out.
So, twenty cars started the formation lap. At least, that is what was supposed to happen, because in reality, twenty cars attempted to start but only nineteen succeeded, with Jyri Kaasalainen's McLaren stalled on the grid. The Finn would be pushed into the pitlane, and he would recover, but he would have to start from the pitlane. So the race hadn't even started properly, and I gained position. That didn't fill me with too much confidence though, because, at the same time, I got to drive around the track for the first time again and see how slick it was and how close the walls were. It would be so easy to put a tyre into the wrong spot and just slide into the wall helplessly, or how about the tunnel where conditions are basically dry? Yet at the same time, once a dry line starts forming, there will be a wet patch at the beginning of the tunnel from all the water dragged in earlier in the race that can't evaporate as quickly as the water outside. Monaco is already a track where cars are being thrown around mere inches from the barrier, but today? Today we would truly be driving at the knife's edge.
The field came through Rascasse and Anthony Noghes to settle on the grid, with the exception of Jyri Kaasalainen, who was starting in the pitlane. The Ferraris were first and second, Henrique de Matteo once again ahead of reigning champion Matti Hamalainen, while American Anthony Harrison was third, the McLaren just behind him. The fourth-place grid slot was empty while the third row was occupied by the BMW Sauber of Piotr Kaminski and the FedEx Williams-Toyota of Tommy Koskinen. The ING Renault of Felipe Alvarez was in seventh, just ahead of the Toyota Panasonic Racing of Ivan Tripoli in what would be the final points-paying position. Martin Weaver was in ninth representing both Australia and Red Bull Racing, while Fabian Schmidt was in tenth, directly behind his experienced teammate. James Buxton was eleventh for Honda while Victor Hartmann was out of position in twelfth in his BMW Sauber - he'll be looking to make his way forward in the race - while I'll be looking to follow him from thirteenth on the grid. Rudolfo Goncalves was just behind me, likely intending to get me back for overtaking him at Monaco last year, while Daniel MacGowan was down in fifteenth following a penalty. At the back of the grid, we had Maximilien Lecroix, Filipe Yannick, Lorenzo Barbaro, Maximilian Renner, and Umberto Petronelli. Lecroix and Renner have the new Toro Rosso STR3 at their disposal - having run the STR2B up until this point - but it doesn't seem to have done them much help, at least not in qualifying. The early season woes of Toro Rosso aside, one of the most prestigious motor races in the world was about to begin.
Henrique de Matteo rolled off the grid first, but it was action behind as Anthony Harrison used all the track and then some to slip past Matti Hamalainen and into second. Piotr Kaminski instantly climbed to fourth, taking the spot vacated by Jyri Kaasalainen, but it was Felipe Alvarez, not Tommy Koskinen, who would move up to fifth. I would technically gain a spot as well, moving up to twelfth by virtue of the McLaren who was left to wait for every other car to pass the pitlane exit so that he could finally get the green light and be allowed to get moving. Getting up beyond twelfth was impossible however, because spray filled the air coming off the rear tyres of every car. The priority at this point was survival, overtaking would come later. So, the track trailed off to the left before throwing itself to the right for turn one, Sainte Devote, bringing the cars perilously close to the outside barriers and beginning the run up the hill. Turn two, Beau Rivage was one of the many small kinks that defined the run up the hill and prepared us for the real challenge at its top: Massenet. Crest the hill and blindly throw the car to the left, taking as much speed as you dare, but not so much as to deposit you into the wall as the corner tightens on exit.
The exit is a crucial thing too, because it spits you out into the next corner, the right-hander of Casino Square. The whole of sector one thus far had been a climb, but now with Casino Square, the descent begins, plunging down to the sector line. Of course, this is Monaco, so not even the straight is fully straight, as us drivers routinely avoid a bump on the left-hand side of the straight, but then trail back to the left to set up for the right-hander coming up. Said right-hander was turn five, Mirabeau. A right-hander with the walls closing in and spitting you out towards the hairpin. Monaco's hairpin has had a thousand different names, ranging from train station to casino to Lowes, but the current name is the Grand Hotel hairpin. Whatever name you know it by though, the point remains, brake, turn as far left you can - so much so that the steering racks teams use at Monaco are different from anywhere else on the calendar - and then renew the descent on corner exit. Turn seven, Lower Mirabeau, is perhaps the sharpest part of that descent, swinging to the right, plunging downhill, and passing beneath the old railway bridge, and then effectively tightening into the right-hander that is Portier. This begins the run alongside the harbor, including the tunnel run.
As mentioned before, the tunnel is treacherous in the rain. The track has been wet all along and we've been on wet tyres for the whole lap, but suddenly we were on a dry surface, with only a little bit of dampness from the formation lap and the cars ahead to give the illusion of being able to cool your tyres down. There was no salvation for your tyres though, all you could do was hope they'd hold on well enough to get you through the flat-out turn nine within the tunnel and then spit you out of it. I got off the racing line slightly coming out of my tunnel, just to cool the tyres in a puddle, but then it was back to the right to allow myself the best line possible entering the Nouvelle Chicane which, after all these years, it not very nouvelle after all. Left-right, right-left was the line we had to negotiate through the chicane with its deadly walls right there, so easy to hit and so costly if you do. I didn't hit the wall though, instead I positioned the car on the run down to turn twelve.
I lifted as I threw the car left into Tabac, coming back on the throttle gently to regain control of the car entering the swimming pool section. Left then right onto a straight just short enough to take a single breath before sending it to the right and to the left, avoiding the kerb on the inside. That kerb could spear a car into the exit wall without a driver being able to do a damn thing about it. I didn't have to worry about that for another lap though, because instead, I followed the track to the left, then braking and throwing the car to the right. The pit-lane entrance was just another right away, but I stayed on the track for a moment longer, then braking and turning right into the penultimate corner. The final corner, part of the Anthony Noghes complex, was then a left-hander aligning us back onto the main straight. We crossed the line and completed the lap, but there were a whole seventy-five left to go...not exactly an easy day at the office.
Now you may have noticed that I didn't mention any of the other cars on that lap, and there is a reason for that: in these conditions, on a track already known for constant barriers and the threat of crashing out, nobody wanted to take risks this early in the race. To that end, the grid was rather strung out, cars hanging out about a second apart from another, close enough that we could theoretically begin attacking the cars ahead again, but far away enough that we weren't in the spray coming off of the car in front. This was the pattern that established itself on the very first lap, but it would continue for the next few laps until Harrison hit the wall in Tabac. The American had begun to try and hunt down Henrique de Matteo ahead but paid the price for it. Anthony was able to keep it going, the team fueled him for a long stint, and he was released in fifth thanks to the gaps forming between the cars, but he was now a lot further behind the Ferraris than he had been just a lap ago. A similar phenomenon affected Felipe Alvarez, who also hit the wall and needed to pit for repairs and a change in strategy. The difference is that Alvarez took a gamble on the rain getting worse, as the Renault exited on the extreme wets in seventh place, intent on reeling in the cars ahead. Furthermore, sometime during all of this chaos, Tommy Koskinen lost his front wing and, pitting for more substantial repairs, my teammate exited the pits behind me. I may not have benefited from what happened to Harrison and Alvarez ahead, but at least I benefited from what happened to the only other Williams driver in this race.
On lap eight, the chaos accumulated so much that the safety car finally came out. Mainly because of an incident that would likely make the Red Bull leadership cringe: the Red Bull Racing of Daniel MacGowan slipped off the track and crashed in Massenet, the yellow flags came out, but not before Maximilien Lecroix also slipped off the track at Massenet, sliding into the wall and settling right in the back of MacGowan's car. So, not only are two cars just off the racing line in the barriers, but the cars are stuck together and need to get pulled apart and then removed. So Henrique de Matteo's lead was reduced to nothing, Matti Hamalainen is second, Piotr Kaminski in third, Ivan Tripoli was in fourth purely as a result of survival. Anthony Harrison was fifth, and the safety car closed the distance between him and the cars ahead, potentially saving his strategy, Martin Weaver was in sixth, Felipe Alvarez was in seventh, Fabian Schmidt was in eighth, James Buxton was ninth, Victor Hartmann was tenth, and I was eleventh. Rudolfo Goncalves was still the car behind me and Jyri Kaasalainen has made some moves forward thus far, but not enough so that he's an imminent threat to me. Thus, I imagine once these cars are removed and the safety car ends, the race will return to the same state until it becomes time for the pitstops. That is, of course, assuming that a dry line doesn't appear before then.
My prediction proved to be correct, because once the safety car came in three laps later and the cars were cleared, Matteo disappeared into the distance. Matti Hamalainen, however, has called into the pits for a drive-through penalty, as it was found that his team did not have the correct tyres fitted to the car within three minutes of the start, as per the regulations. It wasn't his fault, but the regulatory violation was on his car, thus the Finnish driver had to pull into the pitlane and lose second place, dropping him back to fourth. The reason the penalty wasn't as severe as it perhaps should have been that, again, it's a soaked track here at Monaco and cars are stringing themselves out just so we can see, as the spray of following another car is just too much with these kinds of walls just all over the place. As if the world needed to give a reminder of how dangerous these conditions are, Henrique de Matteo slid off of the track at Sainte Devote. The Brazilian was able to make it to the escape road and flick the car around, but not before he lost the lead to Piotr Kaminski, and rejoined in second. So the Polish driver was now leading one of the most prestigious motor races in the world, in a country whose flag is basically just the inverse of his home country's flag.
"The rain seems to be easing," I reported on the radio shortly after, seeing that conditions were getting better and that, at this point, the rain was such that we were displacing more water than was falling. Of course, there was plenty of work left to do, and just off the racing line the track is still soaked, but conditions were better, and the spray was less, so racing was beginning to get possible again.
"Copy that Tamara, we're looking to box soon for tyres and fuel. Push in if you can." Peter Malmedy responded, instructing me to begin preparing for a pitstop. It was still going to be wet tyres, obviously, but conditions were getting better, so it might be that this is a middle stint on the wets leading to a final stint on dry tyres. I would finally box on lap twenty-nine, coming in, switching tyres, loading up on fuel - I noticed that it wasn't too much fuel, so we were planning on switching to dries pretty soon - and coming out ahead of the Honda, having gained a position in the process. At the same time, further up the field, Henrique de Matteo made it back ahead of Piotr Kaminski on the pit strategy, but Anthony Harrison was still in the lead, having gotten out of sync ever since his crash at Tabac. It was a bit of an ironic situation, because this whole strategy happened because of the American crashing, but now, because of the resulting strategy, the American was now leading the race, and he was extending his advantage as a dry line was forming. So much so that when Anthony pitted for dry tyres on lap fifty-four, he emerged in the lead. I would follow a lap later, as Anthony's pace made it clear that dries were now the tyres to be on, with Piotr Kaminski pitting ahead of me on the same lap. Henrique de Matteo would pit on lap fifty-six, two laps after Anthony and a lap after Piotr Kaminski. The extra time the Brazilian spent on wet tyres meant that he fell behind the Pole yet again. Being able to do his outlap on dry tyres meant that the BMW Sauber driver was easily able to overcut the championship contender.
"Safety car! safety car!" Peter called out a few laps later on lap sixty-two "Tommy crashed in the swimming pool section."
"Is he okay?" I asked, knowing that my Finnish teammate has been pushing hard all race long trying to recover after losing his front wing early on in the race, so, once he came out on dry tyres, he was trying to push flat-out. My guess is that what happened is that he slipped onto a wet pack on the entry towards the swimming pool section, he hit the inside wall, and then the car, now out of control, clattered the outside wall alongside the harbor.
"Checking...yes, he's fine. A little rattled but that's normal after a crash like that. They're taking him for precautionary checks." Malmedy responded, taking only a moment to get the information and then responded. That was about what we could expect after crashing in a corner where, even in drying conditions, cars are undergoing forces of 3Gs, perhaps more. The HANS device helps protect the head in crashes like that, preventing it from suffering trauma under such extreme forces, but there are other risks as well, including the steering wheel snapping out of control as the car goes through its multiple hits. That's why us drivers are encouraged to take our hands off the steering wheel in the event of an accident and instead just hold them flat against our bodies, which has the added benefit of providing that little bit more protection to the chest, should it be required. In any case, it sounded like Tommy would pass any checks without issue, it was just about making sure everything was safe.
"What's the order now? Things got all shaken up with the stops, tyres, safety car, and uhh...and everything." I asked, secretly hoping that TV broadcasters didn't pick up that radio message when I basically ran out of things to say while on the radio.
"Okay, Harrison leads, Kaminski is second, de Matteo is third, Hamalainen is fourth, Weaver is fifth, Renner is sixth, Goncalves jumped you in the pits, he is now seventh, you are eighth, I repeat, you are eighth. Tripoli is ninth, Hartmann is tenth, Barbaro is eleventh, Kaasalainen is twelfth, Alvarez is thirteenth, Buxton is fourteenth, Schmidt is fifteenth. MacGowan, Lecroix, Petronelli, Yannick, and Koskinen are out." Malmedy reported.
"Buxton is that far behind?" I asked, not sure how the Honda got that far behind.
"He had a pitstop issue I think, focus on your situation though. We'll have ten laps to go on the restart." Malmedy reported. That wouldn't quite be the case though, because on lap sixty-eight as the race was restarting, chaos struck in the tunnel. The cars were bunched up due to the restart and we were lined up as we entered the tunnel. Now, as mentioned, all race long water had been dragged into the tunnel, which had started out dry, and now the tunnel wasn't drying out as quickly as the rest of the track. The end result is that, as Matti Hamalainen entered the tunnel, he lost the rear, regaining control, but not before slamming into the outside wall. The cars ahead of me swerved to avoid him and I followed, making my way to the right to avoid the recovering Ferrari. Not all of us were so fortunate, because Barbaro got hit by Hamalainen as the Finnish Ferrari driver was rejoining. The Uruguayan Force India tried to continue but his rear left suspension was shattered, so he retired with a broken suspension. Hamalainen would pit for repairs, but because of yet another incident and because of all the time used up by running slowly in the wet, we were hitting the two-hour limit. The rule is that a Formula One race cannot take longer than two hours of green flag running. Now, if there is a red flag, that counter is stopped, but that hasn't happened during this race. Technically speaking, the entire race has happened under either green flag or a safety car. the end result of all of this is that the race would end on lap seventy-six, rather than the scheduled seventy-eight. It was more than enough to count for full points though.
The points-paying results for the 2008 Monaco Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
2: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 8 points.
3: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 5 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 4 points.
6: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 3 points.
7: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 2 points.
8: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 1 point.
So, Anthony Harrison shoots to the lead of the championship with 38 points, Matti Hamalainen is still second with 35 points, and Henrique de Matteo is third with 34 points, having narrowed the gap to his teammate. Piotr Kaminski is fourth on 32 points in a close championship hunt, while his teammate was on 19 points, the German having fallen behind his Polish teammate. I don't think that's because Victor has been had this year - though he did hit the wall late in the race and slip to last, even ending up a few laps down from the leaders - more because Piotr has had a tremendous run so far this year, to the point where the Pole has become an outside bet for the championship going into the Canadian Grand Prix. As for me, I was tied on points with Jyri Kaasalainen on 15 points, but the Finn had a podium, putting him ahead of me on quality of points. So, the fact that I was still even comparable to the BMW Saubers and McLarens at this point in the year shows how good my results have been this year. My results were also such that, while Martin scored a big chunk of points today, Williams was still relatively secure in fourth place in the constructors. So, with that, I circled around the track one more time - at a pedestrian pace, mind you - waving to the fans and such, and made my way back to the pitlane.
"Thanks guys, that was a solid race for us. More points in the bag and we're still the best of the rest." I spoke into the radio, thanking my crew for their good work and congratulating us all on another solid result, a result in which I was just one part of. In the wet conditions, that's often where driver talent gets to shine, as all the cars are stressed and what works in the dry never works as well in the wet, so it's up to individual skill to fill in where the car cannot, but at the same time, wet conditions are also where the strategy department gets to shine. The extreme wet tyre compound, sometimes just called the wet tyres, the normal tyre compound, sometimes referred to as intermediates due to the role they fill, and then the two dry tyre compounds. All of those tyres have a very specific purpose and a very specific point where they start working, so the strategy team needs to be there and needs to be monitoring everything that the drivers can't. The drivers can say it feels awful on the wet tyres, but it always feels awful on the wet tyres, so it's up to the team to see what the weather radar looks like, what the other teams are doing, and even just how many of each tyre we still have available to us. Then of course the pit crew has to execute that, bearing the responsibility of changing the tyres and fueling up the car, and doing that as fast as possible to maintain as much track position as possible. Track position being particularly crucial at a track like Monaco where it's hard to overtake, and that's with the current cars being 1.8 meters wide rather than the 2-meter-wide cars we had before 1998. So yeah, obviously driving the car in these conditions is a difficult job and not something the average person stands a chance at doing with any degree of success, but it takes a lot more than one person to get this all working.
"Copy that Tamara, that was an excellent race. Canada's up next and we all know what you can do there." Malmedy responded, making sure to hype me up and reminding me that the track where I scored my first podium was coming up next. Of course, there was a lot of chaos - including a very unfortunate accident for Piotr Kaminski - that allowed that to happen, but I was also a more mature driver now, and this year has had a habit of being chaotic on top of that, so maybe a repeat performance isn't entirely out of the question after all. Speaking of Canada, the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix was the first win of one Anthony Harrison, an American driver who would then go on to win his home Grand Prix, to win the Hungarian Grand Prix, and to win the Japanese Grand Prix so as to nearly win the championship in his rookie season. Now it was his second season and the accomplishments just kept piling up, with Anthony having won Australia to extend his winning streak to four continents, and now winning the Monaco Grand Prix, the prestige event among prestige events in Formula One. Monaco, along with the Indianapolis 500 in America and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in endurance racing, are considered the three biggest races in the world, forming the Triple Crown of Motorsport.
"Congratulations!" I came over and congratulated Anthony on his podium, being among the group of drivers to go over and shake his hand. He had a podium ceremony to attend to though and I had to get weighed as part of the post-race scrutineering - so did he for that matter - but he definitely saw the gesture and appreciated it. So with that, I held my helmet and all my gear while I went into the FIA garage to get weighed. A trip to the scale and a change of clothes later, I was in the media pen, getting interviewed by a familiar redhead. That being Katherine Symmons of BBC Sports.
"Good job in the race today, Tamara, can you tell us about it?" she asked.
"Uhh...yeah. It was the same result as last year, but I think we got there very differently today. Obviously, the start was wet so that was very different. It's hard enough to see here with the walls and everything, there's a lot of blind corners, so with the spray it was even worse. Nobody wanted to be close to anybody else for that first part of the race because nobody wanted to be the one to crash with seventy laps to go in the race. We were strung out and that led to some of the leaders making strategy calls they couldn't normally make, and that led to us being able to make some interesting strategy calls as well. Ultimately though, today it was about keeping it clean, executing a strategy, and profiting from the mistakes of others, which I think we did rather well." I explained. I suppose that, from the fans' perspective, you could call this a boring race, but on the other hand, you also saw multiple lead changes, multiple different strategies, and a modern classic of a wet weather drive. There wasn't all the much in terms of wheel-to-wheel action, but I also think race fans should appreciate that isn't the only way to get an entertaining motor race. I mean, if we're going purely by overtakes and lead changes, NASCAR would be the best racing product on the planet, and I very much doubt anyone in the world of Formula One would have much interest in that kind of racing. This race provided in a lot of ways; it just so happens to be that cars-battling-other-cars wasn't one of those ways.
"You had a bit of a funny radio message at one point in the race where you were asking about James Buxton. What was that about?" Katherine asked.
"Oh that? Well, I had been battling him before my pitstop and I was expecting him to exit behind me, but then when we get to the safety car, he's nowhere near me. You know, with the big screens they have set up around track for the spectators, you get to see the action, but most of the action they focus on is from the leaders. So when you're in the car and all you have to go off of is the few moments of TV coverage you catch or whatever the team tells you, it's sometimes easier to know what's going on at the front of the grid than what's going on around you." I explained. Formula One broadcasting was a business, I understood this, so they're going to focus on the big, marketable names: that means Anthony Harrison, that means Matti Hamalainen, hell that means everything having to do with Ferrari, that means Felipe Alvarez, and, to an extent, that means me. It doesn't usually mean someone like Fabian Schmidt or Martin Weaver that I might be battling in a race.
"Speaking of the leaders, we saw you congratulating Anthony Harrison after the race. What do you make of his sixth Grand Prix victory?" Katherine asked.
"I mean, he took the championship lead, won the Monaco Grand Prix, and the next race is the track where he took his first win. He's put himself into an excellent position for the season and he's put an end to a streak of four race wins for Ferrari. He's someone I consider a friend so it's nice to be happy for him." I responded, giving a genuine answer to the question.
"Well, I'm sure he's happy for you too. Tamara Shchegolyayeva, seventh in the 2008 Monaco Grand Prix, was on that same 2007 Canadian Grand Prix podium." Katherine signed off with a reminder of my position and pointing out to the fans that I was on the podium last time out in Canada. Could I do a repeat performance? Theoretically yes, the car has speed, I've been on a good run, and Tommy demonstrated in Australia that this car can get podiums when the chips fall our way. That being said, with Ferrari, McLaren, and BMW Sauber all being so on top of each other this year, it's going to be difficult. Almost every individual car there has run into issues, but for me to be on the podium, I need for four out of the six to run into trouble, and I need to be the rest of the rest on the day that happens. With drivers like Felipe Alvarez, Martin Weaver, Ivan Tripoli, and others to contend with, that was no guarantee. I would certainly be trying my best - nobody can ask anything more of me - but the chances of a repeat performance are admittedly a bit slimmer than I'd like them to be. Still though, it's a track I have a positive history on, and I have positive momentum on my side, Turkey notwithstanding, so I should be able to bag a decent couple of points in Montreal.
It was Monaco, Montreal, Magny-Cours in a run of Francophone races starting with the letter M, but it was the middle one on that list that was coming up. I couldn't exactly drive to Montreal though, so, once again, I found myself in the passenger seat of a little Peugeot 308 wagon as Roksana Yurasova drove me to the airport in Nice. From here, I'd be flying out to the one and only North American race this season. I know I've voiced my frustration about this before, but when we have an American competing for the title and no American Formula One race at all, we have a problem. Formula One has raced at Watkins Glen, at Sebring, at Riverside, at Long Beach, in Detroit, in Dallas, in Phoenix, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, hell, Formula One has even raced in the parking lot of the Caesar's Palace casino in Las Vegas. We've done all of this, even hosting three Grand Prix in a year in 1982, but we can't muster a single event for 2008. I know there are efforts underway to fix this and I know the US is hardly the only country that should host a Grand Prix but doesn't, but it still strikes me as odd. I mean, the United States is one of the biggest and richest countries on a planet and it finally has a driver who's winning the Monaco Grand Prix, but that driver doesn't get to race at home. Felipe Alvarez has scored eight points all year long and he's going to get a second home race when we go to Valencia in August. We can race twice on the east coast of Spain, but we can't figure out how to get a United States Grand Prix going for 2008. Not even an interim deal with the IMS, nothing. I know it's a minor issue, but it bothers me.
"What's with you?" Roksana asked, noticing my troubled expression.
"It's just the last race was Monaco, now I'm flying to Canada, and right after that I'm flying back here because the next race is in France. It just really feels dumb to have this one race in North America at this point in the season." I answered. Now I like Canada and I love Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve as a track - and not just because I scored a podium on it a year ago - it's just that, again, we shouldn't just be having the one race. Last year it was fine since at least it was two races, at least it was twenty points that could seriously change the trajectory of a championship.
"Well, what would you do? It's not like you could pair Canada with Brazil at the end of the season." Roksana pointed out.
"Why not?" I asked, goofy smirk growing on my face.
"What do you mean?" Roksana asked, not quite seeing my expression from the driver's seat so not knowing what I was getting at.
"Why couldn't you host the Canadian Grand Prix in November?" I asked, teasing her.
"...well, you could, you'd just need a plow on the front of the car." the Portuguese-Ukrainian woman submitted to the jokes.
"That would certainly make passing easier." I quipped, an amusing image of pushing cars out of turn one with a giant plow in the place of my front wing filling my mind.
"You'll be doing plenty of that anyway, I'm sure." Roksana smiled as she pulled up in front of the airport and turned to face me "Do well out there, I'll be watching."
"You better," I teased as I got out of the car.
"What did you say?" she yelled over her shoulder.
"I love you!" I responded as I grabbed my bag and closed the trunk.
"I don't!" she called out through the rolled down passenger window. I laughed to myself a moment later when her conscience kicked in and couldn't let her leave on a bad note, leaving off with this instead: "Good luck!"
"Thanks," I whispered as I entered the airport and she pulled away, knowing she couldn't hear it, but wanting to say it anyway. So, onto the one-race interruption of the European season, because jokes aside, none of us actually want to go to Montreal when it's cold and miserable. No, we'll keep the early summer date, thank you very much. I just hope this date isn't quite as lonely in the future. Even if for some stupid reason, they absolutely couldn't do another race in the US, why not a race somewhere else in North America? What about returning to the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez for the first time in the 21st century? Or how about adding another round in Canada? I know Canada doesn't have the largest population, but it's also a massive country regardless of that, so maybe a race in like Vancouver - another world class city - could be possible simply because of the sheer distances between Montreal and Vancouver. As well as the fact that, I would imagine, people in western Canada probably don't speak the best of French. I do believe that it's a required school subject in Canada but, well, as someone with no degrees at all who was effectively homeschooled from a race track for half a decade, school skills can atrophy really quickly. Tangents about compulsory education aside, I don't think it's a very realistic proposition anyway, because, let's face it, it would be downright criminal for F1 to have two races in Canada but none in the US.
"Alright Tamara, you're starting twelfth on the grid, what do you do from here?" George Tarantano, from the USA's Speed Channel asked me.
"I don't want to make excuses, because obviously my teammate is up in fifth and everything, but we had some problems with the track surface yesterday and picked up some damage on the floor that made it hard to progress. We were able to get that fixed and now we think we can do something from what is still a pretty good position." I answered, being honest about what happened and about how it could be my fault, but also the fact that, quite frankly, my car wasn't in perfect condition by the time we got to the critical final laps of Q2. I wasn't the only one to get caught out though, because the three cars behind me were Daniel MacGowan, Ivan Tripoli, and Filipe Yannick. Furthermore, James Buxton and Maximilian Renner would be starting from the pitlane. Unfortunately, they had qualified behind me, so I wasn't going to gain anything from their misfortune. Nevertheless, last year I went from tenth to third, so maybe I can score points from twelfth on the grid. This year has certainly produced chaotic races thus far, so perhaps that can help me out today.
The lights came on. One. Two. Three. Four. Five...and go! Go! Go! Go! Eighteen Formula One cars took off down the grid while two more waited in the pitlane for us to exit. The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve's first corner was like the inverse of Monaco, with the track drifting off towards the right before a ninety-degree left-hander for turn one. A touch of throttle before it was back on the brakes for the hairpin to the right that was turn two. A short straight followed before the first of a number of chicanes around this track. It was on the brakes, to the right, and then throwing the car downhill to the left to complete the chicane. It was back to flat-out running through turn five, the fast right-hander that ended sector one. The sixth corner was a hard braking zone before a left turn, then after the slightest delay, send it to the right with the slightest lift for turn seven. We were now on a straight alongside the west side of the Ile Note-Dame on the Saint Lawrence River. Again, it was on the brakes for turn eight, throwing the car to the right and then back to the left, riding the inside kerb at the apex and then letting the car spill out all the way to the outside exit kerb of turn nine. A short straight with the slightest bit of a curve to the left followed to complete sector two.
Sector two opened with turn ten, the hairpin. This one-hundred eighty-degree corner to the right was also the site of many of the problems in qualifying, as this was one of the resurfaced sections of the track that was breaking up, but the race organizers insist that they fixed it overnight. I experienced no issues going through it on the opening lap. Instead, I continued through the kink of turn eleven to get me into position for the Casino Straight. I was in the slipstream of Fabian Schmidt at this point, but with the young German getting a slipstream from Martin Weaver up in tenth, I wasn't making much progress. It was Toyota power against Toyota power, and a car in the tow against a car in the tow, so things were just about even, all things considered. So instead, I remained in P12 as we went through the final chicane. Right and to the left alongside the tall, threatening kerbs of the chicane and then riding it out all the way to the Wall of Champions on the exit. The barrier earned that name for a reason, as it has claimed drivers of every quality, including several Formula One World Champions, but everyone survived the first lap. It was a pretty orderly first lap all things considered, but that wouldn't last long as the race continued.
"Barbaro is retiring with a problem. Yellow flags in sector one, be mindful on the exit of turn two." Malmedy reported as I finally made it past Weaver on lap sixteen to climb up to tenth position, having dispatched Schmidt on the back straight some laps ago. I tried to do the same to the Australian at the end of the last lap, but the Red Bull driver held on, so I sent it through the chicane and fought back to take the position going into turn one. I secured it through turn two and now with yellow flags on the exit, I should be able to secure my position getting into the twisty bit coming up. I couldn't see the full context from here in the car, but it seemed like Lorenzo had a failure - likely the engine or the gearbox - coming out of turn two and then took the escape road going into turn three. So with that, I threw the car into the downhill chicane and waited for the yellow flags to sub down, only for them to come out in greater intensity "Safety car, safety car. Barbaro's car has caught fire. He's okay but the marshals are responding. Tommy is going to pit this lap but we're fueled long, stay out."
"He'll go to the back with the closed pitlane." I pointed out.
"We are aware Tamara; we anticipate he'll regain positions on pit rotation. Focus on your strategy, we'll try and gain positions while they're still negotiating traffic." Malmedy explained. So their plan was to cycle Koskinen back to the front once everyone pitted, but while Koskinen is stuck in traffic trying to get passed cars that have yet to box, I can gain time by going faster than them. The idea was that I could come out just a few seconds behind Tommy - and anyone else on his strategy - while on fresher tyres, and able to take a shorter stop later due to needing less fuel. It made sense on paper, so we'll just have to see how this goes. We cycled around and got to the pit entry, with Koskinen being far from the only car to enter the pitlane: instead, Anthony Harrison, Piotr Kaminski, Matti Hamalainen, Felipe Alvarez, and Henrique de Matteo all joining him in the pits, meaning that the entire top six was on this same strategy. Meaning that my strategy might just have some merit to it, especially if I can achieve some good speed after the safety car while they are stuck behind slow cars on old tyres. What would happen in the pits though...that requires some explanation.
As I understand it - having gotten more context after the race - Matti Hamalainen's team was able to get him out first, but he had to stop at the pit exit and wait for the rest of the field to pass the pits, since the red light was out. Anthony Harrison, rushing to recover from the stop, evidently didn't notice this, because he ran into the back of Matti's car, leaving two stricken cars at the end of the pitlane...two of the championship contenders, no less. To add insult to injury, Tommy Koskinen would be released as the third car on this strategy, and he would run into the back of Anthony. The German-born Finn would be able to continue, but he would need a wing change. As for Piotr Kaminski, Felipe Alvarez, and Henrique de Matteo, they were able to slip out of the pitlane once they got the green light, rejoining the race at the end of the field. A bad day in the pits would get even worse for Ferrari, because they would find out that lap that, while rushing to double-stack the two Ferraris, they failed to get enough fuel into Matteo's car. This meant that Henrique would have to pull into the pits yet again and top off on fuel to make this strategy work.
All of this meant that, when the race got running again, Jyri Kaasalainen was leading the race, Victor Hartmann was second, Rudolfo Goncalves was third, and I was in fourth. A young McLaren driver in the lead, the German BMW driver in second, and myself in contention for a podium...this was starting to look like the 2007 race. That was, however, assuming that we could make this strategy work, and the cars behind wouldn't swallow us up. Well, Jyri Kaasalainen and Victor Hartmann were in top cars, and they would be quick later in the race, but the same could not be said about Rudolfo Goncalves, so my objective became clear: I needed to get past the Brazilian in the Honda as soon as possible.
So, the hunt began, the McLaren and the BMW Sauber breaking away at the front of the grid while the Honda led a train of cars around the track. Now, obviously I am frustrated to be caught behind the Honda driver, but on the other hand, I understand why Rudolfo Goncalves is doing this. Rudolfo came to Ferrari in 2000 and left in 2005, taking nine wins in the process, but achieving no championships in the best car with the best team on the grid, all because his teammate, Wilhelm Ziegler, was Ferrari's chosen one. Now he's left that team and gone to Honda just to see his teammate take their only win in 2006 and the car get exponentially worse since then. Rudolfo probably knows deep down that the car doesn't have the pace to stay here, but for the first time in years, he's running in a podium position, so he's not just going to let that go without a fight, nor should anyone expect him to do that. At the same time, I wasn't exactly going to give him any sympathy, because just like no one can blame him from trying to keep the podium, nobody can blame me from trying to take it from him. Thus, on the exit of the hairpin, I tucked into his slipstream, knowing full well that Goncalves wasn't close enough to get the draft from Hartmann ahead. I also knew that the Toyota engine had an edge over the Honda engine, if only slight. So, it was a pretty easy pass going into the chicane, and I was able to consolidate my position into turn one. I was up to third, the same position where I finished last year, but there was plenty of work left to do in order to repeat that feat.
"Jyri has pitted, Jyri has pitted." Peter announced over the radio a few laps later, once the three of us put a few seconds between us and the rest of the field. The McLaren was the first to blink, but that also meant that he would join the queue of drivers trying to work their way through the field. Hartmann and I were still trying to gain a gap, knowing that the cars immediately behind us were also on old tyres, and just hoping they could hold up the cars that did pit for long enough for us to have a fighting chance, either immediately after the stop or, more realistically, later in the stint while our tyres are still good while they are approaching the end of their strategy. The team would try and try to extend, but soon enough, we got word that Kaminski was approaching the cars ahead, so we knew that if we didn't act quickly, he would be in clean air and charging behind us. Thus, I had to pit in, coming out shortly behind Felipe Alvarez, as the Spanish Renault driver was the second driver on the lead strategy. As I was chasing after the Renault a few laps later, having fired up the new tyres, Malmedy radioed me again "Kaminski has overtaken Hartmann, he is now in the lead. BMW Sauber running one and two, BMWs one and two."
"Copy," I answered before adding my own message "Track breaking up at turn ten again, it's hard to drive."
"Understood Tamara, we'll take a look at what other drivers are doing and get back to you with the best lines." Peter responded, aware that such conditions - the same issues we faced in qualifying - aren't just hard on the driver, but also hard on the machinery. At the same time, the issue is the same for everyone else, and in a field of world class drivers, someone must have figured it out by now, so once Peter has that information, he's going to relay the instructions to me. The last thing we need is to lose out on a podium for the second time this season. Felipe is quick, I'm quick, and we know that Hartmann's tyres are fading away, so either we're going to overtake him, or he's going to take a pitstop and we'll end up ahead of him. So, with all of that in mind, I turned my attention to hunting down Felipe, for what was potentially a provisional second place once all of this shakes out.
The opportunity would come a lap later, when Felipe tapped the wall on the exit of the second chicane, compromising his exit, and giving me a good run into the hairpin. Felipe was an experienced driver that knew all the tricks, so he immediately cut to the right, protecting the inside, making me go the long way around. This meant that, even if I got ahead in the corner, I would need a very good exit to keep ahead on the straight. Felipe was a smart man, but he was a smart man struggling after his brush with the wall, and that meant he was vulnerable enough for me to try it. Now, I braked hard, turned in, and I was on the course to take the corner well, however, Felipe's car seemed to slip, perhaps even locking up a little bit on the inside right tyre, which meant he was going right into my car. His front left suspension bashed into my front right, instantly throwing the steering wheel from my hands as I lost a steering rod, while the moment of the Renault left us both stricken in the paved run-off on the exit to the corner. For the second time in three races, I was out because of a stupid incident that really didn't need to involve me at all. This time it was worse though, because I knew what I did last time at this track, and I knew that I was in a position to do the same thing this year, perhaps even better.
"Argh! I'm out! I'm out! Felipe into the hairpin ran into me. Argh! Sorry guys...it was a good result coming. Dammit. Goddammit." I reported over the radio, making my frustration clear, well aware that I lost a potential second place because of all this. I've finished third twice in Formula One, both times last year, but I haven't been on the podium yet this year, so the fact that I could score my best result ever? That was so enticing for me. Instead, I was out, and unlike Turkey, I had to drive half of the race before I retired anyway, crashing out because someone else made a mistake. A two-time world champion no less. My misfortune aside, there was still a race going on, and once our cars were removed, the yellow flags were subbed down and the race got underway again.
At the end of that race, the points-paying results of the 2008 Canadian Grand Prix look like this:
1: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 10 points.
2: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 8 points.
3: Daniel MacGowan - Great Britain - Red Bull-Renault - 6 points.
4: Fabian Schmidt - Germany - Toyota - 5 points.
5: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 4 points.
6: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 3 points.
7: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 2 points.
8: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 1 point.
So, BMW Sauber took advantage of Anthony Harrison and Matti Hamalainen retiring - as well as the fact that Henrique de Matteo had to stop twice due to Ferrari's panicked double-stack - to take a one-two finish. Furthermore, Piotr Kaminski took the first win for a Polish driver in Formula One, which, as someone of Eastern European origins, as a Slav, and as someone representing a country not known for Formula One, I could appreciate. Victor Hartmann would stop and be on fresher tyres at the end of the race, and he was quicker than Kaminski at the end of the race, but the time gave him fairly clear instructions to stay behind. It was the same type of deal like Jordan at the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix: BMW was finally within a chance of winning a Grand Prix on their own, without Williams, so they weren't going to let it get thrown away because someone got too aggressive due to a battle between teammates. You could say it was coming for a little while for BMW though, because they've been up there a lot this year, Piotr Kaminski in particular, and all of that has come together to make Kaminski the championship leader right now, four points ahead of Matteo and Harrison, seven points ahead of Hamalainen. Now, I expect Harrison, Hamalainen, and Henrique de Matteo to chip away at that lead in the near future, as them falling behind is likely due to their misfortune today, but Piotr Kaminski is a legitimate championship leader right now, and nobody can take that away from him.
Closer to home though, news wasn't quite as good though. Red Bull got a podium while Toyota just behind them had a strong showing across both cars, them finishing on either end of the sole Ferrari that managed to finish the race. The slow and steady strategy produced two points more for Rudolfo Goncalves than my hare strategy did for me, so that's worthy of note. Meanwhile, Maximilian Renner has shown that the new Toro Rosso has some promise, because he went from a pitlane start to taking a point here in Montreal. Of course, Maximilian's race was helped out by another high attrition rate, with Lorenzo Barbaro, Anthony Harrison, Matti Hamalainen, Filipe Yannick, Felipe Alvarez, me, and Umberto Petronelli all failing to finish. Tommy would actually finish the race, albeit down in tenth, after having gotten caught up in the pitlane drama during the first safety car, drama which ruined his race. Tommy started fifth, I started twelfth, but Williams was walking away from Montreal with zero points, on a track where we scored a podium last year. I know it's a different year and a different car and anything, but it hurts to not be able to match a result I've already proven I'm capable of achieving. Especially because now, I have to face the media in the aftermath of that collision.
"Tough race out there Tamara. We spoke to Felipe just before we got a hold of you. Felipe says the track degradation in turn ten caught him out and he's sorry you were caught up in it, what do you make of it?" Katherine Symmons asked, the redhead wasting no time getting into the question.
"Eh, what do you want me to say? I know the track was breaking up but all that paved run off and his car still goes into mine. I don't know if it's his fault and I don't really care, the point is that we're out of what should have been a really good race for us." I responded, not really being able to hide my frustration. I also wasn't able to hide the fact that I think Alvarez didn't particularly mind the fact that we had an incident. I'm not suggesting that he willing threw away a podium, or even that he wanted to crash more into me, more that once he realized he wasn't going to make it through the corner, he had few qualms about taking me out with him. So it's less that Felipe decided that no one is allowed to overtake him, and more that he decided that if he's going out, I might as well go out too. I think that even when he first touched, if he really wanted to, he could have caught the car, steered out of it, and hit me in a lighter way. Felipe being the guy that he is though, pretty much stopped trying once he realized his race was over, with little regard for what happened to me. The fact that the tracking was breaking up served as a neat little alibi for him.
"How do these results affect the championship?" Katherine asked as a follow-up.
"Well, first of all, congratulations to Piotr and the BMW Sauber team, they've all been working hard, and they deserve this. It's always nice to have a new championship leader. As for us, well, Toyota gained points, Red Bull gained points, we didn't gain points. Renault has had a car up there all year, but they haven't been able to convert many points, so that's still good, but I think it's becoming clear that, upgrades or not, our fight is with Toyota, Renault, and the Bulls." I answered, referencing the fact that Felipe has had strong qualifying results this year and a lot of strong showings in the race, but at the same time, so many of those strong showings have failed to materialize into results at the end of the race. Today is another one of those days, and while I can't attribute the entire fault to him, I can say that he was more responsible for this incident than I was, and I can say that he put himself in the middle of a stupid incident that didn't need to happen.
"Do you think Williams can bounce back in the next races?" Katherine asked her final question.
"Maybe, we got France and Silverstone up next. Those weren't the best tracks for us last year, but I think that the point a lot of people are forgetting is that we have made a step forward this year. This is a better car than the last car we had; the only problem is that the cars around us took even bigger jumps. I also think it's fair to say that we were always going to have a hard time achieving fourth in the constructors' this year since we were only up there because of McLaren's disqualification." I answered. That's the whole crux of the problem, we do have a better car this year, but so does everyone else, and right now, it's starting to feel like they've made bigger leaps than we have. We have secured some good results and we are still in fourth at the moment, but the competition is gaining on us, and at this rate, the buffer we have over Toyota and Red Bull is going to disappear any day now. Our new car might be miles better around Magny-Cours and Silverstone than last years' Williams FW29, but what difference does it make when our rivals have made greater strides forward? We still have a good car, and our upgrades seem to have made it better, but I can't quite shake the fact that we're coming to the end of our stint as the best of the rest.
To add insult and injury, based on the last couple of races, we haven't taken advantage of that position very effectively. I've been taken out twice in two races through no fault of my own. If the season thus far has been about us building up a buffer to our competitors, I feel the next few races might be defined by us losing that buffer. Only time will tell though, so onto France and Great Britain.
Notes:
Hope you enjoyed!
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 15: The Dirty Laundry of Global Sport
Notes:
Hello everyone. Last week I had to put Secrets of the Outer Rim II on hiatus because I was getting really burned out and I think the story was suffering because of that. This story is going to continue though. In fact, for the foreseeable future it will be the only story I'm writing. I think one story with biweekly updates is just less of a stress level for me. Also, this story tends to come rather easily to me.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter XV.
The Dirty Laundry of Global Sport.
"Strippers dressed as what?" I asked in disbelief as Roksana and I watched the news reports coming in about the FIA President. In short, Max Mosley, who along with Bernie Ecclestone, took control of F1 in the 1980s through the course of a series of battles with the manufacturer teams, the exponential increase in the sport's television revenue, and the alleged manipulation of the 1989 Japanese Grand Prix by Jean-Marie Balestre, was caught having an orgy. Now, that alone would have been an embarrassment, but a manageable one for the man who has been in charge of the FIA since Balestre stepped down in 1993. The problem is the five women involved are alleged to have been dressed in Nazi uniforms. Not only that, but this is all said to have happened all the way back on March 28th, adding the implication that Max Mosley tried to use his power to have the story squashed so that it didn't harm him politically. To add insult to injury, Max Mosley's father, Sir Oswald Mosley, was apparently the founder of a group called the British Union of Fascists before World War II. Needless to say, this is not a good look for our sport, not at all.
Max Mosley argues that this is all false and has already announced his intention to take the British papers that released this story to court on grounds of slander, calling it a vicious and uncalled for character assassination. Mosley has admitted that there was an orgy for the record, he is simply disputing that there was a Nazi theme. Whether his statements are true or not, he has opted to cancel his involvement with both the upcoming French Grand Prix and the British Grand Prix after that. This is not enough though, because the governing bodies in nations like Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, the US, and others have already spoken out harshly against Mosley because of this, and the FIA as a whole has called for a vote of no-confidence on July 3rd. This Extraordinary General Meeting of the FIA would be the Thursday before the British Grand Prix, meaning that the sport might have entirely different leadership in just two races time. It also brings attention one of the uglier political areas of F1, that being its association with fascism. In the 1930s, the European championship, the precursor to the post-war Formula One World Championship, was utterly dominated by teams from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, such as Alfa Romeo - including the Scuderia Ferrari team - and Maserati on the Italian side, and the silver arrows of Mercedes and Auto Union on the German side. These efforts were subsidized by the governments of these countries who wanted to prove their superiority and their engineering prowess, and the cars that came of it would become the basis for many of the first Formula One cars.
The connection, unfortunately, didn't end there. Jean-Marie Balestre, who died recently so I don't want to speak too ill of him, was part of a Vichy French SS units. Balestre always maintained that he was only there in the capacity of a spy for the French Resistance, and obviously the story of France in the early years of World War II is a complicated one, but it doesn't change the fact there are pictures of the last FIA President in a Nazi uniform. There was also a period in the 1970s when those images surfaced and Balestre, like Mosley now, tried to have the story suppressed. It didn't work out for him either. It was bad enough in the 1970s, but now in the 2000s, F1 is finding itself in the same place, with the son of a fascist having participated in a Nazi orgy. This all could be false, and Mosley could, indeed, be being slandered, but the fact that such a story is believable to begin with speaks volume of the problems with Formula One. F1 has always been a conservative sport, after all, the money involved necessitates that the figures involved want nothing more than to maintain the status quo. I've known all of this, and I've been okay with it despite who I am and my own personal beliefs, but I'm not okay the leader of the sport having a Nazi fetish.
"This has to be the end of his career, right?" Roksana asked, just as shocked as I was.
"It has to be, doesn't it? We're going to Germany next month, the last thing that the ADAC want is to see everyone talking about the global leader of motorsports being a Nazi sympathizer." I answered. Germany is very aggressive against anything having to do with the Nazis, such as punishing those caught with Nazi memorabilia or censoring media depicting the event, perhaps rightfully so. It's a national trauma for Germany and one they don't ever want to experience again, both in regards to what they did to the rest of the world and the retribution committed against them. Now ADAC, the national automotive associating of Germany, has to deal with these accusations against FIA President Max Mosley. Add to the fact that BMW, who has a factory team in F1, and Mercedes, who is an engine provider for McLaren, have their own complicated history with the second World War, and you'll have significant internal opposition against him. Let me put it this way, the fact that there has already been a vote-of-no-confidence called against him says a lot, and I would be shocked if he survives that vote.
"It should be." I sighed before sinking into the couch, feeling disgusted. I know that the Soviet Union has more than its own fair share of problems, including environmental destruction in Central Asia, proliferation of nuclear weapons, and a genocide in Ukraine, but it feels disgusting to be a part of a sport that is now going to be associated with Nazism for the foreseeable future. Every news organization on the planet is going to run a story about how the FIA President was caught in a Nazi orgy, and for better or worse, I'm one of the more popular drivers from the top FIA-sanctioned series. I know that F1 teams tend to like to avoid political statements, sponsors especially - like the old Michael Jordan sneakers quote goes, Republicans buy sneakers too - but on the other hand, I don't think that anyone is going to be offended over insulting the Nazis. The fact that the Japanese have their own complicated history with World War II suggests Toyota will want to denounce Mosley as well. Anyway, the point of all this is summed up with what I told Roksana next "I think I need to make a statement."
"...five. Si-no, too low. Down and try again. Come on...come on...there we go, six. Keep going now. Seven...eight..." my trainer, Walentyna, was pushing me hard today, making me do bench presses to work the arms while she was spotting me. My training regime was not as extensive as Lorenzo Barbaro, for instance, because he was six feet tall and struggled to weigh in, while I was 5'5 and 110 pounds - 165cm and 50 kilos - so weight and size wasn't an issue for me. What could be an issue for me, however, is upper body and neck strength. Neck strength is something all Formula One drivers work on, because an ordinary human can't sustain 5G forces on their neck for a few seconds at a time seventy times over the course of an hour and a half, but the downside of my light weight is that my neck is physically smaller than my male counterparts. I don't have as much muscle in my neck as Tommy Koskinen and I never will, so I need to work pretty hard on the muscles that I do have. As for my arms, well again, I have pretty small, dinky arms but I still have to throw the same type of car around as Tommy and all the others. So yeah, I might not have to diet and skip meals like Lorenzo does, but I need to work hard to have the strength and endurance to push a car through a race.
"Nine...more...more...ten - " Walentyna continued. My Polish trainer was once an Alpine skier in her own right and even now, after retiring, she has kept fit and devoted much of her time to keeping others fit. I'm not the first Formula One driver that she has worked with, and I probably won't be the last, but I am the first female driver she has worked with, and I feel like with her having the combination of experience with F1 drivers and the experience of having been a female athlete, she is uniquely suited to helping me deal with these types of things. Today it's strength, another day it'll be cardio in the form of a morning jog along the harbor, and a few times during the offseason, we go cycling through the mountains around the Principality. We were going through the reps when, on the other side of the room, Roksana suddenly unmuted the TV and got our attention. Walentyna and I racked the bar and I sat up as we saw another news report on the Mosley situation.
"...Stewart and Jody Scheckter have called for Max Mosley to resign. This comes after Honda, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW all issued statements denouncing his actions. Current Formula One driver Tamara Shchegolyayeva joined in on the criticism yesterday with the following statement: "I am saddened to hear our great sport associated with such horrible evils. The Nazi War Machine tore through eastern Europe with merciless brutality and indiscriminate terror. Never before had history experienced death on such an industrialized scale. I was born in the Soviet Union; my great grandfather had been a tank commander on the eastern front. Many tank battalions were recruited in Kazakhstan and my great grandfather, being a Russian and a fluent speaker, was deemed a natural choice for commander. He fought in one of the largest and deadliest battles of the war at Kursk and would die fighting in the Fourth Battle of Kharkiv. My great grandfather is just one of the tens of millions of men and women who contributed to the final defeat of fascism in 1945. Their memory should not, and cannot, be forgotten." Powerful words from the young woman who did not mince words when it comes to the allegations against Mosley. The FIA President has thus far refused to comment." the report went, including my quote in the fullest. Everyone in the former Soviet Union has a story like that, because everyone was affected by the Great Patriotic War in one way or another. I'm glad I'm not alone though, the fact that Jackie Stewart and Jody Scheckter, a pair of champions, spoke out makes me feel a lot more secure in my position. The fact that Toyota, my engine supplier, also denounced Mosley's actions means the only thing left to worry about is Williams, and I really doubt the team will punish me over this.
"You made the news," Roksana said, literally pointing at the TV.
"I did?" I asked with a smirk, having clearly noticed that.
"Come on, be serious. You spoke up about something you believed in, and it got read out on the real news, not just some sports article." she explained herself, making it clear that this was deeper than simply a description of events.
"Yeah, I did. I did. Now we just need to see what comes of it." I answered before laying back down on the bench. I did have to wonder what would happen to be about all of this, I mean, like i said, I don't think anyone would like the optics of firing a driver for speaking out against the Nazis, and my quote didn't mention Mosley specifically, merely the fact that Formula One has been associated with this. Obviously, everyone knows what I'm talking about, but not in such a way where Mosley could sue me if he's found to have been slandered during all this. I doubt it will happen though, because one: slander is very hard to prove in the United Kingdom where all of this is going down, two: I don't think it's good business to sue a driver in your own series. Still though, now that the quote is out there and very real, I have to wonder what the repercussions of this will be once we get to France. He may not be there in person, but Max Mosley will still be the FIA President for at least one more race.
"Good morning," I greeted Mariana, my press handler as I arrived in the paddock at Magny-Cours on Thursday morning, ready for the race weekend to begin.
"Morning Tamara. Michael wants to see you." Mariana greeted me before getting right down to business. A meeting with the boss right away...not the best sign. It's also not the worst sign in the world - that would be a meeting with Frank - but it's not a big leap in logic to assume this has to relate to the statement I made. Then again, if it was something urgently, massively bad, I'm not sure if the team would wait to see me in person, a catastrophically bad situation seems like the type that would warrant an immediate phone call. In any case, I wouldn't have to wait particularly long, since Mariana was guiding me right to the team's motorhome, clipboard in hand and briskness in her step. We entered the prefabricated structure and didn't waste any time, no dawdling or waiting for coffee or talking with other team members, no, we went straight for Michael Coronet's office, and that didn't exactly fill me with confidence.
"Hello Tamara," he greeted as I walked in, Mariana shutting the door behind me, leaving just the two of us "Take a seat please."
"Okay. What's going on?" I asked, growing concerned.
"Nothing major Tamara, just something about the quote you released. We are not asking you to retract the quote or apologize or anything, whatever you have said is fine, however, the team has decided to adopt a wait-and-see approach in regard to all of this. Nothing has been proven in court yet, Max has been a good figure in the sport for a long time, and he's already demonstrated a willingness to go to court over all of this. I just sent out an email to everyone in the team with the following instructions: avoid talking about the Mosley incident, if possible, keep any comments to a minimum. We will reevaluate this policy if and when new information arises." Michael explained. So, I wasn't being punished, at least not directly, but the team was making it pretty clear that they didn't want me or anyone else saying anything. I did have to admit I was a bit disappointed in this, but I could also see that Michael had a point: we didn't know what was true, or what this would look like coming out of court. Personally, I think that that allegations of being involved in a Nazi orgy don't exactly come out of thin air, but I also haven't seen the video of the incident. From what I've heard, he was dressed up as a prisoner, they were dressed up in uniforms, and they were speaking German. So yeah, I think the evidence speaks for itself, but I also understand the urge to just shut up and protect the team, especially with all the various global sponsors involved.
"What should I do if they ask me about the quote specifically?" I asked, knowing full well that if I saw the quote played out on TV, an awful lot of people did as well, including journalists and everything.
"You shouldn't worry about it. The press knows a lot of teams have been instructed not to talk about it. Ferrari included." Michael responded. This was a pretty common policy then, and if Ferrari of all teams has given that call, I'm sure the institutional press at least will interest. A few rags might risk it for the clicks, but most would rather not get on the bad side of a team as fundamental to motorsport as Ferrari. On the other hand, seeing Williams, Ferrari, and likely a few other teams - the Red Bull teams in particular have been silent on this issue - giving the gag order on this is concerning. Combine that with the fact that all the former drivers - Stewart, Scheckter, and Eddie Irvine - who did comment have long been retired, and don't currently have a connection to any of the teams, and I see another concerning trend. I have to wonder if the powers that be in Formula One are content to let this kind of behavior from Max Mosley slide if they can get away with it. This is in spite of protests from all but two of the engine manufacturers - Ferrari and Renault - and protests from some verifiable legends of the sport. I understand why the team is doing it and I know that corporations do have to be cowardly from time to time, but this is a bit ridiculous for my taste.
"Well...I'll just try and focus on the racing then." I responded, feeling a bit uncomfortable about it, but recognizing that I had little choice here.
"That will be for the best. Good luck out there." Michael sighed, suggesting that he didn't feel great about this either. That likely meant that the decision was coming down from Sir Frank Williams, or perhaps even from Max Mosley himself. Either way, what is clear is that the powerful interests in F1 don't want this scandal being talked about, and I understand why - these teams and brands don't want to be associated with a Nazi sex scandal - but the thing is, maybe the solution to that isn't to pretend it didn't happen, but to remove the person involved in a Nazi sex scandal. Perhaps that makes too much sense for Formula One though, because as much as I love this sport and have devoted my life to it, even I can admit that Formula One has a nasty habit of doing downright nonsensical things.
Qualifying hadn't been the best day for us. Quite frankly, we simply didn't have the pace. I wish I could give a more interesting answer or a compelling excuse, but no, we were just slow. Tommy had qualified fifteenth and I qualified sixteenth. Tommy, however, had a ten-place grid penalty - as did Anthony Harrison - dating back to the pitlane crash in Canada. So effectively what Tommy had done is knock me out in Q1 only for him to be starting behind me regardless of that. I admit that I probably wouldn't have been able to have gone much further up the grid than I am, but it is annoying to have not even been able to try. In any case, I will be starting down in fifteenth, and this is a track where the team struggled at last year, so yes, our car is new, and yes, our car is better than it was last year, but it's still going to be hard to do something from back here. The first car on row eight, lining up next to the Honda of James Buxton. Umberto Petronelli, Lorenzo Barbaro, Tommy Koskinen, and Rudolfo Goncalves were the cars behind me. Maximilien Lecroix was fourteenth, Anthony Harrison was thirteenth after his penalty from Canada, and this elevated the other Toro Rosso of Maximilian Renner to twelfth. Renner made an all-German sixth row by lining up next to eleventh place Victor Hartmann of BMW Sauber.
Ahead of that, you had the top ten on the grid. Jyri Kaasalainen was tenth despite qualifying sixth because he, too, had a grid penalty for impeding Martin Weaver earlier on. Filipe Yannick was up in ninth for Renault, hoping to finally score points, Fabian Schmidt was eighth for Toyota, Daniel MacGowan was seventh, and Martin Weaver was sixth. Weaver may have been impeded, but the blocking meant he was elevated into the very position where Kaasalainen had been, leading the pair of Red Bulls. Canadian GP race winner Piotr Kaminski began the top five, qualifying on the third row for BMW Sauber. Ivan Tripoli was up in fourth, in what might be a concerning development in the battle for best of the rest. Felipe Alvarez was in the top three for Renault, but he's had a lot of good qualifiers lately, the question is whether or not he can finally begin converting those grid positions into points-paying results, which has been a problem for him all season long. So, that brings us to the front row, and on a day when both McLarens have qualified in the middle of the pack and gotten penalties on top of that, Scuderia Ferrari has taken full advantage of that. Henrique de Matteo was faster in Q1 and Q2, but Matti Hamalainen was faster when it matters, taking the edge at the end of Q3 and thus taking the pole position. After a pair of bad races, Hamalainen is hoping to get back into the points and has put himself in the best position possible to do just that.
So, with a background of controversy, gag orders, and uncertainty over the future of this race itself, we were about to start racing. All the gallantry - the media, the French anthem, and the ticking down of the Rolex race clock - was over and done, the team members were running to the edge of the track, and the formation lap was about to begin. The tension was at its peak now, we were slowly circulating around the track, heating up the tyres, and getting one last preparatory look at all our markers before we would have to do it for real next time out. We circulated around seventeen corners in the countryside of Central France before parking up on the grid all over again, the final few cars forming up behind me. I took my position on the grid and waited, watching the lights, holding the hand clutch, and getting ready to build the revs up to launch as fast as possible, hoping to immediately gain from fifteenth on the grid. When the five lights went out and the race began, I did just that, blasting off from my slot and pulling alongside Lecroix up ahead, neck-and-neck with the four-time Champ Car champion. It was Williams with Toyota power against Toro Rosso with year old Ferrari power going into turn one, but going into the left-hander of turn one, I had a nose ahead on the outside. This outside line for turn one turned into the inside line for turn three - turn two was nothing more than a slight kink in these cars - and I was able to consolidate my position.
I looked up ahead to see that Anthony had already dispensed with Renner, so the other Toro Rosso was just ahead of me. I checked my mirror for a moment but saw that I had a bit of a gap to Lecroix, as the Frenchman was in a battle with Buxton behind. Satisfied with that, I got into the slipstream of my one-time 2005 Formula 3 Euro Series rookie-of-the-year rival Maximilian Renner through the kink of turn four. Renner was able to just beat me for rookie of the year honors, but that was 2005, and now it was 2008, I had the edge this time, sending it on the inside, outbraking him in turn five - the Adelaide hairpin - and then turning 180 degrees to the right. On the exit of the hairpin, I saw I was ahead of the Toro Rosso, so for now I tucked in behind the McLaren of Harrison, hoping that he could drag me up the grid as he inevitably charged into the top ten. Turn six was a barely existent kink on the flat-out run down to the next real corners: the Nürburgring chicane. Right into turn seven and then back left on the throttle through turn eight, hopping back into the tow of the McLaren on the short run to the next hairpin, literally title 180. Turn 180 was a left-hander that did about what you'd expect, bringing us all the way around. It spit us out into turn ten, a more substantial kink to the right before a lesser kink to the left in the form of turn eleven. We were now coming out of the infield loop section.
Anthony was just ahead of me and I followed the African American driver, throwing the car in to the right and then back to the left on the exit of the Imola chicane. We were back on the brakes and then turning right on the hairpin through turn four, Chateau d'Eau. Now back on the perimeter of the circuit, Anthony and I were well into sector three now, full throttle for a long stretch of the track, a stretch which included a kink, but this kink wasn't counted for reasons known only to the French. It was hard on the brakes at the end of all this though, because turn fifteen was so tight it was almost an acute angle, half ninety-degree corner, half hairpin. The pit exit was directly in front of us, but neither of us were going to pit this lap, instead, it was right then left through the final chicane, and we crossed the line to complete the very first lap. I had already gained a few positions on this lap and I was firmly in the slipstream of Anthony Harrison, using the McLaren to pull myself forward. It was a good thing too, because there was a bit of an incident behind me, mainly that James Buxton touched Maximilien Lecroix in turn one on lap two, giving him front wing damage and making sure that Toro Rosso was panicking to check his tyres for a possible puncture.
We managed to avoid a safety car as both cars kept going - though Buxton would need to pit for a new wing - and Anthony and I would slip past Victor Hartmann who locked up and went deep into turn five. I was now up to twelfth, 2007 championship contender Anthony Harrison was just ahead of me in eleventh, and the two of us were hunting down Jyri Kaasalainen for tenth. Jyri, however, was working on overtaking Filipe Yannick up for ninth, as the Renault driver just wasn't sticking to the top eight the way he had perhaps hoped. Perhaps this wasn't just a Filipe problem though, because up ahead, Felipe Alvarez had also lost third place to the Toyota of Ivan Tripoli, meaning that he was down in fourth, where he'd be falling into the clutches of championship leader Piotr Kaminski. Up ahead though, Matti Hamalainen was pulling away from Henrique de Matteo, beginning what was shaping up to be the Finn's second dominant performance at this track. Back down to Earth though, by lap five, Anthony Harrison had reached his teammate, and Jyri let him through without much of a problem. I tried to take a look on the inside and follow the American through, but I wasn't that lucky. Instead, I followed him all the way around the track, finally getting into the slipstream coming out of turn fourteen. The silver, red, and black McLaren MP4/23 with its Mercedes-Benz engine against my white, dark blue, and teal Williams FW30 Toyota machine. Down the straight, easing to the left following the terrain, I got Jyri to cover off the inside, which is exactly what I wanted him to do. Swinging back to the inside and breaking, I left the Finnish McLaren driver with the crippling realization that he had just been sold a dummy, while I got to continue the race in tenth place.
"Good job Tamara, you're in the top ten." Peter Malmedy gave me words of encouragement as I tried to continue my charge. I did use up some of my tyres staying close to Kaasalainen through the twisty infield bits of track, and Anthony Harrison had disappeared into the distance while I was battling his teammate, so I no longer had the bonus of the tow to make up for the tyre wear I was now having to nurse. My wings had been clipped for the time being, but when word reached me that Anthony Harrison had received a drive-through penalty for a track limits violation earlier in the race, I found myself elevated to P9 while he was down in thirteenth. My car had still lost a lot of the speed that got me up here, but at least I was another position ahead with pitstops coming up in just a few laps time. It had rained earlier this morning and more rain was forecast this afternoon, so while it was dry now and optimistic forecasts had it staying dry at least until the last few laps, this was the kind of day where strategy could play a decisive factor in the race. I was able to get into the points-positions this stint though, since I was able to overtake Fabian Schmidt going into the Adelaide hairpin. I made up a lot of spots in the first few laps and since then I've also been able to dispose of Kaasalainen and Fabian Schmidt, but with a stop on the horizon, only time would tell whether or not I would have to do it all again.
"Who are the cars ahead of me?" I asked over the radio as I settled into the heart of the first stint.
"Hamalainen is leading, Matteo is second, Tripoli third, Alvarez is fourth, Kaminski fifth. Weaver is sixth, MacGowan is seventh, Filipe Yannick is eighth, you are ninth. Kaasalainen has overtaken Schmidt behind you and is closing in." Malmedy reported. Kaasalainen had been battling Yannick earlier in the race but had fallen behind the Renault, the Toyota, and my car as well, now he was finally starting to regain positions. Still though, overtaking a Toyota for tenth place is hardly what the McLaren driver wanted to be doing at this stage in the race. Still, he should be in a position to threaten me later in the race, as should Anthony Harrison who was just a few positions behind, so my goal was now evolving. Not only would I need to break into the points in order to score, but I would need to build up a buffer to ensure I stayed in the points as faster cars came through behind me. So, just as Kaasalainen set up hunting me down, I set about hunting Yannick down. The next overtake would not be me passing Yannick or Kaasalainen passing me, because instead, we would first have to lap James Buxton, who had pitted on lap two with damage and was trying to continue on, seemingly with no avail. Buxton would retire on lap seventeen, finally admitting he would gain nothing from this race, while on that very same lap, Kaasalainen would pit, seeking to undercut me. I covered him off by pulling into the pits on lap eighteen.
Braking for turn fifteen, accelerating on corner exit, aiming it straight and then braking again to slow the car down in time for the white pit entrance line. I held the car at the speed limiter, driving down the lane at an agonizingly slow speed all the way until I hit my box. I pulled into the spot, felt my team raise the car up on the jacks, and watched as the crew changed my tyres and filled me up with fuel. The seconds ticked by as the tyres changed, the cars got lowered, and the jackmen got out of the way - the last few drops of fuel were going in while I watched the lollipop man, waiting for the signal. The fuel hose detached, the lollipop went up and I sped out of the box, back on the limiter and down the rest of pitlane. I drove passed the pit limiter line and I sped up, driving down the acceleration lane as I bypassed turn one and exited on the outside of turn turn, diving the car into turn three as I rejoined the track. I wasn't sure where exactly all the cars were going to shake out or where I was relative to Kaasalainen, all I focused on was delivering the fastest outlap possible. A few laps later, once everything had shaken out, Malmedy gave me an update.
"Hamalainen leads from Matteo, Tripoli is about a pitstop behind them already, Kaminski is fourth, Alvarez is fifth, Weaver is sixth, Kaasalainen is seventh, you are eighth, MacGowan is ninth. You have gained a position, I repeat, you have gained a position." my engineer reported. The Ferraris were utterly dominant today, the McLarens were caught up in the middle of the pack, and the BMWs' pace was no match for what they could do last time out in Canada. Piotr Kaminski was in fourth making little to no progress on Tripoli, while Hartmann was somewhere in the distance behind me, also not making much of an impression. So, behind me, the cars that should have been faster - mainly Hartmann and Harison - weren't making much progress, Daniel MacGowan and Filipe Yannick directly behind me weren't much of a threat, while I didn't have the car to do much about the cars ahead of me. Therefore, the second stint was largely the story of Kaasalainen charging forward and Alvarez falling backwards, at least it was, until something happened on lap thirty-nine.
Matti started slowing down and was soon passed by his teammate, and he was no longer capable of the truly blistering pace Ferrari had shown up until now. However, the Finn was still going fast enough to keep Tripoli at bay, especially when combined to the substantial gap he built up over the course of the race, so the reigning champion seemed like he was going to stay second...provided the problem didn't get any worse. As more information flowed in, Peter would inform me that the Ferrari was dealing with a collapsing exhaust pipe, limiting the performance of his 19,000 rpm V8 engine. That wasn't the type of problem that was going to get any better, and Hamalainen had no choice but to continue in spite of it. Meanwhile, Kaasalainen overtook Weaver for sixth place...it was becoming clear that the only car that had the pace to take second place from the Ferrari was his countryman in the McLaren, but with the significant amount of track position the former leader of the race had built up over all this time, the question became: would Jyri catch up before he ran out of laps?
"Box this lap, box this lap." Came the command on lap fifty-two, bringing me in for my final stop with less than twenty laps to go. I dipped into the pitlane again and the team got me out on option tyres and a light fuel load to complete the race, hopefully with some faster pace than I've had up until now. Up ahead, the trend of the second stint exemplified itself in the second round of stops, where Kaasalainen jumped Alvarez and Kaminski on rotation to come out in fourth place, while Alvarez lost places to not just Jyri, but also Piotr and Weaver, meaning that the driver who had qualified third was now running all the way down in seventh. The Renault was now the car ahead of me and I started trying to catch up to him while Malmedy came over the radio yet again to throw another wrench into the works "Some drivers are reporting light rain on the back stretch, we aren't seeing anything too heavy, but what do you make of it?"
"It's nothing, just a drizzle. The tyres can handle it." I reported as I drove down the back straight at the end of lap fifty-four. I could see the drops on my helmet, and I could see the clouds bearing menacingly over the circuit, but it really wasn't raining hard enough to make much of a difference at all, at least not yet. So, just like Jyri Kaasalainen was trying to hunt down Tripoli and then Hamalainen ahead, it was a race to see what would happen first: would the rain intensify enough to demand a third round of stops, or would the race end before it could make much of a difference? I didn't have an answer yet, but all of us drivers were hoping for the latter, especially Henrique de Matteo well ahead of the rest of the field...the last thing the Brazilian wanted was for something to go wrong. Nothing did go wrong though, because the Brazilian would cross the line first and take the championship lead by two points over Piotr Kaminski. Matti Hamalainen would hold on to finish second despite the fact that his right-side exhaust had completely failed and fallen off the car by the last ten laps or so. Ivan Tripoli, meanwhile, held off a relentless challenge from Jyri Kaasalainen to take the final spot on the podium for Toyota.
The full points-paying results for the 2008 French Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 8 points.
3: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 6 points.
4: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 5 points.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 4 points.
6: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 3 points.
7: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 2 points.
8: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 1 point.
So, I scored a point. Just a point, since I didn't quite manage to catch up to Alvarez in time - I was just over ten seconds behind him at the line - but I did manage to get a result on a day when our car wasn't exactly the best. This brought my total up to 16 points, and with Tommy Koskinen sitting on 8 points, Williams was on a total of 24 points in the championship. Toyota was on 18 points and Red Bull was even closer on 23 points, while Renault sat on 10 points, all courtesy of Felipe Alvarez, but he and the team have been in contention for an awful lot more points than that over the course of the year. So, where we're at is that we are still in fourth place in the championship and our car has been upgraded recently. We have a fast car, a car that feels better than the car we had last year despite the loss in traction control due to the regulations, we have all of these positives, but it also feels like we've been out developed in spite of that. Not only that, but it feels like we had a limited period of time to maximize the amount of points we could score, and we failed to maximize that time. I'm going to dread those incidents I was involved in during the Turkish Grand Prix and then again at Canada, while Tommy is going to dread some of the awful luck, he's had this year. Nevertheless, it's not all bad news though, because we did score a point at a track that wasn't meant to suit us after quite a terrible qualifying session. Furthermore, with cars like the Renault of Filipe Yannick, the Red Bull of Daniel MacGowan, the McLaren of Anthony Harrison, the Toyota of Fabian Schmidt, and the BMW Sauber of Victor Hartmann behind us, we did beat some very competitive cars. This wasn't a great weekend for us and I'm not going to pretend it is, but there are positives even in this.
As for Ferrari, well, this was a weekend where they really seized control of the constructors' championship, with a gap over BMW Sauber in second and McLaren in third, while Henrique de Matteo finds himself in the championship lead, two points ahead of Kaminski, five points ahead of Hamalainen, and a whole ten points ahead of Anthony Harrison. Magny-Cours has always been a good track for Ferrari and this year has proven to be no exception, so I'm sure someone at Ferrari is worried about the news concerning the future of this event. This event itself going ahead was somewhat of a surprise given that Bernie Ecclestone announced after the 2007 French Grand Prix that the race at Magny-Cours was over with, only to come back a few months later, shake the hand of the French President, and announce that the French Grand Prix will continue for another two years. Two years, in my humble opinion, would mean 2008 and 2009, but it seems the powers that be in Formula One beg to differ. There are various rumors in the paddock, such as that F1 is willing to host one more race at Magny-Cours before going elsewhere, that Magny-Cours might take 2009 off to renovate the track and return for 2010, that the 2009 race is going to be held at a new street circuit at Disneyland Paris, that Formula One might return to Rouen for the first time in decades - perhaps at a street circuit around the port or perhaps at a whole new permanent venue - that Renault was proposing a track near their corporate headquarters, or even that some billionaire has already begun construction over a new venue in the outskirts of Bourdeaux. Lots of noise, lots of rumors, lots of potential venues, but very little in terms of actual consensus. I didn't know what the future of the French Grand Prix would be, but with how many possibilities are flying around in the paddock this race weekend, I doubt anyone knows what exactly is going to happen.
Disneyland though? I'm not so sure of that one. Who knows though, after all this controversy leading into the race, I have no idea what the future of this sport is going to look like. Disneyland and Nazis, as likely a future for F1 as anything else at this point.
There is a certain dark room in the Williams factory in Grove. First you walk into a regular, albeit somewhat tight, white-walled office and talk to your engineers and strategist, discussing the last race, last year's event, any changes for this year, how the car has been behaving, all of that. Then the team takes you through another door into the dark room, walking past a row of blue, yellow, and white classic Williams cars from the early 1990s, and at the end of that long room, there is a mockup of a cockpit sat in front of three large screens. I put on my gloves, racing boots, and helmet before climbing into the cockpit, watching as the screens fired up with a virtual depiction of the Silverstone circuit. This was Williams Grand Prix Engineering's simulator, a heavily modified version of a commercial racing simulator loaded with all sorts of confidential team data that no Formula One manufacturer would even think about opening up to the public. Even the classic F1 cars in this room, so many of them still have their true performance figures hidden, especially from the prestigious teams like Ferrari, McLaren, and, at one time, Williams itself.
The three screens in front of me - one directly in front of me, then two next to them on either side to produce a complete frontal field of view - showed the front of my car driving through Woodcote as I completed my out lap. I powered down the main straight towards turn one, Copse corner. A downshift and a lift as I threw the car through the corner, taking a bit of exit kerb before drifting off to the right, positioning the car for the racing line in time for the corners coming next. Those corners were Maggots, Becketts, and Chapel, all of which taken with as much throttle as the car's aerodynamics would allow. Left, back to the right, straight for just half a breath, then a sharper left before touching the brakes just a bit to stabilize the car as I turned to the right, speeding back up as I threw the car back to the left through Chapel and unleashed the full power of the car going down the Hangar straight. The longest flat-out section of the track brought us to one of the few hard braking zones on the track, that being Stowe where I hit the brakes, turned the car to the right, rode the exit kerb, then gently brought the car towards the right side of the track to get on the racing line in time for the next corner: Vale. Braking hard once again, tossing the car to the left, then throwing the car back to the right. It was back up the gears as I swung the car all the way through Club corner, coming back onto a straight.
At one time Silverstone was basically just the perimeter road of a World War II airfield, and the stretch from what is now Club all the way to Luffield and Woodcote was just a long straight, but that is no longer the case. for the purposes of safety, the back straight of this track has been broken up by a number of corners, the first of which was Abbey, where the cars continued on straight for a moment longer before braking, turning to the left, and then back to the right to exit onto what remains of the Farm Straight. That didn't last all that long though, because just a moment later, I passed under the bridge and threw the car to the right as fast as the car would take me, exiting Bridge corner and entering the infield loop. Directly in front was the entry to the support pits, but instead, I turned to the left through Priory, speeding up on the exit and then braking for the hairpin-like corner that was Brooklands, the slowest corner on the track. Brooklands also happened to be where the Grand Prix circuit rejoined with the National Circuit. Next up I threw the car to the right, slow at first through Luffield, but then speeding up all the time, including through Woodcote, finally coming to the line and completing my virtual hot lap of Silverstone.
There was a time in Formula One where teams, especially the big teams, could commit as much on-track testing as they wanted, but now? Now that was rapidly disappearing, as the FIA was trying to cut costs and eliminate some of the advantages that the big teams have over everyone else, and one of those advantages has always been that the big teams can afford to rent out tracks more often and test their cars as much as they want. Hell, Ferrari even has their own test track in the form of the Fiorano Circuit. Williams is in the awkward position where in the 1990s and then even in the BMW era, we were one of those big teams, we had the resources to test relentlessly, develop the car, and constantly introduce new upgrades, but now, Williams is a smaller team, and finances are tight, so we can't compete with the testing that Ferrari, McLaren, BMW Sauber, or even Toyota could do. All of that is to say this: simulators are becoming more and more important in Formula One. So are wind tunnels, computational fluid dynamics, and all the various other ways to learn about your car and develop it, because on track testing and development of the car is being phased out. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the FIA's ambition is to make the scheduled preseason and in-season tests the only opportunities teams have for development outside of the typical practice sessions on race weekends. I understand what the FIA is trying to do, and it probably is necessary for small teams like Force India, the now defunct Super Aguri, and, well, to an extent, also Williams, but I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about it. Development and innovation have always been a part of F1, and even in the course of this seasons, we've seen teams like Red Bull, Ferrari, Renault, Toyota, Williams, and a few others introduce the sharkfin engine covers this year to help guide the air over the rear wing of the car. It doesn't do a huge amount for performance but it's a very visual depiction of the kinds of things that always go on in this sport. That's an integral part and moving away from tangible testing could seriously hurt that.
That's just me though, I'm a racing driver, not a decision maker. Their job is to come up with how to balance sport and entertainment amidst worrying economic signs all around the world, my job is to drive around in circles. The next place where I'll be driving round and round is at Silverstone this weekend for the British Grand Prix, where Ferrari, McLaren, and BMW Sauber will battle it out at the front of the grid, and where the rest of us will be scrounging for whatever points are left. Williams remains at the front of the midfield, but Red Bull is just a point behind us, Toyota has gained on us recently with Ivan Tripoli having been on the podium in Magny-Cours, and even the likes of Renault are not massively behind us. All of these issues threaten to come to a head at the setting of Formula One's very first Grand Prix in the unpredictable scenes of the British summer. Will it be dry? Will it rain? Will there be a mix of conditions that can test even the strongest of drivers? Will Ferrari continue its charge forward these last few races? Will BMW Sauber bounce back after a poor showing at the French Grand Prix? Or will Anthony Harrison of McLaren make up for the lack of a home race by winning the race in the home of his mother and the team he races for.
"Have you heard the news?" Lorenzo asked as the two of us entered the paddock, one of us a short Williams driver, the other one a tall Force India driver.
"The cost cap thing?" I asked, referring to the fact that Max Mosley, while not yet willing to show himself at the track, did release a statement in response to the manufacturers calling him out. Mosley maintains that while there was an orgy, the Nazi thing is a lie perpetrated by people involved in Formula One because of his efforts to make the sport more green and more affordable. The green thing comes in the form of the KERS units - Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems - a device that the FIA is trying to introduce as part of the 2009 regulations, which will not only introduce a hybrid element to Formula One for the first time, but also provide a boost of power for drivers considering that the rev limit will be further reduced from 19,000 to 18,000 rpm as part of the new regulations. Now, some critics might say that this KERS system is nothing more than a very overengineered overtake button, and to an extent, they are right, but there is an impressive scientific factor to it. Something which particularly interests me is a project at Williams Advanced Engineering to build a flywheel-based KERS system. Anyway, the other thing is the cost cap, where, in reference to the tumultuous economy, the FIA is pushing for the introduction of a cost cap for the 2009 season, tightening in 2010, 2011, and so on, so as to increase parity between the teams. This season already we have all the cars running a standardized McLaren-Microsoft ECU, and that seems to be the direction that they really want to go into. Needless to say, this cost cap is not popular with the teams, and it's not popular with the drivers either. That being said, to suggest that the manufacturers banded together to slander Mosley so as to sabotage the cost cap? That's a bit ridiculous, even by F1 standards.
"No, no, no. The Donington thing." Lorenzo Barbaro answered, presumably referring to Donington Park, the race track in Leicestershire that memorably hosted the 1993 European Grand Prix. The site of one of Ayrton Senna's final and most memorable wins.
"Donington? What about it?" I asked, not sure what he was referring to. That might be down to the fact that I've just gotten to the track and haven't had the chance to open my laptop and read up on today's motorsport news yet.
"Bernie wants to move the British Grand Prix to Donington Park for 2010, he says they already have a contract signed." the German-born Uruguayan explained.
"I thought Silverstone was going to be remodeled for 2010." I pointed out, referring to the fact that Silverstone has its own plans to revitalize the venue and bring it into the 21st century. This is something that Donington would need to do as well, after all, it's not like Donington is a state-of-the-art modern racing venue, it's a classic venue that's been around for years, and I very much doubt that F1 is just going to visit the circuit as it currently exists. No, I imagine that the layout would have to change, likely being lengthened somewhat in the process, and the facilities there would have to be brought up to the impressive - and more importantly, expensive - standard presented by places like the Middle Eastern and Asian venues now entering the sport. Of course, the work that would be needed to bring Silverstone or Donington Park up to F1 spec is not nearly as significant as the work they would need at a place like Brands Hatch, for instance, but it would still be quite a bit of work. That being said, I have to imagine it would be easier to work from the existing design of Silverstone rather than effectively starting fresh in the Midlands.
"That was the plan, but who knows if the BRDC will have the money to do it now." Lorenzo shrugged. The BRDC was the British Racing Drivers' Club, a respected institution, which began as an invitation-only club for the best of the best of British drivers but has since diversified their interests. Nowadays they give support to young British drivers and are also involved in the ownership and promotion of circuits throughout the United Kingdom, most prominently via the ownership of Silverstone. The BRDC was planning on an extensive remodeling of Silverstone in time for the sixtieth anniversary of the first Formula One event at the British Grand Prix in 1950. That seems like the type of thing that would fit perfectly into the whole Vision60 plan that the FIA and FOM have for 2010, but it seems they beg to differ. As much as I love this sport and wouldn't trade this job away from anything, sometimes, I can't help but hate the way that this sport is run. The FIA President is in the middle of this giant controversy over a fascist orgy and what, they decide to start a fight against one of F1's marque events? That doesn't make sense to me. I understand the logic and the desire behind expanding Formula One across the world, but that expansion should not come at the expense of the venues that are at the heart and soul of Formula One. That means tracks like Silverstone, like Monza, like Spa, like Interlagos in Brazil.
"Great...what else is new?" I asked with a sigh, wondering what else was going on in this lovely sport of ours.
"The rumor is that MacGowan is going to announce his retirement at the press conference, this is gonna be his last season." Lorenzo shared. I've heard this rumor as well, but on the other hand, I've heard these kinds of rumors for a little while - and not just about MacGowan either, but also guys like Rudolfo Goncalves and some of the other older guys in the paddock - since with all these young guns coming up in GP2 and GP2 Asia, people want to see them in Formula One seats, and the most obvious targets are the drivers that are either struggling or coming near the end of their careers anyway. We don't really have many bad drivers in F1 anymore - everyone is at least somewhat competitive given the circumstances - so the brunt goes on the older guys. The fact that James Buxton and Martin Weaver - who aren't exactly rookies either, mind you - are doing a pretty good job outscoring their teammates at the moment only strengthens the pressure to get these guys to move aside. Of course, it is somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you keep saying that an older driver is going to retire, eventually you'll be right.
"Are they moving Renner up to Red Bull then?" I asked, wondering if Red Bull was going to handle this as an internal matter, or if a seat has suddenly opened up. A move to Red Bull really wouldn't be anything more than a sideways move for me, but Red Bull is also a sponsorship machine on their own, so at very least it could be an avenue to escape Kazakhoil. Of course, with Renner being such a highly rated prospect and already a part of the Red Bull family, it's going to be difficult to try and beat him out, especially because, quite frankly, Renner can just point to the 2005 Formula 3 Euro series rookie of the year race and say he's better than me. I can hope that most modern F1 teams will look at what's going on now, rather than an outdated statistic, but when there really isn't much in terms of a direct comparison between two drivers like us, and Red Bull is already biased towards Maximilian, that stat isn't exactly going to help. Personally, I do believe that I'm a better driver now, and I believe both Renner and I have improved leaps and bounds since 2005, so even if I'm not better after all, that comparison still isn't all that telling. I want to stay at Williams and I want to be here for at least a few more years, but I also want to move away from Kazakhoil as a sponsor, and Red Bull has made some interesting hires in the last few years - aerodynamicist Adrian Newey chief among them - so the energy drink company is at least worthy of a thought, if nothing else.
"I'd assume so, but I haven't heard anything yet. Right now all I'm hearing about is Daniel retiring." Lorenzo shared, revealing that the rumor mill hadn't quite gotten around to who would be replacing MacGowan, simply that he would be gone. Well, as the weekend continued, Daniel MacGowan would confirm that he is retiring at the end of this season, complete with a subtle jab at the FIA by mentioning the fact that, as an accomplished British driver, the Scotsman is also a member of the BRDC. So, a seat open at Red Bull for the time being, but even if it is filled by Renner, that just opens up a seat at Toro Rosso. These may not be openings that particularly interest me, at least not yet, but they do signal the beginning of F1's silly season, and as a driver out of contract at the end of the year, I'm sure I'll find myself in the middle of some of the very kinds of rumors that Lorenzo and I were just talking about.
The British Grand Prix is many things, and one of those things is that it is a race during the British summer. The characteristic rain had been falling all morning, covering the track in standing water...and this comes after all the practice sessions and qualifying had been run in the dry. So, we were going to have to face wet weather conditions for the first time this weekend at the beginning of the race, and unlike the last few laps at Magny-Cours, there was no chance of braving it on the dry tyres. The rain was easing a little bit though, so maybe by the time we got to the first stops, we could at least be switching to the intermediate wet tyres rather than the extreme wets. We would need something like that to help our chances, because our cars had no pace in qualifying, with me qualifying in fifteenth and Tommy Koskinen down in eighteenth. Seeing he had nothing to lose, Tommy took a strategic penalty, adjusted the setup for wet weather, and opted to start from the pitlane - he also figured he had a better chance of surviving the opening lap that way - but I was starting from the grid. I guess the team felt that if we split the strategies, the chances of at least one of us getting this right would be higher. The prevailing opinion was that we needed to do something.
Martin Weaver was lining up in second, behind only first-time polesitter Jyri Kaasalainen. We could hope that the Australian would lose a couple of positions to the fast cars, but the point remains, the lead Red Bull driver is on course for a big points finish. As are Felipe Alvarez and Filipe Yannick, the two Renaults lining up in sixth and seventh, and even Maximilian Renner in eighth. Toro Rosso hasn't been a problem for us yet, but if we keep performing the way we've been performing the last few weeks, we might be in danger of falling behind the likes of Red Bull, Toyota, and Renault, and instead have to look over our shoulder at the likes of Scuderia Toro Rosso and Honda. The one saving grace is that Toyota only qualified a couple places ahead of us, with Ivan Tripoli just ahead of me in fourteenth and Fabian Schmidt only managing twelfth in the sister car. Toyota may be sponsored by The Dark Knight this week, but Tripoli's Batman cape only seems to be weighing him down. Yes, Ivan Tripoli was on the grid in a Batman cape as part of the movie promotion, that is great, but with a wet weather race coming up and the odds against me, my attention was elsewhere. So was Tripoli's too, because when it was time for the formation lap, the cape came off and the helmet came on.
Twenty Formula One cars, a wet track, and sixty laps about to begin. All the controversy and movie tie-ins and silly season drama faded away as we simply became drivers, focused entirely on keeping the car between the white lines, which was a challenge even on the formation lap. As we came back on the grid a moment later, we all knew it would only get harder as we all got up to speed, the spray came off the rear tyres, and every move we made suddenly mattered. Five...four...three...two...one...go. Twenty cars took off into Copse, many of us struggling to get off the grid, but some, like Anthony Harrison, having a cracking start despite the conditions. Harrison took the lead into turn one but with a deep line, Jyri Kaasalainen was able to get the over-under on his teammate. The McLarens touched wheels, the Finn asserted his dominance, and Harrison tucked in behind him as the cars dove through Maggots and Becketts, speeds a lot lower than they were in the simulator or on track earlier this week. The field managed to negotiate the tricky corners but, on the exit of Chapel coming onto the Hangar straight, Weaver lost grip and spun out. The Red Bull was able to continue, but he went right to the back of the field, a lucky boon for us, but I couldn't exactly celebrate, because I was focused on not repeating his mistake.
Others weren't so fortunate, because later on the first lap, Henrique de Matteo would spin as well going into Bridge, falling to nineteenth, ahead of only his fellow spinner Weaver. These were real solid drivers, veterans of the sport by this point, and if they could spin in these conditions, everyone could, so I wasn't exactly being bold on these first few laps. Right now, i was focused on survival, whatever happens next and wherever I end up in the field will be sorted out later, hopefully once conditions start looking better. There did seem to be some merit to this approach, because I would gain another two places pretty soon, as Daniel MacGowan and Maximilian Renner would touch not long after that, both ending up beached in the gravel trap. I'm sure this isn't what MacGowan meant when he announced his retirement, and I'm sure Maximilian Renner doesn't feel great about being involved in another Red Bull family collision after having accidentally taken out Martin Weaver under safety car at the 2007 Japanese Grand Prix last year. That was a wet race as well, come to think of it.
"Alvarez is the fastest car on track right now. He has set consecutive fast laps. He is up to fourth, up to fourth." Malmedy reported over the radio, effectively delivering the bad news line for me as I started getting up to speed. I was going a bit faster now and getting more comfortable with the conditions, even closing in on the Toyotas ahead, but I'm not sure how much good it was doing when the Renault is doing that much better than me up the field. At the same time, I did get to feel a bit more secure in myself when Henrique de Matteo spun yet again in these conditions, dropping behind even Weaver, which meant the Brazilian's chances of catching up to me and passing me were now virtually gone. At the same time, coming out of Chapel, after having spent the corner taking alternate lines trying to get a peak over the spray of Tripoli ahead, I tucked back into the slipstream and gained and gained on the car ahead. We had the same engines, the same gearboxes, and a similar level of downforce and thus drag, therefore, the experienced Italian admitted defeat and let me pass into Stowe. Ivan knew as well as I did that these conditions were difficult and trying to press the battle too hard might result in two cars out of the race. Better to lose a place for now and wait for later.
"Conditions are getting a bit better, still wet but it's good in clean air." I reported to my pit crew as finally broke into clean air. The rain was letting off just a bit and the cars were displacing a lot of water, so while it wasn't a dry line quite yet, it was a noticeable improvement. That just meant things were tricky in another way though, because this is the kind of thing that would give drivers false confidence and lead to more spins and more incidents. In any case, I would take off after Schmidt with Tripoli just behind me, while the leaders crossed the line to start lap six. Shortly into the lap, Harrison would mirror my move on Tripoli by passing Kaasalainen into Stowe and taking the lead. Anthony Harrison would disappear into the distance, gaining a six second gap by lap ten when Kaasalainen would spin - a regular occurrence today, it seems - which would allow Matti Hamalainen to take second. Two of the three title protagonists of last season were now competing for the race win, and Hamalainen was closing in on the American with an English-mother. By the time they came into the pits, the Finn was just a second behind the driver who replaced him at McLaren, but it was the pitstops on lap twenty-one that would shake things up yet again. Ferrari got Hamalainen out first because they only topped him up on fuel, expecting conditions to continue getting better, hoping he would be able to pit again soon and go straight to the dries even. McLaren had other ideas, putting Harrison out on a fresh set of intermediate wets and a larger load of fuel, letting him hunt down the Ferrari driver. Knowing I would have to pit soon and keeping my recent feedback in mind, I asked my pit crew the question "Things are still feeling good right now, what are we gonna do?"
"Negative Tamara, negative. Radar shows more rain on the way. Pit stops within five laps, five laps." Malmedy responded, filling me in on the fact that Ferrari apparently had it wrong, things weren't going to get better - well they might, but they won't stay that way - and we'll be pitting for new intermediates as well soon enough. The team would call me in on lap twenty-five and do the switch then, filling the car up, putting new tyres on the car, and setting me up for the second stint of the race. I exited the pits and worked on getting up to speed and maybe gaining a few positions over the next few laps, while, at the same time, further up the grid, Kaasalainen and Hartmann were closing in on Hamalainen who couldn't get the worn intermediate tyres working in these conditions. Kaasalainen would send it up the inside of his countryman, while Hartmann in the BMW Sauber would curve around the outside of them both to take second, overtaking them both in one corner. Matti would also get passed by Piotr Kaminski and Filipe Yannick before he finally pitted on lap thirty, switching onto the fresh tyres he should have been all the time.
"Rain is getting heavier now." I reported as things were getting harder. This was about the time that Kaasalainen was overtaken by Kaminski and then dove into the pits, coming out on fresh intermediates even as the conditions seemed to be trending towards the extreme wits. Kaminski slipped off the track and recovered, but Schmidt, who also slipped off the track, lost two positions as I passed him, and Tripoli passed him just behind me. To illustrate the fact that things were getting worse, Filipe Yannick would spin out and beach his car in the gravel. Harrison, Matteo, and Kaminski yet again would go off track, but these excursions would be a lot more like what happened to Piotr earlier this stint than what happened Yannick.
"The Hondas are double-stacking for extreme wet tyres, do you want to stop?" Malmedy asked over the radio and, as if on cue, I experienced a tank slapper through Becketts and had to catch the car to avoid a spin. I managed to catch the car, but this compromised my exit into Chapel and the Hangar straight, so I kept my car in the middle of the track in an attempt to keep Tripoli behind me, to no avail. The Toyota overtook me into Stowe and gained the position.
"Yes! Box box, we need wets!" I practically yelled into the radio as I held the car going into Vale. I negotiated the chicane and managed to get the power down through Club despite the rain and got a moment to relax down the first element of the farm straight. I had a rough line through Abbey as I aquaplaned deeper into the corner than I had hoped, but I recovered and kept it in between the white lines, negotiated the corner, and got onto the second bit of the farm straight. Another moment of relaxation before a big lift through Bridge, probably bigger than I had intended - and I could see Tripoli disappearing into the distance ahead of me - but necessary with the way that the car was feeling right now. These brutal conditions continued through Priory, Brooklands, and Luffield before I finally got the car over to the right and dipped into the pitlane before going through Woodcote. On the limiter and in a controlled pitlane, I felt a weight get lifted off my shoulders as I realized I would be leaving the pitlane on the right tyres for these conditions, thus having an easier time. At least as easy a time as I can get in the rain in a Formula One car.
I switched onto the extreme wets and exited the pits on the start of lap thirty-eight. Far, far, far away up the road, Harrison had taken a stop as well for new tyres, while Hamalainen had a harmless spin on the same lap. I would soon realize that Harrison and second place Hartmann were both on new intermediate tyres because their radar suggested the rain was going to ease - something not necessarily backed on our radar - and for a moment, I started to doubt my strategy. Then, on lap thirty-nine, Hamalainen spun for the second time in consecutive laps while Rudolfo Goncalves was cutting through the field, nine seconds faster than anyone else on track that lap. Rudolfo was overtaking Kaasalainen and Alvarez to go up into fourth place, so these tyres must be doing something right, so maybe this strategy will work after all. As we entered the last twenty laps, there was yet another incident, with my teammate Tommy Koskinen running into the back of Fabian Schmidt and damaging his front wing in the process, meaning my teammate would have to pit again, putting himself out of contention. That wasn't the only white and dark blue car out of contention, because Piotr Kaminski would spin out and beach himself in the gravel trap...a far line from his Canadian heroics a few weeks ago.
"The rain is easing off, how are things?" Malmedy asked as I got blue flags and allowed Harrison to lap me on the Farm Straight. The American was having an utterly dominant race at this point, gapping second-place Hartmann more and more with each passing lap. The only car that was a conceivable threat to him was Rudolfo Goncalves, and the Brazilian had an awful lot of ground to cover, not to mention that we were now speculating that he was so fast because he was low on fuel, needing to pit for fuel sooner rather than later.
"The track is completely soaked. These tyres are fine for now." I responded, satisfied with the wet tyres for the time being. So was Rudolfo Goncalves, because needing to stop again or not, the veteran was on a charge, overtaking Hartmann and instantly building a gap over him as well. By the time Rudolfo would pit with just over ten laps to go, he had a twenty second gap over the German in the BMW Sauber. He would lose second to him in the stop, but it was still an utterly devastating drive from him, and if Honda was capable of this kind of pace...we might be in trouble here. Elsewhere on track, Kaasalainen and Alvarez were fighting for fourth place while Henrique de Matteo spun yet again in Woodcote. The Brazilian had become the championship leader after the race in Magny-Cours, a race that had ended in wet conditions, but today? Today Henrique was having an awful race in wet conditions. Perhaps mirroring the beginning of the race when Weaver spun and then Matteo spun, shortly after Matteo's latest spin, Martin Weaver would spin as well.
It became a trifecta of spins as Jyri Kaasalainen spun as well on the next lap, elevating Felipe Alvarez into fourth and Matti Hamalainen into fifth. The younger Finn recovered fairly gracefully, but he was not happy about losing two positions in the space of one corner, so he quickly set about trying to regain those places. As for Hamalainen, he was just happy to be putting himself back into contention going into the final few laps. Matti Hamalainen would do himself even better by overtaking Alvarez for fourth place, and Jyri Kaasalainen would transfer some of the pain over to the Spaniard by overtaking him for fifth. Kaasalainen lost two places at the beginning of all this, while Alvarez was losing two places to end all of this. Elsewhere on the grid, Henrique de Matteo would spin a fifth time for good measure, Anthony Harrison was crossing the line to win the British Grand Prix by sixty-eight seconds, and, in a rather anonymous eighth place, I was still running on those wet tyres from earlier. It was actually a bit of an interesting thing where, as the track continued to dry, the wets were getting shaved down so much they were damn near slicks.
The points-paying results of the 2008 British Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
2: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 8 points.
3: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 6 points.
4: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 5 points.
5: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 4 points.
6: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 3 points.
7: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 2 points.
8: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 1 point.
It was almost like a race from the 1960s because the leader won by over a minute and only three cars finished on the lead lap. Tommy Koskinen, despite all his difficulties, finished in ninth, Martin Weaver was in tenth after his devastating first lap spin, Maximilien Lecroix was in eleventh. Fabian Schmidt was down in twelfth and Henrique de Matteo was in thirteenth, the last car running at the finish, albeit two laps down and probably wishing his day had ended sooner. The end result of this was that Anthony Harrison, Henrique de Matteo, and Matias Hamalainen were all tied on 48 points at the top of the standings, while Piotr Kaminski was just two points behind on 46, meaning that the championship was still wide open. Wide open it may be, but after such a dominant performance at the closest thing the American has to a home race this season, Harrison definitely has the momentum behind him.
As for Williams, well...believe it or not we actually gained a point over Red Bull today. 25 points to Red Bull's 23, Toyota's 20, Renault's 13, Honda's on 13 as well, Toro Rosso is on 7, and Force India has yet to score. With Ferrari on 96 points, BMW Sauber on 81 points, and McLaren on 72 points, fourth place was the best the rest of us could hope for, and the way this season was shaping up, almost all of us had a chance at it. Williams was in the driver's seat at the moment, but our rate of scoring points has slowed an awful lot lately, even if I have scored two points across the last two races. Red Bull was chasing close but had a bad British Grand Prix, Toyota instead closed up to be right on the battle for fourth, while Renault and Honda sat just seven points behind Toyota, meaning a few good rounds could put them right back into contention. Especially if Rudolfo Goncalves randomly decides to score a podium again. So yeah, there we are, nine races down, nine races to go. The summer break is traditionally thought of as the midpoint of the season, and that makes sense, as it provides a month off between the regular part of the season, and the part of the season when things really intensify in the race for the title. The August break is, however, offset to the latter half of the season, so the true midpoint of the season is actually the British Grand Prix here. This is in spite of the fact that we have Hockenheim and Hungary before the summer break, and then twenty-one days off before the season starts again with the revitalized European Grand Prix at the Valencia Street Circuit. After that, it's the traditional Spa and Monza double-header before the final leg of the season: three races in Asia, including the new Singapore Grand Prix, and then the grand finale of the 2008 Formula One World Championship at Interlagos in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Long after the fans had cleared up and the celebrations died down, after most of the trucks had left Silverstone, I finally got released from a long debrief with the team. The gist of it boiling down to the fact that Sir Frank Williams wants to know why Toyota has scored so many more points than we have as of late, the founder and namesake of this team making it clear that we have the same engines, the same gearboxes as these rich Japanese upstarts with no history in Formula One. Yes, Toyota has the money but we have the heart and soul, the experience, and the character, so why aren't we beating Toyota as handily as we were at the beginning of the season? I understand the sentiment of it, believe me, and I wish we were more competitive right now, but I also know it's not that simple. Sir Frank knows that too, he's just frustrated to be leaving his home race with just one point. This used to be a race that Frank would be celebrating just as late as now, likely even later, because his team took a win or even a one-two finish, but Williams isn't quite that team anymore, and Formula One isn't quite the sport that it was back then. So, that's how I found myself in a soggy Silverstone after dark, looking out at the track. It wasn't raining anymore, but the sun was long gone, so the puddles weren't exactly evaporating in a hurry.
My flight home wasn't until tomorrow afternoon and my trailer was already gone, so I'd need to head back to my hotel for another night, but I didn't quite feel like going quite yet. Fortunately for me, as I looked over at the grandstands down at the exit of Luffield, I saw I wasn't the only one still at the track. I crossed over, climbed through a gap in the fence, and then walked up the grandstand, finding Anthony Harrison sitting in the top row beneath the awning, looking out at the circuit, likely reminiscing about his utterly dominant victory, a victory that has put him in control of the championship.
"No trophy?" I asked, making my presence known. The McLaren driver seemed a bit startled at first, but quickly recovered and smiled once he saw it was me.
"Nah, Mr. Dennis gets all the trophies. The best I can hope for is a copy." Anthony answered while scooching over, offering me a seat next to him. I gave it a quick look just to make sure it was dry before taking a seat, kicking my feet up on the back of the seat in front of me.
"It's the same at Williams, I had to get a copy made of my third-place trophy from Montreal last year." I shared, having done the same for my later Nürburgring trophy as well. Unfortunately, I haven't quite had the opportunity to do so again, since this season has been a bit of a dry spell for me thus far - I have scored some good points finishes, particularly in the first half of the year, but not a podium yet, no silverware for me - and figuring out how to get a copy of your Formula One trophy made is a good problem to have. One I wish I had, in fact.
"Yeah...that was a good weekend, wasn't it? For both of us. You know, I always dreamed of winning my first race, but I never thought it would happen this soon. I thought I would have to work my ass off for it, starting at a backmarker team and working my way up, scoring podiums, impressing people, wheeling and dealing to get contracts, but instead, I signed with McLaren, and I got seven wins to my name now. Seven wins. I never thought I'd see the day." Anthony revealed, sharing the kind of thing I assume he kept only to himself or those really close to him, at least until now "My dad was an army mechanic, he worked on trucks at some airbase out here, not all that different from what this place must have been like back in the war, that's where he meant my mom, you know? A black American college dropout with diesel on his hands and a white Englishwoman shunned by her own family...who knew they'd make a Grand Prix winner?"
"You were always the quickest though, even back in Formula 3 all those years ago." I responded, remembering that 2005 year where me, Anthony, Lorenzo, Maximilian, and so many other top drivers raced against each other for the first time.
"God...can you believe that was three years ago? You were just a kid!" he laughed, reminiscing, and surprising me a little bit. I didn't quite realize he remembered me all the way back from when I was a series rookie driving for Signatech while he was dominating the series in his ART.
"So were you." I shot back, pointing out that he wasn't all that much older than me. I knew I was young, a year younger than Renner even, but considering that Anthony was only twenty years old in 2005...which is the same age I am now, come to think of it.
"Yeah...just a bunch of dumb kids in F3, I was the black yank they all wanted to beat, and you were that girl from the weird country they all thought they could ignore. But look at us now, eh? We've made it, we're in F1. We're at the top." Anthony pointed out, making all these kinds of grand gestures as he spoke, showing just how big and important we've become in the last year. He's a championship contender for the second year in a row, and while I don't quite have the machinery to compete at that level, I scored 18 points last year and I'm already on 17 points this season, so I'm on track to comfortably beat that this season.
"Yeah...that was a great win, Anthony. You obliterated everyone." I admitted, remembering that moment when he lapped me with a big chunk of the race remaining, and just how quickly his car disappeared into the distance once he was ahead of me.
"Eh, I can't think that way." he shrugged it off.
"What do you mean?" I asked, looking over to him, confused.
"We're all tied on points basically, me, the Ferraris, Kaminski too basically, I can't start thinking I'm hot shit or else I'm gonna lose it." Anthony revealed, sharing his mindset when it came to all this. It was a decent mindset to have, after all, with how chaotic this season has been so far, things could change in the championship battle in the blink of an eye. I mean, look at Matti Hamalainen's up and down season so far.
"I guess not. I believe in you though." I added. patting Anthony on the back and meaning what I said.
"Thanks Tamara," he said putting his arm around me, giving me a platonic hug. The two of us just sat there for a while, two young Formula One drivers at different places on the grid, but both of us united in our shared experiences, our shared history.
Notes:
So, I had some room left after the races, so I added this little bonding scene.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 16: Legend of the Two Rings
Notes:
Hello everyone, getting into the last few chapters of act one. I considered titling this chapter Tamara Shchegolyayeva and the Legend of the Two Rings as a joke but that was a bit much.
Oh, and just in case I didn't make the joke clear enough in the text, the German Grand Prix was at the Hockenheimring and the Hungarian Grand Prix has always been at the Hungaroring. They're rings, you see? Two rings. Get it? Hehe...he...he...
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter XVI.
Legend of the Two Rings.
"Okay...okay wow, okay. They like me here." said Tommy Koskinen as he was presented with more and more things to sign by the fans, mainly caps, sometimes race programs, sometimes specific pieces of merchandise, and every once in awhile a scale model car. Tommy was a reasonably popular driver; everyone could tell that he was a young kid with a lot of potential and his father having been a champion certainly didn't hurt, but he was often overshadowed by me. The fact of the matter is that there really isn't much all that attractive or enticing about Williams compared to the likes of Ferrari or McLaren-Mercedes or BMW - the latter especially because we're in Germany this time out - so when you have the first female driver in decades racing for the team, and when that driver has been fairly successful in Formula One given the circumstances, a lot of the attention tends to go on me. I've never quite been sure how to deal with it, I mean, I'm pretty much an introvert by nature and I'm pretty solidly a middle of the pack driver, maybe a bit worse than that lately to be honest, so I'm not sure how to react to the fact that I'm popular. I've had people come up to me asking me to sign Ferrari caps before, something which has nothing to do with me or my team, just because they support Ferrari as a team but also support me. Maybe it's because they've waited for so long that they're relieved to see a female driver already, maybe they see me as some sort of novelty, I don't know. I do know this though: it definitely doesn't have much to do with my country or my name or anything like that. In fact, I'd say those things are points against me, if anything. For those few who are deep lifelong fans of Williams - and I say this as someone who is a fan of the team and wants to see them become legends again - Tommy Koskinen fits the narrative better. He's the son of a champion, he's been with the team since 2006, and he's not a pay driver no matter how you spin it. That doesn't seem to make much of a difference at most places though, but he is popular here, though I suspect that has more to do with the fact that he has a German mother and was born in Germany.
"Maybe you should switch flags for the weekend. Be a German." I joked to my teammate and heard a few fans in front of me cheer at the suggestion. At the same time, there was a fan walking around with an event poster for the race and trying to get as many drivers as possible to sign it. I found a space in the corner and gave my piece, scribbling in my first name and then letting the cursive turn most of my last name into more of a suggestion than an accurate depiction of the name. I know I have a long, complicated last name and the last thing I want to do is take up too much space with my consonant stew. The fans didn't seem to be complaining though, because they seemed rather enthusiastic. I will say the number of fans in Germany won't even be as high as the early 2000s when Wilhelm Ziegler and Ferrari were at their peak and the German fans could fill both Hockenheim and the Nürburgring to support their hero. That level of support was fading before Ziegler even retired, and when he did in 2006, that led to there only being one German race in 2007. The 2007 European Grand Prix, the site of my last podium in Formula One, which couldn't use the name German Grand Prix due to a contract dispute between the two venues. This year though, we're back in Hockenheim and the event is called the German Grand Prix once again. The two events will continue to alternate for the foreseeable future, but with the European Grand Prix now at the Valencia Street Circuit with an August date, Hockenheim is going to have to share the German Grand Prix name.
Of course, should Maximilian Renner be able to reinvigorate the German fanbase, maybe we can have a return of the Luxembourg Grand Prix from the 1990s. I always got a kick out of those events named for nearby countries since their actual country already hosted a race, such as the aforementioned Luxembourg Grand Prix and the San Marino Grand Prix long held at Imola. There was also a Swiss Grand Prix at Dijon in 1982, which is particularly egregious, since Switzerland had and, indeed, still does, have a ban on professional motorsport dating back to the 1955 Le Mans disaster. To name a couple more, you had the Pacific Grand Prix in Japan in the mid-1990s, various races named for cities in the United States, such as the Detroit Grand Prix and the Dallas Grand Prix, which were actually back-to-back in 1984 in a year that had no United States Grand Prix, and then there was the Caesar's Palace Grand Prix, a race named for a casino. Formula One trivia aside, Germany is a proud and passionate fanbase, even if they can't support two races anymore. Not every country can, even if the fans are super passionate. I mean Finland has produced three world champions already and they have never had a Grand Prix, let alone two. Not to mention the fact that the country I was born in is likely to never have a race.
"And in Monaco, you can be Monegasque." Tommy teased back.
"So can you." I teased, signing a BMW Williams cap from a few years ago for a fan. I suppose you can't expect every fan to be buying new merchandise every year, but when it comes to something as important as an engine manufacturer which has now broken away from the team and bought its own team, maybe that should be avoided. Of course, I don't have a problem with signing what the fans have, but I know there is probably some PR note saying that we're technically not supposed to sign merchandise containing former partners. Just like you can't expect the fans to buy new merchandise every year, you have to expect the team to try and sell the newest and most expensive stuff they have in spite of that. To be fair, I was seeing a good amount of current stuff, likely even stuff that was bought at the event itself for the sole purpose of getting it signed by the drivers. I wasn't asking questions though; I was just trying to sign as much stuff as I could for as many people as I could, hoping that it was going to people that actually wanted it, rather than just people trying to sell my autograph on the internet. So yeah, two Formula One drivers bantering to each other as we catered to the people out here to support us, even at the very beginning of this Hockenheimring race weekend.
"Can you sign this too?" a fan asked, just after I signed a picture of the car reveal from the beginning of the season for him. I was about to go ahead and just sign it regardless, when I saw what it was.
"Why do you want me to sign a picture of Harrison?" I asked, confused.
"Well, you know..." he started.
"Know what?" I asked, legitimately not understanding where he was going with this. I would maybe understand it if it was my teammate or rival or something, but it's a driver I have barely ever encountered on-track and don't have much public interaction with him off-track. Sure, we've had some good interactions lately off the track, but those have largely been private events.
"Tamara! Come on, we need to go!" Tommy shouted over his shoulder, getting my attention as we left the fan area and started heading over to the garages for a briefing before the race. So, I had to disengage from the fans and left without signing the picture of Anthony, but I kept wondering what exactly was going on. It would almost be better if it was a driver, I have nothing to do with at all, but because it's a driver I consider a friend, and because our friendship has mostly happened on the private side of things, something fishy seems like it's going on here.
The next weird thing to happen came during the pre-race press conference on Thursday. You had the top three from last year's race in Germany, meaning Felipe Alvarez, Henrique de Matteo, and myself, then you had Victor Hartmann lifting the torch for Germany now that Wilhelm and his brother Roland were both gone. In case Hartmann didn't work out, Maximilian Renner was here as well to win over the German crowd, and finally, after a sixty-eight second win, the largest winning margin F1 has seen in decades, of course Anthony Harrison was at the press conference, taking center stage at the front of the bottom row. They had me sat in the upper right seat, behind Renner and next to Alvarez. The first few questions were pretty standard stuff: Anthony and Henrique were asked about the state of the title fight, Victor and Max were asked if their cars could be competitive at their home circuit, and Anthony was asked about his chances of a repeat performance, which he jokingly responded to by asking the reporter what the weather forecast was. Things got a bit weird when someone decided to ask Alvarez about the crash we had back in Canada.
"A few races ago, Felipe, you and Tamara Shchegolyayeva had an incident at the Canadian Grand Prix, taking you both out of a podium fight. You both have finished relatively close to each other in the last few races and there's another overtaking zone in a hairpin on this track, so, considering it's possible you two might find yourselves in that position again, how do you think you will approach it?" the question asked. It rubbed me as a reporter who saw that the two of us had an incident in the last few races and was trying to drum up some drama where there was none, but I'll bite my tongue until I see what Felipe has to say about that.
"Well Renault is a strong team, and we won the championship together not that long ago, so the goal for us is not to be fighting with Williams, it's to be fighting at the front. If we can't do that this weekend and we are fighting the Williams, well, some drivers might have some biases or opinions, but I don't. I will drive the same way as before, the same way I always have, and if there is a crash, well, I don't think it will be my fault." Felipe replied, giving a bit of a bored answer, but managing to slip some snubs in there regardless of that, and a few of those snubs I didn't even quite understand. It was clear that Felipe was trying to saw something about me, or at least imply I'm some sort of way, but beyond that, I don't know what he's getting at.
"And you, Tamara?" the question asker turned to me.
"Well, in Canada the track surface was breaking away at the apex and that caused a car - Felipe's car - to lose traction and crash into mine. From what I can tell, the surface at the hairpin here is good so that shouldn't happen. Nevertheless, I know Felipe is a champion, he's a strong driver, and he's uncompromising, so I race him in a certain way, and I take care of certain things, so if there is a crash this weekend, maybe ask the driver who is not thinking of such things." I responded, giving my own little jabs in return. I respected Felipe, I thought he was one of the most naturally talented racers in the whole grid, but if he is going to accuse me of having some sort of biases going into that crash or that I was more at fault - which is frankly ridiculous, mind you - I'm going to hit back with some remarks of my own. I didn't dare look to my right and Felipe didn't dare look to his left, so neither of us knew what the other thought about all this, but both of us knew that, if there wasn't drama before, there's at least some tension now. The fact of the matter is that Felipe's excuse for the accident was that the track was breaking away under him and he lost grip, effectively barging into me...I don't see how that could possibly be my fault other than the fact that Felipe thinks he would have been fine if there wasn't a car on the outside. Basically, what he's saying is that "how dare you try and overtake me?" by blaming me for things going wrong, while I'm just trying to defend myself. In any case, after those rather icy comments from the both of us, the media turned their attention elsewhere, seeds of discord firmly planted.
After the press conference, we all cleared away from the cameras and the media attention, and I eventually confronted the Spanish champion near the Renault trailers. I realized that Alvarez was already a two-time world champion when I made my F1 debut, I realized that he won multiple races last year and was within a few points of becoming champion for the third consecutive time, and I realized that he was always going to make those kinds of snide comments. Felipe Alvarez is an incredibly talented driver, one of the best ever, especially when it comes to racing against other drivers - his duels with Wilhelm Ziegler at San Marino being the top example - so maybe he's earned the right to be a bit of an asshole, but the fact of the matter is that Felipe is an asshole. Alvarez is with Renault right now, but everyone knows that it is a stopgap until a more competitive seat becomes available, so he left the team that gave him two championships to go to McLaren, now that team took him back, and everyone knows that he is trying to leave as soon as possible. Loyalty means nothing to him, his three-year contract or whatever exactly it is with Renault, means nothing to him, and based on how things went in 2007, the well-being of his current team means nothing to him. I know all of this, I know a lot of people have gotten burned by him before, but I also know in spite of all of that he's a legend on this grid and has plenty of friends who only ever see the good side of Felipe Alvarez. So, I want to know why I've gotten on the bad side of the man who is simultaneously one of F1's greatest drivers and biggest assholes.
"Hey! What the hell was that?" I demanded.
"You heard what I said." he responded, drinking from a water bottle, still walking towards his trailer, pretending to ignore me.
"You crashed into me and now you're saying it was because I have some sort of bias?" I didn't let up though, wanting an answer from the Spaniard.
"No," he finally turned me "I said I don't have any biases; I will drive how I always drive, that is all. I don't care who you are, I don't care who your boyfriend is, I drive against you the same way, I drive against Anthony the same way, if we crash again, it's because you made a problem."
"Boyfriend?" I asked, confused. There was an awful lot in that comment to unpack, including the suggestion that I should have to adjust to how he's going to drive, or it will be my fault, which is basically what I expected the crux of his egotistical argument to be, but before he even got to that I got blindsided by the suggestion that I was dating another driver, presumably Anthony Harrison based on what he said. When this combined with the image I was asked to sign the other day, I realized what was going on here: someone, somewhere, has started a rumor that Anthony and I are together, and that rumor has spread throughout the paddock. Now, Anthony is straight, I am presumed straight by everyone in the F1 paddock, and we're relatively close in age, so with the two of us having gotten close recently, I can see how that could be misinterpreted as something romantic, but again, the problem is all of that has been happening in the private realm of things. It's not like all of this was going on with TV cameras and microphones on us, so where is the rumor coming from? It can't be Anthony, can it?
Unfortunate complications and unsolved mysteries aside, there was still a race going on. The 2008 German Grand Prix, my first trip to the Hockenheimring as a Formula One driver given the track last hosted a race in 2006, and yet another event that Max Mosley was absent from. The FIA President survived his vote of confidence, despite the fact that Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, and a few other countries expressed their disappointment with the decision. ADAC, the governing body for German motorsport, even made a press release suggesting that they will be evaluating their membership of the FIA in the future. So yeah, while I'm obviously focused on the dumpster fire going on in my personal life at the moment, there is a larger dumpster fire going on in the sport as a whole. As yet another unfortunate note, our pace as of late was a bit of dumpster fire as well, with Tommy Koskinen starting in thirteenth and myself down in sixteenth. In comparison, both Red Bulls and the Toro Rosso of Maximilian Renner were in the top ten, the Toyotas of Ivan Tripoli and Fabian Schmidt were fourth and eleventh, respectively, and even Felipe Alvarez was up in fifth. I guess he'll be competing up front after all, but his teammate, Filipe Yannick, was lining up in seventeenth, one place behind me, so I at least had a little bit of satisfaction from that. Given what I said though, Felipe is probably glad that his teammate is no competition for him though.
Starting down here, our primary competition is probably going to be the Hondas, since James Buxton was lining up on the same row as Tommy Koskinen thanks to qualifying up in fourteenth, while Rudolfo Goncalves was directly behind me on the grid, lining up in eighteenth in this staggered, two per row pattern we always started races in. So, for the next hour and a half or so, all the politics, the drama, and the rumors took a back seat because, suddenly, all that mattered was the racing. Watch the lights, hold the clutch, raise the revs, see the lights go out and off the clutch, hold the car through any and all wheelspin, and push the throttle down as far as it'll go. Full power off the start and hope to God your reaction times were better than the cars around you. Mine were pretty good, if I do say so myself, so I found myself alongside the Toro Rosso going into turn one. Lecroix had the inside line though, and turn one wasn't really an overtaking zone here. Similar to Copse turn one here - the Nordkurve - was a fast corner leading onto a short straight. The first real hard braking zone didn't come until turn two.
In the not-too-distant past, turn two wasn't a corner at all, rather cars continued down into the forest for a track that was even faster and even more flat-out than Monza is today, but the old Hockenheimring went away after 2001, so instead, it was hard on the brakes and abruptly to the right. Immediately afterwards, turns three and four formed a fast right-left chicane before heading down the long, sweeping not-so-straight straight. At some point during this sweep to the left, there is a corner counted as turn number five, but I didn't pay much attention to that as I positioned myself in the tow of the car ahead to try and overtake the Frenchman going into turn six, the hairpin, the corner that caused all that trouble in the press conference. In the race though, it was hard on the brakes and one-hundred eighty degrees to the right as I sent the car on the inside of Maximilien Lecroix. The hairpin was relatively wide though so it was a drag race on exit - somewhat fitting, given there is a drag strip within the grounds of Hockenheim, but that is neither here nor there - with Toyota power just getting the edge over year old Ferrari power. I consolidated my position through the on-throttle kink of turn seven before getting back on the brakes for turn eight in front of the imposing Mercedes-Benz grandstand. Off the brakes and to the left before left again through turn nine, depositing us right in the braking zone for the right-hander of turn ten.
The following short straight - another remnant of the old layout - contained the sector line that ended S2 and began the final sector. Hard on the brakes and to the right yet again for turn eleven, Mobil 1, and then throwing the car into the stadium section. Grandstands looked down on the drivers as we turned to the left through turn twelve and then, on the exit of the stadium, it was a quick left-right chicane through turns thirteen and fourteen. Turn fifteen was another right-hander, bringing me to the bottom of the track, grandstands and aforementioned drag strip to my left, pit lane entrance on my right as I sped through the last little, short section between the last two corners. Finally, Sudkurve was another corner to the right that got us back onto the main straight. It wasn't the best first lap of all time for me, but I was now ahead of the Champ Car champion, and fifteenth place is better than sixteenth, I suppose. Up front though, a top seven that had started out as Harrison, Matteo, Kaasalainen, Tripoli, Alvarez, Hamalainen, Kaminski was now Harrison, Matteo, Kaasalainen, Kaminski, Tripoli, Alvarez, Hamalainen. The Pole had put together a mighty, mighty first lap, overtaking the Finn off the start and then passing both the Renault and the Toyota in the hairpin, taking advantage of the fact that Tripoli was preoccupied with trying to defend from Alvarez that he didn't notice the BMW Sauber taking them both. The Pole might just be reestablishing his championship credentials after having lost the lead he had after Canada, leaving me wishing I was capable of an opening lap like that. Instead, though, I just found myself circulating in fifteenth, pushing as hard as the car would allow, but not being able to make much progress without the aid of a good strategy.
That pitstop would eventually come on lap twenty, the team hoping that I could make some progress on a relatively fast two-stop strategy. That seemed to be the thinking up front, for the most part, with Harrison pitting first on lap eighteen and fighting the Toyota of Ivan Tripoli as he exited. Harrison was fueled heavily for a long middle stint, but he still would have preferred to be ahead of the Toyota. Nevertheless, after a few tense moments in turn three and then again in the hairpin, Tripoli was ahead. The Italian would remain ahead for the time being, but Anthony Harrison knew he would get the position back on pit strategy. The American would prove to be right, because once Matteo, Kaasalainen, Kaminski, Hamalainen, and Tripoli had pitted, he emerged in the lead. So now you had Harrison ahead of Henrique de Matteo with Jyri Kaasalainen in third getting chased down by Piotr Kaminski, the Pole intent on gaining as many positions as possible this race. I, meanwhile, was on the same strategy as most of the cars around me, and with no attrition in the race so far, I wasn't quite sure how I was going to get into the points with the machinery I had at my disposal. Unfortunately, though, my thoughts turned out to be tempting fate, because at the end of lap thirty-six, Fabian Schmidt would lose it coming out of Sudkurve. The German's car swung out into the barrier, hitting the pit wall before bouncing off of it and spinning to a halt on the grass on the opposite side of the track.
"Oh - oh God...is he okay?" I asked as I arrived onto the scene.
"Checking...checking. Okay, he's out of the car on his own power. He's okay." Malmedy reported, giving myself and likely a lot of other drivers a sigh of relief as Fabian managed to extract himself from the car, getting picked up by the series doctor and taken into the medical car, the safety staff quickly getting control of the situation while the marshals set about cleaning up the mess from all that. Meanwhile, Filipe Yannick of all people had the fortune of pitting as all this was going on, so the Brazilian rookie effectively got a free stop while the rest of us were in the safety car queue waiting for the pits to reopen. I wasn't sure if he was actually going to be able to pull this off on a one-stop strategy, but most drivers seemed to think this safety car was late enough into the race that we could make it on fuel. I was called in alongside almost everyone else once the pits opened, sacrificing any chance of massive gains on strategy but not having a choice, because the alternative was to make massive losses as everyone behind us pit. So, I found myself a far way outside of the top ten as the race prepared to get going again, but with Anthony Harrison and Victor Hartmann up front having yet to stop - they wanted to gap the field and take advantage of their now lightened fuel loads for their middle stints - and the rest of the grid bunched together on heavy fuel, all on the same strategy, there was potential for chaos here.
On the restart, Anthony Harrison took off, instantly building a gap, while Victor Hartmann followed in second and Filipe Yannick, who has yet to score points this year, running in third. All three of these cars are on some sort of alternative strategy, with the lead two yet to make their second stop, while Yannick made his one and only stop just before the safety car, so he can go to the end, albeit slowly, however, everyone behind him pitted under the safety car. That means all the cars behind him have maybe an extra lap of fuel on him, but with Filipe having coasted under safety car that whole lap, it is unlikely to make a difference. In any case, Henrique de Matteo is fourth, Kaminski is fifth, Kaasalainen is sixth, Tripoli seventh, Renner eighth, Alvarez ninth, Weaver tenth, Koskinen eleventh, Hamalainen twelfth, myself thirteenth. The Ferrari ahead of me was set on making his way through the field as quickly as possible and I did everything in my power to shadow him. I knew our car didn't have the pace to get into the points under any normal circumstances, but maybe, just maybe, with a tow from the Ferrari and taking advantage of some cars getting put out of position by an overtake, I could gain a little bit of track position. The hardest thing in F1 is to gain track position, once you have it, you can do a lot to keep it, even on wide, rather race-y tracks like the Hockenheimring, and especially at narrow, twisty tracks like the Hungaroring up next.
"Weaver is spitting oil all over the track! Report him!" I called out after I saw the Red Bull a few places ahead begin spewing oil. Apparently, Martin picked up some damage from the debris off of Schmidt's crash and, once we got up to racing speed and the car began getting stressed again, it manifested itself as an oil leak. Myself and, I'm sure, all the other drivers behind him complained and made demands, but the matter wouldn't even make it to the stewards, because on lap forty-four, the Australian was left with no choice but to pull into the pits and retire. On that very same lap, I watched Matti Hamalainen overtake my teammate, but I couldn't do anything to follow him through. So, the Ferrari gapped both of us while Tommy stayed ahead of me, holding us both up while the Ferrari driver set about overtaking Alvarez, Renner, and Tripoli in rapid succession, disappearing into the distance along with the opportunity. I tried to follow Koskinen but, as the race went on, my tyres burned up, and neither of us made much progress, I decided to back off and get out of the dirty air, accepting the fact that neither of us were going to score points. In the end, I was right, because Tommy would be able to pass Felipe Alvarez, sure, but it was still only for tenth place. Exactly the same number of points that I scored down in twelfth because the cold hard truth is that zero points is still zero points, regardless of if it comes from ninth of twentieth place.
That's not to say there wasn't action at the end of the race, because Harrison and Hartmann would build up gaps and then chase down the cars ahead, Anthony Harrison in particular charging past his championship rival Henrique de Matteo in the hairpin and then setting off in pursuit of Filipe Yannick. The Brazilian Renault driver started all the way down in seventeenth, but fortuitous timing and a one-stop strategy briefly put him up into the lead, a lead which he didn't have nearly enough grip or speed to defend, but he did give it his best efforts. Elsewhere, Hartmann recovered to fourth and even closed in on Henrique during the final few laps of the race, while Matti Hamalainen, who lost so many places in the pits after having to double-stack behind his teammate under the safety car, completed his miraculous charge through the field to finish in sixth, recovering all the way back up to his finishing position. Not a bad job for somebody who lost eleven places in the space of one pitstop.
So, enough teasing it, the points-paying results of the 2008 German Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
2: Filipe Yannick - Brazil - Renault - 8 points.
3: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 5 points.
5: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 4 points.
6: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 3 points.
7: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 2 points.
8: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 1 point.
For the first time in the 2008 season, a driver - not a team, a driver - took consecutive race wins. Not only that, but it was Anthony Harrison's fourth win of the season, stamping his authority on the season in a way that no other driver has, hence his four-point lead over Henrique de Matteo. Four points isn't much, but considering the top three were all tied, and fourth place was just two points behind after the British Grand Prix, it's a pretty commanding gain by the standards of this highly, highly competitive season. It was a bad day for us, but, in a strange turn of events, none of our rivals really scored that many points. Renault got a podium sure, but it was Yannick rather than Alvarez, so it was really only a gain in the constructors' championship, rather than the drivers. The fact that there was no attrition among the top teams mean that there were only two slots for us midfield teams, slots that were filled by the aforementioned Filipe Yannick, as well as local boy Maximilian Renner. Nevertheless, the Brazilian can be happy to have scored a podium - a second place no less - to finally and definitively get the monkey off of his back. With any luck, from here on out, Filipe will be able to narrow the gap to Alvarez on a more consistent basis. Seventeenth to second is certainly an impress drive, especially when I started ahead of him and could only manage a twelfth place. Filipe putting his car up there also means that we have an all-western hemisphere podium.
An American and two Brazilians. The first time two Brazilians have shared a podium since the 1991 Belgian Grand Prix, when the McLaren of Ayrton Senna and the Benetton of Nelson Piquet were split by the Austrian McLaren driver Gerhard Berger. McLaren weren't quite scoring a one-two like their 1991 appearance, but with a first and a fifth, they were the highest scoring team from this race, and, as mentioned, it gives Anthony the chance to stamp his authority down on this championship in a way that no one has yet this season. Quite frankly, for awhile it has seemed like the championship that no one has actually wanted to win, with Henrique de Matteo opening the season with a pair of retirements, Matti Hamalainen going pointless from Monaco and Canada, and Piotr Kaminski having fumbled the championship lead almost as quickly as he got it with a miserable British Grand Prix. Having dominated Britain and having charged through the field, Anthony Harrison might just be changing that and giving the championship a clearer picture. There is still a lot of ground to cover, because you have the Hungarian Grand Prix, you have a few weeks off, and then you finish off the season with three European races, three Asian races, and then one Brazilian finale. That presents plenty of opportunity for Anthony to win or lose his top slot in the championship, as well as to allow new contenders to emerge.
It also gives us the chance to start planning for the future, because the summer break is traditionally when a lot of contract business gets done. This is a contract year for me, that initial deal I signed covered two seasons and put all the power in the hands of the team, while also demanding that I provide millions in sponsorship to submit myself to the demands of the team. I probably won't be able to escape Kazakhoil and, with so many contracts in place up and down the grid, I probably won't be able to move away from Williams either, but maybe, just maybe, with positive results, solid potential, and a few years of experience, I'll be able to get at least some more favorable terms. I want to have some stability and some control over my future, at very least, because I don't want to put all my hopes and dreams in the hands of one team who will always chase the next big thing - that's just the nature of Formula One after all - ideally, I'd want a long, multi-year deal with any options either being on my side or at least mutual. I don't want to allow the team to be able to unilaterally lengthen or shorten my contract anymore, I don't want to constantly have to be worrying over the next contract deadline, and to be fair, I can be happy enough just being a Formula One driver. Say I was to magically be able to sign a four-year deal with Williams, that would guarantee me a decent seat over a long period of time, potentially better than a slot at a great team for just a year or two. Not that I doubt my abilities or anything, merely that drivers will always seek the easier, least stressful option. I want to be able to move away from Kazakhoil and be here exclusively on my own merit, rather than money, but more than that, I want stability in my career; hopefully Williams can provide that.
"So, I figured out what all of this is about," Anthony began when we met in a cafe in Monaco. If it had just been a week between Germany and Hungary, we probably would have just gone straight to Budapest, but with a week off in between, well...the allure of your own bed is appealing to us drivers that spend so much of the year in strange hotel rooms all across the globe. Monaco is my primary residence whereas Anthony, who still resides in his hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has a flat in Monaco that effectively becomes his home base during the season. With all the teams based in Europe, a good chunk of the races centered in Europe, western Europe in particular, and all the chartered flights operating out of Europe, the easiest thing to do is to live here. The teams tend to be clustered in England, with the exception of Toyota in Cologne, BMW Sauber in Hinwil, Switzerland, and both Ferrari and Toro Rosso in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, while the drivers tend to live in either Monaco or Switzerland, and not just for tax reasons, mind you. Yes, I'm sure the tax thing is a huge appeal for many foreign drivers, but the town is also a place where the people know Formula One, where the people know extreme wealth, and where the people are used to dealing with F1 drivers. A driver can do their groceries in Monaco without meeting a starstruck fan or getting hounded by the paparazzi, and while we are grateful for our fans, it is essential to have a sort of sanctuary where you aren't a global superstar...at least no more of a global superstar than anyone else in Monaco. Anyway, Anthony handed me an open British tabloid magazine "Someone, a fan, a marshal, a team member, I don't know, caught a grainy picture of us at Silverstone after the race. They see us leaned back in the seats and me putting my arm around you, now they're trying to run all these stories about F1's new 'power couple' or whatever."
"That's all it is? A zoomed in picture from like the bottom corner of the grandstand?" I asked, somewhat incredulous that this is what sparked all the drama.
"Eh, my mom always said that the British tabloid press is the worst institution on the planet." Anthony shrugged, a small smile on his face. So, we found what caused all of this and we could now properly squash it...there was just one thing though. I needed to make sure we were both on the same page about all of this, making sure that this really was just a rumor and nothing more.
"Hey Anthony?" I asked, approaching this topic carefully.
"Yeah?" he asked.
"There's nothing here, is there?" I asked.
"What do you mean?" he asked, leaning in and putting his hands together in front of his chin, almost as if he was trying to hide a blush without being too obvious about it...not exactly a good sign.
"I mean that whole thing was platonic on my side, I'm just trying to make sure it's the same on your side." I clarified, exhaling at the end of the sentence, finding this whole thing very, very awkward.
"Oh? Oh yeah, no, I was just being a friend. I wasn't going to do anything...unless you wanted to of...ugh," Anthony signed, putting his head in his hands "Look, you're attractive and you're fun to be around, I admit that, and maybe part of me felt that someone in the racing world, someone who does what I do, could understand me in a way that regular women can't. On the other hand, I also knew that you're a competitor, and you have the speed to get into a top car sooner rather than later, and I don't know if I'll be able to race you the way I need to if this...thing went anywhere. So yeah, I thought about it, part of me wants it, parts of me thinks it's impossible, but you have my word that I absolutely wasn't trying anything at Silverstone. I was just being friendly."
"No, no, I believe you. Thank you for being honest with me." I replied, relieved to an extent. So, there was something there, but nothing that's going to be a problem, especially because Anthony is a smart enough guy to have thought through it himself and decided we would be better off as just friends all on his own. I also have to admit it was flattering to hear such positive things from a driver doing amazing things in F1 at such a young age.
"What about you?" Harrison asked, somewhat unexpectedly.
"Me? Oh..." I stopped for a second, sighed, and then leaned into whisper, knowing there was a risk with this, but also knowing that Anthony was honest with me, vulnerable with me, so I might as well return the favor "Anthony, I'm gay."
"Oh...ohhhhh. Okay...wow. That umm...yeah, that probably explains a lot." Anthony responded, leaning back in his seat, seemingly relaxing a bit himself, almost as if this information was what he needed to hear. Like he needed to know it was impossible to truly let go and be able to move on with all of this. I admit that I wasn't exactly sure what reaction was going to come out of this, but this wasn't it.
"You're not mad?" I asked, surprised not necessarily to see a positive reaction from him, but more because this is really the first time that I came out to anyone in the rather conservative, old-school world of Formula One, and I didn't necessarily think I was going to get a positive reaction in F1 at all.
"Mad? No. Look Tamara, I'm American, so that's already something you don't see much of in the F1 paddock, but I'm also black, and that's really something you don't see often in this sport, so I'm not exactly in a position to judge you for being a little different. Besides, I'm pretty sure I've caught you ogling to grid girls before." Anthony joked, making me laugh.
"Have I really been that obvious?" I asked as I came off of the laugh, admittedly having enjoyed the site of grid girls before. I mean, quite frankly, they are there to be looked at, most of them are professional models who have been hired to represent sponsors and races in F1 and look good doing it. I suppose you could say it's a bit objectifying, but they're choosing to do this, and it takes a certain amount of confidence to stand on a grid with millions of eyes on you across the grandstands and television, and I know I certainly couldn't do it. Not to mention that, without them, I'd be really the only woman on the grid in any capacity, since the engineers and team principals are almost exclusively male, with women mostly in press, assistant, and trainer roles. I also guess that, when sitting in the car before a race, having a woman in a short dress standing directly in front of me, the eyes do tend to wander. Ogling is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't given many of them a once-over. Maybe that makes me a bad representative for women in sports, but hey, I'm only human.
"Nah not really, but knowing what I know now, it kinda makes a few moments stand out." he shrugged "God I'm just glad all of this is out in the open now, I feel like we can put it past us now." the American shared and, honestly, I couldn't agree with that sentiment more.
"Right, right." I nodded, relaxing myself. I leaned back in the chair for a few moments before grinning and changing subjects "So, can we talk about how Felipe Alvarez reads the British rags?"
"Oh man!" Anthony laughed, appreciating the change in subject. Maybe I am a bit biased then, because Anthony has certainly been a better person to me than Felipe has, at least during my time in Formula One. With Anthony, I've had genuine moments with him and get along with him so much now that I'd call him a friend - he's the only person in Formula One that knows I'm gay after all - whereas with Felipe, I've felt like he didn't notice that I even existed until I became an obstacle in his path. Like I've said before, I know Felipe has his own friends in the sport and I know he's a legend in this sport already, being the youngest double-champion and all that, being the man to break Wilhelm Ziegler's dominance in the 2000s, but he's made it clear that he doesn't want to be friends with me, and in fact, I get the impression that he doesn't really like me. Maybe that will change one day, but that is the feeling that I get from him. Of course, I'm going to race against Anthony or Felipe or anyone else the same way that I always have, so I'm not saying that Alvarez's implications are correct, I'm just acknowledging that everyone in this sport has friends and rivals. Right now, Anthony Harrison is making a real good case to be a friend, while Felipe Alvarez seems to be happy in the role of a rival.
"Hey, I've landed in Budapest," I spoke into the cell phone, calling Roksana letting her know I was safely in Hungary.
"Great, do well out there, I'll be watching!" my girlfriend responded.
"I'll hold you to that." I teased as I exited the airport, looking around for the little MPV the team was sending to pick me up. I hadn't flown in with the Koskinens this time as Tommy had been up in England doing some simulator work for the team, while I was still flying out of Nice. Nevertheless, Williams was accommodating for me, so they sent a car to pick me up at the airport and take me to the hotel. I spotted the car and started heading over, suitcase rolling behind me.
"Will there be a pop quiz?" Roksana teased in turn.
"There might," I responded, smile on my face."
"And if I get the answers wrong?" she teased, going in that direction.
"You won't." I sputtered out, not exactly comfortable with that topic. Kissing, touching, even vanilla sex, all of that I've become fine with, but Roksana has a way about joking about certain fetishizes where I can't tell if she is serious or not. She might legitimately have interest in some of these things, or she might just get a kick out of teasing me for being a bit of a clueless virgin up until recently.
"Okay, okay, good luck this weekend." Roksana came off of it, letting me off the hook.
"Thanks. Alright, I'm getting in the car now, I'll speak to you soon, okay?" I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder as I loaded my suitcase into the back of the car before sitting down in the rear row next to Mariana, my press handler.
"Got it, love you." she signed off.
"Love you too," I responded before getting off the phone, closing the door and putting my seat belt on before turning over to Mariana, smiling and raising an eyebrow at me, I asked "What?"
"So, is this why you want to squash these Anthony rumors? Jealous boyfriend?" Mariana asked, having only heard the end of my side of the conversation, but it was enough for her to come to some conclusions, conclusions which were wrong, but not terribly far from the truth either.
"What? No, it's not like that. I'm the one that wants these rumors squashed and, from what I've spoken to Anthony about, he'll be squashing them too." I responded, keeping professional, even if I did feel like there was a bit of a blush on my face now, not having entirely been prepared for this conversation. I think I might have been a bit too open while on the phone, but on the other hand, nothing I said was exclusively romantic, I could just be talking to a family member or something, but Mariana made the leap straight into romance and I couldn't exactly deny that.
"No need to get defensive, I was just curious." Mariana shrugged, evidently a bit taken aback by my reaction.
"Sorry, sorry. It's just these rumors came out of literally nowhere and I don't like to be thought of this way. I don't want to be treated any kind of way or to have drivers vying for my affection or anything, I just want to be treated normally, like I always was." I vented a bit, telling the truth to my trainer.
"No, no, I understand. We'll get it cleared up, okay? The team is with you on this too, we want to be fully focused on the racing just as much as you do." Mariana responded, giving what was probably a bit of a generous spin on a directive from Sir Frank Williams to get these tabloids to stop embarrassing one of his drivers. I get the impression that Frank would rather have the tabloids not covering F1 at all, but instead, his team has had to deal with bullshit like this before, particularly those Australian comedians who pulled the "would Juan want to win in round one, Juan?" stunt on Juan Pablo Montoya back in 2001, or all the drama relating to James Buxton's contract in 2004 and 2005. Buxton in particular was taken up by the British press since, for a long time now, James has been the British golden boy in Formula One, even if his results haven't been necessarily the best. The English haven't had all that much talent in the sport as of late, so it's pretty much just between Buxton and Louis Sanderson and, well, Louis Sanderson's team doesn't exist anymore. Anyway, these kinds of stories, I imagine, were something that Williams had prepared for when signing the first female driver in decades, and I guess it's something that we just have to deal with. Like I said, there was always the idea at first that I was going to be some dainty little female novelty until I set a competitive laptime and things got serious, so I'm used to being treated like a girl in that respect, and every once in awhile there is a humiliating question like "How do you drive during your period?" or whatever that I try not to even acknowledge, but with me essentially having been sexually oblivious up until recently, this particular part of being a female driver hadn't been a problem, at least not until now anyway.
"Thank you. I just hope we can get this over with and get back to racing." I sighed, leaning my head back against the seat. I finished ninth in Hungary last year, and it was really the start of my late season slump where Tommy Koskinen made up the gains, I made with my two podiums and eventually overtook me in the championship, 20 points to my 18 in what was the tightest margin between teammates outside of McLaren. Thus far this season, I'm on 17 points and Tommy is on 8 points, meaning I'm on course to do better this year whereas Tommy has a lot of ground to cover if he wants to match his 2007 season. Once again, the problem is that while we have a car that is clearly faster than our 2007 car and clearly feels better, built on a stable foundation, we just haven't made as big of a step forward as our rivals, and that means we have 25 points as a team. 25 points compared to Red Bull's 23, Renault's 21, Toyota's 20, Honda's 13, and Toro Rosso on 8 points. The championship battle is so tight with four teams separated by five points, millions and millions of dollars in constructors' prize money separated by five points, all with Honda and Toro Rosso definitely in striking range with the number of races remaining. The message is clear then: things are so damn tight and so damn competitive that we cannot afford another slump, quite frankly, we cannot afford to keep going at the level we've been at right now, we need to be strong at Hungary and we need to be strong in the second half of the season. This has been a very volatile season for the top six drivers, so we need to take advantage of that, and ideally, if we're going to stay fourth in the constructors' championship, I think we're going to need to score at least two podiums.
It was a hot day on Saturday at the Hungaroring as twenty cars set out to qualify for the 2008 Hungarian Grand Prix. The event, born in 1986 as the first Grand Prix beyond the Iron Curtain, survived the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, and continues on until this very day. There is a Turkish Grand Prix as well these days, but Turkey isn't eastern Europe in quite the same way that this is, so for somebody like me, born in what was then the Soviet Union, and for someone like Piotr Kaminski, born in what was then the Warsaw Pact, this is somewhat of a home race for us. If for no other reason than Hungarians shared a similar experience to our countries. Of course, at the same time, Hungary also has its own history, its people aren't Slavs - not even related to Slavs, being a Finno-Ugric people unrelated to Indo-Europeans - and Budapest as a city looks a lot more like historic central Europe than post-Soviet eastern Europe. Of course, going one-hundred eighty miles per hour down into turn one on your last lap in Q1, none of those things matter.
I had set a banker lap earlier in the session but that wasn't quick enough to be secure - nor was Tommy's first time - so as I slammed the brakes, threw the car to the right through the opening hairpin of turn one, and accelerated on corner exit, everything was on the line. The track straightened up to the right just a bit, but not enough to count as a corner as we drove down the downhill straight into turn two. Braking for another somewhat faster, somewhat wider hairpin to the left for turn two, I rode the kerb on corner exit before straightening the car up for turn three. A dab of the brakes and a few downshifts before throwing the car to turn three just to start climbing the gears and climbing the track as we headed uphill, crossing the sector line in the process. Sector two opened with braking and turning left as the hill crested to reveal turn four. Following the crest was a brief straight giving us just enough time to appraise the next challenge before us. Turn five was somewhat to explain, it was a one-hundred eighty-degree corner to the left, but it was a bit too wide and a bit too fast to call it a hairpin turn, nevertheless, it served the same function, turning us around and spitting us out on a short straight at the top of the circuit.
Six to the right and seven to the left formed a tight chicane with high kerbs to take is back inside the perimeter of the circuit for a moment, before the fast turn eight to the left and turn nine to the right bought us back to the top edge of the track. This tight and twisty section at the end of sector two was just about over as I drove through the left-hand kink of turn ten before braking for turn eleven. Nearly a ninety-degree corner to the right, this corner deposited us onto the back straight, spitting us out across the sector line, completing sector two and beginning the final section of the track. Climbing through all seven gears using the semi-automatic paddle-shift gearbox in my Williams-Toyota machine as I entered the section of the track that has seen the most changes since 1986. Previously what is now turn twelve was closer down the straight, and lead to a bit of a twisty section heading to the penultimate corner, but in 2003, turn twelve was moved further down the straight in an attempt to improve overtaking. Now turn twelve is a hard braking zone and a ninety-degree right-hander, leading to a short, parallel straight heading down to turn thirteen. A loop to the left mirroring turn two, turn thirteen was the penultimate corner and lead to a short straight. The pitlane entrance was on my left and, as I braked for turn fifteen, the concrete divider wall was on my inside as I negotiated another loop, this time to the right.
I complete the loop and put the power down, catching the car through a bit of a tank-slapper coming out of the loop as I put the power down, probably just a moment too earlier as the car was at the edge of grip, but managed to recover fairly gracefully and power down to the line - which was mercifully close to the final corner on this track - and then easing off the gas as I waited to hear what the damage was. At the same time though, I was cursing myself for that mistake, because even a small mistake like that, costing only a tenth or so, was massive in a year where the midfield was this competitive. A tenth could be the difference between being comfortably in Q2 and ending your Saturday early. Unfortunately for me, I was on the wrong side of that tenth today.
"You are seventeenth. You are seventeenth. You set a 1.21.085, Hartmann set a 1.21.045, Tommy set a 1.20.988. We just missed out there." Peter reported, disappointment clear in his voice, not necessarily disappointment at me, but I knew he was sad to miss out on such a small margin - especially when Tommy in the same car was the one on the positive side of that margin - and we both knew that mistake cost me at least a tenth, maybe more. I could have been ahead of Hartmann at very least. Come to think of it, why was a BMW driver all the way down here anyway? I know I said the grid was tight, but is it really so tight at this track that even one of the top six can get caught out like this? It's a short track here with a quick lap but that normally isn't a problem for the top teams.
"Copy. I'm sorry about that little mistake, we could have been better. What happened to Hartmann?" I apologized for my part in us getting knocked out before asking about the German driver who has had some strong podiums this year, even if his teammate has been having an even better season and has had the luck of scoring BMW Sauber's only win thus far.
"It's fine Tamara, we'll speak about that later. Hartmann was held up by Lecroix, they're investigating, maybe we'll gain a position." Peter responded. Well, we would gain a position as Lecroix would qualify fourteenth but receive a five-place grid penalty for impeding Hartmann on his qualifying lap. This would promote me up to sixteenth on the grid, Hartmann up to fifteenth, and Tommy up to fifteenth, since my teammate didn't set a time in Q2. The team felt that we were at the limit of our pace anyway so we might as well save the tyres and fuel by not running Koskinen in Q2. I was outqualified by my teammate yet again, but not by a big margin, and I was only starting a few places behind him, so I might be able to redeem myself in the race. Nevertheless, it's going to be a tall order for either of us to score points from back here, especially at the tight Hungaroring where overtaking doesn't come easily. Far from the two podiums I felt we needed at this point in the season.
As for the front of the grid, well, Anthony Harrison was on pole, shaping up to continue his commanding form and maybe, just maybe, take a third consecutive victory. If he can lead in the first corner, assuming that nothing goes wrong with the car or McLaren's strategy is dreadful, then everyone else is going to have a hard time trying to beat the American on the track that has been described as Monaco without the walls. As for second place, that goes to Jyri Kaasalainen, the Finn forming an all-McLaren front row as the team looks to regain second place in the constructors' championship from BMW Sauber. If McLaren can jump BMW here, then they can devote the second half of the season to focusing their full attention on Ferrari. Speaking of Ferrari, Henrique de Matteo lines up third. The Brazilian knows that, while Matti Hamalainen wears the #1 this season, his performances as of late have been superior, so with a good race today in Hungary, Henrique can make sure Ferrari throw their weight behind him going into the final phase of the season. If McLaren's goal is to jump BMW Sauber in this race, then BMW's goal is damage limitation, doing everything in their power to stay in that fight, and Piotr Kaminski will be spearheading that effort from fourth on the grid, completing the first two rows.
As for fifth place, that goes to Fabian Schmidt. The German rookie put up a fantastic qualifying performance and lines up alongside the second Ferrari of Matti Hamalainen, giving him an excellent chance of advancing Toyota's cause in the fight for fourth-best team. As for Matti Hamalainen, while winning from sixth place will be difficult, he can at least work on trying to get a podium, making sure that Ferrari has a buffer to McLaren in the constructors' championship. Next up is Felipe Alvarez in seventh. I have my issues with Felipe lately, but I have to admit he is able to consistently put his Renault in challenging places for the rest of us, so if he can start consistently turning those into big points finishes, Renault may be able to leapfrog the likes of Toyota, Red Bull, and even Williams in this tight midfield battle. Martin Weaver in eighth place and Ivan Tripoli in ninth place can be said to have similar goals for their respective teams, and they'll be hoping that Alvarez once again runs into bad luck or issues in the race that make him unable to convert his consistently blistering pace into results. Finally, Filipe Yannick completes the top ten, Formula One's most recent podium-sitter having an uptick in form and now qualifying just a few positions behind his teammate. Yannick does not, however, start in the points, and he, along with many drivers ahead of him and behind him, will be doing everything they can to try and finish in those last few points paying positions.
Everything to play for before F1 goes into its summer break as the cars came through turn fourteen to line up back on the grid. Just this race then they'll be three weeks before the European Grand Prix at Valencia, followed by a week off before the double-header weekend at Spa in Belgium and then Monza in Italy. Fourteen days later it's off to southeast Asia for Formula One's first ever night race on the streets of Singapore. A week off after that before an Asian double-header, with the Japanese Grand Prix once again at Fuji Speedway, followed by the Chinese Grand Prix at the Shanghai International Circuit. Two weeks after that it is the championship finale at the Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace - Interlagos - in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The way things are shaping up, the championship will be going down to the wire, but with five red lights coming on at the Hungaroring, nobody really knew how the championship situation would look after this race. Maybe Anthony Harrison will have three consecutive wins and a dominant lead, maybe Matti Hamalainen will be able to surprise everyone from sixth on the grid and get his title defense back on track, or maybe the Hungaroring will throw up the kind of chaos that you just can't quite predict. Nobody knows quite what will happen, all we know is that the lights are going out and twenty cars are rolling off the grid for the start of the 2008 Hungarian Grand Prix!
Harrison took off, getting a faster start than Kaasalainen, but Henrique de Matteo had the drop on them both, speeding past Jyri Kaasalainen on the start and then getting in Anthony's tow before peeking out in the inside line for turn one. Henrique braked later than Anthony and thus took the lead, something that could prove critical for the Ferrari driver as he attempts to solidify his championship challenge. Back here though, my chances of replicating Matteo's brilliant start were hampered by the movement going on around me, with Rudolfo Goncalves rocketing his way up the grid while Maximilian Renner lost places thanks to a good start. On a relatively narrow track like this with concrete walls not very far from the edge of the track at all, sometimes the most important thing to do on the start is merely to survive. So I did survive the start, but with the order reading like this at the end of the first lap - Matteo ahead of Harrison, then Kaasalainen, Schmidt, Kaminski, Alvarez, Hamalainen, Weaver, Tripoli, Yannick, MacGowan, Hartmann, Goncalves, Buxton, Renner, Lecroix, Koskinen, Shchegolyayeva, Petronelli, Barbaro - Williams wasn't looking too good this race. Even when the Hondas started battling each other and it began apparent that Hartmann was running a heavy fuel load, we just couldn't close in the way i wanted to. It didn't help that the nature of the track, particularly in sector two, made the dirty air a tremendous obstacle.
Henrique de Matteo began to build a gap up front while the McLarens began saving fuel, opting to beat Ferrari on strategy if they couldn't beat them on pace. Back here though, Buxton finally got the edge over his teammate and got ahead, meaning the Briton was now the driver working on overtaking Hartmann. The BMWs were struggling in this race, Hartmann especially, but it was noticeable for Kaminski as well, since he wasn't able to put pressure on the Toyota ahead even as we were settling comfortably into the first stint of this race. I knew Hartmann was vulnerable and I knew that the Hondas had a decent chance of getting ahead of him if this didn't change, so I knew that he could be vulnerable to me as well. In order to do that though, first I need to get past my teammate, and then I need to get past the Toro Rossos. So, points may not be realistic today, but Victor Hartmann seemed like a goal that was achievable, so I gritted my teeth through the dirty air and worked on closing up on Tommy. It wasn't easy, the circuit is already bad but combine that with the August heat and the tyres would quickly complain if I pushed them too hard, meanwhile, I needed to depend on the tyres a little bit, because if I left it to just the engine to get me close to my teammate, I wouldn't be able to make a good fuel strategy work. And a good fuel strategy is what really gets you ahead of other cars here at Hungary. So, it was a balancing act, and I had a lot of things to balance in order to get this right.
"Some cars are experiencing higher than expected tyre wear, how are you doing?" Malmedy asked over the radio as I was driving uphill on the way to turn four on what was roughly lap nineteen or so.
"I'm fine for now. Pit me after Koskinen." I answered, deciding then that what I wanted to do was overtake my teammate, get a proper lap in clean air, then do my in-lap in clean air, and then ideally have clean air on my outlap as well. That is the only way I'm going to gain a significant amount of positions here. So, braking for turn five, turning to the left and then accelerating on corner exit, chasing Tommy all the way. I then clattered over the kerbs through the chicane, taking as much of the kerbs as the car would take as I tried to stick to my teammate's gearbox through this S-section. I lifted through turn eight to get a smoother ride then peeked out of the tow of my teammate, sending the car in a shallower line through turn nine and picking up some much-needed clean air in the process, even if I did ride out on the exit kerbs a little bit because of it. I survived that though, just like I survived the nothing-corner of turn ten and then the braking zone of turn eleven, meaning I was still within striking distance of my teammate as we reached the back straight. His car was blasting a hole in the air for me and thus pulling me forward, giving me the full effect of the slipstream until I finally moved to the right, hitting that wall of incoming air, yes, but also pulling alongside my teammate, getting what was soon to be the inside of turn twelve. I braked later than my teammate and had the tyres to do it, thus putting myself on that overtake-clean-in-out strategy.
"Box this lap, box this lap." the call finally came at the end of lap twenty-one. I pulled to the inside coming out of turn thirteen and into the pitlane, following the inside of turn fourteen as I put myself on the pit limiter and waited for my pit box. My teammate had pitted a lap before, giving me breathing space to focus fully on delivering the best in laps possible, and now, in the pit stop, assuming my boys work as well as they always do, we'll see whether or not we've pulled it off. I pulled into the pitlane, the car went up on the jacks and the fuel hose attached just as my crew started working on the tyres. Tyre guns on, unscrew the wheel nuts, pull the tyres off, put the new tyres on, tyre guns back on, screw the wheel nuts back in - four grooved Bridgestone prime tyres attached, a healthy dose of Petrobras fuel in the tank, and the jacks coming off. The lollipop man raised his stick and I pulled away from the box, coming back on the pit limiter and playing this awful, awful waiting game. Cars are speeding past me to the left, those who have already completed their pit strategy or are going longer than me, I couldn't do anything about that, but when I was finally off the limiter on the pit exit and getting on the power, I was in control again. I got up to speed and then braked hard for turn one, putting the tyres to work immediately as I blocked off an attempt by Maximilien Lecroix to overtake me. I consolidated the position into turn two, meaning I gained a place on the Toro Rosso. Now just to see how all of this shakes out at the end of the pit stop window.
"Renner is out of the race, Renner is out of the race." Malmedy reported later that lap, meaning I gained another position on aggregate. Good work from the strategists and my crew, because we had a really good time on that pit window. By the time everything shook out, the order looked like this: Henrique de Matteo was still in the lead, a few seconds up the road from Anthony Harrison, while Harrison's teammate Jyri Kaasalainen was in third. Fabian Schmidt was in fourth while Daniel MacGowan was in fifth at the moment, but he was on a completely different strategy compared to everyone else so it's still unclear where his real position is. Next were Alvarez, Hamalainen, and Yannick, meaning the defending champion was in a Renault sandwich, followed by Tripoli, Kaminski, Weaver, and Hartmann. Now getting back to the cars we were running with, James Buxton was thirteenth, Rudolfo Goncalves was fourteenth, I was fifteenth, Maximilien Lecroix was sixteenth, and Tommy Koskinen was seventeenth. Petronelli was eighteenth, Barbaro was nineteenth, and Renner was out. Our positions still weren't great, and points were still unrealistic, but at least we were in a better position now than we were at in the beginning of the race.
Henrique de Matteo and Anthony Harrison were still the class of the field at the moment, trading fastest laps as we all settled into the second stint - albeit not without some hints that they are still human, after all, such as Harrison gaining a flatspot on his tyres thanks to locking his brakes in an attempt to close the distance to the Ferrari ahead. At the same time, Daniel MacGowan of Red Bull finally made his first stop on lap twenty-nine, dropping to twelve in the process, a pity that none of us could gain a position from it, but I suppose it was to be expected after all. Just as I was beginning to think this was a rather orderly race by the standards of the 2008 season, Anthony Harrison decided to change all of that in turn two by gaining a puncture. The American's flatspot had finally given up after continued abuse and give way in the corner, meaning Anthony had to do almost an entire lap on a rapidly deflating tyre while Henrique de Matteo got to scamper off into the distance. So, Anthony did just that, but his pace earlier in the race had been so tremendous that he only fell to tenth as he came back out on the grid on fresh tyres. Up ahead though, Matteo could finally relax, since he must have been pushing that Ferrari engine and those Bridgestone tyres just as hard as Anthony Harrison was in their duel on the Hungaroring. On a hot day like this with his rival back in the pack, Henrique's priority now was just to bring it home and bag those ten points.
Henrique would ease off, managing the gap before pitting on lap forty-four for his second and final stop. Jyri Kaasalainen would take up the lead before his own stop on lap forty-eight dropped him back behind the Ferrari, while I took my stop on lap fifty. I was far, far, far away from the battle for the lead of this race, but as I finally switched from the prime tyres of my first two stints to the option tyres for these final twenty laps of the race, maybe I could at least gain some positions during all of this. Granted, most of the other drivers were on this strategy, and Tommy Koskinen had the advantage of pitting on lap fifty-eight, meaning he could push his options harder than anyone else since he only needed them to last twelve laps. He would, however, have to make up for all the time he lost by running on used-up prime tyres, so we'll have to see just where he shakes out at the end of all of this. Meanwhile, Maximilien Lecroix certainly had the most dramatic pit cycle of anyone on the grid, with a flash fire during his regular stop before pulling into the pits yet again on the following lap to wipe the fire extinguisher foam off of his visor. Scary stuff, but it also shows how safe this sport has become and how on top of things the safety crews are, because a car was literally on fire but got taken out and the driver gets to continue the race, even if he did lose a lot of time during all of that craziness.
Pit stop blunders aside, once everyone had made their stops, the order read like this: Henrique de Matteo led from Jyri Kaasalainen, Fabian Schmidt was third in a podium position for Toyota, but he had the hungry Ferrari of Matti Hamalainen just behind him. The Renault of Felipe Alvarez in fifth and the McLaren of the recovering Anthony Harrison in sixth were no less interested in Schmidt's podium position, though they also had a lot more work to do if they wanted it. Filipe Yannick, Ivan Tripoli, Piotr Kaminski, and Martin Weaver completed the top ten, while Victor Hartmann had recovered to eleventh place. Daniel MacGowan on a one-stop strategy was in twelfth place, James Buxton in thirteenth, myself in fourteenth, my teammate in fifteenth, Petronelli in sixteenth, Barbaro in seventeenth, Goncalves in eighteenth, and Lecroix the last car running. The race and the first half of the season were coming to a close soon, but nothing's over until it's over, and a lot could happen with ten laps remaining at the Hungaroring in 2008.
So, Henrique de Matteo built up a lead yet again, Matti Hamalainen pushed his Ferrari hard in pursuit of Schmidt and a potential double-podium for Ferrari, while Anthony Harrison started his pursuit of old rival Felipe Alvarez. There was a small problem for Harrison though, the same problem that dropped him out of contention for the lead, actually, and that problem was the fact that the McLarens just couldn't keep their tyres together under these conditions. They could run well on fuel, yes, but even without flatspotting the tyres or gaining a puncture, the American is just churning through his rubber, and the closer he runs to the Renault ahead, the worse it gets, leaving Harrison with no choice but to drop back. As for the other McLaren, well, Jyri was making some impression on the car ahead and was going faster, but with a fifteen second gap and the number of laps dwindling, Henrique de Matteo seemed in control of the race. Henrique was leading comfortably and Hamalainen was setting the fastest lap of the race in pursuit of Fabian Schmidt, but in the last few laps, suddenly everything went wrong for Ferrari.
"Yellow flags! Yellow flags on the main straight. Matteo is pulling off to the side, he was an engine problem. Be careful, watch for oil." Peter called out through the radio, giving me a warning before I arrived on scene to see the stranded Ferrari already getting wheeled towards a gap in the pit wall, marshals waving yellow flags to protect each other, while another held a fire extinguisher close on hand, evidently concerned that the engine might burst into flames...perhaps again. On the other side of the pit wall, I caught a glimpse of a despondent Henrique de Matteo looking through the protective fence at his stricken car, ruing yet another issue this season, yet another problem, and yet another race lost because of it. Jyri Kaasalainen, who had been running in second, was promoted into the lead. As if to add insult to injury, Matti Hamalainen also suffered a suspension problem late in the race - the Finn was able to keep it going, but his pace suffered because of it, and his podium charge turned into a wounded limp to the end of the race. All the while, I quietly finished the race in thirteenth, one place above my teammate, but both of us miles away from the points and a lap down compared to the leaders. On a race where Toyota and Renault both scored big points, no less.
The points paying results for the 2008 Hungarian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
2: Fabian Schmidt - Germany - Toyota - 8 points.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 5 points.
5: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 4 points.
6: Filipe Yannick - Brazil - Renault - 3 points.
7: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 2 points.
8: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 1 point.
So, celebrations for McLaren as Jyri Kaasalainen becomes the 100th different race winner in Formula One, while Toyota scores 10 points in a single race and Renault is just behind them with another 8 points to do some serious damage to the constructors' championship standings. How much damage? Well Toyota moves up to fourth place with 30 points, while Renault is just behind them on 29, meaning that Williams fell from fourth to sixth in the championship in the length of a single race. Red Bull still sits on 23 points, put that means that all Martin Weaver or Daniel MacGowan need to do is finish sixth in order to demote us to seventh place in the constructors' championship. The fact that today we were only consistently faster than the Force Indias does not fill me with confidence of us staying in the fight for fourth. I've said it before the race and I'll say it again now: we need to be doing better than this. Renault have been on fire lately and Toyota have just joined them as the only teams outside of the top three to score a second place this season. Two races in a row now our rivals have been finishing in second place while we haven't even been able to put a car in the points. This season started out so strongly for us, for me, but now...well, I have a lot of negatives to say.
That's not to say that there aren't positives to take away from the first half of the season.
My results thus far have read: 6th-4th-6th-7th-RET-7th-RET-8th-8th-12th-13th for 17 points.
Tommy's results thus far have: 3rd-14th-8th-RET-8th-RET-10th-16th-9th-10th-14th f0r 8 points.
So I'm ahead of my teammate on points and I beat him on head-to-head results 5-2 in races that we've both finished. My qualifying performances are also looking up compared to last season, still not great at 3-7, but considering I only outqualified my teammate twice in my rookie season, three times before the summer break is certainly an improvement. That's not to mention the fact that one of those times I was just behind him while twice already he just barely beat me to the final slot in Q2 only to not be able to set a lap in the second qualifying session. So yes, while I'm certainly not going to be winning any qualifying rewards any time soon, I am a lot closer to Tommy in qualifying this season, and it feels a lot closer too. This season I know I'm capable of competing with Tommy's out-and-out fastest lap times and I know I'm capable of going faster than him in the races, and all of this comes with the fact that Tommy is no slouch in his own right. We are talking about the son of a champion, a man destined to be a race winner in his own right one day, and I'm closing the gap to him in qualifying while consistently having the edge in the race, to the point where I'm nine points ahead of him. To put that into perspective, in the very next race Tommy could score a second place while I suffered an engine failure before the race even started, and I would still be ahead of him in the standings. Considering that points have become somewhat of a rarity for Williams in this part of the season, Tommy is going to have a hard time overcoming my points advantage, while I'll the while, I'll be getting even closer in qualifying and even stronger in the race.
So yeah, there are positives this season, mainly in the head-to-head department, but while I'm just a point behind my entire points total from last year, I should also note the fact that at this point last season I had two podiums to my name. This season I don't even have one, the closest I've gotten is that fourth place in Malaysia, while my teammate has been on the podium once. A podium that was very nearly mine before that incident in Australia, while I lost out on another podium in Canada thanks to that collision with Felipe Alvarez. I had two podiums by this point last year, while this year, I stand with two races where I was running well - I even briefly led laps in Australia - only to get taken out in stupid incidents that weren't really my fault. So yeah, there are positives from this year, yes, and nobody can take that from me, but we've also missed out on maximizing our chances when the season was at its chaotic start, and now, when our machinery just isn't quick enough anymore, we're paying the price. That's the real problem here, because while I am better as a driver than this time last year, and I know our car is better performance wise than it was last year, I also know that, at this point in the season, it is comparatively worse. Like I've said a few times already, we've improved this season, but other teams have improved more. And as I stood in the media pen after the race, I couldn't help but think that was a bit of a failure.
"...our pace just wasn't there today." Piotr Kaminski gave a solemn answer regarding BMW's pace to my left.
"...make strategy work and we paid the price for it. Congratulations to Jyri though, 100th race winner..." MacGowan answered a question about strategy to my right before congratulating Jyri on a strong race.
"What do you make of the race, Tamara?" a reporter asked me, focusing my attention back on the mics and the camera in front of me.
"Well, we got a new winner today. Pretty heartbreaking stuff for Henrique and Anthony too in the race, but as for us? Well, our cars finished line-and-stern, so I think we were both at our limit today. We'll take the summer break to look at it and uhh...well, hopefully we'll come back stronger." I answered, my tone relatively monotone, perhaps coming across as a bit depressed, but I tried to end on a positive note for myself and for the team. We are really struggling right now, and we're behind Toyota who is doing more with the same engine and same gearbox as us, but we also know they have more money than we do. The team doesn't have the speed or resources right now, but Williams is still a legendary name, and we are working to make it legendary again.
Notes:
So umm, classes are starting back up again on the 22nd for me, but with a two-week writing schedule and with me only writing one story at the moment, hopefully I won't get overwhelmed the way I did when I was writing both Duchesse d'Anjou and Secrets of the Outer Rim last Fall semester. Spring was better since I was wrapping up both stories by that point, and then also starting this one, but for whatever reason, this story has always come somewhat easily to me. Anyway, school aside, this story shouldn't see any disruptions, and that's good, because I have a lot of really cool things planned to come up in just a couple of chapters.
Anyway,
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 17: Ferrari Strikes Back
Notes:
Alright everyone, here we are with chapter seventeen.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter XVII.
Ferrari Strikes Back.
"Do you want me to do anything about it? Write an article with some bait in a different direction?" Roksana asked as I told her about the Harrison situation. I tried to focus on the racing that weekend, letting my people do a pretty good job of squashing the rumors about Anthony and I. That part was going well, most of the British tabloids dropped the story altogether, with one exception: a particular British rag is instead asking the question of "If not Harrison, who is Shchegolyayeva dating?" Evidently having come to the conclusion that I must be dating somebody. They are right, I will admit, but they don't know that they're right, and if they asked this question even two years ago, I would have no reason to be worried about because there would be nothing to find. Now though, there is something to find, so if they keep snooping, they might be able to figure something out about me and Roksana, which, unfortunately, is probably going to be worse for my career than any humiliating rumors about Anthony Harrison and me could be. I sighed to myself, wondering why the British press became obsessed with us all of a sudden. Anthony has an English mother, sure, but he's an American driver, and I feel like that tends to get animosity from the Brits more than attention, at least usually. While for me, I'm about as far from British as you can get in Formula One. Of course, we both drive for British teams, Harrison dominated the British Grand Prix, and the event in question happened at Silverstone, so combine that with the fact that F1 has a large audience in the UK, and that's probably as much explanation as the tabloids need. Still though, it is absolutely infuriating that we literally have accusations of the FIA President sexualizing Nazism, but the gossip pages would rather talk about my sex life.
On some level I knew this was probably going to happen at some point or another. The other drivers may treat me with respect once I've proven myself, but the common people that the vulgar press caters to. Well, they'll always just see me as some sort of novelty, the girly one that they could pair with the black one for some attention, and when that didn't work out, now they're trying to drag this out into some sensationalized storyline. I'm not saying that I regret anything with Roksana, far from it, but a part of me wishes that I was single and had nothing to hide right now so that I could just smirk and wait while they obsess over nothing, rather than having to worry about my very real relationship getting exposed. Instead, though, I have to try and hide this, make sure that my Middle Eastern or Central Asian sponsors never find out about this - not to mention there are plenty of western companies who probably see the harmless European male as a safer pick over the lesbian with a weird name coming from a weird country that nobody's ever heard of. I know I'm probably sounding like Roksana about all this, but the situation is making it about identity politics rather than something I consciously want, because no male F1 driver has to deal with this crap. Felipe Alvarez and Martin Weaver are close, but you don't see anybody proposing the idea that they're secretly gay lovers or anything. Meanwhile, I get caught in a picture with a male driver's arm around me and everyone jumps to it being proof of some sort of whirlwind romance going on right in the middle of the F1 paddock. It's ridiculous and it's a problem only I have to face.
"Thanks for the offer but no, I'd rather just not acknowledge this at all. These tabloids love when the celebrity gets mad and freaks out, because that just draws more attention to whatever the story is. I'm just going to keep it quiet and hope that they get bored sooner rather than later. There can't be that many more clicks left in this." I rationed, deciding that Roksana writing at article about this probably wouldn't be the best idea. Not to mention that, at absolute worse, someone could see through the article and guess that Roksana has a vested interest in my sex life, the kind of conclusion which is the exact thing that we're trying to avoid. I guess we just needed to avoid doing anything clearly romantic until this story dies down, which shouldn't be too hard, considering we're not particularly public about our relationship anyway. I don't need to be public about it either, I'm more than happy enough with what goes on in our apartment, our own little sanctuary without lights, cameras, or external pressures. A place where I don't have to worry about offending the sponsor on the cap I have to wear at every interview, a place where I don't need to worry about the fact that my actions are representative of a multinational tyre company like Bridgestone, and a place where I'm not an internationally known racing driver. A place where Roksana isn't an openly lesbian journalist writing in a niche space within a niche space and trying to make that into a career, with all the pressures going along with that. I just get to be a person, she just gets to be a person, and we get to be people together.
"Hey...you're in your head again, what's going on?" Roksana asked, gently, wrapping her arm around me and putting her left hand on my left shoulder, pulling me into a light hug. It was enough to ground me, bring me back down to Earth, and comfort me, without making me feel constricted.
"Nothing...just...it'll sound stupid." I blushed, looking down and to the left, as far away from Roksana as I could.
"I bet it's not." she smirked.
"I bet it is." I looked back at her, smirking in turn.
"Come on, what is it?" she asked, lightly, making it clear that she wanted me to answer, but she'd also be okay if I really didn't want to talk about it.
"Okay, okay. I love my job, I know I'm super privileged and everything, but I like this. Just this, you know? Sitting together, being comfortable, having some time off. It's nice." I answered, hoping that I didn't sound too ridiculous when I said I appreciate having a break from my life of flying around to all sorts of exotic places and living out my life's dream racing around the world. Then again, considering we're literally having a very stressful conversation about all the media attention having to do with my job, maybe it's a bit more believable than it would be in most situations. I guess the whole point is that I'm still not really good at this whole thing. I've gotten better I think, I know more and I'm getting more confident about doing things with Roksana in private, but I'm still not really cut out for all this. Quite frankly, I'm more built to drive cars than to be emotional. Going through puberty, all the time that kids spend figuring out what they like and having their first crushes and all that stuff, I was busy focusing driving progressively bigger and faster machinery. Hell, by the end of it, I was almost out of school more often than I was actually in school, getting help from a tutor while driving from track to track or even just between sessions during a race weekend. That left me with little time to interact with other people by age, and when I was on track, any potential friendships or bonds or relationships were strained by the fact that we were competitors. In those days, using a lot of spec cars and things like that, I couldn't be happy when a good thing happened to them, because a good thing for them was a bad thing for me, and vice versa. It's really only when you get to F1, where the machinery really makes a mountain of a difference, that I can be happy for my competitors.
I can't get upset when Anthony Harrison or Henrique de Matteo or anyone else wins a race because I know that my car isn't in contention to win a race. Therefore, all I can do is feel happy for them. On the other hand, the guys I can resent, those are the guys like Felipe Alvarez this season, like Martin Weaver, and, to an extent, like Tommy Koskinen, who have similar - or downright the same in the case of Tommy - cars to me. That might be part of the reason behind this recent falling out of sorts with Felipe, because last season I was always well behind him and he was always well ahead of me, so i could be happy for his results while he didn't have to think very much about me at all. Now though, he's one of the best drivers in the world and he's in a car that is at a similar level of performance as Williams, which means that when I get a good result, it's bad news for him, and when he gets a good result, it's bad news for me. Then take Canada for an example, a race that sort of represents the end of Williams' streak of good races, while representing the start of when Renault really got its act together. In that respect, the crash was kinda a turning point in the season. Add in the fact that, in one way or another, Felipe probably resents the fact that he's at a worse team this season - regardless of the fact that it was his choice to move - and there's a lot of factors behind why Felipe might have made those comments about me. Not that any of this justifies his behavior, of course. Anyway, enough about rivals or why it's hard to form relationships in a competitive environment, back to the emotions I'm facing here and now.
"You don't have to explain yourself. What you do is hard and stressful. You drive a 750-horsepower missile around in circles with nineteen other maniacs all trying to get into the same eight places that make a world of difference. You have to do all of this while a bunch of pudgy nobodies on the other end of a TV judge your every move and look for any reason to prove that their guy is better than you. You're allowed to want a break from that every once in awhile even if there are things about it that you love with all your heart." Roksana explained, justifying my feelings for me, all while pulling me down to the bed with her, wrapping her arms around my waist, pulling me in close so I was the little spoon, and then finishing up by whispering the last part of her speech into my ear. I know it wasn't necessarily about our relationship, but I knew I definitely felt something when Roksana whispered in my earing about 'love with all your heart.'
"So..." I breathed out, feeling better already "What you're saying is that I'm a maniac and you're a pudgy nobody?"
"Wow...I try to help you and you call me pudgy, I'm hurt." Roksana responded in such a way that I could practically hear the smirk on her lips, nevertheless, I couldn't help but feel a little bit hurt when she withdrew her arms from around me, even if I knew it was all part of the playful act.
"Hey, it was your words, not-" I argued, turning around as I did so, only to find my arguments silenced when Roksana leaned in and kissed me. I closed my eyes and sunk into it, a private, comfortable moment between two people who were in love, that's all it was. In that moment, I could forget about the fact that the British tabloids were taking an interest in my personal life, I could forget about the fact that the three-week break was going away quickly, and I'd probably have to get back on my fitness routine with Walentyna as early as tomorrow, and I could forget about the fact that I needed to learn a whole new track on the simulator before the race weekend starts. Right now, I could just be a person in love, that's all. Love. Not just a casual love you over the phone, but an actual being in love with someone. Wow, that's certainly a loaded idea, isn't it? Part of me felt that it was too soon to admit that, even to myself, but on the other hand, we've been together for over a year, and in that time, Roksana took me from not even being aware of my sexuality to going on my first date, having my first kiss, losing my virginity...all these things I never even thought about experiencing. Maybe love can be the next experience she brings me through and maybe, just maybe, that can be an experience that's new for the both of us.
Love or not, I didn't feel safe bringing Roksana with me to the race. So, even though Valencia wasn't very far from Monaco or from Marseille which, I suppose, was still her hometown even if she's moved in with me, she wasn't at the track with me. We couldn't risk letting the press get a potentially compromising picture of us, not while this story is still relatively fresh in everyone's mind. It's a shame too, because Valencia is kind of a beautiful city. Could the same be said about the track though? Well, the paddock was a pretty beautiful place, sitting right on the America's Cup Marina, and the parts of the track that looped around the marina looked pretty good too. The rest of the track, sector three in particular though, were a bit of a different story. It's very much a concrete jungle with the track below, walls on either side, a bit of paved run-off every once in awhile, and all the curves and turns being highly artificial. It was also basically perfectly flat. Of course none of those things were necessarily bad, but put together like this, I would be lying if I didn't say that it wasn't the best street circuit in the world. The fact that most of the scenery around the track consists of construction cranes and port equipment wasn't exactly helping. That being said, if the racing product is good - or at least if we can get good results here - I'd be pretty happy with it. As for now though, it seems like the track is an attempt by the city of Valencia to revitalize its seaside district...an attempt that might be a bit misguided considering the currently very concerning state of the United States' economy, something threatening to affect the rest of the world.
So, I wasn't exactly sure if this circuit was truly the best Valencia could offer, nor was I sure about the economics behind this project as a whole, but I think I'll have a better idea of what I think about the track once I complete my first lap. With the exception of Fuji, which was an old track but returning for the first time in decades in a new configuration, this was the first completely new track to Formula One during my time as a driver, and I was eager to experience it as FP1 began. The team sent me out on prime tyres for the first lap of the weekend, one of the first laps of the track period. The pit exit curved inside of turn one and released me into the path of turn two, the first braking zone of the track. That was when i started putting some heat into my tyres and brakes, working them up as I circled around, waiting to get back to the start-finish straight so that I could start my first lap in anger. Finally, coming out of the hairpin turn of twenty-five, I let the power down, letting the eight-cylinder Toyota engine in the back of Williams Racing machine breath as I fired it into the first section of the track, circling around the marina. First up was turn one, a flat-out sweeper to the right. Flat out in these conditions anyway, if I was in the middle of the pack during the first lap of the race, I might have some reservations about planting my foot down. At the start of FP1 though, there were only a handful of cars circulating, so I practically had the track to myself.
For the second time I hit the brakes going into turn two, back in familiar territory - as familiar as you can be with this track anyway - and headed towards the marina for but a moment before the track started to open up. Turn three was the first left-hander of the day and deposited me onto a short straight before a chicane made up of turn four to the left and turn five to the right. This was one of the few sections of track where there was a sizable amount of run-off on either side. It didn't last long though, because the walls seemed to close in again as I swept the car to the left through turn six and then back to the right through turn eight, cresting the marina. The next braking zone came with turn eight, effectively a hairpin to the right that seemed to slightly overshoot its mark - likely an attempt to encourage overtaking - meaning that the next corner, turn nine, was a kink to the left, realigning my car just in time to come onto the bridge. That's right, one of the features of the circuit was the modern, white swing bridge over the canal that connected the marina with the actual sea. It was a braking zone to the right, bringing us onto the track's longest straight. Well, I say straight, but turn eleven, a sweeper to the left, was about a third of the way down the straight. This is also the part of the circuit where the scenery started to change, no longer circling the marina, no longer seeing the bridge or the port cranes in the distance, now the scenery was becoming more urban. I imagine that many of these buildings are the old factories that the Valencian Community would hope to turn into refurbished luxury housing. Urban renewal aside, the straight needed to end eventually.
That came with the next likely overtaking zone on the track, mainly that of turn twelve, a ninety-degree right-hander. This opened a chicane that included turn thirteen, which was almost like they took a ninety-degree left-hander but chopped it down into a somewhat faster double-apex corner. Coming out of turn thirteen, there was just enough room to build a little bit of speed before hitting the braking and shifting down the box for the right-hander of turn fourteen, bringing me onto a sort of back straight for the track. A back straight which, much like the last one, began by sweeping to the left, which for some reason merited the classification of both corners fifteen and sixteen. That meant that when I reached the hairpin, with its Communitat Valenciana signage, the braking zone to the right was considered turn seventeen, despite fourteen having been the last real corner. Coming out of the hairpin, we were truly in the final section of the track now, with the hairpin quickly followed by a series of fast kinks: turn eighteen to the left followed by nineteen to the right and turn twenty to the right again. The steering wheel got to rest in the middle for a few seconds as I drove down the final straight. The straight had a few kinks in it though, so a bit to the right through turn twenty-one, a bit to the left through turn twenty-two, straight for just enough time to back a breath before turn twenty-three again kinked to the left. Then I swung to the car to the right for turn twenty four, a more substantial corner, and one that led directly into the final hairpin. If I wanted to pit, I would've taken a wider line through turn twenty-five before curving left into the pitlane like a letter U, instead through, I stayed out, and that meant that turn twenty-five was a sharp V. On the brakes, downshifting enough to ensure that I'll get good acceleration on exit, and then turn left before powering back up the box, unleashing everything I had to get to the line as quickly as possible. Finally I reached it, completing my first lap of the Valencia Street Circuit in free practice one, welcoming back the European Grand Prix to Formula One.
The European Grand Prix had once been an honorary title rotated throughout the various Grand Prix in Europe as a way of adding prestige, however, at some point, the title began being used for excess events in countries that already hosted F1 events. For instance, in the 1980s, when Brands Hatch needed to fill a slot on the calendar while Silverstone hosted the British Grand Prix, Brands would host the European Grand Prix, introducing the race as a standalone event. In 1993 the European Grand Prix would be in Britain again as a one-off event at Donington Park - a race famously won by Ayrton Senna in the rain - and in 1997, the European Grand Prix would host the controversial season finale at Jerez in Spain. The circuit most associated with the European Grand Prix, however, is the Nürburgring, which hosted the event as early as 1984, but it's primarily known for the era from 1999 to 2006 when the Hockenheimring hosted the German Grand Prix and the GP-Strecke at the Nürburgring hosted the European Grand Prix, the popularity of Wilhelm Ziegler being able to support two events. When Ziegler retired, that came to an end, and there was only one German race in 2007. Of course, with the two German circuits being competitors, there came some legal trouble and the 2007 event at the Nürburgring still had to be called the European Grand Prix, but we're in a new era now. Now it's Spain hosting two Grand Prix, bolstered by the popularity of Felipe Alvarez, no doubt - ironic given he was one of Wilhelm Ziegler's last great rivals - and Valencia is a whole new track created specifically to be the European Grand Prix. Before it was always existing tracks or one-off events at tracks like Donington, but now maybe the event will form a new kind of identity. If nothing else I'll say I enjoyed the lap of this place, I wouldn't call it one of my favorites but I definitely don't hold anything against it. Sure the scenery could be a bit better and twenty-five corners is a bit much, but as a driver, I hope to have better things to do during the race than think about the scenery, and a lot of those corners are flat-out nothing corners.
For the race itself, Henrique de Matteo started from pole, Anthony Harrison in second place, meaning the front row was taken up by the championship contenders. On row two was Piotr Kaminski in third and Matti Hamalainen in fourth, two men would could also find themselves firmly in championship contention if either of the front-row starters stumbles on the unknown streets of Valencia. Jyri Kaasalainen starts from fifth, where the sport's most recent race winner will have a hard time supporting his teammates from the dual Ferraris ahead of him, and Maximilian Renner lines up alongside, able to qualify concerningly well in that new Toro Rosso now that they finally have a hang of the new car. Ivan Tripoli in seventh and Victor Hartmann in eighth are more of the usual customers, but with Tommy Koskinen in ninth and myself in eleventh, separated only by the Toro Rosso of Maximilien Lecroix in tenth, Williams might finally have the chance to score some points again. Felipe Alvarez was lining up twelfth in front of the home crowd, while Fabian Schmidt was in thirteenth, and Martin Weaver in fourteenth. Filipe Yannick in fifteenth and James Buxton in sixteenth increased the number of potential rivals starting behind us today, further lifting my mood. Then there was Daniel MacGowan in seventeenth and Umberto Petronelli down in eighteenth. Rudolfo Goncalves and Lorenzo Barbaro, both having changed their gearboxes late on, will start from pitlane. So, when the formation lap completed, we had eighteen cars on the grid, two waiting in the pitlane so they could begin, and five red lights on the gantry above, just waiting to go out and unleash us.
The lights went out and I shot off the grid, speeding alongside the Toro Rosso as we reached turn one, but, as predicted, I had to lift just a bit through this corner. There were a lot of cars all around me and I needed the car to be stable and exactly where I wanted it, so I couldn't afford to push it too hard. So, I lifted on the outside, allowing Lecroix to defend his position, retaining tenth place. It didn't last long though, because I outbraked him in turn two and got my nose in front...only for him to remain on the inside line, again coming back at me. We were neck-and-neck going down to turn three but, with it finally being a corner to the left rather than the right, I finally had the inside line and thus the advantage. The Toro Rosso was still right behind me though, so I swerved to the left on the short shoot between the corners to ensure I would have the inside for the next corner. At the same time though, Felipe Alvarez followed me, also heading to the inside and hoping he could use my draft to overtake the Frenchman going into turn four. I braked for the corner, Lecroix did as well, not quite managing to outbrake me but definitely closing the distance - something which I imagine would compromise his exit in the long run - but I never got the chance to find out. You see, the problem is that it was fundamentally three cars all vying for the same position, I was the car that won out, and with Lecroix chopping across the nose of Felipe Alvarez who was basically divebombing the corner at that point, the Renault and the Toro Rosso took each other out, leaving Alvarez stricken in the chicane at his home race, and Lecroix limping back to the pits for a new nose.
The race calmed down at this point, with Matteo leading from Harrison, Kaminski, Hamalainen, Kaasalainen, Renner, Tripoli, Hartmann, and Koskinen, while I completed the top ten. The grid continued around the first lap in somewhat of a high speed procession, with turns five and six run under yellow flags due to the crash, and going back to green by the time we got to turn seven. There wasn't any overtaking going on into turn eight on this lap, nor through turn nine as we drove onto the swing bridge, fixed for the length of the race weekend, of course. My mind was briefly brought to the image of Henrique de Matteo and Anthony Harrison doing battle so intensely they didn't even see that the bridge was swung open, leading to Henrique going into the water while Harrison slammed the brakes and just stopped before the ledge. The idea was obviously more something along the lines of an old Warner Bros. cartoon rather than anything that would actually happen at an F1 race, but I had to admit, it was a bit of a funny visual, if only for me. Anyway, back to the task at hand.
I hit the brakes for turn ten and popped down the gears with my left hand as I did so, then I swung the car to the right as we reached the straight. I checked my mirrors for a moment, seeing that I had a bit of a gap to Fabian Schmidt behind - he had obviously been cautious going through the debris of the Alvarez-Lecroix incident, meaning I now had a few car lengths between me and him - while up ahead, my teammate was the car in front. Obviously I could and do race my teammate, but with a bit of a back between us, I wasn't going to divebomb or try anything risky on an untested track. I would bide my time and see how the situation develops. So, because of that, as we reached the chicane, there were no changes of position going on around me. So, we negotiated the chicane and a few other corners, before soon enough, we were on the back straight heading to turn seventeen. if a car could stick to the car ahead, turn seventeen could prove to be a good overtaking opportunity, but again, if there was action going into this corner on the first lap, it wasn't going on here. From here on out, it was a lot of tight, twisty, winding corners with the walls on either side, much of it taken at full throttle, so there wasn't an opportunity for much action, at least not until we got to turn twenty-five, the final corner. At that point though, the beginnings of gaps were forming as the cars started to string themselves out as we entered lap two.
Lap one, for better or worse, effectively set the tone of the race, since there really wasn't much of note going on. Maximilien Lecroix did pit for a new nose and all that once he got to the pits, but having had to do almost the entire first lap with a damaged car, and losing even more time in the pits, he wasn't exactly in contention, now was he? The car that started directly ahead of me was no longer a factor, I was in tenth, and my teammate was the car directly ahead of me, so Williams was already turning its attention to trying to use strategy to get both cars up into the points. This seemed like the best opportunity we were going to get in a long time. That's just kind of how the race went - the nearby barriers meant that overtaking was difficult so teams turned their attention to strategy, which meant that conserving tyres and fuel became critical to securing an optimal pit strategy - which only exacerbated the lack of on-track action. The first thing of any note that happened was during the first pit cycle, when, thanks to a fast set of in and out laps, I was able to get ahead of my teammate. I managed to stay within a second or two of Tommy during the first stint and once I made my stop, I was completely in clean air getting heat into my new tyres, while Koskinen was still circulating about a second off the car ahead on worn tyres. When Tommy did finally make his stop two laps after me, I was already up to speed and beat him into turn two, and I was able to consolidate that position as the nature of these cars on this track strung the cars out again. I was now up to ninth, meaning that Victor Hartmann was now the only thing keeping me out of the points.
So, as we settled into the second stint of the race, Henrique de Matteo led from Anthony Harrison, Piotr Kaminski, Jyri Kaasalainen, and Matti Hamalainen. Maximilian Renner was in sixth, Ivan Tripoli was in seventh, Victor Hartmann in eighth, I was in ninth, and Tommy Koskinen completed the top ten. There wasn't much going on just yet, but some things were becoming apparent: mainly that, once again, Henrique and Anthony were the class of the field, while Piotr Kaminski simply didn't have the kind of machinery that his title rivals did. Jyri Kaasalainen usually had decent pace in qualifying, but it was becoming evident that he simply wasn't a match for Anthony Harrison in the race; with Matti Hamalainen stuck behind his countryman, he wasn't able to make much of an impression on the cars ahead. Matti's best bet was for Ferrari to try and go on a contrary strategy compared to the McLaren in hopes of getting ahead, because passing was difficult on this track, but the Ferrari clearly had strong race pace in the hands of his teammate. Given clean air, the 2007 champion could easily be challenging Piotr Kaminski for a podium position instead of languishing in fifth. Of course, if Matti isn't able to pass Jyri, he'll have a hard time trying to pass Piotr once he catches up to the Pole, but even then, fourth is indeed better than fifth. I don't know, but I needed to think of something while only making incremental gains on Victor Hartmann ahead.
So, Ferrari needed to mix things up strategy wise to get Matti ahead of Kaasalainen, while I needed something a bit more drastic to get the job done on Victor Hartmann. That was the name of the game in the second stint. Well, Henrique de Matteo boxed first, switching from the option tyres to the primes, however, things got complicated as backmarker Lorenzo Barbaro was in the pits at the same time. As the Uruguayan was coming down the pits Ferrari inadvertently released the Brazilian into his path, and it was only some quick intervention from Henrique that avoided a crash. The Brazilian got going again and came out in the lead ahead of Anthony Harrison, but victory was far from certain for the Ferrari driver as everyone on the grid waited to see whether or not Ferrari would be slapped with an unsafe release penalty. Meanwhile, things went from bad to worse when a fuel rig issue for Matti Hamalainen led to the #1 car losing a place when the whole point of the strategy had been had been to gain a place on Jyri Kaasalainen. Instead, the Finn just doubled the amount of work he needed to do. Anyway, with Ferrari having absorbed all the bad luck the final stops would bring, I finally came in towards the end of the race to switch from the primes to the options, ensuring that I would be at my fastest in the final stint of the race, while Victor Hartmann was already wearing down his final prime tyres. I stopped in the box, the car went up, the tyres were switched, fuel loaded into the car, and I was released, none of the misfortune that befell the Ferrari crew.
"Okay good, good, good. Hartmann is slow ahead, you can get him." Peter encouraged through this radio and, true to his word, the one and a half second gap that Hartmann had over me evaporated, down to 1.2 seconds after the first lap, then just under a second after two laps, under seven tenths after three, and within half a second after four. I was on my fifth lap after the pitstop I was right under Hartmann's gearbox going into turn eight. The dirty air was hurting me, sure, but he was also diving me enough of a tow down the straights and I had enough of a speed advantage that I was pushing through regardless. I followed the German through turn nine and into the bridge, then closing in even more into the braking zone on turn nine. The BMW Sauber was able to get somewhat of a better exit out of the corner but the straight afterwards was long enough that it didn't matter, because I was gaining on him, gaining and gaining, and finally, I pulled to the right going into turn twelve, outbraking the BMW thanks to my fresher, grippier tyres, and got up into eighth place with ease, Victor Hartmann powerless to defend as his pace threatened to drop him even further behind. That eighth place would turn into seventh when Matti Hamalainen's engine gave out with ten laps remaining. This proved to be one of the few pieces of action in a race marked by just three retirements and zero changes in the top three.
The points-paying results for the 2008 European Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 8 points.
3: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 6 points.
4: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 5 points.
5: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 4 points.
6: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 3 points.
7: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 2 points.
8: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 1 point.
So, for the first time since Bahrain, Williams scored a double points finish, bringing my season tally up to 19, Tommy's up to 9, and Williams' up to 28. We were still sixth in the constructors' championship, but thanks to the fact that Renault failed to score today, we were just a point behind their tally of 29. Toyota, meanwhile, was solidifying their grasp on fourth by moving up to 34 points. Red Bull was still on 23 just behind us, while Toro Rosso was up to 11 points, thanks to the fact that Maximilian Renner has begun to outperform the senior Red Bulls as of late. Maximilien Lecroix hasn't quite been able to match his German teammate, but the Frenchman does still have two of those points to his name, so he is contributing. It's somewhat the same story here at Williams, where, as mentioned, I have double the number of points as Tommy and have now beaten him head-to-head 6 times to 2, despite the fact that he is beating me 8 times to 3 in qualifying. Granted, this weekend I was basically just behind him in quali, but the point remains, Tommy is a really good driver and has performed well all year long, he just hasn't been able to convert his qualifying positions into points. Some of that is bad luck to be fair, but one thing I have going for me this season is that I have converted bad starting positions to good finishing positions more often than not. Even taking into account my two retirements this year, I have scored points twice as often as I haven't.
As for the championship battle, well, Anthony Harrison retains the lead due to a smartly managed race, but Henrique de Matteo is once again his closest challenger, with Matti Hamalainen's ill-timed retirement hurting the Finn's chance of a title defense. Ferrari still leads the constructors' championship though, but with McLaren being very consistent lately, they have closed the gap a bit, while BMW Sauber is being left behind to an extent. BMW Sauber has a really good car this season, but it almost seems like the team has no greater ambition now that they've won that race, so despite the fact that Piotr is now doubt begging to be given a machine that can challenge for the title, BMW is lagging behind, and Victor Hartmann's pace here in Valencia is a clear example of that. A Ferrari retired, this should be a good opportunity for the BMWs, but instead, one of the cars slipped out of the points entirely without even the convenient excuse of a parts failure. Ultimately though, I knew that Toyota were going to have more good days this season, I knew that Renault were going to have more good days in the final races, so I'm going to appreciate the good days we have - especially the good days we have with both cars - and hope we can pull off a miracle in spite of the horrible pace we had at some of the European summer races.
The 2008 Superleague Formula season would kick off on August 31st, 2008 at Donington Park with two races at the British circuit. This would be followed by race weekends at the Nürburgring in Germany, Zolder in Belgium, Estoril in Portugal, Vallelunga in Italy, and finally finishing up with a race at Jerez on November 23rd, meaning the season would outlast the 2008 Formula One season. So, with the season about to kick off and excitement in the air about this interesting fusion of football and motorsport, AS Roma was doing a special event to unveil their challenger, the Panoz DP09 run by Scuderia Coloni-PASS, driven by Natasha Tsirinskaya, right outside of the Stadio Olimpico. So yeah, that's how I found myself in a 72,000 seat stadium in the Italian capital watching journalists taking pictures of my cousin sitting on the front wheel of the race car, holding her helmet on her knee, with the 2008-2009 Serie A squad flanking the car. Part of me noted the fact that that it was a men's football team and their car, yet the driver was a woman, which seemed a bit off - did AS Roma have a woman's team they could've used for this instead? I pushed that thought aside though, because, quite frankly, other than this unveil, I didn't think the club involved would have very much to do with the team or the championship. Quite frankly, AS Roma was just a glorified sponsor wrap on a car run by Umberto Petronelli's junior team, and the car itself was a modified American Champ Car with an American-made V12 engine, which was somewhat ironic considering the perception of football - soccer - in the United States. Reusing a car because the series went bankrupt a year later aside, I was just happy for Natasha, because not many junior drivers got to be the centerpiece of a major European stadium.
The car itself was red, orange, and white, with the club badge on the sidepod. A shield, red on the bottom, orange on top, with an orange monogram of A-S-R on the bottom and a white she-wolf on the bottom. This, naturally, relates to the founding myth of Rome, where the twins Romulus and Remus floated ashore along the Tiber river to be nursed to maturity by a she-wolf. Roma would join fellow Italian club AC Milan in this series, along with English clubs Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool, Scottish old firm giant Rangers, and Germany's Borussia Dortmund. Clubs from from several other European clubs were represented, along with Al-Ain from the United Arab Emirates, Beijing Guoan from China, and two of Brazil's largest clubs in the form of Flamengo and Corinthians. I admit that there are definitely some major players in football missing - the likes of Manchester United, Barcelona, and Real Madrid being among the most obvious absentees - but the fact of the matter is that the championship, without even having proven itself, has already attracted the likes of Liverpool and AC Milan. A year and a half ago those clubs were facing each other in the 2007 Champions' League final, so yeah, some pretty damn big names, paired with a proven car and a powerful V12 engine. There's also the fact that, in many ways, the series doesn't submit itself at Formula One's feet - it has four more cylinders, a similar power figure, and even ran on Michelin slick tyres rather than the grooved Bridgestones we have in Formula One nowadays. Now, F1 cars are still ten or more seconds a lap faster, mainly down to factors such as lower weight, better technology, competition driving down lap times in a pressured situation that simply doesn't happen in a spec series, and the fact that F1 cars can rev to 19,000, rather than Superleague Formula's 11,000 - 12,000 under push-to-pass - meaning we got more out of our V8s than they got out of their V12s. Still, the point remains, these were far from go-karts, and the drivers in this series included F1 drivers, A1GP talents, Champ Car alums, and a smattering of high level junior drivers, this was legitimately a desirable place to go to for drivers who didn't have opportunities in Formula One. And now Natasha got to be a part of that.
"Would you like an autogr - oh, hi." Natasha asked as she finished signing something for someone else before properly turning to face me, face blushing with embarrassment as she just realized what she asked me.
"Yes actually," I smirked, quickly presenting the guest pass Umberto Petronelli provided me with. Nat smiled, shook her head, but proceeded to sign the pass regardless. I walked away happy with it, having turned a mere forgettable access pass that I would have probably thrown away into a legitimate, signed souvenir from a major next step in my little cousin's racing career. I recognized that we weren't actually blood related - at least not in any meaningful way - but we were practically raised together, and I have always considered her family, so, if I'm going to be collecting various trophies, race suits, helmets, and other memorabilia items from my racing career, I might as well start collecting things from her racing career as well. Later this week, on the same track that Ayrton Senna once put together one of the greatest wet weather performances of all time, Natasha will contest two races, both worth fifty points, and attempt to ensure that her brilliant, brilliant form from the GP2 Asia series earlier this year translate to Superleague Formula again. The cars are different and the racing may be in Europe rather than in Asia, but the goal remains the same: race as hard as you can, finish as high as you can, and ensure you impress people in Formula One in the process.
Speaking of Formula One, the Belgian Grand Prix comes a week after the opening Superleague Formula event, and the long, fast run through the Ardennes will no doubt be a chaotic event even by the standards of a chaotic season. You combine the best drivers in the world with one of the best tracks in the world and the rising pressure of a championship battle nearing its final crescendo...Belgium is going to matter a lot, as is Monza, as is the new night race in Singapore, the East Asian double with Fuji Speedway in Japan and the Shanghai circuit in China, before finally coming to a finale in Brazil on the great Interlagos circuit. The way this season has gone, there is no doubt in my mind the title fight will make it all the way to the finale.
It was somewhat of a bag of mixed fortunes for the two of us when the Sunday of the Belgian Grand Prix rolled around. Natasha, to her credit, got off the line with a brilliant start in Superleague Formula, finishing second in her first race for 45 points and tenth in the second race for 18 points. The total of 63 points from the Donington Park weekend brings her up to 63 points, putting her fourth in the championship behind fellow junior drivers: Ezequiel Martinez for Liverpool, who was on 79 points, and Shandar Khan for PSV Eindhoven, who was on 72 points, and Goncalo Borja for Sevilla who was on 68 points. Former Formula One driver, Robert Deschamps, driving for Italian team AC Milan, was just behind Natasha on 59 points, meaning that the title battle seemed just as tight, if not tighter, than what she had to deal with in GP2 Asia. As for me, well, I wasn't so lucky, because I qualified down in eighteenth for the Belgian Grand Prix, and Tommy wasn't better off considering he was only in fifteenth place. I was outqualified by my teammate yet again, but I was still close enough that I could out race him, not that I thought that points would be on the line for either of us. That being said, I had a hard time predicting where either of us would finish, assuming we finished at all.
The reason for this was that the track was basically still drying from morning showers as the formation lap began, so, the track was slippery to begin with. Add to the fact that it was overcast and more rain was predicted to come during the race, nearly everyone was starting on the option tyres, since none of us expected for us to be on these tyres for particularly long. The fact that we were on the softer, faster tyres also increased the chances of an accident happening on the still very slick track, so again, there was certainly a risk involved, and any of us drivers could be caught out in these conditions. I guess the only thing I could do, as I arrived back on the grid about three minutes later, is try to survive and hope to be rewarded with points at the end of it. Red light after red light came on, elevated on the gantry above us, the tension building more and more until finally all five lights were on. That particular moment is probably the most agonizing moment in Formula One, where every bone in your body is ready to blast off the grid, but you know a race-ruining penalty will come your way if you move even a split-second too early. Holding and holding and holding until the lights go out and then facing wheelspin immediately as the tyres struggled to grip into the slippery surface beneath them. As myself and all the other drivers struggled off the grid, Filipe Yannick on the prime tyres and Ivan Tripoli next to him, were able to get rocketing starts.
Tripoli didn't last long though, because in turn one the Toyota got rammed from behind by Maximilien Lecroix, who locked up into the corner. Lecroix's teammate, Max Renner, also locked up, but he was able to avoid hitting another car, meaning the Toyota was the only one suffering diffuser and gearbox damage because of the Toro Rosso's synchronized lock-ups. That's not to say that they were the only ones to have a bad time in La Source though, because Hartmann and Kaasalainen banged wheels in the hairpin as well. Finally, while I was cautious on the brakes and trying to avoid all of this, far from happy on the slippery surface going into the corner, I got clattered into by Umberto Petronelli for good measure. The Force India was left with a broken front wing and a front left puncture form running over his own debris, while I continued through the corner, turning all the way to the right and then putting down the power on the short downhill straight.
"Is the car okay?" I asked over the team radio, making sure that I wasn't nursing a slow puncture of my own after that lap one, turn one contact.
"No visible damage, continue. If you feel something wrong let us know, otherwise, it's business as usual!" Peter Malmedy gave my orders through the radio, making it clear what was expected of me on the track not very far at all from his ancestral homeland.
"Copy," was my monosyllabic response before throwing the car to the left for Eau Rouge, back to the right up the hill, and the cresting it to the left again as I ascended Raidillon, having completed one of the most classic and historic corners in Formula One. This brought me onto the Kemmel straight, which was so very straight that there was a small kink in the middle of it that was counted as turn six, the second such nothing corner on this track, continuing the tradition set by turn one. Anyway, the Kemmel straight was a mild incline all the way up before we finally reached the first sector line of the race, opening sector two with an immediate braking zone into turn seven to the right, followed quickly by eight to the left and then nine to the right as we completed the Les Combes complex. Now at the top of the circuit - both in terms of the map and the terrain - we began the descent with turn ten, the Bruxelles hairpin. Coming out of Bruxelles, the descent accelerated, plunging downhill through the no-name left-hander of turn eleven, before the ground finally started to even out as I reached Pouhon. Lifting, downshifting, and even dabbing the brakes in these conditions, I threw the car into the first apex of turn thirteen, and then lifting again as I threw the car into the second apex, still very much aware of the slippery conditions. I wasn't even entirely aware of what position i was in right now, my full focus was on keeping the car between the white lines.
Pouhon was followed by a short straight before I braked for the right hander of turn thirteen which was almost immediately mirrored by turn fourteen, Campus, though this time to the left. Another short blast down a straightaway before braking and turning to the right for Stavelot, the edge of the circuit, and crossing the sector two line on corner exit. Now on the last bit of lap one, I turned to the right again for turn sixteen, powering down on corner exit as the modern Spa-Francorchamps layout rejoined with the classic layout, flat-out for a long section of track as I threw the car to the left and left again through Blanchimont, keeping the power down as much as I could before finally hitting the brakes for the bus stop. The tight, forty-five degree corner of turn nineteen was to the left followed by turn twenty to the right as the current bus stop layout made a sort of Z-shape before connecting the back stretch with the main straight. I applied the power gently down the still slippery start-finish straight and finally crossed the line to complete the opening lap. One down, forty-three to go.
While I was just trying to survive on lap one, Matti Hamalainen was making progress forward, having overtaken his teammate for second place down the Kemmel straight, and now coming into the lead as Harrison spun in turn one. The American quickly recovered, but he had lost the lead to the reigning champion, rejoining in second ahead of Henrique de Matteo. Things went from bad to worse for McLaren on lap ten, when Kaasalainen spun Weaver out, leading to the young Finn receiving a drive-through penalty, eventually dropping him down to fifteenth. Unfortunately for me, I was just behind him at this stage, so I didn't get to capitalize on his misfortune. Things would stay rather unfortunate for me because, when I took my first pitstop a little more than a fourth of the way into the race, I found that conditions weren't feeling any better now than they were before. It was still too slick for the dry tyres but nowhere near wet enough for either of the two wet-weather compounds. It was this miserable middle ground where neither tyre was able to function properly. I would, however, gain a place when Filipe Yannick crashed out, and that also lessened Renault's chances of being able to maximize a race where Williams simply had no pace.
The second stop would come on lap thirty-three, but I was back in the pits not ten laps later when the rain finally came, and came heavily at that. Meanwhile though, the most important events of the race - likely what would be one of the most important events of the championship - occurred. Anthony Harrison caught up to Matti Hamalainen and attempted to repass the Finn into the bus stop, but the American overshot the corner and overtook off-track. Anthony slowed, allowing Hamalainen to get a nose ahead, but the American sped back up and outbraked Matti into La Source, retaking the lead. McLaren and Harrison would maintain that, to the letter of the law, they returned the position they gained off track, fulfilling the regulations, and then regained it immediately afterwards. Ferrari and Hamalainen, however, argued that Harrison did not truly surrender the position and thus violated the spirit of the regulation by strategically playing the procedure. The end result of it was that Anthony Harrison was slapped with a twenty-five second time penalty while Hamalainen decided to lose control and clatter into the barriers on lap forty-two, ending his day. Down in fourteenth on a new set of wets, I got to experience that from a front row seat considering I was being lapped. In any case, when accounting for Anthony's penalty...
The points-paying results for the 2008 Belgian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 8 points.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 6 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 5 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 4 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 3 points.
7: Maximilien Lecroix - France - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 2 points.
8: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 1 point.
So, Henrique de Matteo closes to within two points of Anthony Harrison, Felipe Alvarez takes a big haul of points for Renault despite his teammate's retirement, and Williams finishes twelfth and thirteenth, Tommy and I finishing line-and-stern a lap down. Toyota and Renault were now tied on 34 points, Williams continued to sit on 28, Red Bull moved up onto 24 points, modest gains but more than we could do, while Toro Rosso was improving quickly to be on 17 points. Honda, with their points tally of 14, was now ahead of only Force India and the extinct Super Aguri team. The one good thing about being a Williams driver after a race like that is that I get to be blissfully free of the massive controversies going on at the front of the field.
McLaren made it clear that they intended to appeal the decision, Ferrari made it clear that they did not believe that Harrison returned the position correctly, and various figures within the sport were giving quotes weighing in on the issue. I opted not to give a statement, mainly because, quite frankly, I don't want to touch this issue with a ten foot pole. I can see McLaren's side, i can see Ferrari's side, and I can see how everyone would try and use this situation to their advantage.
Notes:
Controversy!
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 18: Yet More Controversies
Notes:
Hello hello everyone. I was feeling a bit of a 1950s kick so two weeks ago I posted a little one-shot called A Beautiful Race about a non-championship race in 1950, basically following the same format as the races in this story. I don't have the time or energy to write a whole additional story right now but I wanted to express that recent interest somehow. Check that out if you're interested, it's posted in the same places as this story so it should be pretty easy to find. Anyway, enough out of me, here's chapter eighteen, and this is gonna be a big one in terms of plot.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter XVIII.
Yet More Controversies.
I threw my left arm out in front of me, pulling in a half-circle all the way, then I came up and took a breath before throwing my right arm in the same way, propelling myself forward as my feet paddled behind me. A few more strokes and it was time to turn around, length constricted by the size of the Monaco swimming pool. Nevertheless, I went all the way back to the other side before allowing myself to grab the ladder and climb out of it. I shook some water off of me before walking over to the two pool chairs set up right now, one containing a sunbathing Roksana Yurasova, dressed a red bikini and gold-framed sunglasses, the other containing my towel. I dried myself off before taking off the swimming cap and releasing my hair from its bun. I ran my fingers through my hair a few times, trying to get back to the way I liked it, before finally putting the towel back on the chair, satisfied with my appearance. I stayed standing for a moment though, instead enjoying the sight in front of me.
My gray-eyed blonde girlfriend must have fallen asleep at some point, because she laid idly on the pool lounger completely still, save for the small rise in her chest as she lightly breathed in and out. I thought for the moment that it was the most adorable thing I've ever seen, and then I took a look around. The pool area was enclosed for privacy, with a brick wall on two sides, a row of hedges on the third, and my building on the fourth. I looked through the sliding doors and saw no one was coming down the hallway to the pool, while up above, nobody was on their balconies, or even particularly close to their windows. There were other buildings around, but I couldn't see anyone overlooking us there either, at least not close enough to be able to tell who we were. Deciding that we were relatively safe - and I hated the fact that I had to make sure of that before doing something like this - I came over to her lounger and lowered myself down onto it, so that I was straddling her. I heard the first sounds of her waking up, somewhat confused, but I was already leaning into her ear and whispering.
"Hey," I whispered into my ear, doing my best impression of a kind of husky, sexy voice. Considering the fact that Roksana seemed to shiver and even squirm a bit underneath me, I think I got the desired effect.
"Hey..." she responded, voice trailing off as she found herself unable to come up with a witty comeback. Her brain wasn't working right now, and I wasn't going to give her the chance to fix it, because instead I leaned into her lips and kissed her. That seemed to knock the sleepiness out of my napping girlfriend, because it took only a split-second into the kiss for her to catch on, start kissing back, and start running her hands along my body, very much aware of the fact that it was late summer in Monaco and neither of us were wearing anything more than a skimpy little two piece swimsuit. I moaned into her mouth when her hands ran down my sides and onto my ass, running across them before finding a place to rest right in the middle, right where she found the offending fabric separating her hands from hot skin. A deep groan escaped her lips next time we broke apart, a downright dangerous mixture of desire and an unwanted obstacle "We should go upstairs...now."
"Yes ma'am." I obeyed, getting off of her and grabbing my towel. The Portuguese born Ukrainian didn't let me get away for long though, pulling me into a hug, giving me a quick kiss - something to be followed up on once we're back inside the apartment I imagine - before grabbing me by the hand and leading me back inside the building, eagerly heading for the closest elevator. The next part was private - hell, the whole thing was a private moment between us - but suffice to say, I enjoyed myself quite a bit. I was only going to be home for two days - the turnaround between Spa and Monza has always been a quick one, but fortunately Monaco is basically on the way - and I had to pass the time somehow. This is especially the case since Walentyna had me on a relatively easy training routine this week, making sure I don't overwork myself between the two races in two weeks. So I had some time to kill, and I can think of far worse ways to spend the time than in a bed in the throws of passion with a woman that I love. I just wish I didn't need to be so guarded about this fact. Looking around before kissing my girlfriend, having to run inside as soon as things got heated - not that I wanted to have sex with her out in the open like that - it's a shame that I need to hide who I am and who i love for my career. At the same time though, I love my career too, and with the next race being the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, I didn't want to do anything that could damage my chances at racing there. I hated the fact that it was a risk to come out, but the fact is that it is a risk, so if secrecy is the price to pay to have both my dream job and my dream love, then so be it.
"You are fifth fastest, fifth fastest. We expect conditions to be like this to start in qualifying." Peter Malmedy informed me as I pulled into the pits at the end of FP3, the third and final free practice session of the weekend. It's been wet all weekend thus far, with yesterday's morning session being by far the worst - the McLarens didn't even go out at all in FP1 and Lorenzo Barbaro of all people set the fastest lap - but it did dry-out a little bit in FP2, allowing for a stint of dry-weather running before the end of the day on Friday. The same has not been true of Saturday thus far, and we don't see much of a dry window coming later in the day. That might be a good thing for us though, because we have had amazing pace in this last practice session on the extreme wets. Nevertheless, that was also true of our rivals, since Fabian Schmidt finished the session on top with teammate Ivan Tripoli in fourth, compared to Maximilian Renner in second for Toro Rosso, Tommy in third, and myself in fifth. These were all midfield cars though, and I got the impression that the leaders weren't really risking it in those conditions by pushing, with Anthony Harrison being eleven seconds off the pace being particularly hard to believe after his dominant display at Silverstone. In any case, there was a gap between now and qualifying, so for the time being, I got changed and found myself hanging out with a few other drivers in a dry spot of the paddock, hoping that the GP2 feature race going on in the meantime would go some way to making the conditions a bit more ideal for everyone involved.
"You guys are quick, aren't you?" Lorenzo asked as me and Tommy joined him, Umberto, Henrique de Matteo, and Maximilian Renner, a somewhat unlikely group of drivers, but nobody that I don't get along with either.
"You're one to talk, you were on top yesterday." I pointed out, bringing up the FP1 result.
"Sure, now the two of you are on top, and so are you for that matter!" Lorenzo responded, gesturing to Max Renner as well during the conversation.
"The car feels good, we'll see how it goes." Max shrugged, his voice showing a mixture of excitement and nervousness, like it could be something really good but that also raises the stakes if something were to go wrong. I could certainly relate to that, I think we all good, because rain really is the great equalizer in F1 - no car works ideally in the rain and it's up to the drivers to perform in spite of that, all while the consequences for each and every mistake are amplified because it's so, so, so very difficult to regain control of an aquaplaning car. Maximilian Renner got a firsthand experience in this late last year when he crashed into senior Red Bull driver Martin Weaver under safety car at the Japanese Grand Prix. He crashed going at a pedestrian speed during the safety car, while in an hour or so, we'd have to go out under qualifying conditions and push the cars as hard as they'll go...not an easy task.
"We'll see how it goes, cocky little shit, eh?" Lorenzo laughed, teasing the German who just smiled awkwardly and shrugged, not quite being able to tell if Lorenzo was merely joking or showing actual bitterness. I wasn't entirely sure either, but I think there is a case to be made for both. On one hand, I know Barbaro well and this is the type of thing that he would joke about. On the other hand, Lorenzo had a very positive junior career, culminating with a seat at ART in the Formula 3 Euro series, giving him the chance and the machinery to compete for the title. Indeed, Lorenzo would compete for the title, and he would beat many of us who were gathered around with him right now, but he wouldn't beat Anthony Harrison, and that pretty much set the tone for their careers. Anthony was promoted to ART's GP2 team for 2006 and won the title in his first attempt, while Barbaro would have to go Japan and compete in their Formula 3 series, which he would indeed win, and he would also become Midland's test driver, which set him up for a drive in Formula One. Barbaro would indeed get that drive in 2007, but that very same year, Anthony Harrison found himself in a McLaren that allowed him to compete for the title, I found myself in a Williams and raced at the front of the midfield, and even Maximilian Renner would find himself in a BMW Sauber and then later a Toro Rosso. All the while though, Barbaro was at the back of the grid in a Spyker - Midland under the name of its new owners - which has now become yet another name, Force India. So yeah, second place in F3 in 2005 but a clear backmarker in 2008, while two drivers who were well behind him in the championship have better drives. I have two podiums to my name and Maximilian Renner looks poised to have a chance to take a similar result from this race. That gives Lorenzo Barbaro a reason to be bitter if that's what going on here, but again, I think he is just joking here, at least mostly.
"Eh, nobody can be too confident in conditions like this. He can qualify on pole for all we know, that doesn't guarantee anything, not if the race is going to be like this." Umberto finally weighed in, the experienced Italian having the experience to rule on this issue. Umberto Petronelli has both won and lost races because of weather, with his first win in particular, the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix, coming in such conditions. That isn't exactly an exception to the rule though, as he won from eighth on the grid and the polesitter of that race - Rudolfo Goncalves, coincidentally enough - retired when his Ferrari ran out of fuel. So yeah, considering that Umberto Petronelli managed to take Jordan's last Grand Prix win in similar conditions from eighth on the grid, I think he's qualified to talk about how unpredictable and difficult such races could be. Maximilian has a good car, Tommy and I have good cars, but nobody knows what will actually happen, and we won't have a better idea of what might happen until after qualifying. Even then, as Petronelli points out, races are long, and wet weather can result in an awful lot of risky moments.
"Excellent work that session Tamara, you finished sixth." Peter Malmedy congratulated me at the end of Q1. Our cars were flying right now: Jyri Kaasalainen was first followed by Anthony Harrison, then Maximilian Renner who seemed to have a good car after all, Tommy Koskinen finished the session in fourth, Henrique de Matteo was fifth, and I was in sixth. Maximilien Lecroix was seventh for Toro Rosso, followed by both BMW Saubers, both Toyotas, the Ferrari of Matti Hamalainen in twelfth, then Martin Weaver in thirteenth, Umberto Petronelli in fourteenth, and Felipe Alvarez just squeaked through in fifteenth. That meant that Daniel MacGowan would start the race down in sixteenth, lining up ahead of Rudolfo Goncalves, Filipe Yannick, James Buxton, and Lorenzo Barbaro. The pace was good, our car was quick, and our biggest rival seemed to be Toro Rosso rather than any of the teams we're currently battling with in the midfield. Of course, Toro Rosso is encroaching on that battle and this seems to imply that they'll close in even further with this race, but the point remains that Toyota and Renault have been our primary competition in the battle for fourth through sixth place in the constructors this season, with Red Bull having fallen off a bit. Indeed, it is entirely possible that Toro Rosso could soon pull ahead of Red Bull in the championship, the junior team overtaking their senior affiliate.
"Good, good. The car is great right now. How are the conditions going to be?" I responded over the radio as the mechanics were already pulling my car into the garage in the gap between sessions.
"The radar seems to show the rain easing off just a bit before a second storm system hits a few minutes later. We think there might be a tight window in which we can run the intermediate wets but it's your call." Malmedy explained. There were two wet weather tyre compounds produced by Bridgestone, those being the intermediate wets, which are the wet tyres used most of the time, then there are the extreme wets, used in conditions when there is standing water on the track that isn't going away, leaving us with no choice but to bring out the big guns in terms of wet conditions. This has been a big guns kind of session so far, with it having kept raining through the GP2 race and Q1, but now, it does seem to be easing off, and if there is a moment between now and that second fit of rain? Well...whichever drivers manage to make the intermediates work while everyone else is qualifying on extreme wets, they'll go right to the top. On the other hand, we're already reasonably close to the front, so why risk it in Q2? It's not even for a spot on the grid. Well, we were sixth in Q1, yes, but are we really going to stay ahead of the Ferraris in the second question? Not to mention that Renner is already ahead of us, so that means Lecroix also has a chance of taking a spot ahead of us, so between the McLarens, the Toro Rossos, and the Ferraris, that fills up the top six, and you have to account for Felipe Alvarez to somehow make his way into the top ten as well, so that only leaves three spots. Two Toyotas, two Williams, and a Red Bull competing for the final three spots, and that's assuming that Force India doesn't take the gamble because they have nothing to lose with Umberto Petronelli. So, yes, it was a risk, but it was also the best guarantee of getting into the top ten and Q3.
"Let's try it." I decided. So, a few moments later, once Q2 had started, the team released me from the garage on intermediate wet weather tyres, a feat replicated by the McLaren of Anthony Harrison. The two of us made our way around, the front two cars in the queue, but Harrison was ahead, so I might even have the benefit of a slipstream from the American if I time everything right. The rain stayed away on the warm-up lap and, coming out of parabolica, I put the power down and started my push lap. I crossed the line to begin my lap and sped down the front straight, wide, fast, and completely unrestricted, fitting for a place called the temple of speed. The downside from such a fast run all the way from back in the Parabolica is the hard braking zone that follows. Hard on the brakes and downshifting to damn near a crawl - especially in wet conditions - for the ninety-degree right-hander, then immediately left for turn two. With the track still slippery, I needed to be gentle getting back onto the throttle on the exit of two, I was back up to speed by the time I got to Curva Grande though. In the dry it was all about throwing the car to the right while keeping the throttle as close to the ground as possible, in these conditions though, a lift was a necessity, it was just a question of how deep of a lift. With these tyres, I was able to get more bite into the road and thus didn't have to lift as much as my rivals on the extremes probably did. A promising start to the lap indeed.
Coming out of turn three I crossed the sector line to finish the first third of the lap, and I was rewarded with the fastest sector time thus far - I was only the second car through it thus far, but the fact that I was faster than Anthony was certainly encouraging - then I reached the second chicane. Braking, turning to the left, and then accelerating to the right through the Variante della Roggia. Normally, I'd ride out onto the kerbs on the exit and repeat that through the next two turns as well, but in the wet, the difference in surface material from the kerbs to the tarmac is amplified, and kerbs can often be wet even as the rest of the track is drying out. Thus, as I threw the car to the right and then to the right again except tighter this time through the two Lesmo corners, I kept my car in a methodical position. It would make for a slower lap in the dry but this was something everyone had to deal with in the wet, so my superior tyres were still making a difference in my favor. It was another straight through the middle of the track, a straight which dipped down below the overpass of the old banked oval. I saw water coming down on the other side and hoped for a moment that it was just water dripping off the edge of the banking, but as I rose back up heading into the Ascari chicane, it quickly became apparent that it wasn't the case. It was raining again and all I could do was hope that the time I made up early on in this lap would make up for the time I would be losing here in the second half.
Ascari wasn't a good omen though. I braked for the first element, as per usual, but as I went left then right then left again, I found myself struggling to find any grip, and that meant that I was struggling to put the power back down. The fact that I resigned myself not to use any of the kerbs wasn't helping matters. There was a bit of a bright side though, mainly the fact that Harrison seemed to be struggling more than I was, so i was close enough to get that aforementioned tow coming out of turn ten. Just one more corner to go and I'd be scot free I thought as I was reaching the end of the back straight. Unfortunately for me, this is where conditions were really starting to feel bad, and I saw Anthony Harrison essentially sliding off the ideal racing line, and try as I might, I followed him down that very path. Thus, when we crossed the line to complete these qualifying laps, laps that started so strong, Anthony was left down in fifteenth and I was left down in thirteenth once everything shook out. Neither of us were on course to progress into the top ten shootout, in fact, we were amongst the slowest cars in the session.
"Alright, come in as quickly as you can. We'll fuel up as quickly as we can and switch you onto the extremes." Malmedy ordered on the radio, scrambling to make up for our strategic blunder. I was scrambling to make up for it as well, even passing Anthony on our cool-down laps back to the pits, but I knew that I had a tall order ahead of me. All the cars ahead of us set their extreme wet weather times just as the second wave of rain was coming in, while I would have to set my time in the heart of the second wave. There was still a positive to all this though, and that was the fact that Tommy was up in third, so we had pace on the extreme wet weather tyres. My job was simply to push hard enough to set a good enough lap time to advance into the next session. Yes, that's all I needed to do: the goal of Q2 was to be in the top ten so you can advance to Q3, therefore, as long as I crack the top ten, I can get a reset in the next session and decide where I'll be starting alongside everyone else. So yeah, I pulled into the pits, saw my mechanics get to work, and after only a few moments, they let me out again, knowing that holding me any longer than strictly necessary for the fuel would just allow the conditions to get worse and my job to get harder.
Thus, the whole process from earlier was repeated, albeit this time, with one major exception. I set an alright sector one on my push lap and was still on target to finish somewhere near tenth as I crossed the sector two line, but in the last couple hundred meters of track before I could complete my lap and hopefully progress into Q3, I got too eager. I pressed the throttle coming out of the Parabolica just thinking about getting to the line as quickly as possible, not about the still very much wet track, not about the very risks that Umberto Petronelli and Maximilian Renner talked about before qualifying, and not about how I've been behaving all session long. No, instead, under these pressured conditions, I defaulted to pure, uneducated instinct, and that instinct bit me in the ass as I lost the rear on corner exit. The car spun around like a pendulum, the momentum throwing the weight of the engine first, so it was the rear of the car that hit the wall first. The rain light, rear wing, gearbox, and left rear suspension were all crushed against the armco as my day was unmistakably ended. I turned to my left and saw the yellow flags coming out, ending the laps of anyone that happened to be behind me, so I knew that I had qualified thirteenth, but with the car as damaged as it is, I knew I'd be starting from the back of the grid.
"I'm fine guys, I'm okay. I lost the car coming out of Parabolica. I'm sorry." I spoke into the team radio, letting them know I was okay, letting them hear my no-doubt dejected voice after that unfortunate crash.
"Understood Tamara, turn the engine off and follow the instructions of the marshals. We'll be back tomorrow when it really matters." Malmedy responded, trying to keep things positive, but I wasn't an idiot. I understood full well that I just ensured my mechanics would be working all night to get the car repaired, I understood full well that I just ensured we'd get a penalty for an unscheduled gearbox change, and I understood that all of this happened because I made a bad judgement call in Q2 despite the fact that our cars were, evidently, more than fast enough on the extreme tyres. I also knew that I turned what should have been a strong double-points finish for the team into something that will be very difficult on my end as I seek to recover from a weak starting position. Anthony Harrison was in the same boat of course, needing to start from fifteenth thanks to his car also blundering it with the tyres and then getting his second lap ruined by a mixture of the rain and the yellow flags I brought out. Anyway, with the power vacuum left behind by two strong cars failing to make it to Q3, it was Maximilian Renner of all people on pole position. The German in a Toro Rosso was a rookie at this time last year, but today, he's scoring his first Formula One pole. At his team's home race, no less. Good for Maximilian, I'm happy for him, I just wish I could've been up there to try and offer some competition for him. Tommy Koskinen qualified up in fifth so I know we have pace. Oh well, nothing I can do now, I'll start at the back of the grid with the knowledge that no points have been handed out yet, those only come at the end of the day on Sunday.
The scenario of the race was almost a repeat of the scenario of qualifying. The heavy rain came a few hours before the race, leaving the track soaked, covered in standing water, and to add fuel to the fire, there was more rain to come. I had qualified thirteenth, but received a five-place grid penalty due to a gearbox change, and was further penalized when the team had to start from the pitlane because of all the repairs and setup changes we needed to make. James Buxton, however, qualified nineteenth and took a pitlane start, therefore, that was at least one car behind me. There would eventually be another car brought into the pitlane, put at the front of the queue, and that was Maximilien Lecroix, who stalled on the grid and needed to be pushed into the pits for a restart. All of us would be at the very back of the field though, because the green light at the end of the pitlane wouldn't come on until all of the cars on the grid made it past us. So, it was wet, there was probably going to be a ton of attrition in front of us, and we had a long way to go in order to get into the points. It was a challenge, but one we would have to cope with.
The cars lined up on the grid at the end of the formation lap. Maximilian Renner of Toro Rosso was in front but with the McLaren of Jyri Kaasalainen right alongside, Max would have a difficult time preserving his position and repeating the heroics of yesterday. Martin Weaver was in third for the senior Red Bull team, so even with Lecroix's penalty, Renner still had a teammate of sorts at the front of the grid. The green flag went up at the back, the red lights started coming on at the top of the light gantry, and eventually, the cars shot off of the grid. Maximilian Renner blasted off, retaining the lead and filling Kaasalainen's view with the spray coming off of his Toro Rosso, while at the same time, the three of us made the agonizing weight for that green light to come on. Waiting and waiting and waiting again until finally the eternity passed and the green light came on, letting Lecroix roll off the pitlane followed by me followed by Buxton, the final three cars joining the fray for the 2008 Italian Grand Prix.
This race was essentially going the same way that the first stint of Monaco or the entirety of the British Grand Prix went, because, for the most cars, we were giving each other plenty of space. The spray was terrible, the speeds were high on this track, and even driving with this much water on the track was a challenge, so actually pushing hard and racing? Well, that was out of the question, at least for me. Speaking of my conditions, I was on the extreme wet weather tyre compound, the same compound as everyone else was, because seeing what happened in Q2 yesterday, nobody wanted to be the one to take the risk with the intermediate wets and pay the price. Least of all me, because I already had my incursion with the wall this weekend, the last thing I needed was another. On the other hand, I was also trying to make up for that, so I couldn't just stay nineteenth in forever, circulating around the track a few tenths behind Lecroix and a few tenths ahead of James Buxton. Pushing was stupid, dangerous even in these conditions where cars could be heading near about two-hundred miles per hour without even being able to see a stricken car thanks to the spray, but pushing was also my job, and I didn't come to Monza to finish nineteenth. I scored a point here last year, I know the car is different, I know the conditions are different, but if I've done something a year ago, my goal is always going to be a repeat performance at a minimum. I haven't been able to achieve that much this year, having struggled at the very same races where I was once scoring podiums, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm targeting a points finish today. I scored a point here last year, so regardless of how difficult it may seem, I have to at least aim for two today. Ambition and advancement is part of being a race car driver, and if you lose that, you basically lose any reason you have to be out on the race track. None of us will ever be happy with complacency.
Maximilien Lecroix could see what I was doing, or trying to do anyway, so he was pushing as well. Two of us pushing, both of us in good cars meant that it was only a matter of time until we caught up with the Force India of Lorenzo Barbaro. Lecroix caught him beneath the banking and thus was held up all the way through Ascari. This was just perfect for me, because that meant that I was all over the back of the Toro Rosso as we came onto the back straight. Lecroix tried to overtake Barbaro, hoping that he could last a moment longer if he put the Uruguayan between me and him, but it would do him no good. As the Toro Rosso pulled to the inside of the Force India, I pulled to the inside of him, going three wide with the braking zone for Parabolica getting closer and closer. At this point, it effectively turned into a came of chicken, because we all knew that we needed to brake soon for the corner, especially in these wet conditions, but also knowing that the conditions made it such that we'd have to give way to whoever braked latest as well. Lorenzo braked first, aware of where his pace was and knowing his best chance here was to hope we overdid it so that he could pick up the pieces. Then it was me versus the Champ car champ, both of us getting closer and closer to the corner. I started lightly putting pressure on the brake, figuring that at this point, Lecroix was probably going to run off the track from his position in the middle. i had the luxury of the inside line so I had the most room in between me and the opposite line. In the end though, it didn't matter, because Maximilien hit the brakes, which allowed me to breath a sigh of relief and follow his lead. Two positions gained in the space of one corner - excellent. Now just a hell of a lot more cars to go.
Fortunately, I would gain another two positions on the very next lap. Umberto Petronelli in the lead Force India had started well, up in twelfth, but it quickly became clear that his qualifying pace did not translate into race pace. Therefore, the Italian veteran was losing positions over and over again at his home race, most recently getting passed by championship contenders Matti Hamalainen and Anthony Harrison as they both sought to recover from poor starting positions. During all of this getting overtaken and driving slowly, Petronelli lost the gap he had built over Daniel MacGowan, and here on lap thirteen, MacGowan tried to put a move on the Italian going into Ascari. The two touched, with the retiring Red Bull driver spinning out while the Force India got caught with his own front wing wedged beneath him, eventually grinding to a halt in the gravel trap on the inside. By the time I arrived onto the scene, MacGowan was just about recovered, but still gaining speed, so it was no trouble overtaking him on the back straight, as well as passing the stricken Force India, thus, in the same spot as last lap no less, i gained another two positions.
"Be advised, Tommy is currently battling Henrique de Matteo for fourth, this is a really good position for the team and we want to keep it. We are going to keep the pitlane open for him for now, so you're going to go long." Peter Malmedy openly explained over the radio. I sighed, on one hand it was extremely frustrating to have your strategy impacted by your teammate, but on the other hand, nothing has ever come easily for me on the race track and I've prospered in spite of that, so yeah, not ideal, not at all, but I would survive this. The fact that Tommy was fighting for a really good position also made sense to me, the team needed the points right now, and I wasn't in a position to affect the points, not yet anyway. I could, however, play this position to my advantage maybe, and potentially take a pitstop less than my rivals.
"Copy that. What's the tyre situation like?" I asked, seeing that the track was slowly beginning to dry out and get better, meaning that intermediates may well be possible before too long.
"We see another cloud system coming through in a few laps. Light rain coming but we don't think it will be long. Stay advised." Malmedy answered, not quite having the full picture yet, but what he was able to see did seem positive. So, we would get a little bit more rain, effectively undoing some of the progress we've done, but it wouldn't last long, and it would come while cars were circulating and displacing that water, meaning it wouldn't really do that much damage to the track. Really, this second bit of rain might just be delaying my plan for a few laps. In any case, Tommy Koskinen and Henrique de Matteo would exchange positions a few times, but overall, the superior pace of the Ferrari made itself clear and, by the time that Henrique made his pitstop on lap twenty-two, he had already gapped my teammate. Tommy would also stop around this time, coming out on track on the extreme wet tyres. It made sense as a decision for him, since the rain the team saw finally came on lap twenty-six, but with the rain only lasting some five minutes this time, it quickly became apparent that they would need to stop again. I, however, would make my one and only stop of the race ten laps after my teammate, coming in on lap thirty-three and switching onto the intermediate tyres. I came out of the pits carefully - well aware of the fact that MacGowan was the first one to switch onto the intermediates and paid the price for it, going off at turn one and needing to negotiate the bypass bollards at the chicane - but by this time, the tyres were good, the conditions were good, and I was good.
Indeed, most of the grid was on the intermediate wet tyres by this point, with Maximilian Renner still in the lead. Jyri Kaasalainen of McLaren was in second, somewhat in no-man's land since he was secure from behind but also not making much of an impression on the Toro Rosso ahead. That was perhaps a bit of a surprise, given that it was a McLaren against a midfield car, but Jyri was also the lead McLaren at this race, so maybe Renner is just legitimately faster. That being said, Anthony Harrison has recovered pretty well from his poor start, and he's back in the points already, running in seventh, so the McLaren did have some mighty pace at this track under these conditions, so why isn't Kaasalainen as happy with the car? I know that Jyri Kaasalainen is a good driver, he performed so well at Renault last year and he's won his first Formula One race this year, so why is it that sometimes, he just feels like he is a league below his rivals? Anthony Harrison, Matti Hamalainen, and Henrique de Matteo all seem to have the edge over Jyri most of the time, and the standings show that. As does the fact that Piotr Kaminski, in a BMW Sauber which simply hasn't been the equal to the Ferraris and the McLarens as of late, is well ahead of Kaasalainen. Hell, Victor Hartmann, who has been rather anonymous in comparison to his race-winning teammate, is also ahead of the Finn, albeit in a much closer fight than the Pole. Anyway, speaking of the Pole, he was running in third, roughly as close to Kaasalainen as Kaasalainen was to Renner. Kaminski even set the fastest lap of the race for a moment - somewhat undermining my point, but whatever - only to get eclipsed by Martin Weaver of all people. Weaver was all of a sudden alive at this point in the race, closing in on Anthony Harrison ahead.
Weaver was alive all of a sudden, but the same could not be said about his teammate. So, I stopped thinking about Weaver battling Anthony Harrison, I stopped thinking about how the track was drying out quickly now, and I stopped thinking about how Matti Hamalainen nabbed the fastest lap as he began a late charge for the points. Instead, I was concentrating on the Red Bull of Daniel MacGowan, ahead of me yet again thanks to pit rotation, and I set about correcting that. I threw the car to the right through Lesmo 1, finally brave enough to ride the exit kerb a little bit, and then I repeated the gesture through Lesmo 2, placing my car in the draft of the Red Bull ahead. This was it, one of F1's oldest drivers against F1's youngest, Red Bull-Renault against Williams-Toyota. We were both late on the brakes entering the Ascari complex in turn eight, MacGowan just barely managing to keep a nose ahead of me as we turned left, but going into the somewhat faster right-hand element coming up next, surely he'd give way and surrender the position? At least, that's what I thought would happen, instead, as I just pulled ahead and turned into the corner, MacGowan was still there! The Red Bull kept his nose in and essentially understeered into me, barging into my side. I held the car, just barely avoiding a spin, while MacGowan went forward and into a gravel trap. He managed to keep it going and rejoined the track, but he'd need to pit for a new front wing. Ironic, considering he was also involved in the incident with Umberto Petronelli on this stretch of track, as well as going off at turn one on the intermediate tyres. The Scotsman has had a messy, messy race so far and being the first one to switch onto intermediate tyres, even with that incident, is the only reason he was even in this position.
"Argh! Check for damage, MacGowan hit me!" I cried into the radio, feeling the car was okay, but also well aware of the fact that, with such an incident late in the race, my charge for the points was over. I was going to finish down here. There was a bit of a saving grace - if only for my pride rather than the general good of the team - and that was the fact that Tommy Koskinen was now behind me. The cosmopolitan Finn had started all the way up in fifth but, thanks to having to switch to an inopportune two-stop strategy and having been on the extreme wet tyres for too long during the middle of the race, he lost a lot of time while everyone else was going at the fastest they've been all race long. Now that Tommy is finally on the intermediate tyres - the right tyres for these conditions - it's too late for him to get back up into the points. I hate to admit it, but I think the team's attempt to favor him on the strategy actually ended up screwing him over. In any case, the team found no damage on my car, but I wasn't able to recover either, so i finished down in twelfth, and with Tommy down in fourteenth, we squandered what, just yesterday, was looking like it was going to be one of the strongest races of the season for us.
Anyway, the points-paying results of the 2008 Italian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 8 points.
3: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 6 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 5 points.
5: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 4 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 3 points.
7: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 2 points.
8: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 1 point.
So, Matti Hamalainen ran out of time to get into the points, Williams and Toyota both squandered the opportunity to score points, and the big winners of the weekend are, obviously, Maximilian Renner and Scuderia Toro Rosso. The first win for the German, the first win for the team - even when counting all of its previous years as Minardi, the first win for the Red Bull organization in Formula One, and the first win for a Ferrari engine customer team. Very impressive work for the man who beat me to the rookie of the year title in the 2005 Formula 3 Euro series, and a good demonstration that the young talent coming into Formula One is not limited to just the heroics of Anthony Harrison. We are all here, and we all deserve respect. In any case, despite the fact that Henrique de Matteo did fade away a bit in this race, he did narrow the gap to Anthony in such a way that it was just one point between them with four races remaining. That's right, with the Italian Grand Prix and the European season over with, all that remains is Singapore, Japan, China, and the finale in Brazil. Just four races left, just forty points available, and just one driver that can win a season that has been so close, that has seen so many drivers shine.
There is a constructors' championship battle as well, but with the aforementioned issues with Kaasalainen's performance as of late, that is a bit more clear in that it is Scuderia Ferrari ahead of McLaren ahead of BMW Sauber. Behind them is when things get more interesting: Renault was now on 39 points thank to Alvarez's one-stop strategy putting him into fourth place. Toyota continued to sit on 34 points thanks to the fact that neither Ivan Tripoli nor Fabian Schmidt managed to score points. Ditto for Williams who was still on 28 points - 9 from Tommy Koskinen, the other 19 from me - was still in sixth, but we were suddenly a lot less comfortable. Maximilian Renner's win rocketed Toro Rosso up to 27 points and into seventh place, just a point behind us. Eighth place Red Bull was on 25 points as well, so we really had no breathing room at all. That's right, that's what this season has become: less than ten points separating the fourth best team from the eighth best time. It would be an exhilarating feeling of competition if not for the fact that we're all looking down the barrel of a recession right now and there are tens of millions of dollars on the line here. There is almost too much money and too much pressure on the line to take enjoyment from it being too close, because every point now can decide the trajectory of a team going into the future. If this race has demonstrated anything, it's the fact that a midfield car getting a win can change the complexion of a season dramatically.
There were two weeks between the Italian Grand Prix and the Singapore Grand Prix. This was practically a necessity considering that the teams needed to transport equipment and staff across the entire diagonal width of Eurasia, more or less, but for us drivers who fly into the races the week of, that essentially just meant that it was a week off. Roksana and I opted to spend our week off at a race track, because we're self-hating sadists like that. The race track in question was the Nürburgring, the site of my last podium in Formula One, and a track I haven't been to since, but I'm not racing this time. Neither is she, come to think of it. Instead, we're both here as spectators, watching Natasha Tsirinskaya driving for AS Roma in the second ever Superleague Formula race weekend. My cousin had been the fastest at testing, both in Vallelunga and in Donington Park, but when the first race weekend of the season came at the British circuit, spoils went to Liverpool's Ezequiel Martinez and Sevilla's Goncalo Borja. Now in the Eiffel Mountains, Natasha is looking to bounce back.
Of course, her results weren't bad - she finished second and tenth across the two races in a series that awards points to all finishers so long as they manage to start the race - but Natasha was ambitious and restless in that way that racing drivers have to be. She finished third in GP2 Asia earlier this year so now, despite being completely different machines and being a completely different series, she would accept nothing else than being in the top three of this championship, and even then, another third would be somewhat of a disappointment. Some would say that it's crazy, that no driver could reasonably expect to always be at that level of competition, but that's the kind of mindset that a top level racing driver needs to have, and I think with the breakthrough Natasha had in the middle of her 2007 Italian Formula Three campaign, she has set herself up to be nothing less than a top level driver. She was, however, faced with a number of other top level drivers in this Superleague Formula series. Some of which were her equals, such as GP2 and GP2 Asia level drivers like Ezequiel Martinez, Shandar Khan, and Goncalo Borja, but then there was F1 and Champ car level talent in the form of Robert Deschamps. I won't pretend that the Belgian driving for AC Milan was the best of the best in his brief F1 career, but he still made it to the top level of motorsport and has won races in Champ car, so he's the real deal. If a few things went slightly differently, if he impressed enough in his reserve driver stint with Red Bull, he could legitimately have been a competitor of mine, instead though, I'm watching him race my little cousin.
It was like a Champions' League knockout stage with AC Milan and AS Roma competing in front of a world class grandstand in Germany. Of course, that grandstand was part of the Nürburgring GP-Strecke, and these two were just some of the cars out onto the track. Robert Deschamps was leading for Milan but Natasha Tsirinskaya was chasing him down, having already disposed of the RSC Anderlecht, Galatasaray, and Sevilla FC cars, leaving championship leader Ezequiel Martinez for Liverpool in the dust. Natasha started out alongside the Spaniard and has just disappeared into the distance, now fighting for the win, potentially putting herself in a position to score twenty points more than her rival. This was exactly the type of thing that she needed to do after only scoring 63 points out of a possible 100 at a Donington Park racing where testing suggested she had the speed to utterly dominate. Roksana and I were enjoying the show when I heard the ring of my phone. I glanced at my girlfriend, letting her know I was going to take this, and then walked into a quieter area of the hospitality unit as I picked up the call from Makhmud Abdullayev.
"Tamara! Hello, listen, things are a little bit urgent right now, so I'm going to - " Abdullayev began, nervousness clear in his voice before getting interrupted.
"Give me that." I heard a voice from the same room state in Russian before grabbing the phone. I heard a breath rustling of the phone before things settled down. Whoever was now on the other end sat down and sighed before speaking "Tamara Shchegolyayeva, this is Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of Kazakhstan and first Chairman of the Security Council."
"Mr. President," I greeted, eyes widen, taking a gulp. This wasn't good.
"I am paying $30 million dollars of my country's money to fund your racing program. That is over three and a half billion Kazakh tenge. I am giving that to Williams every year. You understand this, yes?" the President asked with a deadly serious calm, threatening nature clear in his voice.
"Yes I understand Mr. President, that is a lot of money. I am very grateful for it and I am trying to perform the best I can for myself and for the nation." I responded, preparing with a somewhat prepared mantra, knowing it was the kind of thing I needed to say right now, even if I felt sick in my mouth from saying it. I did want to perform my best and I did want to make the Kazakh people proud, put Kazakhstan in the news for something positive, but I wasn't doing any of this for the government. At the same time though, that government, that terrible, misguided, authoritarian government, is what is funding my racing career. I wouldn't be in F1 without them, I wouldn't have gotten to GP2 Asia without them, who knows what my career trajectory would have been? I probably would've spent 2006 in Formula 3 again, probably would have done the Macau Grand Prix for a second time, and hopefully natural ability would allow for me to get into GP2 or GP2 Asia on merit alone for 2007...assuming I could put funding together. My father could help, he could even cover most of it between Goliath Logistics and his various other companies, but at that level, it gets really expensive really quickly. Even with the merger with what is now Goliath Italia, my father wouldn't be able to fund a Formula One program on his own, so in this timeline, how would I make a step forward for 2008?
I really don't see a way forward without getting to be a part of a team's junior program, and even that is far from a guarantee. Right now, I feel I can't move teams because of limited seats, and I think Natasha is going to have a hard time when she gets to that level, because of so few seats and so many talented young drivers gunning for those very limited seats. So who knows if I'd even get into F1 at all without Kazakhoil's funding? Kazakhoil, Kazakhgaz...all of it is state owned, Makhmud Abdullayev may hold the title and nominal authority, but it all really goes back to Nursultan Nazarbayev, so not only is this man the dictator of the country that I was born in, but he's also the money behind me Formula One career. I hate it, I feel like I'm held hostage by it, but that's just how it is, and I can't help but feel scared when the person behind the money is giving me an angry phone call in the middle of a season, a week before a brand new event, no less.
"You say that, Abdullayev says that, but do you know what I see, Ms. Shchegolyayeva?" Nursultan asked.
"No sir." I answered, playing it respectful, letting him be theatrical about it.
"I see the rear wing with my company's logo crushed against the barrier in qualifying. I see a car with Kazakhoil sponsorship be fourth at the end of lap one but finish the race down in fourteen, and I see you, the driver from my country, the driver that is at the center of this sponsorship, finish in twelfth. Twelfth is all you could accomplish, and while you were at it, the only time you were on the TV was when you were crashing with the Red Bull." Nazarbayev spelled it all out, revealing that he was watching the racing last weekend, perhaps live, perhaps on tape delay just now, I didn't know, all I knew was that he saw everything and he was immensely unhappy with the results. I knew he was angry, but what could I even say? I'm not going to pretend that the results are good, I can't make that case because I don't believe in it, at the same time though, if I say that's just how Formula One is, he's not going to want to hear that. It may be true but that doesn't mean that it's a satisfying answer for the very busy leader of a country whose asking whether or not he's getting his money's worth from his minion's very expensive passion project.
"It was a very difficult weekend for us, Mr. President, and I do apologize for the incidents. I know you want Kazakhstan to enter the world stage and look good, I want that too, I promise. I also promise that we will be going better next time out in Singapore, just...please give me the time to show you that this is worth it." I eventually decided that the best thing to do was to be humble, to practically beg for his mercy, and ignoring the fact that this whole thing made me feel utterly disgusting. I'm glad I walked away from Roksana before taking this call, because I don't think my passionate lover would've taken this display of submission quietly. No, she would have insisted that I've spent my whole career demonstrating that I'm better than this, she would have insisted that I know more about racing at my very worst than Nursultan Nazarbayev can ever hope to learn, and I know that she would be right. She would be right, and I would love her for defending me, but that didn't mean that it was the right thing to say. The problem is that the money comes from Kazakhstan's government, the money that Sir Frank Williams has made clear is a necessity for me to continue with this team. Williams is essentially the only option I have available to me, Williams is the team i want to stay at because they've given me my debut and because I want to be a part of rebuilding them, making them the great team that they once were, and I can't have that if I don't have the funds to give the team. Right now, every dollar of that fund, as well as my own living expenses, come from Nazarbayev.
"You better be right about this Ms. Shchegolyayeva, because I am not paying to see another failure. I hope you know that I will be watching the Singapore Grand Prix live, and I expect to be impressed." Nursultan seemed to finally be finishing, which was a relief to my current state of existential horror, but considering that he was finishing up with a clear threat, it didn't exactly do much to make me feel better. Neither did the fact that Nursultan didn't even give me the chance to respond, instead handing the phone back to Makhmud Abdullayev immediately. I stayed on the line as I heard the Kazakhoil President excuse himself, escaping his boss and finding a bit of a private place from which he could speak to me again.
"Relax, relax, it's not so bad. I'm going to try and smooth things over with the President, try and make this right. But...he does have a point, you would be making my job and his a lot easier if you could get a really good result from the next race. I...nevermind, i need to go." Abdullayev responded before abruptly cutting off the call, likely because of the timely intervention of Nazarbayev's men. Abdullayev was no doubt feeling the pressure too, taking the brunt of Nazarbayev's anger and quite possibly being held personally responsible for the monetary losses of the F1 program so far. Nazarbayev has been the leader of this country with the Soviet era, having risen up the ranks of the Communist Party and then hopped on the train of Kazakh nationalism once that particular regime fell apart. All of that is to say that Nursultan Nazarbayev is an intensely political figure, a predator in his natural habitat, while Abdullayev was someone small time, someone who could be threatened around like this by men that are bigger and stronger than he is. That's why Abdullayev had no better answer than to simply do what Nazarbayev wanted and do better, as if it were really that simply in Formula One, as if I was choosing to finish down in twelfth in all of these raced. I sighed and returned to my viewing area, only to be hit with another way of disappointment when I saw Natasha retire in a puff of smoke, suffering the first engine failure of the season. A fitting description for my mood, and the thing that allowed Robert Deschamps and AC Milan to win race one of the weekend. Natasha was classified as down in seventeenth thanks to her retirement, and thus only scored 6 points. In this championship, every entry scored points, but that didn't mean a lot of points.
"What happened?" Roksana asked, seeing my forlorn expression, and quickly realizing that it wasn't just about Natasha's retirement.
"I just got told off by the leader of a sovereign country." I answered and Roksana cringed, clearly wincing at the gravity of the situation. Formula One is a political sport, it has always been: one of the entries at the very first world championship race, the 1950 British Grand Prix, was the Prince of Thailand after all. Kazakhoil is far from the only state-owned oil company in the sport as well, with BMW Sauber's sidepod sponsor Petronas immediately coming to mind, yet...this felt different. Petronas may answer to the Malaysian Prime Minister but I doubted that Piotr Kaminski and Victor Hartmann needed to pick up calls from him, but I do have to pick up calls from Abdullayev and now, it seems, Nazarbayev himself. I also had to take a photo-op with the man last year when I did that exhibition run in Astana, a picture of me shaking hands with a man who I considered an authoritarian. Nursultan Nazarbayev has been in charge of Kazakhstan for my entire life, having seamlessly gone from Communist Party official to President of the free and independent Kazakhstan, a position he has held since 1991. He may call himself President, he may call his country a Republic, but Presidents don't serve for seventeen years in a free country. Presidents don't wield the kind of power that he has, and right now, Nazarbayev is deciding to wield that power over me, threatening to cut off my funding and end my Formula One career early if I can't produce an impossible result for him. Roksana Yurasova, my lovely girlfriend, simply came over and gave me a hug, feeling powerless that she couldn't do anything more for me. It was enough though.
Maybe things weren't too bad come Sunday. At least, I think it's Sunday, Singapore being Formula One's first ever night race made time weird, what with getting up at noon and getting onto the track after dark, under enough floodlights to put the Champions' League or the NFL to shame. I may not be entirely sure what day of the week it is, but I do seem to know my way around this circuit pretty well, because not only did I just outqualify my teammate, but we were up in eighth and ninth. Now on race day, that was elevated up to eighth and ninth thanks to the fact that Victor Hartmann received a three-place grid penalty for impeding in qualifying. All of that was to say this: when the formation lap started, the only cars ahead of us were reigning race winner Maximilian Renner lining up in sixth, Jyri Kaasalainen in fifth, Piotr Kaminski in fourth, Matti Hamalainen in third, then the championship duo of Anthony Harrison in second and Henrique de Matteo on pole. We were both starting in the points, there were only a handful of cars ahead of us, and we needed a good result - not just because of Nazarbayev either, but also because of the distance Renault and Toyota have been opening up over us while Toro Rosso and Red Bull have been closing in on us - so on this formation lap, I set about firing the tyres up and getting reacquainted with the circuit, because I fully intended to move forward from the very beginning.
Naturally, a lap of the Marina Bay Street Circuit opened with a run down the main straight, but on the formation lap, it was done at a pretty restrained pace. Then came the first corner, a ninety-degree corner to the left with lots of paved run-off up ahead. This runoff would come into play if someone went off, since, after a kink to the right, we reached the hairpin of turn three, heading off to the left again. If you went off at turn one, the runoff would carry you out here, allowing you to rejoin the race in time for the run down Republic Boulevard. Turn four was nothing more than a slight kink to the left going down the boulevard, but turn five was another substantial braking zone heading into a ninety-degree corner, this time to the right. That brought us onto Raffles Boulevard, the longest straight on the track, and the run through the most built up part of Singapore that this circuit ran through. Turn six was another nothing kink to the right in the middle of the boulevard, but us drivers thought nothing of the marginal change of direction as we weaved down the straight, trying to fire our tyres up in time for the race start. Turn seven was a ninety-degree corner - sensing a theme yet? - to the left followed by the similar turn eight, though this time to the right onto Stamford Road. A short run before yet another ninety-degree left-hander, this time in toe form of turn nine. This brought us onto the St. Andrews' Road, one of the other more substantial straightaways on this track.
St. Andrews' Road brought us down to turn ten: the Singapore sling. Some sadist decided to create a chicane here using some high kerbs and F1 drivers almost immediately started trying to hit this corner as fast as possible during the weekend, not without some consequence. I imagine the Singapore Sling will be taking its next victim or two during the race, but I didn't intend for that to be me. Turn eleven to the right and turn twelve to the right basically formed a sweeping chicane coming onto the short Anderson Bridge before returning to terra firma just in time for the hard braking zone of turn thirteen: a hairpin to the left. This brought us onto Esplanade Drive, the last substantial straight we'd really get until we were back onto start-finish. Once again weaving and getting heat into our tyres, the single-file line of twenty Formula One cars preparing for the race reached turn fourteen, a ninety-degree corner to the right. There was something deceptive about turn fourteen though, mainly that there was an exit kerb out here that you could ride onto, making drivers think we had the chance to take some more speed through this corner, but then, the exit kerb abruptly ended and was replaced by the wall coming back in towards the track, making actually using this exit kerb a bit of a risky proposition.
A short blast to build up speed again before throwing the cars into to the left-hand kink of turn fifteen, quickly transforming into the more substantial right-hander of turn sixteen, then almost immediately to the left for turn seventeen. This brought the grid onto a short straight along the bay, even passing a floating football pitch before turning back inland for turn eighteen. We passed under an overpass, emerging just in time to turn to the right for turn nineteen, the second in this series of mickey-mouse ninety-degree corners here in the third sector. Turn twenty to the right and turn twenty-one to the left completed the complex, bringing us back onto the bay, but not for long. Turn twenty-two swung us to the left, with the pit entrance appearing on the inside and paved runoff on the outside just beyond exit kerb. Turn twenty-three, the final corner, was effectively just the second apex of the same left-hand corner. This is when the cars on the formation lap really slowed down though. We crawled onto the grid, taking the opportunity to do our final burnouts and jolt that little bit extra life into our tyres before taking our grid slots. Now it was just that terrible, awful waiting as the rest of the cars took their place behind us, as the green flag waved at the back of the field, and those five red lights came on. One at a time they all flashed on but when it was time for them to flash off they all went out at the exact same time and the grid was unleashed, twenty 750 horsepower motors firing off the grid at the exact same time.
The top three got off the grid orderly and proceeded through the first three corners, but the same could not be said about them. First of all, Piotr Kaminski made contact with Jyri Kaasalainen in turn three, compromising the Finn's exit, leaving him squirrely coming out of the critical hairpin corner. This suited Maximilian Renner and I just fine, as Renner took fifth and I took sixth, leaving Jyri to contend with the cars behind. Second of all, a number of cars, including Hartmann and Alvarez, would fail to make the first corner, having to cut it and rejoin the track in time for turn three. Third of all, somewhere during all of that, Ivan Tripoli got ahead of my teammate. The Italian Toyota driver got a good start but he was also running with a heavy fuel load, so once the first lap chaos had passed and things calmed down, Tommy was stuck behind a much slower car. This could be race-ruining for the German-born, Monegasque-raised Finn, so Tommy started desperately searching for a way past our rival driver at our rival team. I, however, was busy concerning myself with not letting the Toro Rosso out of my sight.
Tommy Koskinen would finally pass Ivan Tripoli on lap seven, instantly using the speed of his Williams - our cars were quick today, finally having the pace we seemed to lack during the race in Monza after an otherwise positive weekend - to try and catch up with the cars ahead. At the front though, Henrique de Matteo was building a back from Anthony Harrison who was building a gap from Matti Hamalainen, putting the reigning champion seven seconds behind by lap ten. Matti was the reigning champion, the one who managed to win the 2007 World Championship despite the speed that Anthony Harrison and Felipe Alvarez had in their McLarens, this year though, Matti was getting left behind. That isn't to insult Matti, no, he's an amazing driver and he's lost none of his speed - hell, Matti Hamalainen has taken the fastest lap of the race in nearly every race this year - it's simply to point out that, this year, Henrique and Anthony have been in a league of their own. To illustrate that, if the race were to finish as it runs right now, Henrique would take the championship lead by a single point, as he's currently one behind Anthony and was on course to score 10 points to Anthony's 8. It would make for an exciting situation with three races remaining. That is, of course, before everything changed.
"Felipe is pitting early, we're not sure what strategy he's on so be aware." Peter radioed in on lap twelve, reporting a surprisingly early first pitstop for the Renault. I didn't think much of it at the time, I was driving my own race after all, so I just figured that Renault must think there is some benefit to getting him out of traffic and into some clean air, even if the price to pay for that is having to switch onto a two stop strategy. Two laps later though, things would get a bit suspicious when his teammate, Filipe Yannick, lost it coming out of turn seventeen, the rear swinging out all the way such that his nose hit the inside wall and his car came resting against it, facing backwards, right on the inside of a blind corner. A blind corner that deposited cars on the outside line, yes, but a blind corner nonetheless, so a safety car was necessary, especially with debris strewn across the track in addition to the stricken Renault. The two Red Bulls and Rudolfo Goncalves lucked their way into the same strategy I pulled back in Australia, pitting just before the safety car came out and the getting out just before the pits closed, but the rest of us weren't so lucky. Now the rest of us, particularly those who intended to two-stop, were waiting to see how long this safety car would take and whether or not we'd make it. I had a little bit of a buffer, but my teammate was not so lucky, so he and Piotr Kaminski would both come into the still closed pitlane for emergency service.
So, my teammate and the third-place championship contender would likely face penalties coming their way. Meanwhile, once the pitlane legally opened, I dived into the pits along with basically everyone else. The scene in the pitlane could only be described as complete and utter chaos: cars diving into their boxes, cars coming out, tyres coming on, tyres coming off, pit crew running into their paces, mechanics having to dodge other cars. The chaos was, however, most evident with Ferrari, where the team attempted to double-stack Henrique de Matteo and Matti Hamalainen. Rushing to get the Brazilian out as soon as possible, both for his own race and to get in Matti as smoothly as possible, Ferrari released Matteo prematurely, leading to him driving off with the fuel hose. Henrique would eventually come to a stop in the pitlane and the mechanics would stumble to service Hamalainen before rushing off to recover their championship challenger. Henrique would need to be rolled all the way back to the garage, the hose would be removed, and only then would he be released for real, allowing Ferrari to figure out what went wrong before it was time for their next stop.
I survived the chaos though, and the cars were running again behind the safety car. Tommy Koskinen was in the lead, penalty still looming over his head, ahead of the long-fueled Ivan Tripoli in second and in third, Umberto Petronelli, the Force India driver also having yet to stop. Fourth place man, Piotr Kaminski, likewise had that penalty looming over his head, so with two cars still needing to pit and the other two staring down penalties, the real leader was actually fifth place Felipe Alvarez in the sole remaining Renault. Weaver and MacGowan were right behind him, taking advantage of the aforementioned Red Bull strategy, while Anthony Harrison was in eighth, the McLaren still in the points despite the strategic games going on all around him. This was the order as the safety car came in and Tommy blasted off to restart the race, taking full advantage of the slow cars behind him. Tommy knew that the penalty was coming so his goal was to build a gap while everyone else was stuck behind this pair of mobile chicanes. At the same time, Piotr Kaminski was behind them, so they would be ruining his race, and perhaps they would even ruin the race of Felipe Alvarez who seemed to be caught up all in the middle of al this.
The penalties would come soon enough though, and they came down all at once. Tommy Koskinen and Piotr Kaminski would both receive ten second stop-go penalties for their emergency service, where Henrique de Matteo was given a drive-through penalty for his unsafe release, the very same one that ended with him driving halfway down the pitlane with the fuel hose still attached. Anyway, Tommy started building a gap immediately - I suppose his time in F1 hasn't done much to kill off the winning habit he built up during the junior championships - while the rest of the grid found themselves in a train led by the slow cars yet to pit. The reaper did, eventually, come a knocking though, and one-by-one, those cars had to pit. First it would be the penalized cars, with Tommy dropping from the lead and ensuring that he fell to down to fourth place, allowing for Ivan Tripoli to take the lead briefly. Next it would be the cars that went long in the first stunt, with Umberto Petronelli pitting first and then, some laps later, it would be Ivan Tripoli pitting from the lead. The Italians stopping finally promoted Felipe Alvarez to the lead of the race for the middle stint.
I was about to say that the next cars to pit should be the cars that pit early, but instead, it was Felipe Alvarez who was the first to make their second stop. I suppose that made sense, after all, he did preempt the safety car and all that, but it still seemed strange to pit now. Alvarez would come out of the pits just ahead of the battling MacGowan and Harrison. The American McLaren driver quickly overtook the Scottish elder statesman and even considered a move on the Spaniard before thinking against it, after all, Anthony and Daniel were both on worn out tyres, and both would need to stop at the end of the lap to come onto the final stint. I would have to pit pretty soon as well, but I was trying to time things out nicely and build a gap to the cars behind. Right now, on lap forty-five, I was running in second, just behind Felipe Alvarez, with my teammate some twelve seconds or so behind me. A Renault was leading sure, and that wasn't ideal, but we had two Williams cars in the podium places: this could be a massive result, exactly the type of result we need right now, and I don't want to let that go.
"Box box." Peter Malmedy's voice came through the radio, a firm but necessary command, but one that left me feeling deflated nonetheless. I would take my second and final pitstop, dropping behind Koskinen, Hamalainen, Tripoli, and Harrison in the process, but then, for the umpteenth time this race, all hell decided to break loose. First Ivan Tripoli ground to a halt with a hydraulics failure, promoting me to fifth place, and on the very same lap, Matti Hamalainen pitted as well, dropping down to fifth and promoting me to fourth. Henrique de Matteo would spin next, giving the tyre wall at turn eighteen a love tap, only for Lorenzo Barbaro to smash into it quite literally seconds later, the Uruguayan lacking the Brazilian's fine touch. This is what finally brought the safety car out for the second time today, and when that safety car period was over, there were nine laps left in the race. Nine laps, eight points-paying positions, two Williams at the sharp end of the grid, and one Marina Bay Street Circuit to host it all. Alvarez blasted out of the final corner followed by Koskinen, Harrison, Shchegolyayeva, Hamalainen, Renner, Hartmann, and MacGowan completed the points-paying positions. I took half a look up the inside of Harrison heading into turn one but by the time we got to turn four, my attention was more focused on my mirrors; it quickly became apparent that the last phase of this race would be defined by Koskinen defending from Harrison and me defending from Hamalainen. The latter would, however, end in somewhat of an anti-climax, as Hamalainen would take too much kerb in the Singapore sling trying to get a good run going to overtake me, and this resulted in his Ferrari getting thrown into the barriers as the most high profile victim of the controversial corner.
Hamalainen's retirement would pretty much bring an end to proceedings, so, at the end of the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, the points-paying results read as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 10 points.
2: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 8 points.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 6 points.
4: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 5 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 4 points.
6: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 3 points.
7: Daniel MacGowan - Great Britain - Red Bull-Renault - 2 points.
8: Fabian Schmidt - Germany - Toyota - 1 point.
So, a race of mixed fortunes for Renault, with one car taking the top spot of the podium and the other car at the very bottom of the retirement list. This is in contrast to Williams, who experienced a day we can be proud of, and Scuderia Ferrari, who experienced quite the opposite. Matti Hamalainen was still classified, having completed 90% race distance, though only just, whereas Henrique de Matteo was thirty five seconds off the lead after his pitlane catastrophe. The Brazilian was targeting chipping into Anthony Harrison's lead this race, instead its only grown larger, and Henrique has given himself more work to do. As for Williams, well, I didn't score a podium, but I did match the best result of my season, bringing my total up to 24 points this season. Tommy, meanwhile, got a second place to bring him some joy and morale back after what has been a very difficult season for him thus far. Now though, he sits on 17 points. This meant that we were back in fifth place in the constructors' championship, 41 points to Toyota's 35, whereas Toro Rosso sat on 31, and Red Bull was on 27. Renault, meanwhile, was now on 49 points, so we had three races to score 8 points if we wanted to take fourth place in the constructors' for a second year running. That sounded possible, especially given our performance here today, but I also know that this race was an aberration, and assuming that Renault won't score even more points in these final three races is a bold assumption to make. Fourth place, at this point, is a tall order. I can, at least, be proud of my season, because I've already scored six points more than I did last year. I may not have a podium to my name this year - which does kind of hurt considering my teammate has two - but I have a podium's worth of points more than I did when I was scoring those third-places.
It was perhaps not the most logistical decision to return to Monaco after the Singapore Grand Prix, but with a week off before Japan and a good result for both of us, the Koskinens were able to convince me to fly home with them so we could celebrate in the comforts of home. Besides, with just a week between Japan and China, I would definitely be spending those days in the Far East, and I'm not quite sure if I could survive four weeks in East Asia with the only languages I know being English, Russian, French, and Italian. Four languages is, admittedly, more than most people, but none of those are exactly relevant to Japan or Beijing, are they? Linguistics aside, I waved to Tommy and Johannes Koskinen, promising to meet up with them to celebrate tomorrow, after taking the opportunity to rest in my own home. To that end, I found myself in front of Nice airport, a smile on my face, approaching a now familiar black Peugeot station wagon with the lovely Roksana Yurasova inside, patiently waiting for me right where I asked her to be.
I smiled at her and looked through the window only to see her frowning, eyes locked on a magazine in her lap rather than looking up to face me. Realizing that something was wrong, I quickly packed my bags in the trunk and then got into the passenger seat. I closed the car door and was about to ask what was wrong when Roksana wordlessly handed me the magazine, still not looking me in the eyes. I quickly realized why, because the magazine was a British tabloid, opened up to an article with the particularly highbrow headline of "Lapping Lezzie: Female F1 driver in raunchy lesbian action!" and it was paired with pictures of me and Roksana from that day next to the pool. Me coming out of the pool and looking around, me straddling Roksana on the lounger, the two of us kissing, then us holding hands as Roksana pulled me inside of the apartment, where we'd go to continue this. I can't believe it. I looked around, I checked, there wasn't anyone there...but then, looking at the pictures more closely, I realized it must have been taken from in the hedges. Some pervert must have seen two women by the pool and started taking pictures, hiding his camera in the hedges, and that pervert must have seen dollar signs in his eyes when he realized that I was someone important. Then it was just a matter of the British press, who took an interest in my love life after the whole thing with the Anthony Harrison rumors a few months ago, getting their hands on the pictures. I took a deep, shaky breath, feeling only anger right now, anger at this complete invasion of my privacy and the publication of my personal life, then I looked over to Roksana. The gray-eyed blonde still wasn't looking at me, instead staring directly at the steering wheel, with a tear falling from her eyes. My anger softened as I realized what happened.
"Hey," I finally spoke, getting her attention. She turned to face me, but she still kept her eyes down, not looking directly at me, but it was enough, because I knew she was paying attention now, and I could see the tears streaming down both sides of her face "This is not your fault, none of this is. We kissed at the pool of my building, a private place, a safe place. And even if it wasn't, I was the one who initiated the kiss, so no, you're not allowed to blame yourself for this. This is the fault of some creepy pervert who probably didn't even know who we were. This freak was watching us, taking pictures, planning on doing God knows what with them, only to recognize me from some place. It's his fault and the fault of this fucking rag for publishing it. Got it?"
"What about your career?" Roksana asked, not fully convinced, but finally looking me in the eyes. That comment is what finally got me strong, confident, comforting façade to falter, because I leaned back into my seat and pulled my phone out of my pocket. I took a deep breath and turned it on, seeing the Apple logo pop up before my home screen loaded in...as did all the notifications. Multiple missed calls, countless text messages, and an inbox full of emails. Who were they from? Well, it was easier to say who it wasn't from, because I received messages from the team, from Makhmud Abdullayev, from my father, from my friends on the F1 grid like Anthony Harrison and Lorenzo Barbaro, and countless questions from journalists, both within the world of F1 and outside of it. This story must have blown up while I was flying back from Singapore, because it seems that damn near everyone in the sport has heard about it by now. I checked the email from the team first: it was a straightforward request from Michael Coronet to meet him and Sir Frank Williams at the team's base in Grove as soon as possible, and to not make any public comment about this until then. Then I checked the email from Kazakhoil. I always thought that Makhmud was the lesser of the two evils compared to President Nazarbayev, but here...well, he was demanding an immediate explanation for why I decided to defile his company and his country's good name with such behavior. Not a good sign, not at all. Last I checked the text message from my father: a rather ambiguous and simple message of "We need to talk."
"Can we just go home for now? I...uhh...I'm going to have a lot to deal with." I asked, not prepared to deal with all of this from the passenger seat of a car. This was my career in the balance, my sponsorship, hell, some of my personal relationships were on the line. All because of some pervert with a camera and an attention-seeking British tabloid. I scored a fourth-place finish, I should be celebrating right now, instead...instead I don't even know if I'll be driving in the next race.
Notes:
Well...like I said, that was a big one.
Chapter 19: A Tale of Two Racers
Notes:
So, last chapter definitely ended on a bit of a bombshell and I'm interested to see how that's going to be received by you guys. In the meantime, here is chapter nineteen, where we start to deal with the ramifications.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter XIX.
A Tale of Two Racers.
The universe almost seemed to be mocking me when I entered the team's headquarters in Grove. As I was taking the long, dreadful walk of shame to Sir Frank Williams' office, I heard the teams' heritage group firing up the Williams FW14B. The 1992 championship winner was one of the most iconic cars to come out of Grove, with its white, blue, and yellow livery, and it was rightfully treated as a halo car by the organization. Thus, a few times a year the car would be fired up and the engine run through a cycle, just to make sure everything was working properly. From time to time, such as before the British Grand Prix or at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, the car would actually be allowed to run, albeit at a slightly more restrained level than it would have been in the actual races. Only slightly though, because various drivers have had the chance to throw around one of Williams' most legendary machines and have done so with some spring in their step. I was now realizing that there was a very real possibility that I wouldn't ever get the chance to drive that car, in fact, there is a very real possibility that I'll walk out of Frank's office today without a drive for the final three races of 2008. There had been no driver changes thus far this season - other than the disappearance of Super Aguri after the first couple of rounds - am I really going to be at the center of the first one? Maybe, I mean, I'm sure when Toyota heard about the tabloid article they felt they finally had a place for Hideki Kitagawa.
"Good, you're here." Michael greeted as I walked into the office. Sir Frank sat behind the desk, Michael Coronet sat next to it, and there was a seat in front of it waiting for me. Claire wasn't here, Peter Malmedy wasn't here, it was just me and the two top men at Williams "Close the door behind you and take a seat please."
"Of course," I responded, feeling the awkwardness in the room but doing as he asked, leaving the three of us entirely alone. I sat down in the seat and waited, waited to see what they had to say, but neither of them spoke for a long moment after I sat down. They both wore expressions of disappointment, but there was something distinct about it. Sir Frank just leaned back in his chair, exhaled, and had his features marked by a deep frown. Meanwhile, Michael leaned forward in his seat, hands clasped together just in front of his lap, and looked down at the floor, suggesting that he felt guilty about all of this. There was a positive and a negative aspect to that: the positive being that Michael, in some way, still seems to be on my side about all of this. The negative aspect, however, is that Michael seems to think it won't make much of a difference either way, suggesting that Frank had come to a decision and he was powerless to stop it. Williams was his team, it wore his name, and while Michael did most of the day to day duties, he wasn't team principal, he wasn't even deputy team principal, and he sure as hell wasn't an owner.
"Alright," Michael finally spoke, sighing and deciding he was going to be the one to deliver the news "As a result of the article about you, Kazakhoil has pulled their sponsorship of the team. Several other sponsors, including Fly Saudia, have threatened to do the same. We think we can manage things with the Saudis and smooth it over, but we aren't making much headway with Kazakhoil. I fear they may be seeing this as an opportunity to sever our deal, claim that you were damaging their reputation, and getting out of their contract - "
"That's not confirmed." Sir Frank Williams cut Coronet off "All we know for sure is that they pulled their support and they cite the article as the reason why."
"Regardless of the reason," Michael Coronet continued "Is there anything you can do to convince them to stay on?"
"No...I don't think so." I sighed "Abdullayev isn't returning my calls, he isn't reading my messages. He sent me an email condemning my behavior, saying that his company will not be associated with it, and pulled the sponsorship. It seems like it might have even come from him, not Nazarbayev."
"About what we expected then." Sir Frank sighed "Tamara, the global economy is in the toilet, we're slower than Toro Rosso, and you're being outed in every rag magazine that has even the faintest idea of what Formula One is. You've lost us a sponsor willing to pay us $30 million a year, potentially other sponsors as well. What am I supposed to do here? I like you as a driver, I really do, but this team is everything to me. I need some way of making that money back, and with Hideki in the car, we can at least cut our engine expenses."
"So that's it? You're going to drop me because of some homophobes in Kazakhstan?" I asked, voice catching in my throat, tears threatening to spill from my eyes as the gravity of the situation was finally hitting me. I worked my entire life to get here, every go kart race, every Formula Renault 2.0 race - whether it be in the Swiss series or the Italian, taking wins in Italian Formula 3 in 2004, graduating to the Formula 3 Euro series, being rookie of the year, and fourth at Macau all in 2005, winning the inaugural GP2 Asia championship in 2006, and testing Formula One machinery that whole year for Williams-Cosworth. All of that culminated in driving in Formula One in 2007, taking two podiums in my rookie year, and now in my second season, i was comprehensively beating my teammate, 24 points to 17, but that wasn't enough. Everything I've done since getting into a go-kart for the first time on May 25th, 1993 after spending the whole previous year begging my parents for the chance, everything I've done since I graduated to cars at age fourteen in 2002, racing Formula Renault 2.0 cars in both the Italian series and the Swiss championship - the latter of which didn't actually race in Switzerland, rather the neighboring countries, predominantly France, due to a longstanding ban on motorsport in Switzerland. All of that was threatening to come to an end, my life's work, so yeah, damn right I was getting emotional about this.
"We aren't doing anything yet." Coronet spoke up, trying to calm me down. It helped a little bit, I softened by white knuckle grip on the armrests and took a few deep breaths while my British team manager explained what was going on "First things first, we are keeping you through the end of the season. That much is already decided, the engines are already paid for anyway, we're in a tight battle with Red Bull, Toro Rosso, and Toyota, and the team knows you well, so it wouldn't make much sense to swap at this critical point if we don't have to. Second of all, it does not mean next season is a definitive no either."
"Provided we can reach an agreement with Saudia and our other sponsors, then our deal still stands. Get me $30 million a year and you'll have a seat at Williams for 2009." Frank offered, making it clear that he really does like me as a driver. Frank Williams has to look out for his team, I understand that, and one of the ways he needs to do that is by making sure this team weathers what ever financial storm is currently coming out of America. That means that Frank needs the amount of money he was expecting from me, or at very least he needs to significantly cut his running costs by bringing in Hideki Kitagawa and thus getting our discount on Toyota engines turned into completely free engines. It was a fair offer in a way, because it gave me a chance, but the same reason he was being forced into this difficult situation is the same reason why I probably won't be able to accomplish it.
"With all due respect sir, my performances are bringing the whole team forward. I'm the reason why we're in fifth place right now rather than down in eighth, that's got to be worth a massive amount in prize money alone, right?" I proposed as soon as I was composed enough to speak again. I knew I couldn't secure $30 million a year, not in this economy, not with all these rumors going on around me. It seems pretty clear that Sir Frank Williams and Michael Coronet don't particularly care that I'm a lesbian one way or another, their problem is that our sponsors aren't happy about it. Why would a sponsor take a chance on the girl from a strange country that has been publicly outed as a lesbian, when there are plenty of straight white men in F1 or in the junior series that they can invest their money in? I'm fast, I've produced some great results from time to time, sure, but the same can be said about a lot of drivers, and most of them don't have the kind of controversy around them that I do right now. That's the kind of perspective sponsors can have, but teams know better. Williams know I am an asset to them, that's why they're keeping me for the rest of the season, and that's why Renault courted me last season before deciding on signing Filipe Yannick on a two-year deal. Michael Coronet has admitted as much, so now I'm going to play that card for all its worth and hope that it can get me somewhere, because I don't have many other options.
"What do you think?" Frank asked, turning to Michael, putting the ball firmly in his court.
"I think she's right sir. Tamara has always demonstrated that she is an asset in the race and it has really come together this season. Tommy was our lead car last race with how the strategy turned out, but she was up there at the front too, and she wound up finishing fourth. Maybe Hideki would've been up there too, maybe he would have been out of the points entirely, or maybe he would've been somewhere like eighth. I don't know where he would've finished at the Singapore Grand Prix, but I know that Tamara finished fourth, and that made Singapore the best race for us as a team since Australia. We know she'll be at Tommy's level, maybe a little bit ahead, maybe a little bit behind, every weekend. We don't know if the same can be said about Hideki Kitagawa. All of that is to say this, I think you and I both know there is a certain value to certainty, Mr. Williams, and a lot of things are going to be uncertain with the regulation change."
"$10 million." Frank said simply, now to me "Find me $10 million a year and I'll make it work. It'll be at a loss, but I'll make it work."
"I'll do what I can." I promised, a smile back on my face. My future in Formula One is far from certain, and I don't know if I'll ever get to drive that FW14B I'm hearing again now that I'm leaving the office, but I know that the team believes in me. The fact that Sir Frank Williams believes in my ability so much that he'll cut his asking price to a third for me speaks volumes, he knows I'm a better driver than Hideki Kitagawa, he knows that I can get results that Hideki can't. There was probably a team where that would've been enough for Sir Frank to give me a contract for 2009, but I think Formula One has broken him down somewhat. Williams is not the giant that it once was, Williams doesn't even have the race-winning potential it did back in the BMW era, Williams doesn't even really have Patrick Head anymore, considering that he's been shifted off to the Williams Advanced Engineering side. Sir Frank Williams can't take the kind of risk on me that he perhaps would have in the past, but he is willing to take some level of a risk. He believes that, between my performances in the new cars in 2009 and a financial package of $10 million a year, the operating losses will be at an acceptable level. I still don't know how I'm going to raise that much money, but it's a lot more achievable than three times that amount.
"What about Renault?" Natasha asked, the two of us walking through the paddock at Fuji Speedway during the first session of Friday practice. I managed to retain my drive for the end of the season, but not without changes - first of all, the car was still white, blue, and cyan, but the cyan elements of the car no longer carried Kazakhoil branding, rather the space was filled with Williams' name and with FedEx branding from our title sponsor. Second of all, with Fuji being Toyota's track and this being the Japanese Grand Prix, Hideki Kitagawa was in my car for FP1. Third of all, there was still an awkwardness looming over the garage, because now, for the first time in my career, everybody knew that I was a lesbian and everyone knew that is why we lost such a major sponsor. They've all read the tabloids and they all want to say something, thankfully none of them had yet, but come on, I can see it, everyone can see it. As for Natasha, well, that is a more positive element. Natasha Tsirinskaya has four GP2 Asia wins to her name - three of which were sprint races but still - and she is now competing in Superleague Formula. A second, a tenth, a seventeenth due to a retirement, and a fourth place from the first two race weekends aren't the best results to kick off the championship, but they represent good enough results to keep her in championship contention, which isn't bad considering she's completely new to this type of racing. Honda was seeing that too, so, they invited her to sit in on their garage during the race weekend and then to take part in a test session the week after at Honda's Suzuka circuit. A historic, all-time classic Formula One venue, a test with a manufacturer team, and being present at a race weekend in an official capacity. Needless to say, I was proud of my little cousin...I just wish my career wasn't imploding at the same time.
"What about them? Felipe Alvarez is their golden boy and Yannick is on a two-year deal, I wouldn't be able to get in there until 2010. Besides, even if I could get into that team, it seems like a good way to become second fiddle to Alvarez." I responded. Bernardo Fulvia had indeed been trying to court me for a seat last year, wanting me before I could really breakthrough and become desirable around 2010 or 2011 or so, but I showed loyalty to Williams. Loyalty, I think, the team is starting to pay back, what with them sticking with me through this crisis and only asking for a third of my previous sponsorship money if we were to continue on together. Back to the point though, Renault was an option then, but I'm not so sure they're an option anymore. Bernardo seemed slighted by me, which is probably part of the reason why he signed Yannick on for two years when I specifically asked him if he could wait until the end of 2008 when I'd be a free agent. Potential slights aside, Bernardo was right about one thing though: the driver market going into 2010 is probably going to be a lot more active than the driver market going into 2009, since there aren't many seats available at all.
McLaren is under lock with Anthony Harrison and Jyri Kaasalainen, Ferrari with Henrique de Matteo and Matti Hamalainen, Renault with the aforementioned drivers, even Toyota is locked down with Ivan Tripoli and Fabian Schmidt. As is Red Bull with Martin Weaver already confirmed and Max Renner going to the team being practically an open secret. That means the best seat available to me is, theoretically, Scuderia Toro Rosso. The former Minardi outfit may be having a great season this year, but they exist solely to be a feeder team for Red Bull, so one: they're unlucky to stay ahead of Red Bull for much longer, and two: Red Bull would probably prefer to give the seat to one of their juniors, someone like Maximilien Longpre for instance, rather than me. Beyond that, Force India would really be a step backwards based on their performance this season, while Honda is a complicated issue. Neither James Buxton nor Rudolfo Goncalves are especially young, the Brazilian destined to be the oldest driver in the paddock by a margin with MacGowan hanging up his boots at the end of the year, but that doesn't change the fact that both want to continue. That means a seat with Honda comes with competition, especially when you factor in the fact that Honda now seems to be courting Natasha Tsirinskaya. I want to stay in Formula One, I really do, but I'm not going to do so by harming Natasha's chances of getting into the sport just to drive a slow car with a picture of the Earth on it. She has enough problems trying to overcome Honda's existing drivers, the Super Aguri drivers left without a drive, and Honda's existing junior driver in the form of Charlie Michaels...needless to say, things would be easier for everyone involved if Super Aguri still existed, giving Honda two more seats to play with.
"So is Williams really the only place left?" Natasha asked, coming to the same conclusions as I was.
"Pretty much, yeah. So, I need to raise $10 million dollars for 2009 and hope my situation looks better for 2010." I sighed. I knew I had to be in Formula One next year, with all the junior drivers around and all the impressive talents coming up, if I'm not on the grid they'll forget about me, however, if I go to the back of the grid to a place like Force India, I'll be struggling at the back of the grid and failing to score points. They'll forget about me that way too. At this point in my career, I need to at least be at Williams or moving forward, I can't be taking a step back, not even if it's because of circumstances out of my control. There have been drivers that have parachuted down to lower teams before, yes, and some of those drivers have gone on to have long careers, but none of them have really gone back to a top team. Felipe Alvarez might be the closest example we have and there are two problems with that, one: Felipe hasn't actually gone back to a top team yet, and two: the lower team he's gone to, Renault, is the same team he won both of his championships with. Not only that, but he's already won a race with Renault this season, so while, it's not as much of a top team as McLaren, Ferrari, or even BMW Sauber, it's not exactly a backmarker either.
"Have you talked to your dad yet?" and there it goes, Natasha asking the question that I knew was coming but was dreading regardless.
"No, not yet. I already had one really difficult conversation with Coronet and Williams, I want to save the next difficult conversation until after the race." I responded. Hell, I wanted to save that conversation for after the Chinese Grand Prix...after the end of the season...hell, I didn't want to have that conversation at all. I had to though. My dad was also my agent and, right now, he was the best source I had for finding those ten million dollars, because even if he didn't have them, he at least had the business connections to figure out how to get that money. At very least, he had the business connections to get a lot closer to that money than I ever could alone. So, that means that, at some point in the very near future, I'm going to have to talk to my father about being publicly outed. Joy. That would come after this race weekend though, because I had to prove I belonged in this series first. The car wasn't great the beginning of the weekend so that wasn't helping, but the first point of reference is always my teammate, so outqualifying him fourteenth to fifteenth was a positive, even if we were both left hoping for more.
"Alright Tamara, try to follow him through, he's going right into the points." Peter Malmedy instructed, trying to keep my head in the game even as I was overtaken by a charging Henrique de Matteo down the main straight. Henrique had just pitted to start his final stint, he had a set of option tyres available to him, and he was given fuel to burn, whereas I was in the middle of stint, having charged my way up the field early on with the option tyres, meaning I was left to run the prime tyres now that we were at the end of the race. That brings us to another thing, in contrast to the torrential rain of the Fuji Speedway last year, this 2008 race is run in the dry, with the forecast remaining clear as we entered the final fifteen laps. No rain was going to upset the result one way or another and I wasn't going to make it into the points alone on this strategy, so over the next lap, I tried to concentrate as much as possible, focusing on following the Ferrari, hoping he could drag me through the field along with me. These sorts of things never really tended to work, but it was the best thing you could do after getting overtaken, anything else would be defeatist.
As the Ferrari braked, so did the Williams, twin Formula One cars slowing down before both turning the right through the first corner, a bit of a hairpin but one that seemed to open up on the exit. Not for too long though, as the kink of turn two, taken flat-out, adjusted our course and put us onto a straighter direction. Two right-handers opened the lap but turn three would be to the left, a fast corner swinging us to the left as we climbed the first of the track's two humps. This first hump was topped by turns four and five, collectively known as 100R, a fast, sweeping curve that had the car hitting on apex on the inside right multiple times. Coming out of turn five it was then a plunge to the south heading for turn six. Hairpin, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a hairpin turn, albeit this time to the left, while turn seven was little more than a straightening kink. This tight, twisty bit of track also proved to be the most difficult area for which to follow, thus I found myself losing a little bit of ground to the Ferrari ahead, not too much tough, as I made sure to keep the Ferrari within my line of site as both cars entered the second, more substantial hump of the track.
Turn seven was a slight kink to the left climbing up the hump, but it was followed up by a pair of right-handers. At this point I was starting to neutralize the gap to the Ferrari ahead, since these were the kind of fast, barely-there corners where these cars could actually follow each other. One of the goals of the 2009 regulations, with the cleaner sidepod profiles, lower, wider front wings, and tall, thin rear wings was to reduce the dirty air and make following easier, perhaps this is why, but maybe I'll get the chance to find out. Maybe I won't, but that's a matter for another time. Turn eight was the more substantial of the two right-handers but it was turn nine which had a name: 300R, in reference to 100R, the first hump of this circuit, as well as Suzuka's famous 130R. Turn ten, Dunlop, was another right-hander, but this one finally required some braking, and it led immediately into a chicane, with turn eleven to the left and then turn twelve back to the right. Shortly after turn twelve we crossed the sector line to complete sector two, in which I was matching Henrique de Matteo to within a tenth of a second. Buoyed by this performance, I entered sector three, braking hard for turn thirteen to the right and entering the infield loop. Turns fourteen and fifteen, both to the left, formed the Netz loop, which was effectively mirrored by the final corner, turn sixteen, the Panasonic loop which deposited us back onto the start-finish straight. Unfortunately for us though, these twin loops formed a technical bit of track, so, the superior chassis dynamics of the Ferrari and Henrique's much softer, much fresher tyres were able to resume building a gap over me. I was still getting a bit of a draft down the straight, but not nearly enough, and by the next lap, I wasn't getting any benefit from the Ferrari ahead. Henrique de Matteo would charge into the points, while I would be left behind to finish the race down in eleventh, promoted to tenth once Maximilien Lecroix received a twenty-five second penalty.
Speaking of, the points-paying results of the 2008 Japanese Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 10 points.
2: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 8 points.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Filipe Yannick - Brazil - Renault - 5 points.
5: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 4 points.
6: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 3 points.
7: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 2 points.
8: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 1 point.
So, pretty much the worst-case scenario for us as a team, as all of our rivals score on a day where our car just didn't have the pace. I was slightly better off, finishing in tenth to Tommy Koskinen's twelfth, but neither of us had anything to show for it. Williams still sat on 41 points while Renault, with a second-consecutive win for Felipe Alvarez and a fourth place for Filipe Yannick, was now on a mammoth 65 points. They were twenty-four points ahead of us and, unless we could somehow pull race-winning pace out of this car for the final two races, we'd need twenty-five points since they'd beat us on quality of results. All of that is assuming Renault doesn't score a single point in China or Brazil while we could score an absolute maximum of 36 points if we somehow scored one-two finishes in the final two races. Needless to say, fourth place in the constructors' championship wasn't going to happen this year. We achieved it last year, but even then, that was only because of McLaren's disqualification over the whole Spygate scandal and all that. Toyota was also now nipping on our heels, up to 39 points after a positive performance at their home track, Toro Rosso sat on 34 points, and Red Bull was down on 28. I don't mean to jinx it, but at least the positive side of all of this is that Toro Rosso and especially Red Bull are running out of time to overtake us in the championship, so if our car doesn't have the pace anymore, at least time is on our side. Still, I wish I had the chance to get a good result at the end of the season here just to remind the team of how much I'm worth and prove that I'm an asset to them, not just a source of funding.
As for the championship, Anthony Harrison failed to score today so he was still on 84 points, but Henrique de Matteo failed to capitalize as well, only taking two points out of the American's lead with two races remaining. So, 84 points to 79 going into the Chinese Grand Prix, the same race in the same place where Anthony Harrison threw away the 2007 championship with his incident in the gravel trap. Behind them, Piotr Kaminski and Matti Hamalainen finishing in second and third keeps the fight for third going, with the Pole sitting on 72 points actually still being a championship contender. Matti Hamalainen, on 63 points, was 21 points behind Anthony and could only score 20 points in the last two races, so he was out of contention, but being just nine points behind third? He could certainly be a threat to the BMW Sauber driver. Piotr, I imagine, will be knocked out of championship contention in China, meaning that it'll go to Brazil as a title showdown between Anthony Harrison and Henrique de Matteo. It's a good thing that Brazil moved from the beginning of the season to the end of it with the 2004 season, because it seems right to me that a title showdown between two drivers from the western hemisphere should be resolved in the west. The fact that Brazil is the homeland of one of the contenders only sweetens the deal. Of course, it would be nice if there was a United States Grand Prix as well, but there doesn't seem to be any more time for a race in America to come together before the 2009 schedule is released. That might mean we have a reigning American world champion that won't get to race in his home country. That is truly ridiculous.
Anyway, I didn't score points and our rivals were closing in, but I did outqualify and outrace my teammate. Tommy Koskinen, the man who Williams has bet its future on, the man who was supposed to dominate over his paydriver teammate, is seven points behind me with two races remaining. Why can't the team replace him with Hideki Kitagawa? Why is it that I'm the one at risk even if the team themselves admit that my performances are impressive? That I'm a difference maker for this team? It's upsetting, I won't lie about that. Anthony Harrison, Maximilian Renner...I came through the junior series at the same time as these guys, I raced them in Formula 3 and on my day, I was faster than them. Now though, Anthony is leading the world championship with two races remaining, Maximilian Renner is the darling of the Red Bull program, while I'm just the paydriver dyke having to raise money just to stay at a declining team.
"Hello?" my father's voice answered through the phone, still a bit groggy from the morning. I winced to myself...Japan to Monaco, a massive time difference...a massive time different I didn't really consider. In my defense, there are about a dozen other things on my mind at the same time.
"Hi dad." I spoke, trying to convey about a dozen such things through tone alone.
"We're doing this over the phone?" my dad asked, instantly picking up on what this was about, but not sounding impressed by how I was handling it. Yes, yes, I know, this is a very important conversation to be having over a cell phone and I probably should have just grown a backbone and talked to him before I left Europe, but right now, I'm in Japan and the Chinese Grand Prix is this weekend, so I'm not going to fly all the way to Europe and back just for a talk.
"I guess we have to. I'm between races right now, you know that." I responded, feeling it was more important to have this conversation now than to wait until we'd be in the same place again.
"Fine. fine." my father accepted with a bit of a sigh. I heard a little bit of shuffling, probably him clearing away the desk in his office - I imagine he just about got in for the day when I called him. The traces of tiredness seemed to be gone by the time my father spoke next, but unfortunately, they were replaced by something much worse "What the hell were you thinking Tamara?"
"Thinking? What - " I tried to interject but my father kept talking.
"You're sponsored by a state-owned oil company, by a Saudi airline, by multiple multinational corporations that do business in countries where the prevailing opinion on homosexuality ranges from acceptance to outright execution. You drive for a racing team in a series that, again, races in some countries where homosexuals are allowed to marry sure, but you also race in countries like Bahrain where homosexuality is downright criminal. Your team's title sponsor delivers mail in America, a country where for every tolerant educated citizen of the world there's a gun-toting Christian fundamentalist. How could you possibly think that this was a good idea?! You spent your whole life getting to this point Mara, and you're a smart enough girl to understand the viewpoints of the people around you, how does this happen?" my father ranted, losing steam towards the end and transitioning into more of a profound sadness, as if he had his head propped up on a hand on his desk.
"I knew that and I was being careful. Don't you dare blame me because some creep took pictures of me without my knowledge!" I argued back, because he was right, I was smart enough to know the risks, but where he's wrong is that I acted accordingly. I did everything right, even on that day I looked around and made sure the coast was clean, only to find out there was some freak sticking his camera between the bushes. That freak sent those pictures along to a tabloid and now he gets to paint his perversion as some sort of journalism. Public interest my ass.
"Why even do it? You've never shown interest in anyone in your life and now all of a sudden you start bringing this girl places. Next thing I know I see you and her making out in some tabloid from another country." my father asked, no longer mad, just disappointed and confused. He didn't seem all that bothered by my orientation - perhaps he got his reaction out of his system already, or perhaps it genuinely doesn't matter all that much to him anyway.
"I didn't show interest in anyone because I didn't know anything about this side of myself. Roksana helped show me that, and I'm happier because of it." I explained, defending myself. I really was happier now that I was with Roksana Yurasova and I felt that my horizons were broadened tremendously because of it...I just wish that it wasn't having an affect on my career like this.
"Okay, okay. Fine, whatever. It doesn't matter right now. What matters is what are we going to do? I know you've talked to Williams already." my father changed the subject. That was less of a good sign in terms of him accepting me, implying that he didn't really want to think of that aspect of me. I also didn't know what to think of the fact that he was treating this like a problem that needed solving: on one hand, I didn't want to think of my sexuality as a problem in any respect, but on the other hand: being outed like this made me a controversial figure in the public eye, and that was having an affect on my career. That problem definitely needed solving.
"Yes, I did. They need $10 million a year. They wanted $30 but I was able to talk them down to $10 thanks to good performances." I explained.
"By when?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"When do we need to arrange the sponsorship by?"
"I don't know, before next season I guess?"
"Tamara," my father sighed again "You need to figure these things out, I need a timetable to work with here, I need to get in contact with business partners, I need to call in favors, I have to call friends of friends...raising $10 million isn't quite so easy!"
"I know that dad, I know, but at the same time, Goliath is bigger than it's ever been. Surely that can be the main source of money?" I asked, reasoning that my father could finally come in and sponsor me in Formula One.
"Tamara...you drive for FedEx Williams Racing. FedEx isn't about to tolerate space on their car going to a competitor, no matter how small we are in comparison. My company can't be the one sponsoring you." so, the shoe dropped with that one. I thought Goliath Logistics, now operating in southern France, Catalunya, and northern Italy, would be able to take a big part of the sponsorship, but my father is right. FedEx does what Goliath does only on a much larger, global scale. Those logos don't belong together any more than the logos of Ferrari and Volkswagen.
"So...what do we do?" I asked, sinking against the wall concrete wall behind me.
"Find out when the sponsorship deadline is. I am going to be making calls and seeing what I can do." my father responded, matter-of-factly. So, I didn't really know where we stood as father and daughter, but we were at least making progress as agent and driver.
"Okay, I can do that." I responded. A moment of goodbyes later, my father hung up and left me along again, sitting on the ground up against a wall next to a stack of used tyres at the Suzuka circuit. I came along to support Natasha during her test but, considering that I race for a rival team, Honda naturally told me to stay away from the garage or anything going on on-track. Thus, I found myself completely alone in a paddock that hasn't seen F1 racing since 2006. I got a lifeline from the team and I have a smaller target to achieve, that was a good sign, but that good sign has now been dashed by this sponsorship complication. Now my dad needs to find $10 million in sponsorship for a girl whose private life has just been plastered all over the British press. Not an easy task. I pulled my knees close to my chest and rested my head on them. My father was right about one thing - I was living my dream job, I got to drive around the world racing cars against the best drivers in the world? Why would I ever risk that? Why did I even pursue a relationship? Sure, it would've hurt to say no to Roksana - and it would hurt even more to stop now that we're together and have grown even closer to each other - but would it hurt any less than the pain I'm feeling now? The pain of seeing my life's work amount to nothing? I don't know.
"Are you...crying?" a confused American accent asked. I tensed and looked up to see a short but fit woman in an unzipped white, red, green, and blue race suit, the colors of Honda mixed with the colors of that stupid Earth Dreams campaign they're still pushing. On her right hip I spotted an American flag next to the name "D. Pieri" Oh. That's who this was. Daniella Pieri, that girl who won a race in Indycar before I could win a race in Formula One, now it looks like I might never get the chance. I'll never been a Formula One race winner while she'll always been an Indycar race winner and, based on the suit, she just tested a Honda Formula One car. I guess she, like Charlie Michaels, is part of the same test program as Natasha.
"No. No, I'm fine." I said, standing up, avoiding eye contact while doing so. I quickly changed the subject once I got up "Is Natasha in the car now?"
"Yeah, I think so. When I left, they were adjusting the seat for her...even the other girl drivers are taller than me." the American laughed a self-deprecating laugh. I stood at 165 cm, 5'5, while she seemed to stand at 160, or 5'3 in her units. It was much of a difference but when it came to seat foam and pedal placement, it made a massive difference in a Formula One car. When things are measured out to a thousandth of a second, you're going to want the throttle and brake to be in the perfect place, you're going to want the seat to bolster your hips perfectly, the belts to keep you in the exact same place all race long, and for your height relative to the car to remain exactly the same, because things like how much of the tyre is blocking the kerb can serve as braking markers for us drivers. Anyway, I found myself in an awkward spot, because I desperately wanted to get away from this situation, but I also wanted to be here for Natasha, supporting her. In my indecisive lingering moment, the American girl asked me a question "Are you testing with Honda too? I didn't see you in the program."
"What? No - " not sure where she got that idea from. In fact, I had hoped that she wouldn't have recognized me at all. I know I'm a famous racing driver and all that, but I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, the fact that I was in civilian clothes and crying into the phone in a corner of the Suzuka paddock, rather than in like racing overalls, it would be just enough to slip beneath her recognition filter.
"Sorry, sorry. I didn't mean to assume anything. It's just...I know who you are. I figured maybe you were shopping for options in other teams." Daniella shrugged. Oh, I guess that's a fair assumption, I mean, realistically, I am doing that to some extent, although Williams is still my primary option and probably the best option available to me right now. None of those alternative options are anywhere near as far along to culminate in a test, especially not right now during the season. I don't know how things are in Indycar, in the world that Daniella is coming from, but over here in Formula One? A team would never, ever give any data to a driver from an opposing team, no matter how great the disparity in the cars or how irrelevant that data might actually be. As far as Honda is concerned, I drive for Williams-Toyota until the end of the Brazilian Grand Prix, only after that point would they consider evaluating me. Of course, that's assuming the Honda team even survives the end of this season, because there are some paddock rumblings that the board here in Japan is unsatisfied with the team's performances.
"No, I'm just here to support my little cousin." I responded, before managing a half-hearted smirk for the next part "That's why they aren't letting me inside."
"Should be glad it isn't raining then." the American teased in turn. Either she figured out that I consider Natasha my little cousin or she was trying to figure out some circuitous way that Charlie Michaels and I could be related, either way, she wasn't pressing it.
"How did the best go?" I asked, leaning against the wall casually, deciding that maybe this conversation could at least prove a worthwhile distraction from my career coming crashing down all around me.
"Eh, it went okay, I think. I'm not expecting much of anything to come of it to be honest. I think Honda just offered me this chance because I won the Indycar race at Motegi. I won in Japan with a Honda engine, so they rewarded me with a Formula One test." Pieri responded, seemingly not all that concerned about what Honda thought about her performance, as if she was content to spend her career in Indycar.
"What if you're quick?" I asked, not sure how she could be so nonchalant about the machinery so many of us in Europe devote our lives to getting a chance in. I know that Formula One isn't as big in America, even if I truly believe that Anthony Harrison has the potential to change that, but surely Formula One still carries weight in the mind of American open wheel racers? I mean, Maximilien Lecroix raced over there in the Champ Cars before getting his Formula One chance with Toro Rosso.
"I don't think I will be to be honest. I've always been more of an oval racer. I came from the IRL side of things, when I made my debut, it was fourteen ovals out of a seventeen race season, so basically none of the skills I have are transferable to F1." Daniella explained. I suppose that made sense, from my understanding, IRL started out as all ovals whereas CART - later Champ Car - increasingly became dependent on street circuits, to the point where there wasn't a single oval on the Champ Car schedule at the end. The two series reunited earlier this year, and this has basically been the first time since the split that there has been any sort of balance in American open wheel racing. Of course, that means there are oval specialists and road racing specialists up against jacks of all trades...though they all have to contend with the same IRL chassis that favors ovals, rather than the Panoz Champ Car chassis that now forms the basis of Natasha's Superleague Formula ride.
"Even your win in Japan was an oval." I pointed out, noting that Indycar runs on the oval at the Twin Ring Motegi, rather than the road course.
"Yup, it was. There were three women in the top ten in that race, you know?" Daniella revealed, sharing something I hadn't realized. I know a little bit about Indycar, more now than I did before thanks to the fact that Natasha is racing in a series which, I suppose, is Indycar adjacent. The fact that Lecroix, one of my regular on-track rivals, is a four-time Champ Car champion, also helps. I was by no means an expert though, and I had no idea about this fact. Pieri seemed to notice, because she continued "Yup, while the former Champ Car guys were running in Long Beach, the 2007 IRL teams ran Motegi, and that meant some oval racing girls like Evie Carpentier and I were able to finish sixth and first, while Tatiana Vynnychenko took ninth in her first oval race. Penske let Damian go to Long Beach for one last run in his favorite cars, so he called up this little blonde development driver nobody had ever heard of, she had to start last since the grid ended up being set by points because of the rain, and she ended up overtaking half of the field anyway."
"Vynnychenko? Is she Ukrainian?" I asked, noticing an eastern European name.
"Uhh...I think she's from Edmonton." Daniella answered without really answering "Why don't you come by a race some time and ask her yourself?"
"Maybe I will." I responded just as vaguely, instantly picking up on the fact that it wasn't just about introducing me to another driver who may or may not be from eastern Europe, rather, it was about introducing me to the world of Indycar in general. Daniella knew who I was, she knew that I was looking for an F1 seat next year, and she knew that I was probably going to have a hard time doing so, so she was giving me an offer to come over and see her world. Indycar. A smaller, cheaper series, that's for sure, and one that isn't as respected in Europe as it perhaps once was, but still a series with some damn quick open wheelers and some damn talented drivers to go along with it. I wanted to be in F1, that was still my goal, and I was going to do everything I could to raise those ten million dollars, even if I knew it was going to be difficult. That being said, the fact that Daniella Pieri saw no problem with staying in Indycar rather than going into F1...that at least gave me something to think about. The conversation ended there, but it lingered with me as I drove Nat back to our hotel after a promising test from her. It was still on my mind as I boarded the plane to cross the Sea of Japan and land in Shanghai for the penultimate race of the 2008 season. Potentially the penultimate race of my career.
The Shanghai International Circuit is a somewhat ozymandian monolith in a sparse corner of Shanghai, far from the skyscrapers and bustling industry at the heart of the special economic zone. The massive grandstand structure with its elevated bridge spanning the width of the main straight being the most obvious example. A big supermodern structure seemingly rising out of nothing. That's not entirely true I suppose; there are some buildings around here, automotive factories and the like, but from the low eye view you get from sitting in a race car, it ends up looking like an empty wasteland whenever your view isn't blocked by a grandstand. It doesn't help that the weather always tend to be poor when we come here, perhaps simply down to bad luck, or perhaps a side effect of the industrial haze decorating this part of south China. In any case, the grid for the 2008 Chinese Grand Prix gathered beneath this artificial ceiling, which was somewhat of an inconvenience because all of us were trying to figure out whether or not it was going to rain today.
There was some cause for concern on the radar, and the skies certainly were cloudy, but there wasn't any rain falling yet when the grid gathered. Nor was their rain where the cars were lowered to the ground on our dry compound tyres, or when we were released onto the formation lap, or even as we gathered back onto the grid for the start. It was dry, the whole track was dry, we knew that, it was just a matter of whether or not these Chinese skies would change their mind between now and the end of the race. Personally, I was hoping for it to stay dry, because with me lining up twelfth on the grid - elevated a position thanks to Martin Weaver receiving a penalty - it seemed like there was a pretty straightforward path to the points, so the last thing I needed was a massive complication to the race. We've been slow a lot lately, we've had a lot of chaotic races recently, so I think that, right now, the best thing for us as a team is to just have a normal event and hopefully score some minor points at the end, since any scenario that could end in big points for us would also be a situation that brings great risk.
On the other hand, the feeling must have been the complete opposite at the front of the grid. Anthony Harrison in first and Henrique de Matteo in second - both of them probably wanted something radical to happen. Anthony knew he could dominate in the wet, the British Grand Prix earlier this season was a shining example of that, whereas Henrique de Matteo could absolutely used Anthony aquaplaning into a tyre wall right about now to keep his championship hopes alive. At the same time, Henrique de Matteo needed to be careful, because while he could use Harrison dropping some points right about now, the Brazilian must also be careful about doing anything stupid, because if Henrique loses points in the process, then that's pretty much game over. Anthony Harrison holds the championship lead with two races remaining, so, as the red lights went out, really, all he needed to do was to make sure the thing that happened to him in the 2007 Chinese Grand Prix doesn't repeat itself this year. Harrison needs to avenge his failure from last year, Henrique de Matteo needs to do everything he can to keep his title hopes alive, whereas me, well...I'm just trying to score some straightforward points from a second half of the season which has been anything but straightforward. These were the storylines to follow as twenty cars blasted off of the grid in Shanghai to begin the penultimate race of my sophomore year in this sport.
Harrison got a good start - which was essential for the American, given that the Ferraris were on the softer tyres for the express purpose of overtaking him - and defended his lead from Matteo and Hamalainen into turn one. Meanwhile, further back, I out-dragged Filipe Yannick off the grid and solidified my hold onto eleventh place as we winded in more and more through the snail section. Turn one was a simple enough fast right-hander, but two had a series of progressively tighter and slower apexes, apexes which also descended downhill. Turn three, braking and turning to the left finally let these cars unwind themselves and speed up, navigating the small kinks of turn four and turn five before finally braking again at the hairpin of turn six. Braking hard, glancing in the mirror to check that the Renault was safely behind me, and then turning to the right, accelerating into the sweeping section that defined sector two. Throwing the car into the left-hand sweeper of turn six before following that up with the slightly slower, slightly tighter turn nine, before that whole section ground to a halt with the slow turn nine, a left-hander into the infield loop at the heart of the track. Turn ten was faster, requiring minimal input thanks to the fact that we were already slowed down from the previous corner, and it spit us out onto the infield straight that ended sector two.
Turn eleven was an acute left-hander, not quite a hairpin but just about one, and that began the second and final snail section. A tap of the brakes again and then I threw my FedEx Williams-Toyota machine to the right. The curve to the right continued and continued, finally culminating with turn thirteen which spat us out onto the grid, leaving twenty cars all trying to get the draft from the car ahead while not giving a draft to the car behind. As mentioned before, we had lost the Kazakhoil sponsorship when I was outed, so on the rear wing, the cyan surface of the wing was covered with a dark blue Williams text, while additional FedEx logos replaced the former Kazakhoil stickers on the front wing end fences. These are the kinds of thoughts that come to mind on China's obnoxiously long back straight when there's a decent gap to the car ahead and a decent gap to the car behind - both of which just big enough to mean there was no danger of an overtake going into the hairpin at turn fourteen. That wasn't the case up ahead, because Jyri Kaasalainen, who started fifth, overtook Felipe Alvarez for fourth off the line, was relegated back down to fifth when the Renault outbraked him going into the hairpin. Considering that rumors of a move to Toyota came up out of nowhere and fizzled out just as quickly for the Spaniard, meaning he was most likely just going to remain at Renault going forward, I would imagine that Felipe got just a little bit of satisfaction out of the fact that he just overtook his replacement. In any case, I didn't make any such move into the hairpin, instead just braking, turning to the right, and speeding out of it with minimal consequence. Turn fifteen was a nothing kink straightening things up, then the final corner was a fast nearly ninety-degree to the left, depositing us back onto the main straight to begin lap two. Meanwhile, behind me, Maximilien Lecroix and Ivan Tripoli pitted due to contact in turn one, potentially eliminating two of Williams' constructor championship rivals.
Up front, Anthony Harrison in the McLaren-Mercedes extended his lead by setting a handful of fastest laps leading up to lap ten, at which point Matti Hamalainen, now in second, set the fastest lap and then started closing the gap to his teammates' championship rival. That was, of course, until lap thirteen when the American set fastest lap once again, stabilizing the gap. It wasn't all happy news from McLaren though, because Jyri Kaasalainen had now fallen behind his own championship rival in the form of Victor Hartmann, who was now up to fifth. Perhaps I'm simply saying this because I'm desperate for a way to move forward, hopefully to a team that doesn't need sponsorship, but surely someone is starting to question whether or not Kaasalainen is worthy of a McLaren seat by now? I know the Finn was a strong driver at Renault last year, but that was last year, this is this year, and he is literally the reason why Ferrari is leading the constructors' championship rather than McLaren. He is on a two year deal though, so there's little chance of a door opening at McLaren before 2010, and at that point, I might be out of F1 and forgotten in the name of some new racing wonderkid that has caught institutional eyes. Not that there's very much room for such a wonderkid to come in onto the 2009 grid anyway. Formula One really does need more than ten teams with their twenty seats.
"Weaver has pitted, Weaver has pitted. He is now in eighteenth place. You are now tenth." Peter Malmedy updated me on the situation on lap twelve, kicking off the pit cycle while the leaders were still up ahead trading fast laps. I was set up to go long on the first stint though, hence the hard tyres and all that, thus I felt somewhat out of the loop as everyone else took their first top. Henrique de Matteo and Felipe Alvarez would pit on lap fourteen, Harrison and Hamalainen pitted to cover off the Brazilian a lap later, giving Kaasalainen the lead. Jyri would pit on lap seventeen, giving the lead to Victor Hartmann in a brief moment of BMW Sauber 1-2 running before he, too pitted. My teammate pitted around this time as well, but he was behind me, so I would have to wait for Maximilian Renner to pit so as to gain another position. For a moment, I thought I might inherit the lead for a brief moment - leading a lap in front of the massive Chinese market which every western corporation seemed to want to tap into might do good for my sponsorship situation - but no, because I ended up having to pit a lap before Piotr Kaminski, pitting from second place and falling back down into the edge of the top ten. Of course, it's not like any of us expected to stay at the sharp end of the grid, because Anthony Harrison was putting out a commanding pace. Matti Hamalainen was keeping within seven seconds of him, while Henrique de Matteo was around another seven seconds behind his teammate.
Elsewhere in the race, Maximilien Lecroix was doing his best to get back into the race. The French Toro Rosso driver overtook Lorenzo Barbaro but the unlucky Uruguayan in the Force India didn't get the chance to retake the position since he spun out not longer after that, losing gear in the process. The only other thing of note in the middle stint of the race was that Jyri Kaasalainen's name went from bad to worse thanks to a puncture on lap seventeen, dropping him down to seventeenth once he was back out onto fresh tyres, meaning he had to climb all the way back up the field. I did gain another position because of it though, so it wasn't all bad. It wouldn't last long though, because I took my final stop on lap thirty-eight, coming out on the option tyres with a fresh load of fuel. The top four all stopped as well, with Anthony Harrison still leading from Matti Hamalainen, the second Ferrari of Henrique de Matteo in third. Felipe Alvarez was in fourth, not quite in a position to challenge his former teammate, but also doing more than enough to eliminate any remaining doubts that Renault takes fourth place in the constructors' championship. No one really was able to match Anthony's pace today, with Matti in particular going slowly in this final stint, losing time to his teammate. I, unfortunately, was in no position to affect the leaders - too slow to keep up but too fast to get lapped - because my situation was looking a little bit different.
Filipe Yannick in the Renault was behind me already, on a one-stop strategy in an attempt to score points, but the Brazilian truly didn't have the pace to make that strategy work, thus he was down in tenth. I wasn't scoring points at the moment either, running in ninth, but I had a good chance of undercutting Maximilian Renner, as the lead Toro Rosso driver was on course for a late pitstop after having extended his middle stint. I'm not quite sure what the Faenza-based team was waiting for, but ultimately, they had to take a green flag pitstop on lap forty-one and, in the process, he lost not just a position to me, but a position to Filipe Yannick as well. Elevated into the points, I continued running forward, knowing that once Max gets his tyres up to temperature, he will, in theory, be the fastest car of us three. It didn't make much of a difference though, because Renner would take a while to fire up his tyres and then eventually get stuck behind the Renault of the Brazilian. Jyri Kaasalainen would pull into the pits on lap forty-eight to retire from the race once it became clear he wouldn't score points, Henrique de Matteo overtook his teammate for second a lap later, and finally, at the end of lap fifty-six, Anthony Harrison crossed the line to win the race by nearly fifteen seconds.
So, the points-paying results for the 2008 Chinese Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
2: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 8 points.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 5 points.
5: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 4 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 3 points.
7: Fabian Schmidt - Germany - Toyota - 2 points.
8: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 1 point.
So, Chinese redemption for the American, while a late race pass on his teammate keeps the Brazilian in the championship fight. A seven point advantage for Anthony Harrison unquestionably makes him the championship favorite, but Ferrari has won the last two Brazilian Grand Prix, and in dominant fashion too. In 2006 Henrique de Matteo took his second win in Formula One, winning his home race by eighteen and a half seconds over the championship-winning Renault of Felipe Alvarez. On that occasion, it wasn't enough to keep Alvarez from winning the title, but 2007 was a different story. The 2007 Brazilian Grand Prix saw Matti Hamalainen win by a second and a half over Henrique de Matteo while Felipe Alvarez was fifty-seven seconds behind. As for Anthony Harrison? Well, the American was a lap down and down in seventh in his first Brazilian Grand Prix appearance. If a repeat of that were to happen, Anthony Harrison would win the title 96 points to Matteo's 95 points. However, there is some implication that Henrique de Matteo had the pace to win last year, he merely sought to help his teammate win the title, so if Henrique de Matteo has the pace once again and Anthony could only manage seventh once again, then Henrique de Matteo would be world champion, 97 points to Anthony's 96. In that event, Anthony Harrison could even finish up in sixth, because Henrique de Matteo would win a tie-breaker six wins to five. In effect, if Ferrari has the pace it has historically had in Brazil, Henrique needs Anthony to finish sixth or lower, while Anthony just needs to make sure that Henrique doesn't score more than seven points more than he does.
As for me, well, I was now on 25 points - a respectable championship total, considering the car we have - compared to Tommy's 17, for a team total of 42. Renault has quite frankly fucked off with 70 points, meaning we'd be ten points behind them even if we somehow scored a one-two finish and they didn't score a single point at Interlagos. The fight for fourth is over, Renault has won it with ease, we now had to turn our attention to the fight for fifth. Toyota was just behind us, now sitting on 41 points thanks to Fabian Schmidt's one stop strategy granting him two points today beneath the Chinese smog. Meanwhile, the energy drink company failed to score points with either of its teams here in China, thus Scuderia Toro Rosso was still on 34 points while the senior Red Bull Racing team was on 28 points. I could pretty much safely say that Red Bull was out of the fight by now, but I couldn't quite say the same about Toro Rosso. I scored points today, yes, but on average, our car has suffered in the late part of this season, so realistically, it is quite possible that we won't score any points in Brazil. That means that Toro Rosso only needs to score 8 points to match us, and Maximilian Renner's win in Italy would break the tie. Renner could finish in fourth for five points while Maximilien Lecroix could certainly manage a sixth place if he finally had a weekend where things went right for him, so as much as it pains me to say, it's certainly possible for Toro Rosso to overtake us. That doesn't mean likely, because good pace or not, we will do everything in our power to hold onto fifth. Holding onto fifth because I'm also holding on for my seat here, while Tommy Koskinen is holding onto his team leader status, not wanting to be outshined by a girl who doesn't even have a contract for next year. All of this, both the championship situation and the midfield battle going on back here, are to say that Brazil is shaping up to be a mega finale, and hopefully it won't be the final Formula One race of my career.
I took a deep breath, summoning all the confidence that I could, and then marched into my dad's office. I did what I had to go, offering his secretary a polite smile, knocking on his door, and then waiting for an affirmative response before entering. That, difficult as it was, was the easy part, because now? Well now, I was face to face with my father after being publicly torn out of the closet and having my livelihood threatened while racing on the other side of the globe. There was no long distance phone call to shelter me from any potential disapproval, no: now, if my father hated me because of my sexuality, I would see every bit of it expressed in his face and, likely, in his words. For now, he was leaned forward in his chair, elbows on desk, hands clasped together in front of his mouth, eyebrows arched in ever so slightly in thought - if he even noticed I was looking him in the eyes, he wasn't showing it - thought of what I couldn't tell. A few more moments of this later, I realized that he wasn't going to be the one to start this conversation, so I started instead, revealing something I learned from my trip to East Asia.
"I talked to Coronet, we have until the Brazilian Grand Prix to come up with sponsorship." I told him.
"Tamara..." my father began, sighing and leaning back in his chair "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Oh," I looked down. We were starting the conversation with that regardless of my efforts to deflect "I guess...I was scared, okay? I didn't know how you'd react and I didn't think I needed that complication in my life. Things were starting to go well between us after last year and I didn't want to damage that by telling you something you might not like. I guess I also didn't want to know how you felt, it would be better to hide it than get rejected by my own family I guess. I don't know."
"So finding out through a magazine is better?" he asked, his tone a mixture of despondent and incredulousness.
"I didn't intend on anyone finding out through a magazine!" I countered, raising my tone just a bit. My eyes widened a bit as I realized what happened so I was more subdued with what I said next "I was being careful, I've told you this, but we got caught anyway."
"And now companies don't want to touch you until this story dies down." my father responded, sighing as he delivered the bad news. So, the bomb had dropped - try as he might, I was damaged goods, and my father couldn't find companies willing to sponsor me while his own company is a competitor to our title sponsor. And without a tangible benefit from the sponsorship, my father's various business partners and even the banks that helped facilitate his company's expansion into Italy, he can't just take money out of Goliath to pay Williams himself. The unfortunately reality is that my father, like many rich people, doesn't actually have much in terms of liquid assets - cash sitting in a safe is never going to be worth more money, after all - so while his net worth may qualify him as an oligarch or whatever, that net worth is tied up in companies, restaurants, properties, and the like. None of it is exactly stuff that can be turned into cash in two weeks time. I hated this. I hated this so much. What more did I have to do to prove myself? What have I done wrong that I can't be in Formula One on my own merit? I understand that this sport is the very pinnacle, I understand that this is the opportunity of a lifetime, but I've scored results already, podiums even, and I've lead laps. Not only have I beat my teammate this year but I was close to getting some very serious results this year before being undone by bad luck - why isn't that enough? Why can't I start being paid to be in F1 rather than having to pay just to stay in the sport? Like surely, by now, the teams should know that I'm an asset.
I know that sounds arrogant but, at the same time, it's true. Maximilian Renner is basically guaranteed a cushy future with Red Bull as he leads the rebuilding project from the team getting beat by Toro Rosso to a team that can contend with the established powerhouse teams of Formula One. Maximilian Renner is going to a team that has Adrian Newey as an aerodynamicist ahead of perhaps the biggest aerodynamic regulation shakeup in modern Formula One. All of this is true, but I've scored more points than Max has in the time we've been in Formula One. I've outscored Renner and I've outscored Tripoli, Weaver, MacGowan, Yannick, and all the rest. Why do they all have guaranteed spots on the 2009 grid while I don't? Why aren't I enough of an asset that some of the teams disappointed with their drivers aren't considering breaking a contract early just to have the opportunity to sign me? Tommy is considered a hot prospect, the one that Williams is going to build its team around...but I've outperformed him, I came into the same team that he had already been at for a year and finished just two points behind him, now this year I'm eight points ahead of him with just a single race remaining. Why aren't I a hot prospect? I'm so quick and I'm also young, which theoretically means that one: I still have room to improve, and two: a team can trust me to be around for a long time to come. All of that should make me a hot commodity. Yet I'm not. Bernardo Fulvia seems to think I will be one, but what's that worth when nobody seems to be willing to put their money where their mouth is? Speaking of Bernardo, maybe he was right, maybe I should have just taken him up on that Renault offer and gotten as far away from Kazakhoil as possible. I certainly would be doing better than Filipe Yannick in that second Renault seat.
The worst part is that my career seems to be collapsing around me all while Natasha's career is coming together. I remember those days in the mid to late 1990s at the kart tracks where we dreamed of racing against one another in Formula One, I remember playing those old arcadey F1 games on the playstation and racing against each other all week long waiting for the next race to come, and I remember how we celebrated together when I finally got the attention of Williams. Now we're painstakingly close to a reality where both Natasha and I could be racing against each other for real...and I'm losing my career. Natasha had a pretty rough weekend at the Superleague Formula race at Zolder - perhaps because she was reacquainting to the car after her Formula One test - taking only 38 points from the weekend courtesy of a 13th and a 7th place finish, all while Ezequiel Martinez swept both races for Liverpool, taking a maximum 100 points. Natasha bounced back immediately though, because at the very next race in Estoril she took her first pole position in the championship, went on to win the first race of the weekend, and took 57 points going into the team's home race at Vallelunga. This is a track Natasha knows, somewhere where she has done well in the past, so I can expect her to do well again in the Superleague Formula cars, perhaps finally showing the pace that she dominated the preseason test with. She's a longshot for the championship at this point - Ezequiel has simply been too consistent - but she can still finish strong and impress the world with her skills. A lot more eyes will be on her too, because Natasha gave me the impression that Honda is ready to sign her as a test and development driver for 2009, provided they get board approval from Honda to continue in Formula One. GP2 Asia in the spring, Formula One testing in the summer, and perhaps a second attempt at Superleague Formula in the fall could be the springboard to get Natasha Tsirinskaya on the 2010 Formula One grid - perhaps replacing a retiring Rudolfo Goncalves at Honda - but it's sounding like I won't be there to see it.
"Don't panic," my father began, seeing that I got caught up in my own head and now had tears beginning to stream from my eyes "There is an option to keep you in Formula One for 2009, and I think it's quickly becoming the only option."
"What is it?" I asked, voice barely holding together.
"Goliath and some partners put some money behind you in order to replace Umberto Petronelli at Force India." and the shoe fell, there was a path to keep me in Formula One...albeit at the worst team, and having to replace a driver who has been good to us in the past. Umberto has taken on Natasha as a driver for his Superleague Formula program with AS Roma and he's even offered her a bit of advice and driver coaching when he hasn't been busy with Formula One commitments, but now my father expects me to come into Force India and effectively launch a hostile takeover for his seat. Umberto Petronelli went to Force India because he wanted to stay in Formula One above all else and he was tired of Renault jerking him around at the end of his career, now I'm just supposed to go over to the team that has become his happy place and force him out of there? That doesn't sound good to me. Furthermore, again, it's the worst team on the grid. I know Umberto fairly well but I'm great friends with Lorenzo Barbaro and, let me tell you, the Uruguayan feels miserable sometimes. He was there with us in Formula 3 but now he's supposed to try and impress the bigger teams - where he feels he belongs - with a car that struggles to get off the back row of the grid in qualifying? It's not possible. It's not going to be possible for me either. If I go to Force India I'll be forgotten about or, even worse, thought of as a backmarker because I'll be going to a team so stable that it was Jordan in 2005, Midland in 2006, Spyker in 2007, and Force India in 2008. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe they'll improve in 2009, but right now, they're a backmarker team that seems like it might be gone in a few years, especially with the global economy going the way it currently is. The Jordan of 1999? I'd go there in a heartbeat, but the Force India of 2008? No.
"Dad...come on, no. This is the point in my career where I need to be moving forward, not backwards! You have to find some other way, you have to." I practically begged, knowing that a move to a team all the way at the back of the grid, even for a year, would practically be career suicide. But what wasn't career suicide at this point? If I took a year out of F1 I would have a hard time making it back in, even if I was able to dominate in some other series, because, like I said, the whole problem here is short memories. I needed to stay in Formula One, I needed to stay in a team good enough that I could showcase my talents, and I needed to do it all without financial backing because that clearly wasn't coming any time soon. In short, in order to keep my Formula One career going, I needed to do the impossible.
"Tamara...what do you want me to do here? There is no other option." my dad said, raising his voice at this point, getting exasperated with me.
"Well find something! …Or I'll find an agent that will." I responded, raising my tone to match his. I'd march back out of his office soon after that. I came here for solutions hoping that we might have made some progress on the Williams front, instead, my father basically told me that my chances of staying at Williams were over and the best thing he could offer as a consolation was a seat at Force India, the worst team on the grid. That wasn't an option for me...and most likely that meant that staying in Formula One wasn't an option for me. I had some hope after having scored a point in China, but now...now I'm facing a very real possibility that the 2008 Brazilian Grand Prix will be my last race in F1. It won't be my last race though, I'm too good at this to not make a career in motorsport, so even if the money and this fucking tabloid scandal make it impossible for me to race at the pinnacle, I can still make a living here. Indycar, endurance racing, the various other single seater championships like Superleague Formula and A1GP and the rest...one way or another I'll find a way.
I stood in the little nook of my apartment where I stored my career memorabilia. Hanging on my walls were four sets of racing overalls: Signatech Plus from the 2005 Formula 3 Euro Series, DAMS from the inaugural GP2 Asia series in 2006, my FedEx Williams overalls from 2007, and the matching suit from 2008. For a junior driver, continuity is a rare thing, as we change teams and, often enough, series every year in pursuit of glory, so it's not until you get to Formula One that you get two sets of race suits that look anything like each other. That being said, looking at the 2008 race suit I have hung up here, it's already an anachronism. Kazakhoil sponsorship? The 2008 season isn't even over yet and that's already a thing of the past. I was just beginning to wonder what kind of race suit from what kind of series I might be wearing in 2009 when I heard the door unlock and a somewhat frustrated Roksana entering the apartment, having just gotten back from Marseille. I was about to ask what was wrong but I didn't get the chance, since the Portuguese-born Ukrainian was talking already.
"You know one of those rat bastard British tabloid hacks actually figured out who I was? I spent half my morning trying to shoo him out of our building, I finally had to call security on that sick asshole. The freaking nerve of that talentless, vicious dick to think that he could - " Roksana started ranting, dropping the bomb on me that the British press were still interested in airing out my sex life, at least one of them having gotten curious as to who the other girl was. Apparently one of them identified Roksana Yurasova, tracked her down to the address of the Ligue 1 magazine she does columns for in additional to her own expat-targeted magazine, and had the gall to try and confront her in her own building.
"Hey," I interrupted, now trying to calm her down, my priority having changed from moping about my own situation to helping my girlfriend through this. it's unjust enough for me to have to deal with this, but at least I'm a public figure, at least I'm the one the articles are about. Roksana is literally just getting caught in the crossfire of this so it's incredibly unfair that these 'rat bastards' as she called them are now pursuing her as well "It's going to be okay. You're here now, you're safe, you're good. We're good. Now though, since I won't be able to race with Williams next year, there are going to be actual damages. We're going to take each and every one of those magazines to court and we're going to make it as ugly and expensive for them as possible. We're going to make them all pay for what they did to our lives, we're going to make them reveal where the pictures came from, and we're going to press charges against the creep that took those pictures."
"You're not driving next year?" Roksana asked. I got all excited about the idea of finally getting to take this to court and get some sort of revenge here - I wasn't exactly sure how jurisdiction would look or what kind of slander laws we would need to deal with, but having actual evidence that this public outing has done tangible damage to my career is a big difference maker in my opinion - that I hardly even noticed that I just revealed my lack of a driver to my girlfriend. So it's real then. For the first time I've said out loud that I won't be racing in Formula One next year. I didn't know how I felt about that to be honest, and perhaps the biggest revelation thus far is that I felt nothing at all so far. I was expecting to feel some kind of profound sadness or some kind of emptiness, and I am sad about it, yes, just not quite as sad as I perhaps expected to be. I am objectively in a bad place, I don't know where I'll be racing in 2009, I don't know who my agent is going to be or how exactly I'll get one, and I don't know whether or not I've closed the door on a return to Formula One or not. It's certainly going to be harder to get back into the sport from outside, but ultimately, having lost a Williams seat for reasons that weren't my choice is a big mark against continuing in F1 to begin with. All of these are bad things and I'm devastated about it...but the world goes on. I've said it out loud and my life hasn't come crumbling down around me.
"No. There aren't enough sponsors willing to come and sponsor me after what happened. Williams needs a sponsorship plan by the Brazilian Grand Prix or else they're just going to go with Hideki Kitagawa. The only option I would have is Force India and just...what would that accomplish? At least when Felipe Alvarez left McLaren his parachute was Renault, what good is the worst parachute on the grid? The only way I would go to Force India is if it was just a stopgap for something greater in 2010 and nobody has come forward offering that yet. Not even Renault. So if that's the case, am I going to be a backmarker in Formula One or am I going to try and let my talent shine somewhere else?" I asked, explaining why Force India wasn't really an option for me. Like I said, staying in F1 with Force India would almost do more harm than good, because then for 2010, teams aren't going to think of me as the driver that outperformed her highly rated teammate at Williams, rather I'll be thought of as the driver that gets lapped three times a race in the slowest team on the grid. I won't pretend that I'll be front of mind for anyone in 2010 - some other rookie will come along and take the spotlight or an existing driver will have a breakthrough season - but the memory of what I did in 2008 will be better than anything I could do in 2009 with Force India. So I'll find something else. Who knows, maybe I'll even join Natasha in the last few Superleague Formula rounds after Brazil.
Notes:
So...things are happening, eh?
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 20: It is Indeed Fabian Schmidt
Notes:
Hey everyone! I know this is unexpected, but the story is still going to be on biweekly updates. I just happened to have this chapter finished and I have some papers coming up in the next few weeks, so I decided to realign this story onto these weeks. Basically, the next chapter will be uploaded two weeks from now on October 16th, 2022. If you're reading this in the future, disregard this whole first half of the Author's Note.
Alright everyone, here we go, the final chapter of act one. I think you can probably tell from the last few chapters that act two is going to go into a slightly different direction and I'm excited to explore that!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act I.
The Spaceship Era.
Chapter XX.
It is Indeed Fabian Schmidt.
"What are we going to do about all of this?" Roksana asked me as we began packing her wagon to head to the airport. I was about to fly out to Brazil, the team and I would mutually announce on Wednesday that I wouldn't be racing in Formula One in 2009, and I would probably get grilled about it in the media during the Thursday press conference, because I'm sure those media vultures will put me in it if I'm not already. Media vultures aside, I will admit that certain Formula One personalities have been talking about the scandal since it broke, with a certain retired Canadian world champion making some crude comment that, I imagine, in his twisted mind must have seemed supportive by saying that he didn't find it scandalous, instead he just thought it was "hot." The strange comments of Jacques Villeneuve aside, most of the people involved on the current grid have dodged questions about it, not wanting to get dragged into any scandal. I suppose I could understand that, after all, just because this shit has blown my life up doesn't meant that other drivers need to dip their toes in controversy. There was a somewhat harsh comment about a media circus being made out of this in a racing series, but the harshness wasn't directed at me - I've dodged every media question about it thus far - more at the tabloid press for turning this into a thing.
"I don't know. Do you think maybe if I deny this I might be able to get sponsors?" I asked. Kazakhoil was probably a long shot, what with some of the comments from Nazarbayev Nursultan before this seeming disappointed in the investment, and the bad blood that Makhmud Abdullayev has spit out since...but what about the rest? Saudia is still on the car despite my outing, even if they do want me out, so maybe if I can somehow convince the world that it wasn't me in those pictures or that they were taken out of context, I could reduce the pressure pushing me out and maybe secure enough funding to pull together that $10 million. I knew it was a longshot, I knew that I was realistically out of Formula One already, and I knew that I wanted to get away from being a paydriver anyway, so maybe that's why I felt so numb about all of this. I wanted to be in Formula One still, I hated the fact that my dream was getting away from me, but I still wasn't really feeling anything about it. At first I thought it was a relief, that my world wasn't collapsing around me, but as time goes on, I just feel empty. I feel like a piece of me has just been taken out and I don't know how to get it back. Maybe that is the feeling of my world collapsing though. Not something big and dramatic, but rather just a long, deep, depression.
"No," Roksana firmly counted my suggestion "You're not going to do that Tamara. You're not going to deny who you are because you think it might get you more sponsors. if they're not willing to support you for who you are, they shouldn't be supporting you to begin with. Besides, you're talented enough that you shouldn't need sponsors to get a seat. If Williams doesn't see that, then quite frankly, fuck them."
"While I love that idea...I'm not sure if a 'fuck them' attitude will get me very far in the most corporate sport on the planet." I responded. Sure football clubs have shirt sponsors and brand partners, and sure American sports teams have ridiculous things like "the Official Beer of the New York Yankees" but none of that matches up to the level of sponsorship in motorsport. Quite frankly, our cars are billboards, and in the case of Williams, that means everything from the Royal Bank of Scotland to Swiss watch maker Oris, from Dutch conglomerate Philips to Saudi airline Saudia, from Swedish truck brand Scania to American logistics giant FedEx. State-owned Brazilian Petrobras for fuel and even Thomson-Reuters for whatever reason. That is an awful lot of corporate names to keep happy, corporations that, like my father said, come from every point on the political spectrum and have every opinion on homosexuality possible. That means, unfortunate as it may be, being openly lesbian in the world of motorsports is essentially career suicide. Once again, the question becomes: why take a chance and sponsor me when there are plenty of harmless straight men to sponsor? Corporations like blandness, they like being inoffensive, and they like making sure they have a product they can market to everyone. The way the world is, I'm not a product that everyone is willing to stomach, and because of that, Williams would rather put Hideki Kitagawa in the seat and make their money back via an engine discount coming from Toyota. So yeah, the team, the sponsors, and the engine manufacturer...that's a lot of people that could be pissed off by a "fuck them" attitude.
"It's just unfair...and it's not even like being a lesbian is illegal in Kazakhstan!" Roksana argued, slamming the trunk closed as she did. I wish I could make this better for her, but I didn't know how to, and she couldn't just ignore it either, because based on that reporter in Marseille the other day, this is all starting to involve her as well. That really was the worst part for me, because I could find some other way to make a living in racing - it may not be the pinnacle that is Formula One, but I could still race against some of the world's best drivers and best teams in a variety of series - it wouldn't be ideal, but I could find a way. However, if the British press is trying to figure out who my girlfriend is? That's a different matter. You see, I assumed they were just going to carelessly ruin my career and then move on to the next scandal - perhaps whining about the wages of some footballer or intruding on the sex life of some other celebrity - but it appears that at least some of those so-called journalists aren't letting this go. If they're going to keep intruding on my life, then that is going to be a far, far bigger problem than losing the Kazakhoil sponsorship.
"It doesn't matter if it's technically legal, the point is that Nazarbayev and Abdullayev don't like it. It's a dictatorship, all the matters is the will of the people involved." I explained, sighing, then I grabbed her arm gently and got her gray eyes to look back up at me "Let's go to the airport, okay? I want to end my career on a bang."
"You know what would be a real bang?" Roksana's face lit up, coming out of her awful mood "Why not reveal everything on your own terms? End all the speculation, tell them exactly who you are, what that was all about, and that they can't do anything about it?"
"Maybe I will," I responded without committing. Look it was a nice idea, something that might work in a movie or something like that, but what good would that actually do me if I just confirmed all the rumors and the dirty laundry floating out there? It seems like a good way of making sure that I'll never get back into Formula One again. I know I'm basically killing off my chances of returning to F1 - at least, returning to F1 in the capacity that I'd want to be in there in - by losing the Williams seat, but I want to believe that there might still be a small hope of something for 2010. Maybe, just maybe if I can have a really strong season somewhere else in 2009, if Bernardo Fulvia was right about me being in demand, and there really will be a lot of free seats available for the new decade, I'll be able to get my foot in the door. The only demand I have is that it's not a step backwards: I'll settle for a Honda, Toyota, or Red Bull - it truly doesn't need to be one of the top teams - all that matters to me is that if I ever come back to F1, I'll be able to do the same things I was able to do with Williams. Nobody is going to care about me if I'm just going to be getting lapped and finishing down in nineteenth every race. That's why Force India was never really an option for me.
"...so yeah, this is goodbye for now, but who knows. I want to race in Formula One, I think I've proven I have the speed to do it, and I am quite young still, I'm only twenty years old, so maybe this isn't the end." I concluded my answer to the question on a positive note. I hope that was as conclusive an answer as I could give, because I'm sitting next to the two championship contenders but I feel like the press conference has just been focusing on me.
"And the second part of my question, to everyone else, how do you feel about Tamara losing her seat?" the reporter asked.
"I'll start if I can." Anthony said, the American championship leader leaning into his microphone "I first met Tamara in 2005 when we were both racing in Formula 3. She was this lanky sixteen year old girl in this cutthroat championship where all these eighteen, nineteen year old guys were competing to be the best drivers in Europe. I got to be honest, i assumed she was just going to be at the back of the grid and wash out, but instead? Instead she impressed us all and was one of the best rookies that year. You know there were only five of us that won races that year? She was one of them, taking a win at Zandvoort when I retired. Next time I saw her we were both rookies in Formula One and she impressed right away there. I know she lost her sponsorship but honestly? If I were Williams, I'd keep her."
"I agree with Anthony." Henrique de Matteo began, the last driver joining us on the front row of the press conference "I don't know her as well but she is very good and I think it is a shame that Formula One is losing maybe the best woman driver there has ever been."
"I was there in 2005 as well. I ended up finishing 9 points ahead of Tamara in the standings but I also had a really good car in the second half of the season whereas she had a very inconsistent one. I think she is a very good driver, her results speak for themselves, and it would be a real shame if she isn't on the grid next year." Maximilian Renner spoke up from the back row, sitting directly behind me. The German, about to race his final race for Toro Rosso before a promotion - they still call it that despite Red Bull being behind the junior team this season - to Red Bull, replacing the outgoing Daniel MacGowan. The Scotsman was sitting next to his replacement, dressed in a special white race suit this weekend to match the unique car livery he is running to support the Wings for Life charity in his final race. The elder statesman of Formula One was the next to speak up on my behalf and I was starting to feel like I had left an impression on the sport, even if it did seem like my time was coming to an end.
"You know, I've been in the sport for a long time and I thought I was finally beginning to see the end of the days where good drivers lose out on their seats because of funding. It's a damn shame to see her losing her seat and it's just as much of a shame that none of the teams are moving in to offer her one." Daniel answered the question with some series passion, perhaps hinting that he might take an interest in junior drivers now that he was done driving for himself. In any case, he expressed his disappointment in Formula One in a better way than I could have. I suppose he was a bit wrong though, after all, Force India did make an offer for me, but I think if MacGowan knew that he would make the same argument I've been making - I'm too good to be at the worst team in Formula One. So, four of the best drivers in the world, all male, had spoken up on my behalf, and the only one at this press conference who hasn't is sitting in the upper left corner: Felipe Alvarez. I expected us to be moving on from the question after MacGowan's comprehensive answer, but much to my surprise, Felipe spoke up as well.
"I think Daniel said it better than me, but yes. This is a racing championship, and it is wrong for a driver to be losing her seat because of something that has nothing to do with the racing. Tamara and I have had our disagreements in the past, yes, but she is a good driver, too good to only be in F1 because of the money." and there we have it. A unanimous expression of support for me. I would finally get a reprieve from the questions, as the media turned their attention to the championship battle between the two men next to me, but I would spend the rest of the press conference with a smile on my face. Maybe 2010 wasn't such an unrealistic idea after all, because while Formula One has short memories, I've clearly given Formula One a lot to remember in my two seasons in the sport.
I was on the front row for the Thursday press conference, but when time back for the Sunday race, I was all the way down in sixteenth. Believe it or not, I actually outqualified my teammate, as Tommy was lining up on the row behind me in eighteenth. Neither of us exactly had much to be proud of back here, but at least I got to improve my qualifying record against my teammate before leaving the championship. So, we were all the way at the back of the grid, surrounded by cars, and just to make things a bit more dramatic, everyone was on intermediate tyres thanks to a shower that had soaked the Brazilian Interlagos circuit shortly before the start. There was one bit of good news though, mainly that Piotr Kaminski was starting in the pitlane rather than from thirteenth, so at least we gained a position there. Of course, this also provided the Pole with a way to avoid all the carnage that was bound to ensue in a wet turn one, but you have to look on the good side when you're about to race what may be the final race of your Formula One career and it seems like the weather itself is against you.
One red light. Two red lights. Three. Four. Five...zero. Nineteen cars blasted off of the grid to begin the final race of the 2008 Formula One World Championship. Henrique de Matteo took the pole and defended it off the line, doing exactly what he needs to do to keep his championship hopes alive, but with Anthony Harrison in fourth, it may not be enough. Enough about the championship battle though, because I had my own situation to deal with. Cresting the hill and diving to the left under braking we reached turn one, the sharp left-hander that opened the hairpin. I began turning into the corner only to be at the end of a disastrous chain reaction. Tommy Koskinen hit the back of Daniel MacGowan and that essentially punted the white-liveried Red Bull into my side. Two Williams cars rolled down the hill to continue while a Formula One veteran got to retire a little bit early as his career ended in the runoff area. I reached the bottom of the Senna S, turned my car to the right, and then swept to the left through the Curva do Sol, driving past the Renault of Filipe Yannick - embedded in the barriers for completely separate reasons - before finally getting on the radio.
"I have damage. Tommy and I both have damage. We need to pit." I informed the team, feeling that the car was good enough to continue the race but not much else right now. Tommy was some distance behind me, practically crawling through the corners thanks to a completely shatters front wing, whereas I was trying to lap the circuit with a smashed up sidepod and a punctured rear left tyre. Fortunately for me we weren't at risk of getting lapped on the short Brazilian circuit thanks to the fact that the twin incidents of MacGowan and Yannick brought out the safety car. Henrique de Matteo led, Ivan Tripoli was making a very bad day for us even worse by being in second in his Toyota, Matti Hamalainen was third in the sister Ferrari, but Anthony Harrison was fourth keeping his title bid alive. Jyri Kaasalainen was also in fifth, meaning McLaren was in position to take the constructors' championship as well if the Ferraris were to get caught out by the wet weather. As for Williams, well, we were at the very back of the field limping into the pits for emergency repairs, meaning we avoided the penalty for pitting under safety car. I got to the pits first, so I got my tyres replaced and sent back out before Tommy took his lengthy pitstop and nose change. We would be nose-to-tail again soon enough under safety car, but it still felt good that I didn't have to just sit there while they worked on changing his entire nosecone.
In any case, Tommy and I soon closed up to the back of the pack, myself in seventeenth and him in eighteenth, the last cars running after the turn one incident. It was far from an ideal start at such a classic track - a classic track where I scored a point last year, no less - but with the grid bunched up under safety car and the kind of conditions that were likely to cause attrition, perhaps we could still do something here today. Like I said, if this is indeed going to be my final Formula One race, I wanted to end it on a bang, not on a whimper. The safety car came into the pits on lap five, unleashing the remaining eighteen cars of this field across the Brazilian track. Due to a combination of it no longer raining, cars displacing the water quickly, and the sloped terrain of Interlagos to begin with, the track was drying up quickly, and considering we had nothing to lose from back here, we were among the first cars to pit. Tommy came in on lap seven, along with the Honda of James Buxton who, likewise had nothing to lose, whereas I pitted a lap later. I figured I was getting the better end of the deal here; the intermediate tyres were close enough to the grooved tyres that my in-lap was pretty good all things considered, and I'd still be on the dry tyres earlier than the rest of the field. However, that's not quite what happened.
First of all, I was held for maybe a tenth longer than I normally would have been as the pitlane was very active, with Maximilien Lecroix, Lorenzo Barbaro, and Fabian Schmidt all pitting at the same time as me. Second of all, as I curved through the long, long pit exit here at Interlagos, I saw my teammate steaming past on up-to-temperature dry tyres, while I still had to get mine up to temperature on a track which was still somewhat damp, all things considered. It was especially damp off-line, where all the displaced water had been dumped. Maximilien Lecroix would find those out the hard way on lap thirteen when he spun out after dipping a wheel into a wet patch some distance behind me. The Toro Rosso driver would remain in the race, but he lost at least five seconds during that maneuver. Conditions were treacherous to say the least, but it was the same for everyone, because by now all the cars were on dry tyres. Including a certain Umberto Petronelli who was running in the top five, according to the timing and scoring tower along the start-finish straight.
"How is Umberto that far ahead?" I asked the team radio.
"He gambled on the dry tyres under safety car, he's up to fifth but now that the cars behind him are on dries as well he's dropping like a rock. We'll be back ahead of him soon enough." Peter Malmedy answered over the team radio. I think I'll miss him quite a bit when I move on, because he knows just how to motivate me at times like this, giving me a target and just lighting the fuse. So, I got on that right away, throwing the far to the left into turn one, plunging down the hill and then snapping to the right at the bottom for turn two, getting on the throttle and staying on it through turn three as I swung to the left onto the Reta Oposta. Climbing through the gears and climbing up the speedometer, I crossed the sector one line just before braking and throwing the car to the left for turn four. Turn five was another left-hander, but even faster this time as the track widened out. Not quite as fast as it would be on a fully dry day though, because I still found myself avoiding the exit kerbing, knowing damn well what happened to Maximilien Lecroix not that long ago. Anyway, I was now on a short infield straight, the elevation of Interlagos clear as day as the paddock sat on a cliff face overlooking this part of the track. Just before said cliff, I swung the car to the right through turns six and seven, effectively acting as two axes of an uphill corner. The uphill climb culminated in the hairpin of turn eight, which then started the rollercoaster that defined the Interlagos track.
Coming out of turn eight the cars plunged down into another hairpin, Pinheirinho, and then climbed uphill once more to Bico do Pato, braking uphill, turning to the right, and then accelerating as we plunged down the hill yet more. To use the rollercoaster analogy once again, this was like one of those fast, sweeping dips...mainly since it was, you know, a fast, sweeping dip. I'm talking about Mergulho of course, the lowest point on the track, a fast left-hander taken as close to flat-out as we dare; and spitting us out onto a short straight containing the line which ended sector two. One sector to go, and it was all about climbing. First though, there was Juncao, the final braking zone and a tight ninety-degree corner to the left. After that though, it was all climbing and climbing and climbing - climbing up the track, climbing up the gears, and climbing up the mountain that was the start-finish straight. All along the way we were sweeping to the left through these nothing corners like thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. Here though, the elevation and the wideness of the track came together in such a way that it might as well have been banking. At the crest of this impressive hill was the start-finish line, which I crossed to complete lap fourteen, my fastest lap of the race so far. Of course, it wasn't the fastest lap of the race by any means, and that much was reinforced the very next lap when Henrique de Matteo set a laptime half a second faster than mine, increasing the deficit.
I was, however, making up time on my teammate, and on Umberto Petronelli who was my current target. At the moment the Force India driver was holding up Anthony Harrison, with the McLaren driver just not able to pass. Perhaps Harrison was being a bit cautious, as the American knew he had a lot more to lose as the championship leader than Petronelli did as a backmarker. Nonetheless, Anthony needed to make something happen, because as they run right now, Henrique de Matteo is on course to win the race and increase his points tally to 97, whereas Anthony was only scoring three points at the moment. Henrique de Matteo taking a sixth win here would break a tie, so unless something happens to the Brazilian, the American must finish fifth of better. He would eventually pass Umberto on lap eighteen, taking that critical fifth place, but he still had an awful lot of work to do. Henrique was still in the lead, trading fastest laps with second-placed Maximilian Renner as he managed the gap, and pit stops were going to come sooner rather than later. Anthony had lost a lot of time stuck behind the Force India, and he didn't know what shape he'd be in after the pitstops. The American's situation would get somewhat worse when, in the course of the very same lap, the Toyota of Fabian Schmidt passed Umberto Petronelli with ease, meaning Anthony wasn't even getting the benefit of the cars behind getting stuck behind the Force India as well.
The second round of stops would come in the 30s and 40s, with Maximilian Renner pitting first, followed by Fabian Schmidt on lap thirty-six, Henrique de Matteo on lap thirty-eight, Alvarez and Harrison on lap forty, and Matti Hamalainen on lap forty-three. When this shook out, Henrique de Matteo was in the lead once again, with Alvarez in second, Hamalainen in third, Harrison in fourth, and Maximilian Renner in fifth. Harrison was on course then, but the Toro Rosso was closing in, and Max was fueled to the end of the race, as was sixth-place Fabian Schmidt, whereas Anthony was not. The black driver would need to make a pitstop again at some point, and it seemed like it would drop him down to sixth - maybe even seventh depending on what the team does with Jyri Kaasalainen - which would not be enough for the championship. As for me, well I was fueled up for a long recovery stint at the beginning of the race, so I didn't take my second stop until lap fifty-one, so the downside was that I lost a lot of places again, but the bright spot was that I was fueled to the end so I would likely make some of those places back as the cars ahead of me pitted for fuel. These cars included Tommy Koskinen, who took his second stop ten laps before me. Despite having caused the turn one incident that took us both out of contention, the Finn pitted for dry tyres first and that allowed him to undercut me earlier in the race and not look back. Perhaps now, thanks to the fuel situation, I could get him back.
It wouldn't work out that way though, because it would begin to rain around lap sixty-three. To their credit, the team did try to limit the damage by calling me into the pits and switching me onto the intermediate tyres basically as soon as the rain started, but it was futile. My strategy depended on not having to take another stop and now everyone would have to stop because of the rain, allowing the cars that hadn't fueled up yet to get a cheap stop. Victor Hartmann was one such car, the German taking fuel and intermediate tyres at the same lap as me, positioning himself to make some progress on the frontrunning cars. As for said frontrunners, Kaasalainen would pit on lap sixty-five for McLaren, followed by the Renault of Felipe Alvarez and the Ferrari of Matti Hamalainen on lap sixty-six, and the McLaren of Anthony Harrison and the Toro Rosso of Maximilian Renner coming in nose-to-tail a lap later for their own stops. Finally, Henrique de Matteo would pit from the race lead on lap sixty-seven and come out, still at the front of the field. There was a bit of an aberration in all of this though, mainly the fact that Fabian Schmidt stayed out in all of this, the crazy bastard in the Toyota deciding to grin and bear it on dry tyres whereas everyone else was on the wets.
Heavy rain began to fall two laps from the finish. In these difficult conditions, Anthony Harrison ran wide, finally giving Maximilian Renner the opening he's been waiting for all day long, and the Toro Rosso was up to fifth. The crucial point was out of Anthony's hands, and he knew it, because he was ferocious in trying to regain that position from the German driver to no avail. It all seemed to have worked out for Ferrari as Henrique de Matteo crossed the line to win the race: Bahrain, Turkey, France, Europe, Belgium, and now Brazil, six wins to the America's five - Australia, Monaco, Great Britain, Germany, and China - just enough to win the tie breaker for the two drivers on 97 points. Felipe Alvarez crossed the line in second, and normally I'd make a snide remark about that, but I have to admit I've warmed up to the Spaniard now that he defended me at the pre-race press conference. The irrelevant thoughts of the driver down in fourteenth aside, next came the Ferrari of Matti Hamalainen in third, ensuring that Ferrari would be the 2008 constructors' champions. For a moment, it seemed like Ferrari had done the double for the second year in a row, and this time fully legitimately, none of the stink of McLaren's disqualification to put their title into question. That was, until the following happened:
"Is that...is that Schmidt? Is that Schmidt going slowly?" asked Martin Brundle of the ITV commentary crew, as Maximilian Renner overtook the Toyota of Fabian Schmidt climbing up the hill, moving up into fourth place. Mere moments later, Anthony Harrison followed, the American overtaking the struggling Toyota to move into fifth place. Maximilian Renner crossed the line in what was another very fine wet-weather performance for the Toro Rosso driver in his final race for the team, but all the attention was on my friend, Anthony Harrison, as he crossed the line to take fifth place, four points, and a 98-point total to take the title by one point over hometown hero Henrique de Matteo. It must have been heartbreaking for the Brazilian crowd, but for the Americans, it represented only their third-ever champion, following in the footsteps of Phil Hill and the great Mario Andretti, Anthony Harrison became the 2008 world champion.
The points-paying results of the 2008 Brazilian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 8 points.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 5 points.
5: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 4 points.
6: Fabian Schmidt - Germany - Toyota - 3 points.
7: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 2 points.
8: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 1 point.
So, Anthony Harrison beats Henrique de Matteo 98 to 97, Matti Hamalainen's two wins give him third place over Piotr Kaminski as the Finn and the Pole tie on 75 points, and Felipe Alvarez's two wins help him beat out Victor Hartmann who sits just a point behind him on 59. As for us, well, Toyota takes fifth place in the constructors' championship, their total of 45 points beating out 42-point total. Toro Rosso was close behind, taking 39 points, almost all courtesy of Maximilian Renner's late-season surge, but not quite close enough to overtake us. Still, having taken a maiden win and beat the senior Red Bull team in the standings, I'm sure Scuderia Toro Rosso is plenty proud of their performance in 2008, and I would be too in their position. Anyway, enough teasing, the full 2008 championship results up next.
The 2008 Formula One World Championship for Drivers' reads as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 98 points.
2: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 97 points.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 75 points.
4: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 75 points.
5: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 60 points.
6: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 59 points.
7: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 53 points.
8: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 35 points.
9: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 26 points.
10: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Williams-Toyota - 25 points.
11: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 20 points.
12: Fabian Schmidt - Germany - Toyota - 19 points.
13: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 17 points.
14: Filipe Yannick - Brazil - Renault - 16 points.
15: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 11 points.
16: Daniel MacGowan - Great Britain - Red Bull-Renault - 8 points.
17: Maximilien Lecroix - France - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 4 points.
18: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 3 points.
19: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Force India-Ferrari - 0 points.
20: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Ferrari - 0 points.
21: Haruki Tanaka - Japan - Super Aguri-Honda/Unemployed - 0 points.
22: Louis Sanderson - Great Britain - Super Aguri-Honda/Unemployed - 0 points.
The 2008 Formula One World Championship for Constructors' reads as follows:
1: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 172 points.
2: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 151 points.
3: BMW Sauber - Germany - Hinwil, Switzerland - 134 points.
4: Renault - France - Enstone, Great Britain - 76 points.
5: Toyota - Japan - Cologne, Germany - 45 points.
6: Williams-Toyota - Great Britain - Grove, Great Britain - 42 points.
7: Toro Rosso-Ferrari - Italy - Faenza, Italy - 39 points.
8: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 28 points.
9: Honda - Japan - Brackley, Great Britain - 14 points.
10: Force India-Ferrari - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 0 points.
11: Super Aguri-Honda - Japan - Leafield, Great Britain - 0 points.
You know, between flying around the world, racing, being publicly outed, and losing my job, I basically forgot that Super Aguri existed this year. They didn't do much, only managing four races before they went bankrupt, but it is interesting that they lasted this long. So, I finished down in tenth, the same position I finished 2007 in, but I scored more points this year, outperformed my teammate, and reduced the deficit in qualifying. The gaps in the midfield were really close, perhaps closer than the actual points totals show, because if the team didn't have a driver like me, then who knows, maybe we would have finished down in eighth, behind the sister Red Bull teams, rather than up in sixth, having fought Toyota for fifth place the entire way. Renault once again was too much of a force for us, but we kept them honest for much of the year, and I think the fact that Filipe Yannick scored 16 points to Alvarez's 60 is really going to bother Bernardo Fulvia. I asked him to just wait a year, let me finish out my contract with Williams, and then I would go to Renault no problem, instead though, Renault is stuck with him for 2009 despite the fact that I am a free agent this year. Renault wouldn't be a step backwards, I'd go there in a heartbeat, even if it did mean having to put up with Alvarez as a teammate, but no, Bernardo had to be stubborn, so now he has an underperforming driver, and I don't have a seat. Thus, that's what was going through my mind when Lorenzo Barbaro found me, hiding in a quiet corner of the paddock getting frustrated at the way my career was going.
"I heard you're in need of an agent." Lorenzo told me when he found me, apparently having heard that I stopped working with my father after he was unable to secure me a good Formula One seat...how though? Did my father tell him? I didn't mention anything, and I guess my father might be aware one way or another that Lorenzo and I are friends, perhaps they've spoken from time to time, but still, it is surprising to see the news spreading before the Brazilian Grand Prix has truly even ended. Across the paddock Henrique de Matteo was giving a very mature, honorable perspective on having narrowly lost the championship yet my South American friend - at the closest event he has to a home race - is caring after me. Seeing my confusion, Lorenzo clarified "I drive for Force India, they're trying to sign you, they know we talk sometimes. I found out through them."
"I'm not going to go there. I'm sorry Lorenzo but it would be career suicide to take a step back right now." I cut off that line of thinking immediately, echoing the same sentiments that have been in my head since I got this opportunity. It's not easy to turn down a Formula One seat when one is on offer, regardless of where you come from in motorsport, but I have to remember that I've scored podiums, outperformed my teammate, and raced with McLarens and Ferraris at times. All of that comes together to mean that my ambition should be to get into a winning car, not a backmarker car. And I've made the decision that it is probably better to go somewhere else and have a chance of winning again than it is to rewrite my history in Formula One with a bunch of 18th place finishes, regardless of whether or not I would get to be teammates with one of the first friends I made in the Formula One paddock.
"Hey, hey, I don't blame you. I wouldn't want to take a step back either. I do think I can help you do that though." Lorenzo explained. So, he found out about all of this through Force India but he's not actually acting in the interests of his team.
"How so?" I asked, glancing over at the man in a black suit, white shirt, and no tie standing next to him.
"Through me." the man in a suit answered, proceeding immediately with an elevator pitch "My name is Ernesto Signorelli, I'm Lorenzo's agent, and I can get you racing in a top-level single-seater race as early as next week." I tried to think of what that might be - it wasn't Superleague Formula, they were racing in Vallelunga this weekend and then had their season finale in Jerez on the 23rd - those last two races at Jerez were the ones I was hoping that I could find a way to join Natasha in the series for. Indycar had already finished their season I'm pretty sure, and the only reason it even went this long is because of a hectic schedule due to their attempts to incorporate the Champ car rounds at the eleventh hour after their merger earlier this season. So that left...what?
"What do you have to offer?" I asked.
"I represent a number of clients, mostly Latin American drivers in Europe, but some European drivers as well. One such client is Olivier Clemente, the driver and seat holder for A1 Team Monaco. Olivier drove in the first two rounds, at Mugello and Zandvoort, but can't make it out Shanghai and Sepang for the Asian rounds. Meanwhile, Lorenzo here tells me that you live in Monaco, you have residency there, and can, as far as the FIA is concerned, represent Monaco as well as Kazakhstan. So how do you feel about racing in the World Cup of Motorsport?"
"Well," I started thinking. So, A1GP. From what I understand it's a spec series based around the concept of drivers representing their country - and considering I didn't much feel like representing Kazakhstan after everything that has happened this year, I could easily see myself representing the country that I actually call home - and as of the 2008-09 season, the series now uses a modified Ferrari F2004 chassis paired with a 4.5L V8. It reminds me a lot of the same concept used in Superleague Formula, with its modified Panoz Champ car chassis paired with a new V12 engine, and much like Superleague Formula, I imagine that the A1GP car is a little bit slower, a little bit less wild than the car it is based off of, but still backs more of a punch than a GP2 car, for instance. These various racing series. Formula 1.5s if you could call them that, are not positioned as feeder series, and while they certainly can provide good experience for junior drivers, they can also be an endpoint for drivers as well. In fact, from what I understand, Robert Deschamps - the very same who Natasha races in Superleague Formula - also competes in A1GP when the schedules don't conflict. The random places ex-Formula One drivers find themselves aside, I suppose there are worse things I can do for two weeks of November than competing in a spec series using a derivative of one of the greatest Formula One cars of all time "How about you give me your contact information and I'll make a decision once I'm back in Monaco?"
"That'll do." Signorelli smiled. The Italo-Argentinian agent had his foot in the door, and he was satisfied with that for now.
"Thanks for meeting me." Michael Coronet greeted as I arrived in Grove on a bit of a detour from my planned trip back to Monaco. My boss wanted to meet with me at the team headquarters one last time. I wasn't sure what this was about but seeing Michael standing outside the team base crushing a cigarette underneath his shoe - I've never seen him smoke before - suggests he's nervous in a way I haven't seen before. The Briton looked around, took a deep breath, and then took two envelopes out of his jacket pocket before turning back to me "Follow me, we're going to go meet Frank."
"Okay," I answered with a raised eyebrow but received no answer as we entered the Williams Grand Prix Engineering headquarters. I took my time to look around, knowing this very well may be the last time I get to come here. I think I had the same thought last time, but that was in an uncertain time, where I didn't know whether or not I would be fired outright. Now, it was certain, I got to see out the season, but that was over now, my contract had expired, and after today, I would have no reason to be allowed in this building again. Michael Coronet wasn't giving me much time to reminisce though, walking at a decisive pace to Frank's office. Michael entered without waiting or even knocking, and I reluctantly followed him, finding a surprised Sir Frank Williams with his daughter, Claire. Michael didn't waste any time as he walked right up to the desk and placed the first envelope on Frank's desk.
"What is this?" the venerable team principal and founder of Williams asked.
"A list of demands that need to be met before the 2009 season. First of all, I need the title and authority to lead this team when you're not at the races, therefore, I want to officially be named Deputy Team Principal. Second of all, I wanted to be treated as a partner in this organization if I am going to stay here. I have a very persuasive offer from somewhere else Sir Frank, so while I respect you and everything you've done for me, I need to be recognized for the value I bring to the team. And speaking of value to the team, my third demand is that Tamara is signed on with no sponsorship required." my eyes widened - so did everyone else's to be fair - as we realized that Michael was finally fed up with doing all the daily running of the team without being recognized for it. He was making his power play and one of his demands was that I was retained, no $30 million demand, no $10 million demand, nothing. Michael knew I was good enough to be at this team on merit, so he was putting his career on the line to make it happen...I see now that he really is on my side, more than I even realized.
"Michael, Tamara...you both know I can't do that. This team is everything to me, this is my legacy, this is what me and my family have built. I need all the help I can get to make this team survive the crash and Toyota is providing that. They're not just discounting the engines, Michael; they're paying for his seat. We wouldn't just be losing a discount if we kept Tamara, we'd be losing money! But you already know that don't you? You've already made your decision. So go on then Michael, tell us where you're going to be next season?" Frank demanded, a bitterness seeking into his voice as he realized that he had lost yet another member of his inner circle. This is a Sir Frank Williams that has built up one the greatest organizations that Formula One has ever seen but has seen countless underlings leave for other teams, had countless engine deals go wrong one way or another, and faced every obstacle imaginable. The fact that Williams still exists and is still relatively competitive in spite of that speaks volumes about the type of man that Sir Frank is, but that doesn't mean there aren't scars because of it.
"McLaren." Michael revealed, confirming Frank's suspicion. I glanced over and saw Frank's frown deepen as he heard the name of the same team that he lost Paddy Lowe to all those years ago, that he lost Adrian Newey to all those years ago. Now he's losing Michael Coronet to them as well, the latest Judas in a long line of traitors as far as Frank is concerned "Ron Dennis is stepping back into a chairman role. They've been pressuring him to step down since the Spygate scandal and, with his prodigy Anthony Harrison winning the champion, this is the only way that Ron feels like he can retire on his terms. So, he's putting me in charge as team principal of the Formula One effort and giving me a stake in the organization. That much is true, but you're wrong about one thing sir. I didn't come here having already made a decision; this was where my decision was made. You could either offer me the same thing that McLaren has offered, or you can give me all the justification I need to go somewhere that I'll really wanted." Michael placed the second envelope on Frank's desk "My resignation sir. I want you to know that I'm grateful for everything you've done for me, but you've also made it clear that this is a family operation, and that I'm not part of that family."
"Goodbye and good luck then Michael," Sir Frank responded, brisque but dignified, perhaps to show that this is no big loss to him, or perhaps genuinely wishing luck onto the exiting Brit in some way. Once he left the office, Frank looked at Claire and then me "You two go on as well, I'd like to be along now."
"Of course," said Claire, exiting the office quietly. I lingered for a moment longer.
"I'd like you to know that Renault offered me a contract back in 2007. I stayed with you though, I wanted to be loyal sir, even through all this I did everything I could to try and raise the money to stay here. Goodbye sir...and thank you for giving me my chance." I left on that note, not having the heart to see how Frank would react. I left the factory immediately after that, leaving it, and Williams behind. I came out of the front door to see Michael leaning against the wall, looking completely drained of the confidence and the bravado he needed in that office. Once he noticed me, he began speaking.
"I can't do anything for you for 2009 Tamara. Anthony and Jyri are both under contract, but I can offer you a testing role. Get you some seat time in top-end machinery and get you acquainted to the new regulations for when you get back into the car." Michael offered, doing the best he could do, showing what a true ally was in a sport like this. I also couldn't help but smile at his wording - when, not if - that was true belief in my abilities if I've ever seen it.
"I appreciate the offer, but I intend to be too busy driving next year to have any time for testing." I answered, "I have to say thank you though, you've done everything you could do to keep me in Williams."
"I've done all of that because you deserve it. You've surprised us all Tamara, we never expected you too be as good of a driver as you are, and it feels disgusting to me that we've stumbled on a driver of such caliber just to lose you because of funding of all things. This is a bloody sport, it should be about talent, not about money. I know that's probably a lost cause by now but that doesn't make it right." Michael lamented, speaking more on the state of Formula One as a whole rather than just about what was going on with my future.
"Well, still. Good luck at McLaren." I smiled, offering my hand to the Brit.
"Good luck with wherever you find yourself next." Michael responded, shaking my hand. We were shaking hands in front of the Williams building, but after today, neither of us would be an employee at this team. Michael was heading for the top of Formula One, I was heading out of the sport...at least for now.
"...so that's the offer Signorelli gave me." I explained, standing in the middle of my apartment, looking at Roksana and Natasha sat in front of me. Roksana wore a bit of a concerned expression on her face, which surprised me a little bit, but I suppose she had her reasons to be upset. As much as I've tried to keep her out of it this has affected us both by now, so I imagine she was probably looking forward to spending the week together instead of having to drive me to the airport yet again for another obscenely long flight to the east. As for Natasha, well, that was a different story. The darker haired blonde seemed excited for me to have the chance to win races again, after having spent these last two seasons in the middle of the F1 pack at best. I imagine that is something Natasha is somewhat dreading as well, because she's in the form of her life in Superleague Formula right now - following her first pole and first win in Estoril, she followed it up last weekend with a win and a second place at Vallelunga, just about taking maximum points at the Roman track for the AS Roma team...a popular combination, I'm sure - and when she does finally make the step up to Formula One, she probably won't be anywhere close to winning.
This is especially the case as Tsirinskaya has a foot in the door in F1, sure, but only with Honda. Considering that Honda only narrowly decided to remain in F1 for 2009 - while searching for a buyer, mind you, so this is far from a permanent thing - in a recent board vote, the Ross Brawn-led team is likely going to struggle next year. Of course, they've struggled plenty in 2008, so if it's going to be worse going forward, then things might truly get miserable for their drivers. I suppose the one bright side to that misery is that it might encourage James Buxton and Rudolfo Goncalves to move on sooner, giving an opening for Natasha to join. Of course, that's assuming that Charlie Michaels isn't still first in line, and even if they both go, who's to say that Honda won't pick Daniella Pieri over all? I know the American said she was more than content to stay in Indycar where her talents shine, but things can change quickly, and if Honda shows that they want her, perhaps Pieri can be persuaded after all. It wouldn't be out of the question for Honda to choose the driver that won at Motegi in a Honda-powered car over a recent addition to their development program if it ever came down to Pieri or Tsirinskaya. Hypotheticals aside, it's still 2008, and I have just laid out my plans for the future.
"Are you sure this is what you want to do?" Roksana asked, making my shoulders dip immediately, so she quickly corrected herself "I mean, it sounds like a good opportunity, don't get me wrong, but you just finished the F1 season, do you really want to go out there and learn a completely new car a week later?"
"It doesn't matter, this is an opportunity to make my mark the very moment I've become a free agent. Besides, this particular opportunity is only for two races, I'll be back home before December." I answered, trying to clear up any concerns.
"It's just...I thought you'd be spending some time at home after the season. Now you're flying out again." Roksana explained, voicing her own concerns.
"I know and I will be, it's just two races. I don't think that it's a big deal. I'm just going to go, hopefully score some good results, and prove Kazakhoil and Williams wrong." I argued, voicing that it was simple and really wouldn't take that long.
"I get that, I do, I just thought it was going to wait until the next spring." Roksana sighed.
"I don't see why it needs to when I have the opportunity now. It's not like I'm signing up to run thirty races a year or something ridiculous like that, it's just another two events, two races each, and then I'll be back home just after. I'm not going to be racing any deeper into the winter than Natasha is." I reasoned, pointing out that Natasha's season would likewise end on November 23rd. Of course, I know that I'm going to have a bit of a harder time - Natasha's last race is going to be at Jerez, mine is going to be all the way down in Sepang - in terms of travelling and all of that, but it's not going to be a dramatic difference. Like I said, I'm going to be at home relaxing by the time the calendar switches over to December, and then we'll have no races or training or any of that for a few months. I'm only doing these two rounds on A1GP, there are no plans to run the whole winter series, at least not this year, and I can't imagine that I'll get back into the car until March or April or so, depending on whatever series I end up in full time. I suppose there is a valid question - why am I doing just two races of this random single-seater series? The point is that I want to, I want to make a statement that, despite being out of Formula One for the moment, I am not done with open wheel racing, far from it. The fact that it is a spec series should also give me the chance to showcase my talents.
"Yeah but Natasha hasn't been racing all summer long!" Roksana argued, Natasha shifting uncomfortably next to her as she became the subject of our argument. I did feel bad for her, sitting there as if she's the child watching her parents' fight.
"It's just two races, I seriously don't understand what the problem is!" I responded, getting a bit exasperated now. It wasn't like I was running myself into the ground, this is no more races than I'd have to face if I continued in Formula One considering the expansion of the calendar coming in the next few seasons. The Vision60 plan has struggled a bit due to the financial crash, but there will be three new races in 2009: an Atlantic Grand Prix, a Russian Grand Prix, and an Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The Atlantic Grand Prix is the result of the Bordeaux circuit proposal going ahead while Magny-Cours got that one last contract extension for 2009, at least provisionally. As for the Russian Grand Prix, it seems that the world as a whole has quickly forgotten the Georgian war earlier this year, because despite the situation in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the FIA has decided to go ahead with a new street race in Saint Petersburg. The Lakhta Embankment Circuit, on the north side of the city, is part of a building spree in that area of the city, which is supposed to include the tallest building in Europe as well. A bit of a gimmick I must admit, but no more than the Yas Marina track. The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix is to be a day-to-night race around a luxurious venue built on reclaimed land in the Persian Gulf. So, three new races, meaning the calendar is getting closer to twenty, even twenty-five races a year than the sixteen or seventeen we've been used to. If I intend to get back to Formula One - which I do - I'm going to have to get used to this anyway.
"Just...fine. Whatever. Figure out when you need me to drive you, I'm gonna go lie down for now." Roksana sighed, leaving the room. I looked over to Natasha but she just shrugged before excusing herself.
Notes:
So, that's act one. I know this story is weird and niche - as is everything I write to be honest - but I've been proud to see a good amount of people reading it and a solid amount of engagement by my standards. For me it's been really fun to explore this 2007-2008 extreme aero era of F1, especially since the current 2022 season has, for me, been one of false promises and disappointments. F1 is the focus of this story, but it's not the only form of motorsport, and we're going to take some time to explore some of that in act two. That's about all I can say without spoiling some of the upcoming plot developments.
Chapter 21: The Rise of a New Paradigm
Notes:
So, after that slight schedule realignment, we are back to biweekly updates, and we are starting act two of Life at the Speed of Formula One!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXI.
The Rise of a New Paradigm.
"...not only the first American champion in decades, but the first black driver to ever win the Formula One World Champion. Anthony Harrison sealed the title in Brazil last weekend after..." the news report continued, delivering the same piece of news that was being shared all across the motor racing world. Anthony Harrison nearly won the title in his rookie season - only to tragically lose out to Matti Hamalainen thanks in no small part to Anthony's own mistake entering the pits in the penultimate race in China - but now, a year later, he has redeemed himself, and won the championship over Matti's teammate. McLaren entered the year with their drivers numbered #22 and #23, but in 2009 their cars would be numbered #1 and #2. Numbers #22 and #23, meanwhile, would actually be going to Honda. It seems the boardroom jockeying back and forth had actually been more damaging than it had first appeared, because the Honda team spent much of the second half of the season in a state of complete uncertainty. The actual Formula One team in the United Kingdom wanted to stay, obviously, but the Honda board room in Japan? They wanted to pull out due to the financial situation in the world. Revered team principal, Ross Brawn, was just about ready to pull a hail Mary and buy the team himself when Honda finally compromised that they would fund the team for one more year whilst looking for a buyer. That all happened a bit late for Formula One's taste though, so they would be treated as a new entry. A new entry that will be waived the required entry fee, of course. Tedious bureaucracy aside, McLaren was on the ascendancy while Honda would continue in Formula One on shaky foundations. That was, however, more than what could be said about me.
"Enough of this," Roksana groaned in the seat next to me, changing the radio station to some French pop nonsense that mercifully meant nothing at all.
"You're still upset." I pointed out, not even needing to ask. Roksana Yurasova has been weird about this situation ever since I informed her of my new plans to spend November out in East Asia filling in at A1 Team Monaco thanks to the connections of Ernesto Signorelli, my temporary agent. There is a saying in American motorsport that everyone is a cousin, and I suppose that's true in European motorsport as well, because A1 Team Monaco is seated and driven by Olivier Clemente, the Italo-Monegasque driver is represented by Italo-Argentine agent Ernesto Signorelli, Signorelli also represented German-born Uruguayan driver Lorenzo Barbaro, and Barbaro, finally, is one of my closest friends in the F1 paddock. I effectively got this job through connections alone, as very little formal movement has gone on thus far. Nevertheless, everything was in shape, and it seemed all Roksana needed to do was drive me to the airport and send me to the east with a chance to remind everyone of what I am capable of when I have a car that is just as good as the competition.
"...Yeah, okay, I am." Roksana admitted after a moment's silence, perhaps debating with herself as to whether or not she'd even answer.
"I really don't understand why you're mad. Do you want me to stop racing? Is that what this is?" I asked it gently, or at least I tried my best to do so, but I really didn't know how I'd react to her answer. If she said that she wanted me to stop racing, what would I do? I really didn't have an answer for that right now. On one hand, I love her and I want her to be happy - I want to be happy with her - but on the other hand, racing is all I can do, all I've ever done. I didn't go to university - honestly, even with lyceum I was being tutored at the track more often than I was actually in school at the end, and my grades fell to just barely passing because of it - so it's not like I could find a well-paying job easily either. I've gotten accustomed to the Monegasque lifestyle, we both have really, since she's been living with me for awhile now, so even if I wanted to stop racing - which I don't, mind you - I don't really know how to either. Racing is my passion, perhaps tragically, it's kind of my only passion, because I honestly don't know what I'm going to do with my life now that I'm not a Formula One driver. For the longest time my life's goal was to become a Formula One driver: I did that. Then it was to score a podium in F1: I did that too, twice. Then the goal became winning a race, and likely after that my goal would have become trying to win the world championship. None of that is possible now, I am not of F1, and my future is unclear.
"No, it's not that. I know this is what you love and what you want to do, and I truly did love having a girlfriend that's a Formula One driver. At the same time though, you just had a relentlessly long season and had the chance to come back and spend the offseason with me. Instead, you're going off and finding the first racing series you can so that you don't have to spend time with me." Roksana shared, revealing her insecurities. For this whole time I looked at Roksana as the one in control: I had the money and the fame yes, but Yurasova was the brilliant journalist, she was the one with all the experience in lesbianism, and she was the one guiding me through my half of the relationship, but all the while, she's been seeing herself as the regular journalist dating the global superstar racing driver. Roksana is a niche writer pandering to a niche audience, so she was always going to make less money than me, she was always going to be less important than me, and she seems to be scared that, as of late, I've realized that too. Now my intense focus on preserving and now rebuilding F1 career does not mean anything for our relationship. There has been no change, i still love her, I still want to be with her, and I still see her as responsible for my sexual awakening, but at the same time, I have to acknowledge that my focus has been elsewhere. I think it's justified, after all, my professional life was falling apart around me, but I can also begin to understand why she's been upset about this.
"Hey, hey...it's not like that at all. I'm with you and I love you, and I'm going to be with you as soon as I can. I just feel like my career has been falling apart these past few months, so I just want to be able to go out there and insert some stability into my career. It may not be F1, I might even end up disappointed, hell, I might not even have any success doing it, but I want to do something to try and make people think of me as someone other than the driver that got outed and lost her career." I explained, voicing how I was doing this in an attempt to change the narrative, to give the motorsport world something positive to think about - rather than just the controversy - in hopes of improving my chances of finding a decent stopgap from 2009. In effect, this detour to the far east wasn't so much a career move in itself, rather it was a means to an end, two rounds, four races to give some positives to my name again.
"Okay, okay. I believe you." Roksana accepted, breathing a sigh of relief as we pulled into the airport. We would be separated for a little while as I filled in for Olivier Clemente at A1 Team Monaco for the Shanghai and Sepang rounds, but I think we'll be alright. I had to hope so anyway, because for now, I needed to clear my mind and focus on learning a new car and a new series, all against drivers who already have a few races worth of experience at doing just that. It wasn't a complete wash though, because the car itself was based heavily on the Ferrari F2004, a car that isn't all that dissimilar to the cars that Ferrari is running now. There have been regulation changes throughout the decade, obviously, but they've been tweaks, little things here and there, and that's exemplified by the fact that the Super Aguri SA05 used early in 2006 was based heavily on the Arrows A23 from 2002. So yeah, a Ferrari F2004 is not exactly like a Williams FW30, but they are similar, and hopefully that will give me a bit of a hand. The 2004 and 2008 cars are certainly more similar than the 2008 and 2009 cars will be, since F1 is experiencing a major regulation shakeup with the goal of reducing dirty air and promoting closer racing...a regulation change that I won't be experiencing.
A white open wheeler sat in the garage. It sat on slick Michelin tyres and wore a black rounded rectangle badge on the engine cover reading "Powered by Ferrari" with a silver prancing horse next to it. The white livery was broken up by red front and rear wings, bargeboards, mirrors, engine cover fin, flick-ups, and, along the nose of the car, a pattern of red diamonds. This was A1 Team Monaco's challenger, the car I would be driving for the weekend, and the sides of the headrest born the name "T. Shchegolyayeva." The engine was not the brutally powerful 3.0L V10 machine that revved to the heavens and dominated the 2004 Formula One season, rather it was a modified production block, a 4.5L V8 from Ferrari and Maserati. Rather than the 700 plus horsepower of the V10, this engine topped out at 600 horsepower - and even that required use of the powerboost button, effectively this series' version of an overtake button, allowed to be used four times in the sprint race and eight times in the feature race. The V8, despite being two cylinders smaller than the V10, was also heavier, as, once again, it's based off of a production engine rather than being something designed specifically for racing. All of those came together to form a car that was slower than the F2004 despite being on the slick tyres, but a car that was an impressive machine nonetheless, and one I was excited to be driving.
I wasn't a factor in the championship - I've already missed too many races to have an effect, and I won't be coming back to the championship after these two races either - and the team wasn't exactly a major feature in the championship battle either. I mean no offense to Olivier Clemente - after all, he's still the boss of the team and its seat holder despite the fact that he couldn't make it out to east Asia for these two races -but he's not the best driver in the world...he would admit as much as well. So, I didn't have to worry about the championship, and I didn't have to worry about messing up anything for my teammates. I had the freedom to dry as hard as I wanted and take whatever risks I deemed were necessary, aiming to take advantage of the spec machinery to show what I can really do. Points didn't matter, championship position didn't matter, this was all about being able to point to this result whenever someone thinks of Tamara Shchegolyayeva in 2008 and automatically jumps to the homosexuality scandal and me losing my job. This was a matter of pride, and on that note, for better or worse, I was driving a Ferrari open wheel racer. It wasn't Formula One, but this car shared so much DNA with the best Formula One cars of all time, it was badged as a Ferrari, and while it may be A1 Team Monaco rather than Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro, I'm going to savor this anyway. Considering what happened to me in F1, this may be the closest I ever get to driving for Ferrari.
"You know, there were only two races where Wilhelm Ziegler failed to finish in the points. There was Monaco, where he crashed out, and there was Shanghai, where he had that nightmare weekend after winning his seventh title." my engineer for this brief little A1GP stint, Edouard Desjardins, pointed out, joining me in looking over the machine we'll be trying to score a maximum number of points with.
"That's true, but the F2004 won anyway, Rudolfo Goncalves' most recent win." I countered. So, I wouldn't get to be part of the F2004's first win at either Shanghai or Sepang, for better or worse, but I would get to be part of a damn fine race with some damn fine cars. As for Rudolfo Goncalves, China 2004 was the most recent of his nine race wins. Considering his age and the performance of the Honda team, as well as their impeding sale to God knows who, I would wager that it will remain Rudolfo's final career win. It won't be the F2004's last win though, because no matter what happens to me or anyone else in this series, the F2004 derived A1GP Powered by Ferrari car will be winning all four of the races I'll be competing in.
"It did, yes. A proven winner then. So, tomorrow we qualify for the sprint and then go racing for the first time. Then the day after that we got the main event." Desjardins reminded me, making sure that I knew the format of this series. It wasn't like Formula One, and it wasn't like GP2 or GP2 Asia either, because, while the latter two did have sprint and feature races, much like A1GP, it is formatted differently. The GP2 series both have the same, singular qualifying session that sets the grid for the feature race, then the sprint race is run in a reverse grid format, flipping the top eight from the feature race. In contrast, A1GP has a sprint race and a feature race, but with two separate qualifying sessions, the two races were effectively separate events. The sprint race uses the same 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 points system for the top eight as in Formula One, whereas the feature race uses a 15-12-10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 points system...which seems a bit cheap considering that the feature race has more than twice as many laps as the sprint race. In any case, that's the points system this series has - with the added benefit of a single bonus point for fastest lap, awarded for both races - and it won't affect me very much anyway. Like I said, for this season at least, I'm just racing these two rounds, filling in for Olivier Clemente, and doing it for the sole purpose of
My second qualifying lap ended prematurely when the yellow flags came out for the Italy car spinning out in front of me, thus I was left qualifying with my first attempt. This meant that I would be starting the Shanghai sprint race from ninth. This wasn't ideal, the car had the pace to do more, even if I was still getting used to the intricacies of the series, but at the same time...I'm in ninth. I would have been thrilled if I qualified up in the top ten at a race like this in the Williams FW30, and I have a whole stint of racing to try and make up for it. No pitstops - not unless something bad happened - just twenty-five minutes or so of flat-out racing. Thus, as we negotiated the final hairpin, drove down the little straight with the pit entrance straight ahead, and finally turned left through the very last corner to arrive underneath the monolith, straight-spanning structure here at the Shanghai International Circuit, it was time to start the race. Team Ireland ahead of Team Belgium, reigning champion Team Switzerland in third next to Great Britain, then Team Portugal in fifth. Team France in sixth, then the row ahead of me was made up of Team South Africa in seventh and Team New Zealand in eighth for a celebration of the southern hemisphere. I was in ninth for Team Monaco, lining up next to the Team India car for my first ever rolling start in the so-called World Cup of Motorsports.
Twenty 4.5L Ferrari V8s revved up and released their limiters, speeding down into turn one. I made sure to clear the Team India car - driven by former Formula One driver Praveen Ramakrishnan, who drove for Jaguar in their final season in 2005, even scoring a fourth place at that controversial 2005 United States Grand Prix - before throwing my car into the snail section of turn one. A sense of deja vu came over me, well aware of the fact that I did this exact thing a few weeks ago at this very circuit, but there were a handful of differences. This car had slick tyres, so there was more mechanical grip in that respect, however, the 2004 aerodynamics provided less aerodynamic grip than the advanced, excessive flick-ups, turning vanes, and winglets of F1's 2007 and 2008 spaceship era. Simultaneously, the engine wasn't providing the type of power that F1's 2.4L V8s did, as, while they were higher displacement, they just didn't provide the revs that our engines did. Our...can I even say that about F1 anymore? I didn't think so, but I didn't exactly have the chance to dwell on it either, because the New Zealand car got ahead of the South Africa car as turn two tightened more, then Singaporean-South African driver Timothy Zhang was effectively stuck behind New Zealander Christopher Reynolds. This allowed me to send it inside Zhang in the downhill drop and then flick to the left that was turn three. The South African tried to fight it but I managed to insert myself between Zhang and Reynolds through the kinks of turns four and five, solidifying my position. I took a look up the inside of Reynolds in the turn six hairpin - both to keep the New Zealander on his toes and to prevent Zhang from sending it up my inside but retained eighth place. A move wasn't on the cards quite yet, so I settled in behind him for sector two.
Turn six was a right-hand hairpin, spitting us out onto a brief straight where we could accelerate before lifting and downshifting for the sweeper of turn seven. Slick tyres or not, these cars were noticeably slower through the long left-hander of turn seven, and likewise through the bottom of the esses section in the form of turn eight to the right. Turn nine and turn ten were both to the left - the latter faster than the former - and shot us onto an infield straight. Here I checked my mirrors for Zhang, making sure he wasn't a threat, and then just enjoyed the slipstream from Reynolds, already planning a move into the hairpin even though we were just crossing the line to begin sector three. Turn eleven to the left and then turn twelve to the right brought us into the second snail section, speeding up and building up throttle as we came onto the mammoth back straight of the Chinese Grand Prix. It was early in the race, it was, but I decided this was a good opportunity to use the first of my four powerboosts for the race - and good thing too, since Reynolds used his to defend himself as well - giving me that extra power to increase the chances of an overtake. It was a gimmick, there was no denying that, but as I dived to the right and outbraked the New Zealander into turn fourteen, I decided it was a useful gimmick as well.
I kept the car on track despite the late braking and got it composed through turn fourteen, speeding up on the exit and through the kink of turn fifteen. The pitlane was directly ahead, but nobody was going to be using it today, and instead, me, Christopher Reynolds behind me, and Timothy Zhang behind him all swung our A1GP Powered by Ferrari cars to the left through turn sixteen, arriving back onto the start-finish straight to complete lap one. So, after my first lap of racing, what did I think of the A1GP series? Well, there are positives and negatives. To get the negatives out of the way first, the car is a disappointment for me. It may be derived from the Ferrari F2004, but the performance isn't anywhere close to that, lacking the monster engine of the F2004, but also lacking the monster aero of the modern F1 cars. This series, as ambitious as it may be, is not a substitute for F1. On the other hand, there are positives as well, mainly that the racing is quite good, and it is interesting to race against such a wide variety of drivers. You have young drivers, you have Formula One veterans, you have an Indycar driver in the form of Team USA's Mario Andretti III, and you have drivers from disciplines I'm not even entirely aware of. That's a fascinating mixture of skills and experiences, something that, admittedly, Formula One lacks from time to time. With the creation of GP2 and GP2 Asia, F1 is employing more and more of a fixed ladder system, even though many of the legends of the sport - including Matti Hamalainen quite recently - have achieved success without going through that kind of progression system. So, yeah, a good experience, one I'm grateful to be having, but also one I don't think I need more than four races of. I hope to be able to find a better way to spend my 2009 season than this.
For now, though, I still had a sprint race to compete in. Northern Irish driver Aidan McKenna lead for A1GP Team Ireland in an odd mix of national implications I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, former F1 driver Robert Deschamps was second for Team Belgium, whereas Team Britain's Derrick Watson of the Porsche Supercup series battled for third place with Swiss-Indian driven Jehan Nielson of Team Switzerland. There is a rather high number of dual nationals in this series, isn't there? Then again, this is the World Cup of Motorsport and Bojan Krkic just got capped for Spain, so I suppose it's only being accurate to the real World Cup. Antonio Ferreira - whose younger brother Patricio actually races against Natasha in Superleague Formula - ran in fifth, closing in on the battling pair. As was the Team France car of Pierre Karatchian, who was actually a maternal cousin of Alain Prost of all people. We started closing in on the battling pack ahead, knowing a podium position was possible. Timothy Zhang in particular recognized that it was a dog-eat-dog race right now, because on lap six, he overtook Reynolds into the turn six hairpin, moving up into eighth place. A points position already, but more was on the horizon.
Then on lap seven, about halfway through the race, all hell broke loose. Nielson and Watson made contact in turn two, with the Brit crashing out of the race in the process. Nielson's car was fine, mostly, but both cars definitely left debris on the track, debris that Ferreira and Karatchian didn't get a chance to notice through the blind, circular section that opened the lap. The safety car saved them for now, and neither of them had a puncture, but we all knew they ran over debris, and we all knew that meant they likely had damage. Race car drivers were like sharks in that respect, always looking for a little bit of blood in the water, always looking for a hint of vulnerability that we could exploit. Watson's crash, for instance, was not something we exactly minded. We were all relieved to see him getting out of the car alright, of course, but for the most part, the crash was good news for us, since it meant we gained another position. Now me, Zhang, and Reynolds were all in the points positions.
The safety car came in on lap ten - lengthened thanks to the fact that the Brazil car got a puncture at one point or another, perhaps due to the debris, but perhaps due to something else. In any case, he had to take a pitstop and went straight to the back, meaning he wasn't our concern anymore. I had my eyes set on the cars ahead - mainly Nielson in third, who was involved in the crash, and Ferreira in fourth and Karatchian in fifth who were first on the scene, first over the debris. The race restarted and it quickly became apparent that Karatchian was the worst off of the three, and I was able to pass him quite easily. Which was good news too, because this sprint race was short after all, and we were running out of laps. I was able to get Antonio Ferreira as well, overtaking him on the back straight on the penultimate lap. I did lose some time battling the French and Portuguese drivers though, so when the final lap started and I was a second behind Nielson in third place, I knew that I had a lot of work to do if I wanted to pull this off. I tried my hardest, taking four tenths out of him in a single lap, but ultimately, a podium was not to be. Still, for my first race in the series, to go from ninth to fourth in less than twenty laps? I was impressed.
The points-paying results for the sprint race of the 2008-09 A1 Grand Prix of Nations, China at the Shanghai International Circuit, reads as follows:
1: Team Ireland - Aidan McKenna - 10 points + 1 for Fastest Lap.
2: Team Belgium - Robert Deschamps - 8 points.
3: Team Switzerland - Jehan Nielson - 6 points.
4: Team Monaco - Tamara Shchegolyayeva - 5 points.
5: Team South Africa - Timothy Zhang - 4 points.
6: Team Portugal - Antonio Ferreira - 3 points.
7: Team New Zealand - Christopher Reynolds - 2 points.
8: Team France - Pierre Karatchian - 1 point.
So, a strong debut from me. Timothy Zhang also impressed me, having overtaken Ferreira at the hairpin at the very last lap to take fifth place by the skin of his teeth. Zhang is the son of a Singaporean father and a mixed-race South African mother so he's a minority in motorsport in every sense of the word. It feels nice to be in a world where the reigning F1 world champion is half black and where a half-Asian, quarter black driver can represent South Africa on the global stage as well. Pierre Karatchian also managed to hold onto a points position despite his damaged car, while I get the sense that Antonio Ferreira and Christopher Reynolds will both be hoping for more out of the feature race, since both showed impressive speed at points in the race only for things to not quite work out for them the way they wanted. Otherwise, while I'm not involved in the championship, Aidan McKenna certainly is, and having taken maximum points from this race, I'm sure he's thrown a wrench in Jehan Nielson's plans to defend his title. As for Robert Deschamps, while not the main driver for Team Belgium, has also impressed with a second place. I know his Formula One results weren't spectacular, but I think Robert Deschamps at least deserves credit for the sheer variety of open wheelers he's had success in since his Formula One stint ended.
"Alright, we start where we start and we go from there." I told Desjardins after qualifying in seventh for the feature race. It was better than my starting position for the sprint race, and I had more time to work my way through the field, but I won't deny that I had hoped for a bit more after having finished fourth in the race yesterday. Nevertheless, I was already starting out in the points and I would try to do something from there in an hour or so when the race starts. So, I stood there outside the garage, watching Edouard Desjardins get to work, when I heard someone approaching from behind. I turned to see a somewhat portly, older man with a graying goatee and hair to match, his polo marked with the unabashed red, white, and blue livery of A1 Team USA.
"Congratulations on the race yesterday. I finally got to see why so many of my drivers speak so highly of you." he complimented me. A moment passed before he realized I didn't entirely know who he was...which perhaps meant that I was supposed to. He wiped his hand on his jeans before offering it for a shake "Right, sorry. MJ Andretti, I run Team USA as a branch of Andretti Green Racing."
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva," I responded, even though it seemed he already knew as much. I shook his hand as well. MJ Andretti...also known as Mario Andretti Jr. This man was a front runner in Indy and CART for nearly the entirety of the 1990s, save for a somewhat disappointing 1993 that he spent in Formula One in America. In 2001, still in CART, MJ would move from Newman-Haas Racing to Team Motorola, a satellite team of Green Racing. From there he would take more and more control of the organizing, becoming Andretti Green Racing in 2003 as it switched over to the Indy Racing League. Now, Andretti Green Racing is racing in Indycar, Indy Lights, the American Le Mans Series, and A1GP, partnering with Honda, Infiniti, Acura, and Ferrari in the process. AGR was unmistakably centered in the United States and centered on Indycar, but they were unmistakably a big deal in motorsport despite that. So yeah, I suppose I should have recognized MJ when he approached me. Do I at least get partial credit for being familiar with the name once I've heard it?
"Dani Pieri and Haruki Tanaka speak highly of you, and I just watched you outqualify my son for the second day running." MJ answered. I spoke to Daniella Pieri briefly in Japan, and I know she races in Indycar, for Andretti Green Racing as it turns out, and it seems that Haruki Tanaka has found his way over there as well. I suppose it makes sense, when Super Aguri fell apart Haruki likely wanted to keep racing in high level open wheelers, and the best option available to him was the Indycar, which coincidentally enough, is powered by Honda...the very same company Haruki was linked with for his entire F1 career. Then there was Mario Andretti III, MJ's son and the grandson of the great Mario Andretti himself. Rio Andretti was yet another driver in AGR's Indycar stable, but he was also here in A1GP, leading the charge for the United States with A1 Team USA, run by Andretti Green Racing. Add the long time Indycar veteran Afonso Wagner of Brazil to the mix and that's a stable of four drivers for the Indycar program. Why then, do I get a feeling that this is still about Indycar? It certainly wasn't for A1GP, because even if I did have interest in remaining in this series long term, the only team that AGR was running was A1 Team USA. I was born in Kazakhstan, I lived in Monaco, and I could maybe qualify for Russia as well depending on what exactly the criteria in this series were, but I certainly couldn't claim American nationality. Not to mention the fact that, even if I could, is MJ really going to drop his son Rio for me? No, this wasn't about A1GP, this was about Indycar, where, unlike most open wheel series, teams could run however many cars they want.
"I appreciate the high praise, but I want to know what this is about, Mr. Andretti." I responded, not assuming anything, but also asking MJ to get to the point. Both because I was nervous about this and because, quite frankly, it were in the pitlane during a race weekend, we both had a lot of things to do before it was time for the feature race. I think it's better for both of us to skip the formalities.
"Alright, alright. I'll get to the point. Acura is discontinuing its involvement with us in the ALMS. That means a lot of really good mechanics, engineers, and staff members don't have a program to work on anymore. I don't want to fire those people, they're good people, so I'm trying to create a program where I can keep them employed and keep them in the organization. We have plenty of Indycar chasses, we have discussions with a number of sponsors, and we have a talented bunch of people with experience in motorsport. All we're missing is a driver, and while we're having plenty of discussions on our side of the Atlantic, I can also see a lot of benefit in bringing over a highly rated European superstar driver. I know I'm asking a lot, it's a big move and it's a pay cut compared to F1, but...just give me your agent's details and let's see if we can work something out, eh?" MJ proposed, explaining the situation, and painting his goals as rather noble. The American economy is in flux and he's losing one of his keystone factory racing efforts, but rather than taking the opportunity to downsize and wait out the economy, MJ wants to keep his people employed, repurposing the team for a fifth Indycar program, and they're offering me the chance to spearhead it.
I did take a moment to think about it, really think about it. I also kept in mind what Daniella told me, about how much female talent there is in Indycar and about how appreciated they seem. And speaking of appreciation, MJ mentioned a pay cut, evidently not realizing that I was paying for my seat in Europe rather than the other way around. I know it's a much smaller stage and it's not what I really want, but if I'm not going to be in Formula One for 2009, why not go over to America for a year and be appreciated as the talent that I am? Well, there is one big reason that I can think of: the one of safety. Quite frankly, oval racing was dangerous, and every fatality in recent American motorsport, whether it be Greg Moore at Fontana in 1999 or Paul Dana at Homestead in 2006, came on an oval. Then there are incidents which weren't fatal, but came dangerously close, such as Alessandro Zanardi's career ending crash at the Lausitzring oval in 2001 or Kenny Brack at Texas Motor Speedway in 2003. If I was to race in Indycar, that would mean racing the very same Texas Motor Speedway where Brack had his crash, where CART cancelled a race in 2001 because the G forces were so high that the drivers were blacking out, and Homestead, where Paul Dana died just a few years ago. Not to mention other ovals like Kansas, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Milwaukee, Iowa, Richmond, Kentucky, Chicagoland, and Motegi.
"I've never raced ovals before...I'm not sure if that's something I'd be comfortable doing." I admitted.
"If that's the hang-up, there's enough road courses on the calendar to do a partial season." MJ assured me. I wasn't sure if he said that because he was desperate to keep the American Le Mans Series team employed or if he thought that if he could just get me into Indycar, convincing me to do the ovals would be easier. Get me into an Indycar, give me a taste of success on a road course, then just point out that I'll never have any championship success doing just half the season...a motorsport gateway drug. So maybe MJ Andretti was playing a game, maybe not, what was clear is that he's making a concerted effort to get me into his team, which is more than what I've ever gotten in Formula One.
"Well...give me your number and I'll text you my agent's details later." It wasn't a yes, but it wasn't a no either. I would have to make a decision, and I've already made a separate decision in all of this, because when I did eventually text MJ my agent's details, it wasn't my father's contact information, rather, it was Ernesto Signorelli. A1GP wasn't the series I wanted for my future, but I am grateful for this opportunity, and the fact that the Italo-Argentine agent organized all of this in a week is a testament of the kind of talent he has. Whether or not something comes of this Indycar offer, I'll be exploring it with Signorelli, not with my father. Getting to finish fourth in my first attempt in this new series is already better than anything I could have done with my father's half-hearted Force India deal.
"Pit pit pit!" Desjardins called as I came out of the hairpin on lap twenty-two of the feature race. Heavier on fuel, needing to conserve tyres, and facing a grid of cars with experience from the race yesterday, things were moving slowly thus far in the race. It had started out with Team Great Britain on pole - Derrick Watson looking for redemption after crashing out in the last race - but he was swallowed up by the Team Ireland car of Aidan McKenna and the Team Portugal car of Antonio Ferreira early on. The Northern Irish driver was now defending the lead from the Portuguese driver, as Antonio too wanted to make up for a disappointing Saturday. Further back though, Jehan Nielson ran a calm fourth place for Team Switzerland, just managing the points gap the way he did last year which won him the series championship. I would imagine that Nielson would be the furthest achievable target in this race, at least the way the first stint was seeming. Thus far, from seventh on the grid, I've overtaken two cars, largely benefitting from the struggles of Timothy Zhang of Team South Africa and Mamat Mahmud of Team Malaysia. I'm not entirely sure if they made contact or simply if they are struggling with tyre wear in this longer race, but I didn't have the time to find out, because I was pitting in Shanghai.
I drove off straight at turn fifteen and got onto the brakes, slowing the car down and then turning sharply to the left. I manage to avoid the gravel trap that, over a year ago, spelled doom for Anthony Harrison's championship hopes, and instead continued on down the pitlane. I gave the throttle a light push, building just a bit of speed before braking again. I know it may seem a bit useless to build speed only to immediately lose it, but it's there for a necessity. Time in the pitlane is time lost for a driver, so obviously we attempt to take the pit cycle as fast as possible, maximizing entry and exit to the best of our abilities, however, there is also a timing line to consider. There is a set maximum speed in the pitlane, and all cars are outfitted with a pitlane speed limiter to help hold us to that, however, that obviously slows us down and lengthens the pitstop, so we go as fast as possible when before or when after the pitlane demarcation lines. Those lines helpfully marked where exactly you would get a penalty if you were caught cheating, so the pitlane at Formula One tracks becomes a constant game of drivers trying to abuse every inch of the system, and the FIA trying to crackdown on the drivers as much as they could. Enough of that now, time for the pitstop itself.
I stop on my marks, directly in front of the lollipop, allowing the jackmen to lift my car. Another difference between A1GP and Formula One is that the pit crews here are much smaller, with just the two jackmen and a set of tyre changers working on the car at any given time. More mechanics could be called in if needed, of course, but ultimately, the car is staffed by a fraction of the number people during a Formula One pitstop. Perhaps that is an example of how F1 tends to waste money and resources when not strictly necessary, or perhaps it is yet another reminder of how this series is no match for Formula One. In any case, Team Monaco - despite being created for this specifically and not having a relationship with an existing race team - pulled off a competent pitstop and I didn't lose any noticeable amount of time lost during the stint, so I ran an aggregate fourth as the race began to shake itself out. One by one more and more cars ahead of me would pit for their one and only stop, taking fresh Michelin slick tyres, rising back up towards the fringes of the podium in the process. In the end though, it wasn't to be, because I ran out of laps before I could really make a podium push, and instead was left having to settle for fifth place.
The points-paying results for the feature race of the 2008-09 A1GP Grand Prix of Nations, China at the Shanghai International Circuit, read as follows:
1: Team Portugal - Antonio Ferreira - 15 points.
2: Team Ireland - Aidan McKenna - 12 points.
3: Team Great Britain - Derrick Watson - 10 points.
4: Team Switzerland - Jehan Nielson - 8 points.
5: Team Monaco - Tamara Shchegolyayeva - 6 points.
6: Team Australia - Martin Johnstone - 5 points.
7: Team South Africa - Timothy Zhang - 4 points.
8: Team USA - Mario Andretti III - 3 points.
9: Team Malaysia - Mamat Mahmud - 2 points.
10: Team India - Praveen Ramakrishnan - 1 point.
...
16: Team Belgium - Robert Deschamps - 0 points + 1 for Fastest Lap.
In terms of former Formula One drivers, I had by far the best performance across the two races. I got to walk away with a combined eleven points, compared to nine points from Robert Deschamps and just a single point from Praveen Ramakrishnan. Jehan Nielson outscored me by quite a bit, but one: he was only ever a Formula One test driver, and two: that's to be expected, he's the reigning champion in this category, while I'm just a guest driver for this round and the next one. As for Indycar talent, well Robert Deschamps might count because of his Champ Car stint as recently as 2007, but the proper case is for Rio Andretti. Team USA wasn't exactly electric these last two races, which perhaps shouldn't inspire confidence in Andretti Green Racing, but there are a number of factors contributing to this. Rio is an American driver from an American discipline, thus he's used to a certain type of car at a certain type of circuit - and I'm not even talking about ovals, American road courses have a certain character which isn't exactly shared by the rest of the world - whereas the Shanghai International Circuit is very modern, very technical and very Formula One. It is not a hilly, sweeping American natural terrain road course, in fact, it's rather flat and the corner design seems to take more inspiration from the protractor than any feature of the terrain. All of that is to say that this isn't Rio at his peak performance, and it's not the team at their peak performance either.
Future career options aside, and points totals aside, I think I can be pretty proud of this race weekend. In late 2008, during those last few races when Renault really stretched their legs away from the midfield and where Toyota caught and overtook us, a fourth and a fifth back-to-back could have ramifications in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I won't pretend this is the same type of stage as Formula One, or that the competition level is quite at the same level, but nevertheless, in my first weekend in the car, I think a fourth and a fifth are excellent results. Basically, just out of the gate and I've been knocking on the door both times. Jehan Nielson and Aidan McKenna seem to be the real championship contenders this year, they have the speed, and they are subject to all the talk in the paddock, and I've finished both races within ten seconds of them. There were times in my Formula One career where finishing within ten seconds of Tommy Koskinen was an accomplishment. Of course, the shoe goes the other way as well, and there were plenty of times Tommy struggled to finish within ten seconds of me. The point isn't about driver quality, merely that in the world of Formula One, a ten second gap might as well be tiny, and in this series, a ten second gap typically covers a significant portion of the points. I suppose that is to be expected, given that it's a spec series, but I can't help but think of it as a culture shock compared to what I became used to in Formula One.
And just like that, my A1GP career is halfway over. Like I said, there are enough problems and imperfections in this series - mainly the fact that, despite the fact that there is a one in the series name and the cars are based off of a Formula One car which, in its heyday, really was faster than the machines we have now - that I can't see myself ever coming back here or doing more than these two races. Nevertheless, I am glad I took this opportunity, because this weekend has given me a reminder of what it's like to be competitive at every single race on every single track. I had a good run of races at the beginning of the 2008 season in Formula One, yes, but as good as that run was, I more than made up for it with how dry and miserable much of the second half of the season was. In this type of car in this type of series, I feel like I can be in contention for big points every single time no matter where we are and what the circumstances are. That's a feeling I want to feel again. Of course, the goal for every driver is to have that feeling in Formula One - being able to succeed everywhere in Formula One is a dream for myself and countless others - but for every driver that has achieved that form of motorsport nirvana, twenty others have failed and left to try their hand in another series. Unfortunately, circumstances have made it such that, no matter how fast I am or the results I'm able to get, I'm not in Formula One anymore, and I must learn how to show my hand in another series. For now though, it's time to pack up the A1GP gear and get going for one final weekend of racing down in Malaysia.
It had only been a few weeks between the Formula One Chinese Grand Prix and the A1GP Grand Prix of Nations in China, but there was a bigger gap between F1's Malaysian Grand Prix and the Sepang round of the World Cup of Motorsport. Some might call that a disadvantage, but I don't mind it actually, because I have always preferred Sepang as a track over Shanghai, and I hope I can at least make it on the podium in one of these races. I am proud of what I did in Formula One this season, scoring more points than I did last year and finishing just as high up in the championship, but I didn't claim any trophies in F1. At least here, hopefully I'll be able to get a trophy to close out the 2008 season and help fill in my resume for finding a good drive for 2009. A trophy here and a strong 2009 elsewhere currently represents my best chance of getting back into Formula One, even if it does still seem like a longshot to get back into the series now. I know Michael Coronet is a true ally of mine and I know him being the team principal of McLaren puts him in a powerful position, but there's no way that the board would allow their fresh team principal to bring in an unproven quantity who isn't even in Formula One anymore. No, I can't depend on Michael's generosity pulling the strings from a powerful perch atop McLaren, instead I have to depend on myself, and that means doing everything in my power to impress from the outside. It's not an easy task, but a necessary one.
I was trying to impress the F1 world, but, in comparison to F1, A1GP was once again failing to impress. I do not mean to demean the series too much, but the dual straights at Malaysia really tested that 4.5L production block in comparison to the real 3.0L V10 of the F2004. To that end, in qualifying, the A1GP cars were thirteen or fourteen seconds off the pace compared to what the F2004 could do at the 2004 Malaysian Grand Prix. The 2008 cars are about a second or two off the pace of what the 2004 cars could do - and the cars make speed a different way as well, lacking the straight-line raw speed of the V10s but having stronger speed in the corners thanks to the extreme aerodynamics that cars had in 2007 and 2008. In any case, while talking about qualifying for the sprint race here in Malaysia, I only managed to qualify in tenth, right in the middle of the pack. I have to admit I am a little bit disappointed, but quite frankly, I suppose it is to be expected - I've always been a better racer than qualifier, and the fact that this is a spec series is only amplifying that fact - and I have always managed to score good results at the Malaysian Grand Prix. In 2007 I went from the back of the grid after a car failure to come back and finish just outside of the points, whereas at the beginning of this year I finished in fourth at Sepang - my joint-best result of the 2008 season, along with the chaotic Singapore Grand Prix.
So, as I circled onto the back straight on the formation lap, these were the cars ahead of me: Jehan Nielson for Team Switzerland was on pole, lining up next to the Team France car of Pierre Karatchian for an all dual-nationality front row. Row two consisted of drivers that performed well at Shanghai, with Christopher Reynolds in third for Team New Zealand and the race-winning Antonio Ferreira for Team Portugal in fourth. Team Italy was in fifth with driver Pierluigi Ercolini, lining up next to Derrick Watson who was down in sixth for Team Great Britain. Aidan McKenna was down in seventh for Team Ireland - a performance he'll likely be unhappy with - while Team Mexico was in eighth with driver Davide Garcia. Finally, there's my row, with the Team Belgium car in ninth, however, with Robert Deschamps back in Europe for the Superleague Formula finale, countryman Bernard Vandenbroucke was filling in for him, just like I was filling in for Olivier Clemente. So, we rounded the final corner, shadowed by the large canopy structures of the Sepang International Circuit, and emerged onto the start-finish straight, rolling two by two in preparation for the rolling start.
We only had eleven laps to work with here and I got to work immediately, with Vandenbroucke and I swerving to the edges of the track - courtesy of the wide start-finish straight here in Sepang - to swallow up the slow starting Garcia. Once the Team Mexico car was behind us, we closed back in towards one another, Belgium vs. Monaco in a drag race towards the first corner here at Sepang. I managed to outbreak the Flemish rookie, going deeper into turn one but keeping it on track, the outside of this right-hander turning into the inside of the turn two hairpin very next corner. Speeding out of turn two I solidified my grasp on the position before throwing the car to the right, Michelin tyres biting into the surface of the track through the fast turn three. We crossed the F1 sector line before braking for turn four, a sharp, ninety-degree right-hander at the top of what elevation exists in this track. I took the opportunity to pass Derrick Watson and it's a good thing I did, because Watson wound up getting collected in turn four due to the rest of the Team Brazil and Team USA cars coming together. Someone braked way too late and caused a three-car incident, but I didn't get the chance to see who it was as I continued on my lap. No safety car yet, so that means I continue to focus on my charge.
A short straight followed, giving me the chance to appraise things. Jehan Nielson still led for the Switzers, Karatchian in second for the Franks, and Christopher Reynolds was third for some ANZAC representation. Antonio Ferreira was in fourth for Team Portugal, whereas Aidan McKenna also took advantage of the chaos with the Team Britain car to slip up into fifth, overtaking the Italy car of Pierluigi Ercolini in the process. I was now in seventh, having made it past Vandenbroucke, Garcia, and Watson in the first few corners. Mexico never stood a chance, Belgium was dispatched with haste, and Great Britain was completely destroyed, now the soft underbelly of Europe lies ahead: Team Italy. Target firmly in my sights and still no safety car, we dove to the left through turn five before tapping the brakes into turn six, slowing the car down as we shot back to the right at the top of the S. Speeding up out of it, we quickly found ourselves on the brakes yet again for the dual corners of 7 and 8. A touch of brakes before throwing the car to the right in turn seven, then tightening for what was effectively a second apex at turn eight. A second apex that deposited us onto the short straight at the south end of the circuit, just before the tricky turn nine. There are little bits of elevation around Malaysia, there are corners which are cambered, and there are corners which are cambered away from the apex for drainage purposes, all of this can be weird, but Sepang is a good circuit in spite of that in my opinion. A good circuit, save for turn nine. A tight left with a sudden increase of elevation and then almost immediately throwing us into the right-hand sweeper of turn ten. Not before crossing the sector line to complete sector two though, just the final sector to go in lap one.
We were still accelerating out of turn nine all the way through turn ten, only really building our way back up to speed by the time we reached turn eleven. By then though, it was already time to scrub the speed off again, downshifting, braking, and throwing the car to the right, mindful of the fact that the corner tightens on exit. Another short shoot followed, one that I used to try and catch the draft from Ercolini ahead, wishing to erase some of the time I lost through those twisty corners that always hurt the chasing car. I didn't have much time to act though, because soon enough, we arrived at turn twelve. Braking and throwing the cars to the left this time, I made perhaps incremental gains on Ercolini, but it was hard to tell. Especially because immediately afterwards we were throwing the car to the right through first the fast turn thirteen, then throwing the tightening penultimate corner of turn fourteen. Finally, we were back onto the straight and I could enjoy the slipstream from the car ahead slowly but surely pulling me in, giving me the chance to strike. The back straight and the front straight of Sepang were, curiously enough, inside the circuit, with the rest of it essentially being a loop around the somewhat Pacman-shaped track, hence all the right-hand corners. The final corner, turn fifteen, would be to the left. The apex was the highest point of the corner for drainage reasons - it was dry now, but Malaysia has hosted some of the wettest races ever in the past - and the corner was a bit hard to describe. In shape it was essentially a hairpin, but it was also wider, faster, and a less aggressive turning radius than what is usually implied by the term hairpin. In any case, Ercolini managed turn fifteen just fine, but so did I, and the front straight provided me with a second chance with the draft. Two Ferrari powered cars thundered over the line to complete lap one, but by the time we got to turn one, I was ahead. It was a textbook overtake really, catch the draft down the straight, feign to the left to make Ercolini cover off the outside, and then dive to the right to take the now undefended inside, giving Team Italy no way of fighting back. I started in tenth, but I made it all the way up to sixth by the time we got to lap two, turn two. Good thing too, because with the cars nearing the crash site at turn four, the safety car was finally called out. It was just an eleven-lap race to begin with, but this safety car was going to make it even shorter.
The race restarted at the end of lap four, the cars finally cleared and the safety car returning to the pits, but that meant I only had seven laps to work with if I wanted to get a good result from the sprint race. So, I got to work. First came Aidan McKenna, the northern Irishman put up a fight, a fight worthy of a championship contender, but finally, I managed to goad him into outbraking himself into turn four, allowing me to do the over-under to get past him while he got his car off the kerbs and back onto track in pursuit. I lost some time in this battle and I now had one of the fastest drivers in the series behind me while I was trying to catch the reigning race winner - I know, I know, easier said than done - but I was up to the challenge. I set the fastest lap of the race on lap seven whilst in pursuit of Ferreira up ahead, finally closing up to the back of his gearbox as we crossed the line to begin lap nine. Lap nine, lap ten, lap eleven - I had three laps to work with to try and maximize this race and I was currently in fifth place. Well, both of us caught a lucky break that lap when Pierre Karatchian spun out from second lap in sector three. The Frenchman just barely managed to keep it out of the gravel and got going, but not before losing a whole bunch of positions. So, I was now in fourth, but more importantly, the car in front of me was now in a podium position. I took a look in the inside of turn fifteen on lap nine, but Ferreira covered it off, defending his position. I would tuck back in behind him and we'd cross the line to begin lap ten - Antonio was probably smiling beneath his helmet, well aware of the fact that I was running out of time.
I followed him through the entire lap, grinning and bearing it through the dirty air in the twisty bits, and then diving for his draft whenever we were on a straight bit of track. Finally, once we got onto the back straight, I decided I was going to make my play - this was it, either I was going to get into third place now or I'll be left settling for another fourth place - so coming out of turn fourteen I got into Ferreira's draft. The Portuguese driver tried to break it by swerving to the right but I followed him, closing in all the way, and that's when I used my final powerboost of the race, giving my 4.5L Ferrari/Maserati V8 that little bit extra power. It proved to be just enough, because I swerved to the left, taking the inside, and managed to outbrake Ferreira into the final corner and take the position. I hugged the inside wall on the left at first, well aware of the fact that Antonio was coming back at me with his own powerboost. I swung my car across the front straight in an S motion, both to break the slipstream and to give me the inside for turn one, but Antonio was following me closely. The Monaco car and the Portugal car crossed the start-finish line to begin the final lap, still locked in the battle for third. Antonio went to the left, trying to hang it on the outside of turn one, but with a front right lockup, he went wide and allowed me to defend my position. Ferreira would spend the rest of the lap trying to close up back to my gearbox, but he wouldn't get the chance, as when the checkered flag flew, third place was mine.
The points-paying results for the sprint race of the 2008-09 A1 Grand Prix of Nations, Malaysia at the Sepang International Circuit, read as follows:
1: Team Switzerland - Jehan Nielson - 10 points.
2: Team New Zealand - Christopher Reynolds - 8 points.
3: Team Monaco - Tamara Shchegolyayeva - 6 points + 1 for Fastest Lap.
4: Team Portugal - Antonio Ferreira - 5 points.
5: Team Ireland - Aidan McKenna - 4 points.
6: Team Belgium - Bernard Vandenbroucke - 3 points.
7: Team Italy - Pierluigi Ercolini - 2 points.
8: Team South Africa - Timothy Zhang - 1 point.
Good results for Nielson and McKenna keep both of them in the championship hunt, but outside of the championship battle, I finally had a trophy to collect. I came tantalizingly close in Australia before that incident with Kaminski, and I was fighting hard to make my strategy work in Canada before Felipe Alvarez and I crashed out, while in Singapore I was a critical two places behind my teammate to settle for fourth. No longer though. It may not be Formula One, but I finally have an open-wheel racing trophy from the 2008 season to add to my collection, and that goes some way to help make up for the agony of losing my F1 seat. Honestly, this whole A1GP experiment has done a good amount to remind people of what I am capable of, because in my first three races in this car, the first two were run on the same weekend, I've finished fourth, fifth, and now third. Every single race I've made progress from my starting position, every single race I've scored major points - to the point where I'm now a clear majority of the team's points, having easily surpassed what Olivier Clemente was able to do thus far this year - and every single race I was able to take the fight to the series regulars. Formula One is a bigger stage so there will always be those who only remember me as the damaged goods who got outed and soaked in controversy, but the people who really look at the drivers, the people whose opinion really matters, will know better.
"So is it going to be Indycar then?" Ernesto asked over the phone that afternoon as I called him from my hotel room. The very same hotel where I stayed during the 2007 Malaysian Grand Prix weekend no less, connecting to beginning of my Formula One career with what now seems to be the end of it, at least for now. As for Ernesto Signorelli, well, the Italo-Argentine agent was in Monaco - where he had an office to work with his various Formula One and Formula One adjacent clients - but he was now officially my agent as well, and here, we were making plans for 2009.
"Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that the Andretti Green Racing offer is on the table. What I want you to do is find out what else is on the table. Talk to people around the motorsport world, find out what's available, and let me know about it. I don't care how left-field it seems, I want to know about it, even if I'm just going to immediately dismiss it." I explained what I wanted from my agent. Truth be told, this was somewhat of a final test for my new agent, wanting to see just how hard he'll push for me and what kind of contacts he can dredge up in the world of motorsport. My father was somewhat of an outsider, coming from outside of the world of motorsport, but having enough money to get his way with most of the cash-strapped junior teams we encountered. Signorelli doesn't have the same money to brute force his way through, but what he does have is actual talent in this field. Ernesto has experience, he has contacts, and he has persistence, all the things a motorsport agent needs to be any kind of successful in this world. I want to see just how far all that will go. Of course, the test has real consequences, after all, I want to be in the best ride or even rides possible for 2009, making sure that my year spent outside of Formula One is well spent - especially since it may end up being more than a year, hell, it may end up being my career - but curiosity is certainly part of it.
"Alright, give me until the end of the month and then we'll meet in person to go over what I've found, alright?" Ernesto offered.
"Of course...hey, I'll talk to you later Ernesto, I got another call - oh, and thank you." I ended the call with Ernesto as politely as possible before switching to a call from a certain little cousin of mine calling from southern Spain "Hey there, Ms. Tsirinskaya."
"Ms. Shchegolyayeva," Natasha greeted in turn, her grin practically audible through the phone just like it was in 2007. A lot has changed since then though, mainly the fact that we're effectively equals now. Sure, I had my two years in Formula One but that's over now, and now I'm racing in the A1GP World Cup of Motorsport while she's racing in Superleague Formula, motorsport for football clubs. If anything, Natasha was closer to getting into Formula One than I was to getting back into it, because in addition to her driving duties for Trident in GP2 Asia and for AS Roma in Superleague Formula, she was just signed on as a Honda reserve driver. Of course, Honda's Formula One effort is hanging on by a thread at this point, with the Japanese board just barely agreeing to fund the Ross Brawn led team for one more year while looking for a more permanent buyer, but still, being intertwined with a Formula One team is more than what I could say right now. It might have had something to do with Sir Frank Williams being upset over how the whole Michael Coronet thing went down in the end, but I wasn't even offered to stay on as a reserve driver. I thought that the least the team could do was to give me Hideki Kitagawa's old job considering Toyota is paying for him to take mine.
"How did the race weekend go?" I asked, referring to the 2008 Superleague Formula finale at Jerez.
"It went fine. Fifth and fifth in the two races, a solid way to finish the championship. It's not like I was going to close the gap to Ezequiel no matter what I did." Natasha explained, having lost the championship, but not feeling particularly sad about it. The truth is that Ezequiel Martinez and Liverpool had dominated the season, taking three wins and retiring only once, sweeping the two races at Zolder as well as winning the opening round at Donington Park. As for Natasha, she was the fastest car in preseason testing and demonstrated that speed over and over again during the season, even if she did suffer a fair bit of bad luck, finishing outside of the points at the first races at the Nürburgring and Zolder, as well as in the second race at Estoril. Nevertheless, Natasha also had some brilliant performances, such as winning the first race at Zolder, the first race at Vallelunga, and the following the latter up by finishing second at the circuit outside of Rome. Considering that she also took a pole position at Estoril before winning the race, overall, I would consider the season a great success for her. This is the first time she's been in a car like this - hell, she was in Italian Formula 3 last year - and she's doing great, just like she did great in the GP2 Asia series. Earlier this year she finished third in said Asian series, now she's gone and finished second in the debut Superleague Formula season. Natasha is contracted to race both again next year, and I can only imagine that her return performances will be absolutely dominant performances. No one would have imagined that the girl born in Kyrgyzstan as the Soviet Union was collapsing would be on the road to Formula One, but after a super impressive 2008, I don't think anyone can deny that she is Formula One bound. I can only hope I'll be back in the sport to greet her when she does make it to the pinnacle of motorsport.
"Honestly, that's great. I'm really proud of you." I told her, meaning every word of it.
"How about you?" she asked.
"Well, the second race is tomorrow, but today I made it onto the podium." I smiled, then remembering I asked a member of my team to take lots of pictures of me on the podium - the same podium they use for the Formula One race - with the trophy "I'll send you some pictures once I get them from the team."
"I can't wait. Good luck in the next race. I'll watch it if I can figure out who broadcasts in Spain." Natasha promised.
"Thanks. I hope I'll make you proud." I smiled. Fifth and fifth at Jerez, a former Formula One track and a track that still hosts F1 testing...not a bad result, not a bad result at all. I imagine Natasha will be doing even better a few months from now when the 2009 GP2 Asia season begins. The series will open with a race weekend at the Dubai Autodrome before heading up to Qatar for a night race at the Losail International Circuit. The next two rounds will be returns to the Sentul and Kari tracks in Indonesia and India, respectively, before the series embarks on a series of Formula One support races. GP2 Asia will be the undercard event at Australia, Malaysia, China - now at the beginning of the Formula One season rather than the end - and Bahrain, the same track where the inaugural GP2 Asia series finished in 2006. That time I was triumphant in the championship, and maybe in 2009 Natasha will be able to repeat my feat.
The sprint race and feature race at China were over with, as was the sprint race at Malaysia. Even qualifying was over with now, so all that remained for me was the feature race. I had thirty-four laps to work with and, courtesy of a great lap where everything finally came together for me, I was going to do it from third on the grid. Jehan Nielson was at the back of the grid thanks to a penalty sustained in this morning's qualifying session, meaning my name competition for this race would come from the two cars ahead of me: Aidan McKenna on pole position for Team Ireland and Derrick Watson lining up alongside him for Team Great Britain. Of course, there was Mamat Mahmud lining up alongside me for Team Malaysia and, more concerningly, Antonio Ferreira in fifth for Team Portugal. I wouldn't be all that surprised to see Mahmud drop a few places in the race, but Antonio? I knew that Antonio was quick, and I knew that he probably wanted to get revenge for the move I pulled on him late in the race. My full intention is to focus on the cars ahead of me and go for the lead, but with my time in A1GP coming to an end, I have to admit that Antonio Ferreira is one of the handful of drivers who have demonstrated that they cannot be ignored.
On the rolling start of the race, Ferreira demonstrated that, blasting off from the third row and pulling to the left, trying to hang it on the outside of me. I held firm in turn one, braking late enough to make his job difficult and holding firm on the inside line, keeping my position. We ground through the slow turn two before unleashing the full power of the cars down the short straight and into turn three. I was still in third when we reached turn four, but an opportunity was beginning to present itself as McKenna and Watson battled in the corner, going side by side. The unfortunate implications of Ireland battling it out with Great Britain aside, they survived the right-hander of turn four and then held it through the S-section of turn five and six. A short straight followed before the dual corners of seven and eight, coming onto another short straight. McKenna was ahead again at this point, but Watson was there, right on his gearbox. As for me, I was two or three car lengths behind, keeping a cautious distance in case disaster struck, but remaining close enough that I would still get a draft going down the straights. Antonio Ferreira was another three car lengths or so behind me, still recovering from what happened in turn one, but also successfully warding off any attempt by the Team Malaysia car to get back ahead of him. This may be Mamat Mahmud's home race, but at the moment, he'll have to settle for fifth place.
No positions changed hands in the braking zone of turn nine, and then ten, eleven, and twelve weren't the kind of corners to allow for overtaking. Neither were thirteen or fourteen really, at least not in formula cars - perhaps in something like motorcycle racing, for instance, it's a more competitive corner - but braking and turning to the right through those corners deposited us onto the back straight, giving us another chance to fight for position. Here Watson was again coming at McKenna, but the Northern Irishman held the position through the final corner of turn fifteen to the left. Watson was really close though, mere inches separating them, and even that distance was erased in the road down to turn one. There is a particular kind of crash in open wheeler cars, the kind that looks like the slightest bit of a touch, but winds up having disastrous results, at least from what I could see from the car behind. Watson came out of the slipstream, going to the left and going around the Irish car, then trying to pull ahead of him before turn one. That's not how it happened though, because Watson pulled ahead a moment too late, and his right rear tyre caught the sharp, carbon edge of McKenna's front wing. There was some contact, a little bit of sparking, and a wiggle from the British car, then things calmed down for a moment before it all really turned to chaos in turn one. Watson found himself completely lacking in grip in turn one and had to deliberately spin the car to point it down into turn two, spitting there as the whole field passed him before continuing on to the pits.
As for Aidan McKenna, he resumed in the lead for just a moment before, on the road down to turn four, his front wing gave out. If it had gotten caught under the car, that may well have been day over for the championship contender, but the front wing shot free of the car, meaning McKenna survived to fight another day. That being said, with no front wing, Aidan would have to pit for a nose cone change. So, Aidan and Derrick were out of contention, and a moment later, the safety car would come out. This was not only because of the incident between the leaders, but also because of a concurrent incident further back, when Jehan Nielson crashed into Praveen Ramakrishnan trying to pass the Team India car. So, with that, three of the top drivers in this series and a former Formula One driver were all out of the race, leaving me in the lead. On the other hand, this safety car also practically neutralized the race, meaning that once all of this was over with, I'd have to deal with Antonio Ferreira restarting the race just behind me, so it's not like a victory was preordained. Not by any means.
It was early enough in the race that nobody pitted under safety car - the pit window was set for between laps twenty and twenty-eight - perhaps a bit later now that the tyres have been preserved under safety car, but not much later as the race is only thirty-four laps long after all. I should, of course, clarify that there is an exception to that, mainly the two damaged cars that pitted at the end of lap two. Aidan changed his nose and tyres and was released without issue, but it seems Derrick Watson scratched up his floor on the road back to the pitlane, so the team spent several minutes surveying the damage. Watson eventually got back out there, but he was multiple laps down by then, even compared to McKenna, so it was unlikely that the British driver would be able to accomplish much of anything today. Watson was irrelevant now, instead, I was running in the lead, the Portuguese championship contender was in second, and a race win was on the line as we rounded turn fifteen on the restart. There were multiple things I could do here - I could try and catch Ferreira off-guard by blasting off from turn fifteen while he was still in the corner, but then he would have the entire straight to regain time on me, so instead, I decided to do something a bit different. I slowed to a crawl coming out of turn fifteen, letting the grid form up in two lines - the odd numbered positions behind me, the even number positions to the left offset just a bit behind us to retain the SC order. Creeping and creeping down towards the line, I even started weaving, taking the opportunity to heat up my tyres and to catch the rest of the grid off-guard. Ferreira hesitated for a moment but then weaved as well, heating up his own tyres, and this is when I took off.
Ferreira had to catch the car and straighten up in pursuit, while third-place Mamat Mahmud got another chance to fight him. With Ferreira caught off-guard and now battling the Malaysian driver, I was clear to blast off into the distance and build a lead. I did just that, setting the fastest lap of the race then going even faster and faster, being the fastest car on track for four consecutive laps before my pace was finally matched and eventually beaten by Aidan McKenna during his charge through the field. The Northern Irishman was quick, but he had a whole grid worth of cars to get through and time was slipping away from him. McKenna was making his way up the field, but Mahmud was dropping through it, his battle with Ferreira quickly ending in the Portuguese's favor and the Malaysian dropping back ever since. Derrick Watson, however, was not able to match the face of McKenna, so the Brit was caught multiple laps down and dropping even further back as it quickly became evident that he was still nursing more damage than he could cope with. Watson fell yet another lap down on lap fifteen when I caught up to him and the blue flags compelled him to let me by, and at that point I really just have to wonder why Team Great Britain don't just retire him from the race.
The miserable pace of Watson after the second lap crash aside, I was mustering some dominant pace at Malaysia thus far. The only drivers that were somewhat comparable to me were McKenna, whose pace took a nosedive once he was out of clean air and needing to overtake slow cars once again, and Antonio Ferreira, who while quite a bit of distance back from me in second, had even more of a gap between himself and the rest of the field. That put the Portuguese driver in somewhat of a no man's land, where he was faster than the cars behind him but slower than me, meaning he had nothing to do all day but circulate laps. Oh well, I'm sure Ferreira enjoyed a bit of a break from the monotony when we entered the pitstop window. I took my stop on lap twenty-four, solidly in the middle of the pit window - I had enough of a gap that I didn't feel the need to pit aggressively early or stay out late in search of an advantage late in the race, so instead, I bit when I felt the tyres weren't giving me the performance that I wanted - coming out of turn fifteen I went wide, taking the first half-turn to the left but then continuing straight rather than completing the turn, only finishing the turn later on when the pitlane turned parallel to the track. I stopped in my box, watching the team members raise the car up just like in Formula One, but from there, the stop progressed a lot more slowly.
In a Formula One pit crew, there was a man on the fuel hose, the jack men, three men per the tyre, and a handful of assistants and spare guys. In contrast, in A1GP, there were the jackmen and just one guy for each tyre. The same guy was responsible for bringing in the new tyre, removing the old one, and putting on the new one, all of which served to keep the budget down and slow down the pit stops. However, there was something keeping the pitstops around the same time as Formula One, and that was the fact that A1GP did not have in-race refueling. The fact that we had to run the beginning of the race on full tanks was yet another reason as to why the A1GP Powered by Ferrari car was slower than the actual Ferrari F2004 that it was based on, but that was a matter for a different time. For now, I had my new Michelin tyres, my pit crew was done, and I was clear to rejoin the track. Ferreira had already pitted, so I retained the lead, and now it was simply an academic matter of completing the final ten laps. Twenty cars had entered the event and only sixteen cars were running right now, but nothing went wrong with the mighty A1 Team Monaco car as I completed lap after lap before finally crossing the line to complete the 2008-09 A1 Grand Prix of Nations, Malaysia feature race.
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva...you are an A1 Grand Prix winner!" Edouard Desjardins celebrated through the radio. His excitement was clear in his voice "Excellent job today. you truly had the speed over the rest of the field."
"Thank you, Edouard. Thank you, Olivier too, I know you couldn't be in Asia for these two races, but I'm honored that you have me this opportunity." I thanked the team, well aware of the fact that Olivier was the seat holder as well as usual driver for this time. Each A1 Team had a seat holder, usually someone significant to the history of motorsport in that country, like an ex-Formula One driver. For instance, for Team USA, it was MJ Andretti, former CART champion and one-time Formula One driver. Monaco did not have much racing pedigree in of itself - it was more that drivers from other countries moved to Monaco when they started racing - so Olivier Clemente was the best that the team could do. The team had more options for race driver though, because I qualified as Monegasque as well as Kazakh to the FIA, and in this series, I was firmly representing the former.
In any case, the points-paying results for the feature race of the 2008-09 A1 Grand Prix of Nations, Malaysia at Sepang International Circuit read as follows:
1: Team Monaco - Tamara Shchegolyayeva - 15 points.
2: Team Portugal - Antonio Ferreira - 12 points.
3: Team USA - Mario Andretti III - 10 points.
4: Team Australia - Martin Johnstone - 8 points.
5: Team South Africa - Timothy Zhang - 6 points.
6: Team New Zealand - Christopher Reynolds - 5 points.
7: Team Brazil - Fernando Magalhaes - 4 points.
8: Team Belgium - Bernard Vandenbroucke - 3 points.
9: Team Ireland - Aidan McKenna - 2 points + 1 for Fastest Lap.
10: Team Malaysia - Mamat Mahmud - 1 point.
So, for the first time since the 22nd of July 2007, I stood on the podium. Furthermore, for the first time since the Dubai Autodrome GP2 Asia sprint race all the way back in the spring of 2006, I was standing in the spot reserved for the winner. I would take the finest trophy and hear my country's national anthem played...except, it wasn't quite my national anthem. It was the Monegasque hymn. I wasn't quite sure how to feel about that, to be honest. On one hand, I have to admit that I'm upset at Nazarbayev, Abdullayev, and Kazakhoil after they dropped their sponsorship, but on the other hand, am I really going to let them win? I was born in Almaty, my family lived in the Kazakh SSR for damn near the entire Soviet period, to the point where my great grandfather was made tank commander of a Kazakh division in World War II because he could act as a go-between for the Russian officers and the Kazakh conscripts. I am not an ethnic Kazakh, I never claimed to be one, and I freely admit that, but no one can claim that I don't have a right to represent the nation of Kazakhstan. I am from there; countless other Russians were from there - Almaty and Astana had Russian pluralities before the fall of the Soviet Union - and I have a right to fly that flag. When I race for Kazakhstan, I feel like I am giving something back to the people, like I can be a force for something good, but for Monaco? They don't need me.
Anthems aside, I was a race winner again, and for that, I am proud.
Notes:
Well, this chapter hasn't completely come out the way I wanted. I will admit that it was a bit of an experiment thrown in rather late in the planning process. I wanted to cover another one of these obscure, short-lived but cool open wheel series, and set up some of the coming plot lines for the meat of act two. I do feel like I did manage some of that, but I also feel like a lot of this chapter is just very dry racing content for a series that doesn't really matter. I don't know. Either way, it's over with and we're moving on to what I hope is better stuff with chapter twenty-two onwards. That's my opinion though, what do you guys think?
Chapter 22: The End and the beginning
Notes:
Alright everyone, last chapter was a bit weird but here we're getting into the meat of act two.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXII.
The End and the Beginning.
I rolled onto my back, keeping my eyes shut despite the fact that I knew it wouldn't make a difference. I raced those four races across the two rounds in China and Malaysia in A1GP, but now I was back to Monaco, and I was struggling to adjust to the time difference. I fell asleep from exhaustion pretty much as soon as I got home and, because of that, I'm not waking up at...3:42 in the morning. Wonderful. I sighed and glanced over at Roksana's sleeping form, seeing the blonde laying there, facing me, eyes closed with her brows furrowed just a bit in a cute way. I didn't want to disturb her. I lightly tried to raise the covers off from me and scooched over to the edge of the bed. I just started to think that I managed to get out of bed before I heard Roksana stir behind me.
"Tamara? What's going on?" the gray-eyed blonde asked.
"Nothing, go back to sleep. Sorry for waking you." I responded, trying to assure her that everything was fine. Because it was fine, this really was nothing, I just went to sleep early and now I was waking up early. I tried to make every effort not to wake her up, but I failed and now she was wondering what was going on. So here we were, her waking up on the bed, me standing up next to it, both of us facing each other in a dark Monaco apartment.
"Are you coming back to bed?" Roksana asked, sitting up on the bed, voice fragile in a way that I couldn't really make out what was going on here.
"In a little bit," I answered, seeing her face drop. I decided I needed to do a little bit more "Hey...I promise."
"...okay." Roksana eventually accepted, taking a moment before laying down, this time facing the opposite wall. Now I wasn't completely dense, I could tell that something was going on here - I suspected it was that she was lonely after us being apart for so long and now that I'm back, she can't even get a full night alone in bed with me - but it's really not like that. If I had the slightest chance of getting back to sleep right now, I'd be there with her, but right now, I'd just be tossing and turning all morning making things worse for her. I'm in the offseason right now, I got nothing going on, but she is still working. Roksana still has freelance work to do, she still has her own magazine to maintain whenever possible, and she's also been a contributor for the Ligue 1 website for quite some time now. I can afford to have a ruined sleep schedule right now, she cannot. It's that simple.
With that, I went into the living room and sat down on the couch. In front of me, sat my television, the blank screen showing the reflection of a brunette girl in a gray tank top and black shorts sitting alone on the couch in the middle of the night. Not exactly the proud, glamorous shot one would associate with Formula One...though on the other hand, I suppose I'm not associated with Formula One either at this point. For the first time since I was five years old, really. I'm not saying that it was inevitable that I was going to get to Formula One from the moment I got into a kart - far from it, nobody expected the Kazakh girl with the weird name to make it much of anywhere in motorsport - but that was always the dream. Whenever I scored a good result on the karting track, Formula One was always the fantasy, and whenever I crashed out or otherwise failed to deliver, the fear always was that this was the day when I pissed away my F1 dreams. It was never easy, not in karts, not in Formula Renault 2.0, not in Formula 3, and not in GP2 Asia, but there was a natural progression with a clear end goal. When I got noticed in the Formula 3 Euro series and at the Macau Grand Prix in 2005, I picked up my first major international sponsor in the form of Kazakhoil, and they wanted me to represent them in the augural season of GP2 Asia. Once I was in the second tier of open wheel racing and winning in it, Formula One became the next destination.
To that end, I partnered with Williams. I sat in during the 2006 Bahrain Grand Prix when Tommy Koskinen scored points on debut, I represented the team in interviews for the first time that weekend, and I tested the car for the first time a few later. The rest of the year was spent testing the car, helping Williams develop it, and generally inserting myself into the team on time for a 2007 race seat. In 2006, the goal was to get into Formula One for 2007, and in 2007, the goal was to keep my seat. I accomplished both of those, and to that end, I got to be a Williams Racing driver for two years, racing in thirty-five Grand Prix, and scoring points in seventeen of them, including two podiums, both in 2007. The dream was realized. The dream came to an end though, I lost my sponsor, and I lost my seat not long after that. My life's work gone in the blink of an eye because of a tabloid article. I won't pretend any of that was easy or that the path ever seemed as clear as the goal was, but the point is that everything fell within the width of this tunnel heading to Formula One. Now that my F1 career seems to be over - perhaps only for now, perhaps forever - I almost have an even harder problem. Formula One is the pinnacle of motorsport, meaning that it is the best, but also that it is the only one in that position. The same cannot be said for the level just below. Everything is available to me, from lesser open wheel series to GT racing to prototypes to something else entirely, all of it is a possibility because there is no clear place for drivers to go to after their Formula One careers come to an end.
There is one way of narrowing down that broad lens though. All of those categories may be available in theory and there may be a path to damn near anything with four wheels and a motor, but that doesn't actually mean it's being offered. Everything is available, but what is realistic? To that end, I grabbed my laptop off of the coffee table and reopened an email I got last night from Ernesto Signorelli. My Italo-Argentine agent was fulfilling my request to spread the word that I'm a free agent and drumming up whatever was available. Last night, he sent me the first results, the first fruits of his labors, and I was eager to see where I was wanted and what the catch was. So, going down the list of offers, we have:
1: Indycar with Andretti Green Racing - this I already knew about, but it seems MJ was earnest about getting in touch with Ernesto as soon as possible. We now have a definitive dollar amount on how much I would make a year, as well as a clear list of races I would drive at: Saint Petersburg, Florida, Long Beach, California, Watkins Glen, New York, the Toronto and Edmonton races in Canada, Mid-Ohio in, presumably, Ohio, and finally Laguna Seca, California. These are all fine venues, with Long Beach actually having started out as the host of the United States Grand Prix West before becoming an Indycar race, but...not everything is perfect with this calendar. First of all, the calendar includes many ovals, and these are clustered together in such a way that I miss out a huge portion of the middle of the season from April all the way until July, and again at the end of the season, with Laguna Seca scheduled for August 23rd while the season finale was on October 10th at Homestead-Miami. Indycar is a tempting offer considering the machinery and the talent level of the series, but it is only half of a road-racing championship, and road-racing is, really, what I'm here for. Furthermore, this seems to be the most America-centric calendar Indycar has had in a long time. I understand the days of Champ Car running races in Europe, Montreal, and such are over with, but the only races outside of the US are the two Canadian street circuits and a run around the oval at Motegi, Japan for the penultimate race being the only exceptions. I understand that it is an American series, but what I am looking for is the best international option outside of Formula One. Indycar, regrettably, doesn't quite seem to be that, at least not at first glance.
2: GP2 and/or GP2 Asia. This one is perhaps only natural given the circumstances, but I have been approached by multiple GP2 teams, including at least one team that offered to give me a drive both in the 2009 GP2 Asia series and the main GP2 series in the summer. GP2 is a good car - I thoroughly enjoyed my brief stint in GP2 Asia with DAMS - but the cars are now different, with GP2 having adopted a new chassis which GP2 Asia has yet to use, however, that does not make them a premier series. In effect, to accept a GP2 offer would be to admit that I failed in Formula One. It would perhaps leave me closest to the sport - after all, many, many of the races in both championships are Formula One support races - but at what cost? I don't even want to take a step backwards within the world of Formula One, let alone taking a step backwards form Formula One to its support series. No, I need to be at the top level of whatever it is I end up doing. Not all top tiers are created equally, of course, but the point is that this is more than just merely a pride thing. When I say that I cannot move backwards, I mean it, because I will be forgotten. GP2 is a young driver's game, and to return after two seasons in Formula One would come across as nothing more than a desperate plea to stay relevant. I am grateful for the offers, and some of these teams are teams that young drivers would kill to drive for...but that's just it, isn't it? GP2 is meant to be for young drivers, to develop them into Formula One rookies, it's not meant for drivers who have already completed a stint in the top-flight. Besides, I think Natasha would kill me if I had a GP2 ride while she didn't.
3: So, with Indycar and GP2 both having problems holding them back, how about the old pass time of great racing drivers? By that, of course I mean the 24 Hours of Le Mans with Peugeot. Le Mans has been dominated by Audi and its turbodiesel program for quite some time now, but Peugeot has entered the fray against them with the V12 Twin Turbo diesel-powered 908 HDi FAP aiming to bring an end to a decade dominated by the Germans. This is more than just Le Mans as well, as Peugeot wants me there to act as a third driver for their program heading out to race the 12 Hours of Sebring, the Spa 1000km, and the Petit Le Mans. Sebring and Petit Le Mans are the bookends of the American Le Mans Series, two of the most historic and prestigious motor races in history, whereas the Spa 1000km has traditionally been the race in which teams test out their Le Mans programs, having little more than a month between the Spa-Francorchamps round and the round at the Circuit de la Sarthe. To race at one of the greatest races in the world - part of the triple crown, no less - was an enticing offer, especially because it would make me a factory Peugeot driver. The downside, however, is that this isn't very much in terms of racing either. Part of me wondered if I should just find a way to avoid mentioning the elephant in the room, but a Formula One season is seventeen, eighteen, maybe even closer to twenty races these days. I cannot afford to be doing seven races in Indycar or four races in endurance racing. Even if one of those races happens to be twenty-four hours long.
Those were the outright race offers - understandable given that Indycar and GP2 were single seaters which were at least similar to F1 machinery, whereas the LMP1 class at Le Mans was no stranger to incorporating Formula One drivers into their lineups - while the rest were predicated on first testing the car. These included the likes of various GT series throughout the world, a DTM offer from Team Koskinen - which seems to suggest that Johannes Koskinen is also on my side - to test one of his Audis, and then an offer trying to get me to drive in some new, experimental European stock car series in France. None of those seem particularly appealing to me, to be honest. It's not like I'm offended at the idea of having to test first - that makes sense to me, and I'd imagine the teams that are offering me a drive outright have mechanisms to drop me if it turns out I can't get their machinery working - it's just that I don't have much interest in those series. I don't see myself getting back to Formula One if I spend 2009 racing in some random GT series at Spa-Francorchamps or whatever, while DTM is an interesting one.
In theory it is merely a German touring car series, however, in reality, these cars are practically high-end racing prototypes wrapped in a body faintly resembling a German saloon car. Furthermore, I have a good relationship with Johannes Koskinen, and I wouldn't particularly mind racing for the Finn, especially if together we could turn his team into a winning force. In terms of talent, Roland Ziegler has wound up there, as has my old junior series rival Richard DiPaolo, and one-time Formula One race leader Andreas Wilhelmus. I know that's not exactly the cream of the crop, but the point is that there is some talent in the series...the problem is that, by Formula One standards, it's retired or washed-out talent. So, while I do think there are some positives to DTM and it is probably one of the less offensive testing opportunities, I don't think it is the one I'm going to take. I will, however, take note of the fact that Ernesto mentioned Team Koskinen had already been using a female driver in that seat before she decided to move on elsewhere, so the team has experience working with women. Between this and Indycar, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps the problem isn't a lack of female talent, simply that the talent isn't making it to Formula One...myself excluded, of course. Anyway, speaking of chassis wrapped in a shape faintly resembling a road car, I cannot think of a bigger culture clash than trying to bring NASCAR over to the French, so whatever the idea behind this Racecar Euro Series is, I just can't see it working. More than that, I can't see Formula One teams caring about it.
So, in terms of what was really on the table, I had seven Indycar races or four endurance races to choose. Neither of those were exactly the best offers in the world, nor did they consist of a full season of racing to keep me sharp and in contention for a Formula One seat should an opportunity open up. I was a race winning driver again, yet somehow getting back to Formula One seemed further than ever. I almost wondered if I should say screw the fear and try racing the ovals in Indycar for a full season, but even putting the risk aspect aside, what would that accomplish? It would make perfect sense if my goal was to move on from Formula One and have the best career possible outside of the pinnacle of motorsport, but is that my goal? I don't think so, I think what I want is Formula One again. My entire time in A1GP I couldn't help but compare what I was doing to Formula One and every time F1 came out on top. If my goal is to get back into F1 above everything else, then the ovals don't really matter. The closest F1 gets to oval racing is the final corner at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway infield road course, but we don't even race there anymore. It might look better to a casual observer if I manage to get a hold of oval racing and do quite well in the Indycar championship, but for the eagle-eyed F1 observers I'm trying to impress, they could care less if I can manage to finish on the lead lap at Kentucky Speedway because that means nothing for their discipline.
Though...come to think of it...the 12 Hours of Sebring would be on March 21st, 2009, whereas the first Indycar race is on April 5th, just next door in Saint Petersburg, Florida, followed by another race at Long Beach on April 19th. Then Indycar goes on a run of oval races stretching into the summer, which would, theoretically, allow me to go back to Europe for the Spa 1000km on May 10th and then the 24 Hours of Le Mans on the 13th and 14th of June. That gives me about half a month before Watkins Glen on July 5th, Toronto on the 12th, and Edmonton on the 26th. A break for the oval at Kentucky then back to it for Mid-Ohio Sports Car course on the 9th and the Grand Prix of Monterey at Laguna Seca on August 23rd, both in the Indycar series. Indycar then goes on its run of three final oval races while I prepare to cap my season off with the ten-hour long Petit Le Mans on September 26th. It wasn't quite as long as a Formula One season, and it was only eleven races, but seven of those were similar to F1 in length while the other four were dramatically longer. In short, while it wasn't perfect, doing both was a significant improvement over doing either one individually. I sent Ernesto an email to check with both sides and see if it was possible, before finally heading back to bed. I had an idea, and I knew my agent would do everything in his power to bring me a result as soon as possible, and that made me feel like I had a massive weight lifted off my shoulders. I could finally go and relax because I knew that I could be doing something I'm happy with in 2009, something prestigious enough that Formula One teams would have no choice but to monitor my progress.
After lunch on that very day, I sat down on the couch once again to check my email. I smiled when I saw the good news from Signorelli - it would work, MJ Andretti was fine with it and Peugeot was accepting it on the condition that I didn't do any of the ovals, perhaps out of fear of an accident - and suddenly my plans for the next season were realized. I was now a Peugeot factory driver in endurance racing and an Andretti Green Racing-Honda driver in Indycar. I'm sure it helped that Peugeot and Honda weren't exactly primary competitors, but the point remains, I was now representing two major automotive companies during a time when much of the automotive industry is suffering through economic turmoil and contraction. That was the good news, the bad news, however, is that the situation sort of mirrors what I was going through in A1GP. I was doing less than half of the Indycar series thanks to only racing the road and street courses, while with Peugeot, they picked and chose which endurance series to do out of the American Le Mans Series and the European Le Mans Series, because for them, the prize was prestige rather than any particular championship. All of that is to say this: I will not be competing for any championships in 2009.
I suppose that isn't all that different from 2007 and 2008. In Formula One, McLaren, Ferrari, and maybe BMW Sauber and Renault are the only ones that can really compete at the top level. Of those, Ferrari, BMW, and Renault are all major forces in the automotive world while McLaren has a special relationship with Mercedes-Benz in such a way that they are a factory team for all intents and purposes. That all means that with Williams, I was never really a factor in the championship - hell, I finished tenth in the championship both years - but at least then I was at every round, and I could compete with those who were scoring points. In Indycar, I'd sit on the sidelines for basically the whole summer and then come back hundreds of points behind the drivers I was originally competing with. In short, it wasn't ideal, but ideally, I would be a full time Formula One driver in 2009, so this is all about compromising and making do with what I can. Speaking of making do...every Indycar race I'm doing is in the United States or Canada, as are half of the endurance races I'll be doing. Andretti Green Racing is based in the United States - in Indianapolis no less - and Honda's Indycar simulator is also in Indy. The sensible thing may be to move out to the United States for the duration of the season and make do over there, before returning to Europe for the summer of endurance racing and then again for the offseason as I attempt to find a way back into Formula One for 2010.
"Hey Roksana?" I asked, knowing this was going to be a big ask.
"Yeah?" Roksana popped out of the kitchen to ask, expression sinking as she noticed the guilty look on my face...this just got harder, as if such a thing were even possible.
"I heard back from Ernesto...I got the job. I going to test the Indycar at Sebring in mid-March and then prepare for the 12 Hours with Peugeot, and then the Indycar season opener is in Saint Petersburg just a few weeks later. Long Beach not long after that..." I began, explaining the situation. To be honest, I was stalling a little bit, because I knew this was hard, and because I was dreading to hear the answer.
"What are you getting at Tamara?" Roksana asked, the Portuguese-born Ukrainian woman instantly getting suspicious.
"I'm saying it might make sense to buy a place in the US for the spring and the fall if I'm going to be campaigning in Indycar. It's not worth it to be in hotels the whole time and, who knows, I might not make it back to Formula One and I might have to start thinking about Indy as a more permanent thing." I explained. Of course, with all these partial seasons and time-filler campaigns, I was concentrating on impressing F1 teams and earning my place on the grid, but I wasn't naive enough to think that a return to Formula One was guaranteed, so I was also taking the opportunity to test out how these series would look long term. A1GP wasn't that option for me, and I suspected that Superleague Formula wouldn't be either - as unique as they are, they still come across as too similar to Formula One to have real identity to them, and they fail in comparison to F1 in every area except equality of competition which is a given considering these are spec series - but Indycar might just be. Alternatively, endurance racing might just be, I didn't know. What I did know is that it made sense to find a place to live in the US that was slightly more permanent than a hotel room.
"Tamara...come on, don't put this on me -" Roksana started panicking.
"I'm not saying we need to; I'm just proposing -" I stood up, trying to interject, trying to calm the situation down, and only succeeding in escalating the situation.
"My whole life is here Tamara, my magazine is here, all the other publications I write for are here. How am I even going to write for Ligue 1? I don't even think they broadcast it anywhere in the United States. What about my car? They don't sell Peugeots in the US, is it even going to be street leg -" Roksana raised her voice, cheeks red, clearly having some sort of panic attack or anxiety attack or something. I don't know what this is exactly, but I know it's something...and I also know that I am entirely unequipped to deal with it. The problem with this relationship is and always has been that I am completely ignorant of relationships: I don't know what to do in a relationship, and now it's becoming clear that I don't know what to do when having a fight either.
"Roksana! Please...calm down." I tried to stop her, succeeding in quieting her down a little bit and taking a few steps closer. I lightly put my hands on her shoulder, light enough to let her brush me off if she doesn't want to be touched right now. She was letting me touch her though, at least for now "I'm sorry, of course you have a lot to think about, I know that. I'm also not saying that we have to sell this place either - I don't want to do that - I was just thinking aloud. If you don't want to invest in a place in America, we won't. And even if you do, that doesn't mean all of this is gone. I still need a place to live during the summer...and the offseason...and next year hopefully. We could even have it where you could stay here while I go to America during the races there. I know it's not ideal, but we can call, video call even, and we can make it work. How does that sound?"
"...I don't want to be apart." Roksana whispered, "It worries me."
"Why?" I asked, maybe not the best thing to do in terms of helping her out of this, but I was genuinely curious as to what this was all about.
"Because you're a world-famous racing driver and I'm just some journalist?" Roksana bit back, asking the rhetorical question as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
"But...you're the one that flirted with me." I pointed out, the argument fading away a bit, during into something strange and tense instead.
"Yeah, I know. I knew that, and I even expected you were gay, but I didn't think that meant you would actually be interested in me. I know you were basically clueless through the whole beginning of the relationship, but the truth is I wasn't that much better off. I was flying by the seat of my pants. I've had girlfriends that have been in the closet before, hiding their relationship from their parents maybe, but I've never had girlfriends who were hiding their sexuality from the international media. I've never had a girlfriend getting outed in a magazine and then had a journalist from a foreign country track me down for an interview. I live in Monaco, I date a racing driver, and I get taken to dates at the Nürburgring. All of this just screams to me that I don't belong, and when we're apart, I can't help but get scared that you're gonna move on and find someone else. That I'll just end up being the gateway for you getting a girlfriend that's actually in your league instead of way, way below it." Roksana admitted, staring a hole into the floor to avoid looking at me. For good reason too, because she was airing out her anxieties, anxieties which - and I hate to admit this - I didn't see at all. Roksana has been suffering this whole time and I've been completely clueless of it...how shitty am I for that?
"Roksana...if that's what you're worried about...I can honestly say I don't remember saying more than five words to another woman while in Asia." I responded, assuring her by pointing out that, quite frankly, when I'm in a racing mindset, this romantic and sexual stuff doesn't even occur to me. I suppose that's why I was so blind to this before I finally got to Formula One. Before F1, everything was about getting to the next race, portraying myself the best way possible, and doing everything in my power to actually achieve that impossible goal of becoming a race car driver. In F1, even as a pay driver and even on an initial one-year deal, I could finally afford to relax. I could finally afford to indulge the weird feelings I felt when Roksana expressed interest in me. From that respect, I could understand Roksana's fears - though not agree with them - because yeah, since my sexual awakening, I have been noticing women more and I have started to develop an idea of what I like. The problem with Roksana's fears is that, quite frankly, she checks all my boxes. There is no risk whatsoever of me finding someone better than her because, as of now, I haven't found anyone that's even comparable to her, let alone better.
"I know, I know. It's stupid, I know. But I can't help that this is how I fear, this is what I'm afraid of." Roksana admitted. So there it was, plain irrational, human anxiety. It didn't really matter what I said because this wasn't a logical argument, this was all tied up in self-doubt, inferiority, and a feeling that things have been going a little bit too well. That meant there was no easy way to deal with this. The easiest - not by much, mind you - I suppose would be to just keep showing her that I love her and that there isn't going to be somewhat better.
"Look...none of this stuff matters until March anyway, okay? Let's just enjoy the offseason together, shall we?" I offered, deciding to drop the subject entirely. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to conduct an Indycar season from a Monaco apartment - that just didn't make sense - but, like I said, none of that really mattered until the spring of next year anyway. What's most important for me right now is reestablishing a status quo with my girlfriend and repairing some of the damage I seem to have done by spending that month in east Asia racing in A1GP. There is plenty of travel in the F1 season, but I suppose Roksana knew that was coming and prepared herself for it, what she was not expecting was for me to immediately embark on a whole new experiment the second the F1 season was finally over. She thought that I was finally back and instead, I put a whole two continents between us.
"Alright, alright. I'm gonna be okay." Roksana accepted, getting her breathing under control and wiping the last of those half-formed tears from her gray eyes. Crisis averted...at least for now.
One afternoon Roksana and I walked down a French Riviera beach. Dressed in a bikini, flip-flops, and an open sweater over my shoulders in case it got cool later on, I held my girlfriend's hand as we walked parallel to the Mediterranean Sea, the sun setting in the west behind us. The water sloshing back and forth onto the beach was cold, too cold to swim in, but it wasn't ice cold. The air temperature was nice and warm to offset that though, so overall, I'd say this is downright beautiful weather considering it was already mid-December. It was certainly nicer than the weather would be in our ancestral homelands, which brings us to what we were talking about. Roksana and I are both fairly disconnected from Eastern Europe, considering she was born in Portugal, I was born in Central Asia, and we both live in the south of France - well, Monaco in my case, but let's be honest, Monaco is a French town with some minor feudal objections - but there is still an emotional connection to where our families come from. Though admittedly, in Roksana's case, her family has been in Ukraine much more recently than my family has been in Russia.
"...so over time, they moved into the cities. Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, even Kyiv to an extent, but none of them were really having that much of a better life. My parents didn't want to be like these various cousins and uncles and siblings, they wanted something better. So, they moved to Portugal, living just outside of Porto, and made a life there. Within the year I was born and, well, the rest is history." Roksana shared her story, revealing how her extended family - once a tight knit village unit - dispersed throughout Ukraine in hopes of finding a better life, but the struggles just kept coming and coming, finally leaving her parents with no choice but to leave for western Europe. It's an unfortunate story, but one all too common throughout the former Soviet Union and its satellite states...and one that reminds me of how comparatively fortunate my situation is. My father, admittedly, made a lot of money from the fall of the union and ultimately used that money to fund leaving Central Asia and setting up a company based out of Monaco instead. I'm sure a lot of Roksana's relatives, those who are still there, still struggling in the tortured economies of eastern Europe, would describe my father as a robber baron or an oligarch, the very same sort of man as those who cause all the problems, they face in their day to day lives. The sad part is that they're probably right about that, and that's probably why I'm one of the few racing drivers from that part of the world.
"Honestly, my family comes from somewhere not very far away from that. Most of us relocated - or got relocated - from Bryansk, Mogilev, Chernihiv...back then they were all just neighboring provinces, now they're spread across three different countries. Go even a hundred years back from that and I'm sure you can find ancestors of mine who called themselves Poles or Lithuanians. Of course, not much of that mattered in Central Asia. We were farmers trying to bring civilization to the wild steppe or whatever simplistic fantasy existed in the minds of Saint Petersburg and Moscow. That movement stopped for a few decades but then by the 1930s, the Soviets were relocating people to bring industry and revolution to the Kazakhs, and that's where the rest of my ancestors come from. My great grandfather came out of that, and they used him in the war because he could talk to both the Russians and the Kazakhs, which was useful as more and more troops from beyond the Urals were getting thrown into these Russian areas, these Ukrainian and Belarusian areas, and beyond that." I shared my own story. Everyone from the Soviet Union has a story about the Great Patriotic War, and in my case, it's the story of my great grandfather leading a tank crew into battle just a few hundred miles away from our ancestral homeland.
I suppose that brings to mind another thing that makes me feel weird about continuing to represent Kazakhstan: the fact that I can't speak Kazakh. My great grandfather could, my grandfather could, and even my father knew enough to hold a basic conversation. They had to because that was simply a matter of existence in an ethnically diverse land home to both Russians and Kazakhs, but that wasn't my life. I moved out of Central Asia when I was very young and never had a reason to learn Kazakh, instead spending my time learning French, Italian, and English. Though it's not entirely my fault either, because my mother didn't know Kazakh either, because she spent her whole Central Asian life living in a Russian neighborhood of Almaty. It's no longer the case, but back then, many of the cities in Central Asia had a Russian plurality, if not an outright majority, but all of that practically evaporated when the Cold War ended, and my family is an example of that. As is Natasha's for that matter, moving to Nice before we even met her, and relocating to Monaco when we finally did start working through the karting ranks together. Now she's close to Formula One, whereas I've had my two years and, despite putting together some good results, it still wasn't enough. I've burned out of F1 before I even got the opportunity to race against my little cousin like we've been dreaming about ever since we first raced each other in the go karts.
"Hey," Roksana spoke up "I see some people up ahead, should we turn around or...?"
"Oh, there," I saw them in the distance, a couple of men and women lounging on the beach, enjoying the unseasonably nice weather but none quite approaching the water itself. Then I realized that Roksana was trying to do two things here: first of all, she saw that I was getting into my own head again with this F1 shit so she was trying to distract me, bring me back down to Earth. Second of all, she knew I was outed, now she could see us approaching a group of random people, holding hands, me and the woman I was photographed making out with. She was giving me the opportunity to turn away from any potential recognition - however big or small that chance may be - and just continue enjoying our private walk. I understood and appreciated the sentiment, but what's done is done, and I have nothing to hide now, so why not keep walking in this direction? At this point it doesn't matter to me what some random winter beachgoers in the south of France think of me. It can't affect my career any worse than its already been affected "I don't mind, let's keep going."
"Alright," Roksana accepted, the two us continuing down the beach. Earlier this afternoon we had walked down the beach away from Monaco, but now we were heading back towards the city. The Alfa Romeo was parked just off the beach, and we'd drive that extra little bit into the city. Being this close to Monte Carlo on a nice day meant that I shouldn't have been all that surprised to see another driver on the beach, but I had to admit I wasn't expecting to meet Anthony Harrison of all people lounging on a beach towel along with a small entourage consisting of his trainer and two women. Anthony was dressed in sunglasses, a lose white short-sleeve button up shirt, and American style swim trunks, while his trainer wore a matching black shirt, sunglasses, and a distinctly more European speedo. The two women with them - maybe girlfriends, maybe just friends, I wasn't sure - were dressed similarly to Roksana and I, wearing swimsuits with just some sort of shirt or sweater over it.
"Tamara?" he asked once I was close enough to recognize, propping himself up on his elbows to get a better look.
"Yeah, hey Anthony." I greeted with a somewhat awkward smile. I kept telling myself in my head that it was fine, he knew I was gay, he made it clear that he didn't hate me for it or anything, but that was on the race track. This is in public, this is me with my girlfriend, and I can't help but feel like it's different to actually see it, than to just merely hear about it. Anthony didn't seem to mind, nor did anyone else in his entourage, so I slowly started to relax. Anthony introduced the people he was with and, a moment later, I finally felt confident enough to introduce Roksana "This is my girlfriend, Roksana Yurasova."
"Anthony Harrison, pleasure to meet you," Anthony greeted, the American offering his hand to shake.
"Likewise," Roksana accepted, shaking hands.
"So, how you've been?" Harrison asked me, phrasing it as a casual question, but I got the impression that it was more of a serious question, wondering how I've been coping with being out of Formula One and what my plans are.
"I've been okay. I did some races in A1GP just after the season ended, scored a win, and now I'm making some plans for the next year. I don't know how much I can say before it's officially announced, but I'm just about ready to put pen to paper for some options for 2009." I told him. I didn't think that Anthony would share anything publicly, but I couldn't say the same thing about his entourage, so I'm not quite going to name drop Peugeot and Andretti - there is a way that announcements are made, and this is not it - but I am gonna say that plans are just about there. I am pretty satisfied with this as well, but I will say one thing though: considering that I'll be in America, while in 2009 F1 won't even be racing in Canada, let alone the US, I won't be able to even manage the most nominal of F1 testing roles. That is one thing I'm concerned about, because I would like to get some seat team with these new regulations before making a full time return in 2010. Though not having experience with these new regulations might actually hurt my chances of making said planned comeback in 2010. That being said, give Michael Coronet a season to establish himself with McLaren, and then maybe I'll be able to talk to him and see if I can't get a little bit of seat team in the 2009 McLaren. Coronet gave me the impression that he would be willing to offer it, so it's just a matter of whether or not he'll be able to do it. Anyway, speaking of McLaren, I should focus on the fact that I'm talking to their reigning world champion.
"Hey that's great. I knew you had the pace to be a winner, and sooner rather than later they'll see that in F1 too. Keep being there and keep driving, because with your talent, they won't have a choice but to give you a seat again." Anthony sat up, speaking with upmost sincerity. No one wants to speak ill of Williams because everyone in the paddock understands the economics are king in the sport - and plenty of people have first-hand experience with that - but at the same time, nobody thinks that this is the way that my career should have ended. Like, quite frankly, Formula One finally gets a competitive female driver - someone who instantly become popular and marketable for that fact alone - and then two years into that it ends because a sponsor pulls out? That's horrifically anticlimactic. That's the thing where I also feel for Sir Frank Williams here, because I'm sure some people think he's some kind of sexist or homophobe because of this, but really, me being dropped had nothing to do with me being outed, rather it had to do with me losing my sponsor because I was outed. The result is fundamentally the same but the distinction matters.
"Well, thank you. I'm doing everything I can to get back there as soon as possible." I blushed a bit, not used to getting praise like this, especially not from someone who is the reigning world champion. Of course, it doesn't help that when I got into Formula One, the reigning world champion was Felipe Alvarez, and while he did defend me after I got dropped, I still don't think that Felipe could praise anyone other than himself. Then there's the 2007 world champion, Matti Hamalainen, who does have a friendly side beneath his monosyllabic media persona, but he's still not the guy to praise you. That's not to insult Hamalainen, that's just the kind of guy that he is, but Harrison? Well, Anthony is the kind of guy that's open enough to show his appreciation of other drivers.
"Hopefully at the front of the grid." Anthony offered me a genuine smile, the African American driver meaning every word. The implication was clear: I didn't just belong in Formula One, but I belonged on the sharp end of the grid. I was incredibly proud to get that kind of praise from a driver at his level, but he also wasn't just blowing smoke up my ass or anything like that. In my first two seasons in F1, I matched a highly rated driver, one that is good enough that Williams is banking their future on him. I did so good in Formula One that MJ Andretti wants me for his 2007 championship winning Indycar team, that Peugeot wants me as part of their third car lineup for the 24 Hours of Le Mans and a number of other races...I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I'm a good driver. I was a driver that Renault was trying to sign at one point, and the only reason that they didn't try again was because Filipe Yannick is on a two-year contract for 2008 and 2009. I'm too good of a driver to be at mucking about at the back of the grid with Force India. That being said, I'm also too good of a driver to be out of Formula One at twenty years old, so now I face the difficult job of getting back into the sport. It's only going to be more difficult to get back in at a top team, even with some friends at high places.
"Ernesto found an apartment for me while he was talking to some people in Saint Petersburg, Florida. He sent me some pictures." I told Roksana one day in mid-January. We had just taken down the tree after keeping it up late for Orthodox Christmas as well as the western date, then as we were cleaning up the apartment, I received word from my agent all the way from Florida. Andretti Green Racing was based in Indianapolis, as was Honda's racing simulator, but I didn't want to scare Roksana by looking at anything too permanent, so I didn't want a house, not in either Florida or Indiana. Instead, I was merely looking for an apartment to spend February and early March in, basically for Indycar spring testing, all the festivities surrounding the 12 Hours of Sebring, and then the Firestone Grand Prix of Saint Petersburg. At that point, I'd figure something out for the Long Beach Grand Prix - probably just a hotel for that - then come back here for the European leg. I suppose then I could find an apartment in Indianapolis or something to base myself out of for the northern road courses and the Canadian rounds.
"Looks like a nice place." Roksana responded after taking a look. She tried to hide it, but I could tell that her voice was clipped, that she still wasn't comfortable with any of this.
"Roksana..." I started.
"I know, I know. It's your career and it makes sense for you to be there. I can accept that what you're doing makes perfect sense, but you need to accept that it making sense doesn't make me feel any better, okay?" Roksana responded, turning her back to me, not wanting to look me in the eyes right now. I guess that made sense - I couldn't expect her to be happy with everything I do - but that didn't make it any less infuriating. Perhaps infuriating is a bit of a harsh, but I was getting a bit annoyed with how she feels about this - I understand, her life is here, she wants to continue living her usual life, and she wants to do it while dating an ambitious racing driver - but the fact of the matter is she's being an obstacle right now. The F1 season is a long commitment with all kinds of stress and traveling, I get that, and the moment that was over I went out and spent a month in East Asia in A1GP, which is annoying for her, I get that as well. At the same time, I'm a Formula One driver, she's known that for our entire relationship, and now I've lost my seat, so I'm doing everything in my power to regain my seat. That requires me to be active, that requires me to be relentless, and yeah, that probably means that I'm hard to be around right now, but - and this is going to come across as harsh - that's part of the package. I'm sure it's the same with actors or musicians, or other types of athletes, but my career is a huge part of my life, and right now that's in jeopardy, so I'm working on fixing that.
"Come on...you know we're going to keep in touch." I changed tactics, not trying to get into the heart of the argument again, instead focusing on the fact that we have literally created a plan to keep in touch. Basically, I scheduled out an hour every weekday - and weekends when I'm not racing - which matched up to a time in the afternoon here in Monaco, for a video call with Roksana. I knew that it wasn't the same as being together in person, but it was something, and it should show that I am putting legitimate effort into this relationship even with me trying to salvage my relationship. I know I'm not perfect, I know that I'm probably missing out on at least some of the social cues - I don't have experience in relationships and my social life in general was stunted thanks to my commitment to racing from such a young age - but I am trying to make the most of this bad situation and I think that Roksana could also be doing more than meet me halfway.
"Alright, yeah, I know. Sorry about that. I...I'll try not to get so uncomfortable about this." Roksana sighed. This wasn't perfect either, because I think she's getting self-conscious now, thinking that she was actively harming the relationship and not being good enough for me. That wasn't true either, I wanted us to be working together and a happy couple, not either of us being right at the expense of the other. That's how the offseason has been going though: there are some good moments, like on the beach, but at other points, it's either me feeling uncertain about my future or doubting my choices - there's been nights where I looked up at the ceiling wondering whether or not I should have just accepted a single year at Force India just to be able to have ready access to everyone in the paddock and explain the situation to them - or her living in some sort of fear of our relationship falling apart. It got difficult sometimes, I admit that.
I parked the Chrysler 300 rental car outside of Sebring International Raceway and headed to the paddock. Sebring was, believe it or not, not actually all that different from Silverstone. The track is flat, historic, and a significant chunk of it consists of an old, World War II airfield. I suppose in the case of Silverstone, it was in active service while the one here at Sebring was just a training field, but the culture remains. Nevertheless, thanks to the age of the track and not necessarily being built with motorsport in mind, Sebring has a reputation for being a very bumpy circuit. That is why this place is a popular destination for Indycar testing - because the imperfect surface allows teams to create an approximation of what the upcoming street circuits may be like. In this case, teams were preparing for the upcoming Grand Prix of Saint Petersburg and the Long Beach Grand Prix. That's another thing worth mentioning - this is not an exclusive test. it's not even a rookie orientation thing, no it's a straight up testing date. That means not only will I be coming to terms with my car, but I'll be also doing it while sharing the track with my Andretti Green Racing teammates and drivers from other teams. I suppose I was going to get an eye-opening Indycar experience from the very beginning.
"Good, there you are." Ernesto greeted as soon as I got to him. I was dressed in civilian clothes and held my plain, sponsorless A1GP helmet in my hand - I figured it would be less offensive to the team's sponsors than if I took one of my Williams helmets - whereas Ernesto Signorelli had gone all Florida on me. The Italo-Argentine agent was dressed in a white shirt, white pants, black loathers, and a navy-blue blazer, with gold-trimmed aviator sunglasses. I smirked at his look, and he sighed and shook his head, having evidently expected something like this. The 1980s-chic ensemble aside, Ernesto had been hard at work, so despite the sound of preliminary engine checks beginning in the pitlane, Ernesto instead lead me over to a bit of a temporary hospitality set up in an Andretti trailer. Signorelli explained the situation on the way "Like I said, the contract is all written-up and just needs your signature, but they're also going to introduce you to your new primary sponsor. Don't worry, I know you have bad past experiences, but I made sure there were no special demands, no unique restrictions, just a company wanting to grow their market share in the US."
"Your presence in the team is not contingent on any sponsors or anything like that. We have a partner for the car, the partner would like you to do some ad reads for them in both English and Russian, and yeah, we're going to be making some money off of this, but none of that means it's required. If something goes wrong here, we have plans to get you through the season, so don't even worry about it." MJ added, reassuring me. Obviously, he was hoping I would be fine with it and that this sponsor relation would last a long time, but he was making it clear that I was not a pay driver. The Russian thing made me think that the sponsor specifically wanted me or someone like me, but again, Andretti is making it clear that I'm not in this seat because of this sponsorship, rather I'm here because I'm a highly rated European prospect coming over from Formula One to play the role of the Indycar superstar to market abroad. Daniella Pieri was the shining young female driver Indycar waves in front of their domestic audience, and it seems that I'm going to be the shining young female driver for the international audience.
"So, who's the sponsor?" I asked, understanding that they were making it clear that this wasn't like the Williams situation, but I didn't need them to be gentle with me or tread lightly around me. I was a big girl, and I could handle it.
"Kaspersky Lab, a Russian-American cybersecurity company." another individual spoke up, this one a gray-haired man with a matching goatee, dressed in blue jeans, sneakers, a V-neck shirt, and a silver blazer "Yevgeny Kaspersky, CEO of the fastest growing cybersecurity company in the world, with offices in Moscow, Silicon Valley, London, Dubai, South Africa, and more coming every day."
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva," I greeted in turn, shaking hands with the man styling himself as the Russian Steve Jobs "You want to sponsor me?"
"I think we're a bit past want at this point. The car is wrapped and waiting in the pitlane, money has already changed hands between me and the team, and the only part missing is your signature on the paper." Yevgeny pointed out.
"I get that part, I'm just curious as to why a man like you wants to sponsor a racing team." I clarified. Maybe it wasn't right of me, but I had to admit that I was a little bit paranoid right now - the fact that Kazakhoil was looking for ways out of the deal before I was even outed probably doesn't help - but, despite the western facade, he is still very much an oligarch. The absolutely rapid growth of Kaspersky Lab also might suggest corruption - maybe a baseless accusation, but when you come from eastern Europe, you can't help but be pessimistic about these things - or in a slightly less provocative way, they may have benefited from lucrative government contracts and favoritism. Not quite breaking the law but abusing the system to get a head start over any potential rivals.
"Oh that? What can I say, I'm passionate about racing. I have an E36 M3 that I take to track days, I remember my parents scolding me for having a poster of a Ferrari on my wall instead of one of Lenin, and I respect the talent. You drivers are the modern gladiators, risking your lives every day as you perform superhuman feats in pursuit of almighty victory. If anything, the question should be why it took me this long to finally get around to it." Kaspersky shared. Well, he certainly had a romantic idea of what motorsport is, but considering he's here at an Indycar test, he must clearly have some idea of what motorsport is really like. In any case, this was a man offering to sponsor me mere months after I was outed, mere months after the Kazakh government cut all ties with me, so could he really be this kind of dark insider to Putin's inner circle? I wasn't about to call myself an expert, but this wasn't Nazarbayev, this wasn't Abdullayev, and he didn't strike me as belonging to the crowd. Now maybe I'm wrong and he has all the personal data of every US government employee ready to hand over to the Kremlin at a moment's notice, but if he's doing this with some sort of nefarious purpose, there's many more effective uses of money than sponsoring an Indycar team.
Thus, with that, I went and signed the contract with Andretti Green Racing to drive the #25 Kaspersky Lab Honda for the road and street courses of the 2009 Indycar Series.
Twenty minutes later, I was dressed in a new black, white, and mint green race suit. I wore my cyan and gold helmet already, the circular sun and its rays on the top, and the outline of a soaring eagle on either side, same as the helmet I wore in A1GP. The difference here was that this helmet was freshly ordained with a Honda badge on the forehead, Kaspersky Lab branding across the top of the visor, and various other partners of Andretti Green Racing set up around the helmet as needed. As I entered the garage, I saw that the car matched the race suit, with a predominantly black livery with white sidepods and wings marked with the mint green and red Kaspersky Lab logo, along with a white #25 on the nose. The nose of a Dallara IR05 to be exact, the spec chassis used in Indycar. The car was heavy and a bit bulky, necessary to withstand crashes on ovals, but in this road configuration, it had some pretty significant wings as well. It would be heavy, it would handle like ass, and it wouldn't even come close to Formula One's lap times, but it would hustle its way around a race track, and it would hustle its way around a race track in a tighter racing pack than Formula One has seen in decades. Pluses and minuses as I sat down in the tub for my seat fitting, the foam of seat essentially contouring itself to me as it formed.
"Alright, how're you feeling, Tamara?" my race engineer asked over the radio.
"The seat is good. help me strap in." I asked. There is something in motorsport that all drivers need to get used to regardless of our feelings on personal space, and that's the six-point harness. It needs to be tight; it needs to strap us perfectly in place to keep us from moving around in the event of a crash, and drivers need external help to get it in right. Getting it off is easy, that we can do ourselves, but pulling it in right knocks the breath out of you because it has to. Some of my male colleagues have mentioned before that the worst part of getting into a race car is the crotch belt...fortunately I don't have that problem, but I suppose the trade-off is that they don't have to deal with getting the belts over their boobs. Career-mandated lack of privacy aside, once I was strapped in, I felt good. Once you're strapped in your body gets used to the fact that the belts aren't going anywhere and makes do. So yeah, after two months of no racing whatsoever, I'm back in a race car.
"Alright Tamara, my name is Jacob DeStefano, I'll be your race engineer and chief mechanic. Right now we want you to take a few installation laps and get a feel for the car, push as hard as you feel comfortable with, and then when you come back, we'll talk about what to do next." Jacob explained. This was pretty standard stuff when in the car for the first time, just given the most neutral set-up possible and sent out to get a feeling for the car, then over the course of the test dialing in the set-up and building up speed, to the point where hopefully by the end of the day your car is right up there at the competitive level. So, with that in mind, I drove out of the pitlane at Sebring and immediately turned left, following the pit exit on the outside of the wide, paved turn one and watching as it narrowed to the width of the usual track, with grass on either side and the walls not much further out. In any case, I built up speed as I passed through the nothing-kink of turn two before braking for the ninety-degree left-hander of turn three. My first corner at speed in an Indycar revealed a few things already: first of all, Sebring really is an old, old bumpy surface that Formula One, for better or worse, wouldn't even think about driving on. Second of all, with heavier weight and less aero, I had to brake earlier than I would in an F1 car, maybe even earlier than I would have in a GP2 car. Third of all, while I expected to get a bit more back mid-corner thanks to the slick Firestone tyres, what instead became apparent is the lack of power-steering, and just how heavy it was to turn this heavy car through the corner...maybe there's more to it than just past experiences as to why Daniella Pieri, Evie Carpentier, and the other female drivers in Indycar have, historically, been better at the ovals.
Yes, it seems like it would be hard to hold a turn at hundreds of miles per hour through an endlessly long corner, but there are things you can do on an oval to alleviate that - bias the steering to the left, angle the wings to the left, hell, in Indycar, even the bodywork on an oval race is asymmetrical, making sure everything is designed to make the car turn left better. This is taken to such an extreme where, based on the onboards from my Andretti teammates that I've been watching during the offseason, Indycar drivers actually have to hold the wheel to the right down the straightaways to go straight. You can't do that on a road course though, and more than that, you have to throw the car to the left and to the right, sometimes in the span of a short chicane, and doing that over and over and over again can wear away at you if you don't have the same strength as your male colleagues. If it's bad for me at 5'5 and 110 pounds, it must be even worse for Daniella at 5'3 and 100 pounds. To illustrate that point, turn four was a kink to the right and then I was on the brakes for turn five to the left, turning through it until it spit me out into the fast sweeper of turn six to the right - called, somewhat imaginatively, Big Bend - before finally settling onto a short straight. Whoever said motorsport isn't a physical sport has never driven a race car. Going through Big Bend though, I did notice one physical thing though: these cars didn't have the aero or the cornering speeds of F1, therefore you didn't experience the same kind of extreme G-forces, so while my arms were getting worked hard, my neck wasn't taking the kind of forces it would be if I took such a corner in F1.
The next corner was turn seven, the hairpin. Braking hard and shifting down the gears - fortunately Indycar did switch to paddle shifters recently, so I wasn't having to relearn driving with a manual sequential gearbox for the first time in half a decade during all of this - and then turning to the right before an immediate left right on corner exit. Then followed a flat-out section with a series of kinks - two to the right and then turn nine back to the left - before finally reaching the next hard braking zone at the top of the circuit in the form of turn ten. It wasn't a walk in the park quite yet, but I was starting to see what the car was like and fall into a rhythm, watching the speed decrease, the gears come down, and the mechanical grip come in as I threw the car to the right and then watching it all build back up on corner exit before lifting through the left-hand sweeper of Collier - I was already thinking about taking it faster next lap - before straightening up to the right through turn twelve, then finally reaching the squared-off braking zone of turn thirteen. I turned to the right and then had a long, fast section to build up speed coming out of Tower corner. Hearing the Honda V8 engine behind me getting to stretch its legs a little bit before reaching the next corner - Bishop.
A slight kink to the right followed by a slight lift through the more substantial kink to the left, then it was back on the throttle hard for the short run down to turn fifteen. Riding the radius of the corner to the right before collecting the car to the left for just a moment before reaching another braking zone. Turn sixteen, Le Mans, was a little more than ninety-degree, it was a corner to the right, and it deposited us onto the old airstrip. This was the longest flat-out stretch of the track and formed an iconic element of it during the 12 Hours of Sebring endurance race, as did the corner coming at the end of it. Turn seventeen, the Sunset bend. First, throw the car to the right at the end of the straight, now, staring directly at a tyre barrier, get on the brakes as late as you can before throwing the car to the right yet again, hitting the second apex, and then start building speed as you hit the third apex and get back onto the start-finish straight, with the pit entry on the inside. I stayed out for one more lap, pushing the car harder as I got used to it. I wanted to take the opportunity to learn the track as much as possible considering I'll be in this year's 12 Hours of Sebring with Peugeot, and I just knew at some point during that race a car will bury itself into that tyre wall at Sunset Bend. I just hope that it won't be me - or my teammates for that matter. Yes, that's going to be something to get used to during the 12 Hours, the fact that I'll be sharing the car, sharing responsibility. Every race car driver can be a bit of a control freak, especially coming from such a selfish discipline as Formula One, but for most of the race, it'll be someone else in the car, and if they run into a problem, it'll affect my race without me having done anything. Motorsport is always a team sport, but endurance racing takes it to a whole new level.
"So, how are you feeling?" Daniella Pieri asked, the Italian-American brunette wearing her black and blue Motorola overalls. She was leaning against the wall at the end of the garage, joined by two of our other teammates - Brazilian Afonso Wagner and Japanese driver Haruki Tanaka - while Rio Andretti talked to his mechanics, having also just gotten out of his 7/11 sponsored car. That's another thing to get used to in Indycar - in Formula One, two car teams became standard thanks to the way constructors' championship points were tallied, and for decades now two cars have been mandated, but in Indycar? There are no rules as to how many cars you can run. Some teams run only one car, many run two or three, but Andretti Green Racing? We run four full time cars and a fifth on the road and street circuits. There's the #26 7/11 Honda of Mario "Rio" Andretti III, the #27 Motorola Honda of Daniella Pieri, the #28 Panasonic Honda of Haruki Tanaka, and the #29 Itaipava Honda of Afonso Wagner. A convenience store, a cell phone manufacturer, an electronics giant, and a Brazilian brewery promoting Indycar's upcoming return to Brazil in 2010. It was a diverse cast of sponsors and it made for a diverse set of liveries - unlike F1 where both of a team's cars look identical - especially when paired with my #25 Kaspersky Honda. Then it goes even further because Indycar teams don't have to run the same livery all season, so for select races, Daniella will run a black and orange Boost Mobile car, Afonso will be in a second 7/11 sponsored car, and more sponsors might be added by the time the season actually starts in early April.
"My arms are dead!" I complained, but with a smile on my face showing that I did thoroughly enjoy that. Later on in the test I started encountering traffic and it quickly became apparent that Indycar isn't afraid to get down and dirty a little bit when it comes to this stuff, with a little bit of shoving, some wheel banging, and absolutely no one waiting for blue flags or anything like that. These cars are big and heavy, but that also means they're robust, and they can take more rough treatment than most open wheelers. They certainly can't bang into each other all race long like NASCARs can, but they also don't lose buckets of time at the slightest bit of a hit like F1 cars seem to do in this aero-dependent era.
"Eh you'll get used to it," Afonso smirked, a big old grin on his big old face. He was the driver I was least familiar with on this team, but he was instantly coming across as a good guy - fitting, because from what I hear, he's one of the most popular personalities on the grid.
"How did it go for you?" I asked Haruki, wondering how my fellow Formula One refugee was coping with this.
"You have to fight these cars, you have to fight the drivers, you have to fight all the time. It's wonderful, Formula One is so technical and advanced but this is raw and physical. I love it." Haruki explained, eyes lighting up as he spoke. Haruki had a bit of a reputation for being incredibly fast at Honda but often failing to finish races. Most of that was down to reliability issues, but a lot of it was down to Haruki being a bit too aggressive for Formula One, and that's part of the reason why Honda dropped him down to Super Aguri. In that package, Haruki's aggressiveness is what allowed him to go ahead and score points, and here in Indycar, I imagine that Haruki's aggressiveness will fit in even more. This isn't a dirty series, not by any means, but it's not a pampered series either.
"You got a place to shower?" Pieri asked me, all of us aware that we've just spent all day in hot cars in Florida which, even in late February, can't help but be humid.
"Yes, an apartment in Saint Petersburg." I answered. The thing about the United States is that it really is that much bigger than Europe, so what I thought was actually pretty close is two hours away. Of course, most Americans would probably saw two hours isn't all that far, but it's a difference in culture.
"You're gonna drive all the way out there?" Daniella asked, Afonso and Haruki heading off to the paddock as we spoke.
"I guess so, why?" I shrugged.
"Because everyone else has a fully stocked bus in the paddock - where do you think they're going?" she pointed out, gesturing at our departing teammates.
"Bus?" I asked, picturing one of those tall American coach buses.
"Ugh, follow me." Daniella sighed before leading me off to a lot full of the drivers' customized RVs, "fully-stocked" as she said in that each one had a kitchen, bedroom, and its own shower. So that's how I found myself washing the grime off from a day of racing in someone else's RV. In F1, drivers usually had their own bathroom to work with, either in the garage area itself or in the team's hospitality area, some in their own trailer, but I guess in America the RV was the vehicle of choice. I suppose with comparatively few races and all but one taking place in the same continental mass, driving from track to track in a mobile slice of home, made sense. I guess this was the first of many culture shocks I was going to experience while racing in America.
"...and lining up next to their teammates, from sixth on the grid, we have the #09 Team Peugeot Total entry, driven by James Brabham, Miquel Guerrero, and Tamara Shchegolyayeva, three drivers with Formula One experience led by the son of the great Jack Brabham himself. James has multiple class-wins to his name here at the 12 Hours of Sebring, and today he'll be trying to score his first overall victory..." the announcer continued down the rest of the field as, on March 21st, 2009, the 12 Hours of Sebring was finally upon us. We had a good car - the #07 qualified third and the #08 qualified fifth - but we had competition in the form of the hometown Acuras and the international powerhouse of the Audis. We had a strong roster in this car though, with James Brabham - named for the late, great Jim Clark who raced against Jack Brabham all those years ago - having driven in Formula One in the 1990s and having had success in endurance racing ever since. Then Miquel Guerrero drove for Minardi in 1999 and 2000, then filled in at Williams in 2003 and 2004. The Catalan driver was also part of the Peugeot entry that finished second at the 24 Hours of Le Mans last year, so he certainly had the talent as well. I was the odd woman out in that respect, because I was a rookie to endurance racing, but I also had the most recent Formula One experience, and my skills in the car are sharp thanks to having just spent a week last month doing Indycar testing at this very track. James did the qualifying run for the team - natural given his experience - and he would be in the car for the first stint, leaving me and Guerrero watching in the garage.
On 10:30am the cars rolled onto the start-finish straight, crossed the line, and unleashed their full power in the run down towards turn one. It was the Gil de Ferran Motorsports #66 Acura that took pole position, but it was the #2 Audi Sport Team Joest entry that took the lead followed by our teammates in the #07 Peugeot, relegating the Acura to third. The #1 Audi Sport North America continued in fourth, while our car - the #09 Peugeot - was up to fifth...though not for the best reasons. The #08 Peugeot was our all French contingent - driven by current Toro Rosso driver Maximilien Lecroix, 2006 Super Aguri driver Francois Montclair, and experienced sports car racer Jean-Marc Mazzarino - and they must have hit a bump down the start-finish straight or something because as soon as Lecroix reached turn one, he lost power steering. Speaking from experience, driving an Indycar around here with no power steering is hard enough, but now, add a whole lot of weight thanks to being in a sports car and add in the fact that the car needs to race for twelve hours? It's simply impossible to drive through that. That means the race just started and one of our cars is already heading back to the pits for repairs...not a good sign.
At the same time, it's endurance racing, and that means our French comrades are going to have nearly twelve hours to work their way back into the race. So, I've gone over the lineups for our #08 and #09 entries, but how about the #07 car that's currently leading the charge for the Peugeot contingent today? Well Pierre Karatchian appears yet again, 1990s F1 driver and experienced sports car racer Nicolau Morais of Portugal, and former Jaguar and Red Bull driver Christopher Koenigsmann of Austria. So like I've said previous, endurance racing is no stranger to Formula One talent, with countless drivers having seen it as the next best thing after their Formula One careers failed to materialize or they retired or whatever, and I suppose I've found myself in the same situation. It's not all doom and gloom though, because there are also examples of it going the other way, such as the great Wilhelm Ziegler and even Martin Weaver, both of whom raced for Mercedes at Le Mans before beginning long and successful careers in Formula One. I could still work my way back into F1 from here.
So, with that, the first hours of the race kept going on and on, with the Audis and Peugeots leaving the Acuras in the dust. The Audis with their turbocharged diesel V10s and decade of dominating endurance racing had some series pace, but we were nearly as fast, and we had a distinct advantage over that. As discussed in A1GP, Formula One pitstops are unique for having a ton of people and being incredibly fast, but in endurance racing, it is even slower, with just a couple people per car, in charge of changing the tyres, fueling the car, doing repairs, and cleaning these giant windshields. All of that is to say that, while in Formula One, changing the tyres and refueling happens at the same time, here it takes long to do both, and in fact there are times where you only pit for one or the other. The Audis had to change their tyres every pitstop, whereas we were smoother on our tyres and could double-stint them. This allowed us to cycle to the front of the grid, with the #07 first, the #09 second, and even the #08 having worked its way back up the field.
"...the hardest part is actually sunset, when the light is changing. Once it's actually night you get used to the - he's spun!" Miquel and I sat in the garage, the Catalan driving explaining the intricacies of night racing to me, when all of a sudden, we saw James spinning out on the TV in front of us. Negotiating traffic is just a feature of multiclass racing, and that means there are all kinds of incidents throughout the race. In this case, a GT2 class Ford GT locked up and crashed into the tyre barrier at Sunset Bend just as our #09 Peugeot had arrived onto the scene, and James Brabham had no choice but to spin to avoid. He managed to recover pretty quickly and didn't lose any positions, not yet anyway, but it was a concerning moment, and it allowed our rivals to close in a little bit more.
"It's alright, it's alright. We're still going." I calmed myself down once I saw James starting the next lap, all fine.
"Right, I'll be starting my stint soon, you should rest a little bit, make sure you're sharp." Guerrero offered some advice as we entered the phase of the race where driver changes began. These were among the longest stops in the race, where we changed tyres, loaded fuel, and also had the driver switch out and another come in. In this phase of the race, Maximilien Lecroix managed to get the repaired #08 Peugeot into the lead briefly, as they were off strategy thanks to their unscheduled pitstop, so their driver change came about fifteen minutes after the rest of the field. The #08 fell back to the rear of the leading class, and it was settling in that the battle right now was between the two Audis and our two lead cars. For my first endurance race I was being trusted with one of the fastest cars in the series and we had a chance of winning the race - no pressure, right?
"Go, go, go!" the crew shouted as we went over the wall, pulling Mikel Guerrero out of the car after the sunset stint and putting me in the car for the second time. Brabham started the race, Miquel Guerrero did the second stint, and I did the third, but then Guerrero returned to the car to close out the day, while I was getting back into the car now that it was nice and dark so that Brabham could close out the race in a few hours. The Catalan was out, I climbed in, got strapped in, and adjusted the seat a little bit - it wasn't perfect, endurance racing seats were never perfect because it needed to work for three different people - and the team put new Michelin tyres and Total fuel in the car. A French car, French tyres, and French fuel, but you have a Kazakh driver at an American track. They released me out of the pitlane and onto the track with one clear goal for this stint: go as fast as we can.
The #07 suffered an air conditioning failure - yes, yes, I know it sounds stupid, but you try racing 12 hours in the Florida heat without it - and fell to the back of the pack, while we had to repair some bodywork damage during Guerrero's second stint. Effectively, the situation is thus: the #2 Audi is leading, the #08 Peugeot is up to second because they got all their problems out of the way early, and the #1 Audi is two laps down from them after having suffered a handful of their own issues, while our #09 was two laps down from the Audi. Guerrero had done well to minimize the time lost after picking up bodywork damage, now it was down to me and James to try and take the podium from the Audi Sport North America entry.
Thus, as Miquel tried to explain earlier in the day, it was actually easier to race during the extreme darkness of night than in the transitional zone of sunset. Now we have our headlights on, and we see the lights of the cars ahead - neither Sebring, nor Le Mans, have much in terms of overhead lighting - whereas at sunset, there is glare, the headlights don't quite work great, and you have to deal with both the extreme dark and the extreme light. Now you just need to cope with the extreme light. It was weird to get used to not seeing much, but the bit of track illuminated by my headlights and the position of the taillights of the car ahead were actually all that was really necessary. It was almost a minimalist way of racing, but it was working for me, because as I tore through traffic, took those double stint pitstops, and charged through the track, I eventually closed up to the back of the #1 Audi. Coming through Le Mans onto the back straight here at Sebring, I got into the slipstream and closed the gap, diesel twin turbo V12 verses turbodiesel V10, finally overpowering the Audi to overtake into the Sunset bend, pulling off the move. From two laps down to one lap down...now I just need to hand over the car to James Brabham so he can overtake the Audi another two times, once to get back onto the same lap, once to get the position.
We gave it our all, but at 10:30pm on March 21st, 2009, the LMP1 class results of the 2009 12 Hours of Sebring read as follows:
1: #2 Audi Sport Team Joset - Audi R15 TDI - 383 laps.
2: #08 Team Peugeot Total - Peugeot 908 HDi FAP - 383 laps.
3: #1 Audi Sport North America - Audi R15 TDI - 381 laps.
4: #09 Team Peugeot Total - Peugeot 908 HDi FAP - 380 laps.
5: #07 Team Peugeot Total - Peugeot 908 HDi FAP - 356 laps.
6: #9 Patron Highcroft Racing - Acura ARX-02a - 302 laps.
7: #66 Gil de Ferran Motorsports - Acura ARX-02a - 246 laps.
8: #12 Autocon Motorsports - Lola B06/10 - 151 laps.
9: #37 Intersport Racing - Lola B06/10 - 77 laps.
So a fourth place for us and an overall and LMP1 victory for the Audi. The other class winners read as follows:
LMP2: #15 Lowe's Fernandez Racing - Acura ARX-01b - 360 laps.
GT1: #3 Corvette Racing - Chevrolet Corvette C6R - 349 laps.
GT2: #62 Risi Competizione - Ferrari F430GT - 332 laps.
Somewhat embarrassingly for Acura, none of their LMP1 entries were still running at the end of the race, meaning they all fell behind a privateer, LMP2 version of their previous car. Corvette finished not too far behind but that was a given, as they were the only GT1 entries, and then Ferrari's American sports car racing partner, Risi Competizione, took a class win. It's not F1, but it's certainly a prestigious and international field.
Notes:
So, Life at the Speed of Indycar and/or Endurance Racing, what do you think?
Chapter 23: The East and the West
Notes:
Hello, hello everyone! So, like I said way earlier in this whole thing, the divergence from reality is going to increase the further along we go. You could already see some tinkering with the results in the 2008 F1 season, but with us doing Indycar and endurance racing in 2009, things are gonna get even more different from reality. Also, let me know what you think about the Indycar stuff, I'm intrigued.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXIII.
The East and the West.
"You're not racing today?" Daniella asked as we got out of the cars after qualifying on the streets of Saint Petersburg. Airport tracks were apparently a trend in central Florida since even this street circuit had its back stretch and start-finish straight on a municipal airport. I suppose Sebring was good preparation in multiple ways then, because the track was bumpy, the cars were heavy and steered even heavier, and all the cars were so close to each other competition wise. So, with all the obligatory racing driver excuses out of the way, I qualified down in fourteenth. The car directly ahead of me was - and I shit you not - Robert Deschamps because he is apparently trying to race in every open wheel racing series on the planet. The car behind me, meanwhile, was Dani Pieri herself, while Rio Andretti was in eighteenth and Haruki Tanaka in nineteenth. Taking those four cars, it would be easy to say that Andretti Green Racing simply didn't have the pace here on the streets of St. Petersburg, and I actually did the best out of my teammates, but...that's not the whole story. Since the #29 Itaipava Honda driven by our dear teammate Afonso Wagner was all the way up in third. Afonso is a great driver, experienced as hell in the world of Indycar, but that alone isn't enough to explain how he's eleven places ahead of the next closest teammate. I found myself a picked ticked off after qualifying, wanting to have some choice words with the team after I got changed, but instead Dani was trying to make small talk in the changing room.
"No, Peugeot is only doing the prestige rounds. It's just the Acuras and the Lolas out there today." I answered as I changed out of the Kaspersky Lab race suit and into a pair of jean shorts, black converse, a black team polo, and the obligatory black and white cap with the minty green and red Kaspersky Lab logo on the front of it. Daniella was asking about the American Le Mans Series, as they were starting to fire up and prepare for their race now that Indycar qualifying was over. In comparison to Formula One, where teams had bespoke garages right up against the pitlane, Indycar's pitlane was all business, and garages were set towards the paddock rather than the pits, meaning the support races - the ALMS in this case - were in the same area as us, so we could hear those Acura V8s firing up from the prototypes.
"So what are you planning on doing tonight?" Dani asked, now dressed in a black and blue Motorola polo, the shorter woman already dressed, yet still lingering in here.
"I don't know. I was going to finish up here, then go back to my apartment, rest, and probably call my girlfriend, why?" I answered. For a moment I felt dread at my own words, scared that I let something as simple as a fact of my sexuality slip out so easily, but I relaxed just as soon. The fact of the matter is that, even if they didn't get the same tabloids over here, they surely heard about why I was dropped. My sexuality isn't exactly a secret anymore, I mean, the whole fact that I'm here instead of racing the Malaysian Grand Prix for Williams was, essentially, proof that I was gay. In any case, my panic didn't seem to matter at all, because when I turned to face her, Daniella didn't so much as blink. Whether that was because she - much like everyone else - already knew, or because she didn't mind one way or another, I couldn't tell, but I suppose it didn't matter either. If it wasn't going to affect how we interact with each other, then it's not going to affect how we interact with each other, whereas if she does have a problem with it, it's not like I need her approval.
"I was wondering if you wanted to do anything. You've been in America for about a month now but you don't seem to have done much, I thought I might try and show you around, give you a look at what my country has to offer." Dani explained. An invitation to become friends then. I reminded myself that there was no need to be harsh with her, she's not some sort of threat to me, and there being multiple successful female racing drivers can only be a good thing for the world of motorsport. Yes, she won a top-level open wheel race before I did, yes, she was given a Formula One test by Honda - a team that just won an F1 race, but more on that political showdown in a moment - but she's also made it clear that she's primarily an oval racer and she's clearly content with life in Indycar. This isn't some scheme from a rival, it's a teammate trying to be friendly - a teammate who has already voiced her support of me and let me use her motorhome during the Sebring Indycar test - and she's offering to show me around the country where I'll be staying for the next few weeks at minimum.
"What is there to do in Tampa?" I asked, not having seen anything in St. Petersburg or the broader Tampa Bay area to convince me that it was anything more than a rather typical American city. Of course, I'm far from an expert, I've only been here for a little while - and like Dani said, I've spent most of my time either at the apartment or at the Sebring circuit a little bit inland and to the east of here.
"Well for starters, there's a place the team always goes to prepare for the race over a nice dinner, figured you'd want to be there." Daniella offered, inviting me into one of the impromptu traditions of Andretti Green Racing. I'm a foreigner, an outsider, and only here on a part-time basis anyway, so I wasn't sure how much of this I'd be involved in to begin with, but it seemed like Dani at least was content to treat me as if I was a regular teammate.
"Should I dress up?" I asked, not believing I was dressed for a nice dinner in my sponsor-laden teamwear.
"Nah, half the people there will be coming from the race track anyway. We're not exactly a suits and dresses crowd." I was about to argue something about Indycar having plenty of their own formalities and pageantry, but I bit my tongue because, underneath that, yeah this very much reminded me of the kind of stuff you'd see in the junior series in Europe. The kind of stuff you would have seen in Formula One a few decades ago before the glamor image really kicked in, like comparatively modest garage areas, like the pit crew coming over the wall, and like the access that fans get. There were obviously times that they dressed up and had big events, but overall, this wasn't a series I'd ever call rich or elitist, and a lot of team members probably wouldn't fit in at a formal restaurant with reservations and all that. I also noted that, with the heavier cars and higher muscle mass required to drive these cars, the diets weren't quite as regimented as in F1, so having a big dinner before the race? That was actually something possible here. I'm not saying that Indycar drivers eat like slobs or anything like that, simply that they don't make every driver over six foot practically go fasting all race weekend long to keep the weight down to shave a thousandth of a second.
In any case, I found myself dragged to this dinner with the Italian-American brunette driver.
"So how did they do it?" one of the team members asked as we were wrapping up dinner. Most of us finished eating, some were finishing up, and MJ was getting the bill, insisting on paying for everything despite the fact that at least twenty people from Andretti Green Racing were here...without a party reservation or anything like that, we just walked in, and they made it work. Maybe they're just used to this type of stuff going on during a race, but it seemed shocking to me that a restaurant would accept this many people as if it was nothing.
"I don't know all of the details. The fact is that the Honda engine was getting more reliable through 2008 and maybe with the rev limit being another thousand rpm lower this year, they were able to get more comparative performance out of it. Then the whole chassis is built around this double diffuser which basically just means that, when the regulations are meant to shrink and simplify the rear diffusers, they're just using a loophole to bypass those regulations all together." I tried to explain. The fact of the matter is that this Honda situation is a developing story. What we know so far is that, despite the team being on sale and despite Honda having damn near pulled the plug during the offseason, they've turned up with the fastest car. In the hands of James Buxton, the Honda RA109 dominated the Australian Grand Prix and last night - at least over here, thanks to the time zones - they took pole position for the Malaysian Grand Prix as well. 1-2 in Australia while the other Japanese team, Toyota, was third and fourth - and it seems that is permanent with Anthony Harrison's disqualification after overtaking under safety car being decided upon in the days leading up to the Malaysian Grand Prix - while the only other cars to score were Felipe Alvarez for Renault, Tommy Koskinen for Williams, and then the two Toro Rossos, driven by Maximilien Lecroix and Maximilien Longpre because Red Bull evidently has a Max fetish lately.
All of that is to say that after two seasons of Ferrari and McLaren battling it out for the championship with BMW Sauber lurking in the shadows, none of those three teams have any points, and instead the lion's share of the points went to Honda of all teams, who finished ninth in the constructors' championship last year. Then Toyota is second and Williams is fourth...what do all three of these teams have in common? The double diffuser. I'm neither an engineer or an aerodynamicist, but I know enough to say that the 2009 regulations were meant to reduce aerodynamics and improve the cars' ability to follow and race each other closely. The double diffuser, much like many F1 innovations, is technically legal but clearly flies in the face of the spirit of the regulations as it gives teams that rear grip back. Honda is obviously the team that has figured it out best so far, but it is fascinating to look at regardless. The cars look very different, the pecking order looks very different, and unfortunately, the grid looks very different as well, because I'm not on it. Instead, Williams has enlisted Hideki Kitagawa, our former reserve driver and a Toyota development project who qualified down in eleventh in Australia and then crashed out of the race. I'm not guaranteeing I would have done better, I can't do that, but the point is that the seat was mine, and now they've given it to a kid who has failed to give a strong first impression, and because of all that, I'm missing what might just be F1's most chaotic season in years.
"So if that's the key, why don't the other teams just build their own and knock Honda out of the water?" another engineer, a young guy, asked. I suspected he has only raced in Indycar in the spec era, so he doesn't really know the realities of developing a car. I know that Indycar isn't entirely closed off, there are things you can do with the suspension dampeners and all of that to improve the car, but that's small fry compared to what can be done in F1.
"I'm assuming they all are, but if you don't get it right, you're gonna be like Williams or Toyota rather than Honda. The system needs to be integrated into the car and the aerodynamics need to be shaped in a way where all the performance is gained in that double diffuser. Do it wrong and you won't be as effective with it, or you'll have too much drag, or the balance will be all wrong. Honda really found something here and really did do it perfectly. Now they just need to make sure they can capitalize on it before everyone else catches up." I explained. I knew Natasha Tsirinskaya, and she was now getting to sit in on the F1 garage as well as tending to her driving duties with Trident in GP2 Asia, so she knew a little more than I did about the Honda F1 operation. At the same time, I knew Natasha, so I knew more about Honda than the average person did at this stage. These guys? They were just American race team staff. Sure, they all had the Honda badge on their uniforms, but the Honda badge was in a lot of places, and the Indycar side had nothing to do with the F1 side. Sure, the F1 team may be part of the reason why Charlie Michaels has ended up racing here as well, but they're using the Indycar program to further their interests in that case. What they're not doing is giving the Indycar staff all the juicy details about why the Honda Formula One team is all of a sudden so fast and so competitive.
"Do you think Williams can get third with this?" Daniella asked from my right.
"Honestly? No. The top teams are gonna catch up soon enough and Williams is the slowest of the double-diffuser cars, so they'll always be the first one to get gobbled up by everyone else." I answered. Some could argue that my answer was unnecessarily bitter thanks to the fact that Williams dropped me, but I prefer to think of myself as a realist, and in the case of Formula One, those with money and power are always going to find their way back to the front. Williams does not have money and power, neither does Honda to be fair, but Honda at least has the name of a huge manufacturer and the privilege of being the fastest car at the moment. Honda has more of a buffer to the rest of the grid than anyone else, and that means it's easier to imagine Honda going all the way and winning this than it is to expect Williams to be able to establish themselves as the third best car in the field. That being said, seeing the pace that Williams had in Australia, what could I have done? Well Tommy Koskinen qualified in fifth and Hideki Kitagawa down in thirteenth - raised to eleventh after penalties for other drivers - so I can imagine I would've been able to squeak into Q3, probably around eighth or ninth, and then in the race? Who knows. A late race safety car thanks to Maximilian Renner's Red Bull crashing into Piotr Kaminski's BMW Sauber meant the gaps were tiny in the end, so if I was running in the top ten, I could have finished anywhere from the podium to the lower end of the points.
"Hmm...yeah, probably not. Especially because they lost such a good driver." Daniella said, seemingly for the sole purpose of flattering me.
"Such a good driver who could only manage fourteenth...how'd you do it?" I voiced my frustrations at qualifying before finally looking over the table and confronting Afonso Wagner for the thing that's been bothering me ever since Indycar qualifying.
"Me? I barely got to the second round and once I did, I just took advantage of the clear track. This is normal stuff for Indycar Tamara, the hardest part isn't qualifying in the fast nine, the hardest part is getting there." Afonso explained, the veteran trying to impart some wisdom on the highly rated European rookie. Indycar had this qualifying system where the grid is split into groups, these groups go out and qualify, and the fastest cars transfer over to the next session, then the final session whittles it down to just the fastest nine drivers who qualify. I guess that kind of made sense, qualifying was never my strong suit - even in my imagination of what I would've done in Australia, I'm still a few tenths behind Tommy Koskinen in what would be our third year as teammates - and that was amplified in a spec series where everyone was so close, and the areas of development were these oddly specific things like suspension components. Considering I outqualified every other teammate of mine, I should be happy, but it's hard to ignore the fact that I'm fourteenth and he's third. Afonso Wagner has been racing in this series since 1998, he's been winning races since 1999, and he became champion with Andretti Green Racing back in 2004, so perhaps I shouldn't be all that surprised...but I can't help how I feel.
"Hey," Dani got my attention "Why are you so hung up on qualifying anyway? There's only one point for pole and Gordon got it, not Afonso. You can score as much as 52 points tomorrow...getting pole literally doesn't matter. No one expects us to stay back here in the race."
"Okay, okay." I relented, deciding to let it go. It was a spec series, so I was taking that as it meant I needed to perform instantly, I needed to prove I was better than all of these drivers in the same car, but the reality of the situation is a lot different. The fact that it's a spec series means everything is super tight and that is going to make it so hard for raw talent to shine through the experience and the far from insignificant raw talent of these Indycar drivers. I don't need to dominate this series to be recognized as the driver I am, rather I need to be doing the best I can and making it work. Getting outqualified by Afonso Wagner or not isn't going to make a dramatic difference in my chances to get back into Formula One because it's going to be ridiculously hard regardless of how I do. Most people in F1 don't care, and those who do care - like Michael Coronet I imagine, because he's demonstrated that he believes in me and wants to see me back in F1 - are watching closely enough to understand the nuances of this sport and the level of competition.
Having a friend at the head of McLaren can only be a good thing, even if my chances are still slim. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to be offered a seat at McLaren - they're a top team with big international investors, and big corporations involved, most prominently Vodafone and Mercedes, title sponsor and factory engine supplier, so even if Michael wants to give me a seat outright, there are all kinds of considerations that can put an end to that - but they're a powerful force in the sport. McLaren has the power to go and persuade a team to sign me. Just for an example - and this is completely baseless as far as I know - McLaren could go to BMW Sauber and say they intend to sign Piotr Kaminski for 2010 to replace Jyri Kaasalainen, and then to help make the deal work, McLaren can say "you can have Jyri if you want him, or Tamara Shchegolyayeva is a free agent" and that might be enough to make BMW relent and agree, letting McLaren buy out Piotr's contract and signing me as a good enough replacement. I'm not sure how realistic an example that is - Jyri Kaasalainen might be able to pull through this season and do something good for Mclaren, or BMW might pull out of the sport because of the financial situation and thus make this example impossible - but that's just an example of what McLaren can do. Worst case scenario, Force India now uses Mercedes engines and McLaren gearboxes, so if there really is nothing better, Michael can help me get a seat with their technical partner. I wasn't willing to race for Force India based on their 2008 performance level, but maybe with these new regulations and McLaren partnership - as well as my time away from F1 - I'll be willing to accept it now. I don't know what the 2010 Formula One season is going to look like because right now, I'm still getting used to the fact that I'm not part of the 2009 Formula One season. Instead, I'm doing a partial season in Indycar, and tomorrow will be my first race.
"Drivers! Start your engines!" the most famous words in racing tore its way down the grid, followed immediately by a cacophony of 3.5L Honda V8 engines. On pole was the #02 McDonalds Rahal Letterman Lanigan Honda of Gordon Rahal, lining up next to the #19 Z-Line Furniture Dale Coyne Racing Honda of Johnny Willis, and the #29 Itaipava Andretti Green Racing Honda of Afonso Wagner was third. I was lining up on the seventh row, next to the #06 Hole in the Wall Camps Rahal Letterman Lanigan Honda of Robert Deschamps. I didn't intend to stay back here though, and I don't think my teammates behind me intend to either, because as much as they all said that it's normal that Afonso Wagner was ahead of us, we were all hungry to close that gap. We circulated behind the pace car - safety car, just labeled differently because it's America - and finally got released for the rolling start.
Gordon Rahal lead going into turn one but a little bit of bumping and barging through turn one dropped him down to fourth. As I reached the corner, I certainly saw why those kinds of things happened, as the wide airport straight narrowed into a tight, twisty acute-angle corner to the right before building the speed back up and flinging it over to the left through turn two. With concrete walls on either side, we sped single file through a series of unnumbered kinks before finally reaching turn three. Coming onto the straight on first street, I got into the draft of Deschamps and chased him down towards turn four, finally peeking on the inside and making the overtake happen. Turn four to the right got me ahead and then the twisty section - with turn five to the left, then a fast chicane of six and seven - solidified my position. I got back on the brakes for turn eight to the right and then again to the right for turn nine as we negotiated the grid pattern streets to come onto Bayshore Drive. Getting back up to the speed, climbing up the paddle-shift gearbox, and then coming down the flat-out kink to the left halfway down the street. I glanced in my mirrors, making sure nobody was behind me, then I got onto the brakes for turn ten, swinging to the left. Speeding down once again as we reached the airport section, then reaching the final chicane with turns eleven to the right and turn twelve to the left. A brief shoot followed before turns thirteen and fourteen, effectively two apexes of the same long corner coming back onto the runway that formed the start-finish straight with the pitlane on the right side.
One lap down, ninety-nine to go.
The first stint of the race was relatively calm, with Charlie Michaels crashing out on the second lap being the only real incident of the race. The former Honda GP2 development driver's crash elevated me up to twelfth, then in the next few laps I would pass the Panther Racing car of Callum Walters and the Dreyer & Reinbold car of Derrick Munnings, working my way up into the top ten. I took my pitstop a bit early, on lap twenty-eight, switching off the red option tyres onto the black prime tyres - I wanted the better performance at the beginning of the race to work my way up the field, now the second stint was going to be my long way so that I can be on the fast tyres again at the end of the race - and launched out of the pits to start my next stint. It was even harder to be fast now because the car was super heavy again thanks to the fuel, and I had even less grip to act against the weight, but the same goes for everyone else, so it was an even match. That was until a wrench was thrown into the works. As Daniella was working her way through traffic on fresh tyres when she got into a major incident. Rafael Martins for Dragon Racing, Lorenzo Magalhaes for KV Racing Technology, and Dani Pieri for Andretti Green Racing all barreled into turn one, all three of them trying to be the one ahead going into the twisty bit heading onto First Street, and, as to be expected, it ended in disaster. Three cars out of the race in one corner and the caution - yellow flag - came out, along with the pace car. For the next seven laps, the race was neutralized as the safety team tried to clean up a massive mess.
"Alright, we think we can extend the second stint because of this. Save as much fuel as you can under the pace car." Jacob DeStefano, my race engineer, explained. I grumbled a bit, not wanting to be on these tyres for the majority of the race, but I understood what the idea was, and hopefully if I acted properly under the pace car, I wouldn't lose performance because of it. So I weaved down the straights, keeping heat in my Firestone tyres, but I coasted as much as possible, and when I needed to use the throttle, I was gentle and using as high of a gear as I could without risking stalling the engine, doing everything I needed to do in order to extend the fuel and the tyres while also keeping them warm enough to ensure that I'll be competitive on the restart. When the time came, I set my eyes firmly on the Conquest Racing entry driven by Italo-Canadian veteran Maximilien Trapani. I couldn't overtake before the green flag, and from there it was a short run down to turn one, but with a little bit of bravery and some late braking, I was able to pull ahead into turn one. Trapani, not wanting to cause a repeat of the incident that caused this restart, did eventually back out of it, deciding that it was more important to play it safe and remain in the race than it was to fight me. In any case, I was now up into the top nine.
That being said, I didn't exactly go on an aggressive charge quite yet, because I needed to make these tyres last. The same was true of most of the cars around me, thus the top fifteen cars or so - basically those of us who were still on the lead lap and still in contention - basically found themselves running within a second of the car ahead, all of us close, but none of us willing to put in that extra little ten percent necessary to overtake. The tyre life and the push-to-pass system right now reminded me of that old video game trope where you have an immensely useful item that you don't use in case it may prove to be useful later. So that seemed to define the middle of the race quite well, and I think some of us were starting to think about when we'd make our stops when the caution came out for the second time on lap seventy-one. This time, it was Evie Carpentier crashing out in turn ten. She was okay, but it may have screwed up some strategies today, because what Indycar does during a yellow is close the pitlane until the grid is bunched up, and at that point, taking a stop is suicidal, since it sends you all the way to the back of the field. I was fine, because I had been planning on going long anyway, but I can't be sure how it's going to affect my rivals.
This is especially the case with the battle for the lead heating up. There was the #12 Marlboro Team Penske of Australian Damian Peters, then the #29 Itaipava Andretti of Brazilian Afonso Wagner, and Briton Johnny Willis was hanging on to third place for Dale Coyne Racing. Once again, the gaps between them were erased and they would be all over each other on the restart. As would Gordon Rahal, with the young American driver looking to redeem himself after that failed launch off from pole at the beginning of the race. Gordon's time wouldn't come on the restart though, because the grid was rather orderly on the restart. Even I didn't manage to pull anything off on this lap, getting close enough to battle the Brazilian Vittorio Marques ahead, but not quite being close enough to pull anything off just yet. As we got back onto the start-finish straight to start the next lap, I had more of a chance, and this time I tried to see what I could do to the outside. I wasn't going to make it simple though, so first I feigned to the inside, making sure that Vittorio wasted his defensive move on blocking me from going to his right, and then I swerved to the left, trying to send it around his outside despite the presence of the walls. I had to back out of that one, but it sure got Vittorio's attention, and I was able to pull the move off on First Street going into turn four. Now it was just a handful of cars ahead of me...unfortunately, these were the veterans and frontrunners of this series.
First of all, there was the aforementioned Damian Peters, who was not only a success in his own right, but he was driving for the juggernaut that is Team Penske, perhaps the largest and most successful racing team to come out of North America. Up next you had Afonso Wagner leading the charge in the name of two great names in American motorsport: Andretti, a name that needs no introduction, and Green, referring to a pair of brothers who, with a little bit of help from Kool cigarettes, assembled one of the finest racing teams in CART history in the late 1990s. In third place was still Johnny Willis for Dale Coyne, who had led the first stint of the race but had fallen behind the Penske and Andretti cars due to strategy. In fourth place ran 2007 IRL series champion Marino Franzese, the Italo-Scottish driver freshly returning from NASCAR. In fifth place was the 2008 IRL series champion and Marino's Target Chip Ganassi Racing teammate, Charles Armstrong of New Zealand. The #3 Team Penske entry was sixth in the hands of Demetrio Colombo, the two-time Indianapolis 500 winner having just barely made the race thanks to an offseason tax dispute relating to some confusion over the contract he signed all the way back in 1999. Pole-sitter Gordon Rahal was immediately ahead of me in seventh place, having lost out on the start and now again on the restart. Every single driver ahead of me had a race win, several of them had race wins at this very track, and about half of them were series champions. Like I said, these were the veterans and the frontrunners of Indycar racing.
For now I bid my time, simply running behind the Rahal car for the time being. The Newman/Haas/Lanigan team had been a Champ Car loyalist team to the very end, dominating that series, and really taking a beating due to the IRL and Champ Car unification in 2008. Newman/Haas did make it through the 2008 IRL season with two wins, but overall, they weren't competitive enough and their debts were too large. Newman/Haas Racing collapsed, and Rahal Letterman Racing took the opportunity to revitalize their struggling team with Newman/Haas' assets, with investor Mike Lanigan also jumping ship to Rahal. This coincidentally also had the effect of bringing Gordon Rahal over to his father's team, along with Robert Deschamps who I overtook more recently in the race. In any case, coming onto the start-finish straight, I got into the slipstream of the RLL car and tried to overtake, but he used his push-to-pass system to defend while - thanks to having extended the middle stint so much - I simply didn't have the fuel to be doing the same thing. Like A1GP, this series has an overtake button, but unlikely A1GP, this series has in-race refueling, so it wasn't like the team prepared before the race to have the perfect amount of extra fuel for the necessary overtakes, and instead, I just had the fuel available to me to work with. Right now, that meant that I couldn't push-to-pass for now, but that was going to change as I pulled into the pits on lap seventy-eight.
"Alright, stop on your marks." Jacob DeStefano spoke up over the radio as I pulled into the box and the car went up on its own pneumatic jacks - a neat bit of technology here in the Indycar series - while the team got to work, taking off the tyres and replacing them, while the fuel man filled the car up with the 98% ethanol fuel. Indycar pit crews weren't as big as Formula One, but still larger than A1GP, so the stop went relatively quickly, and I was released back on track on the red option tyres for the final twenty-two laps of the race. I worked on getting up to speed and getting heat into the tyres, but it wasn't an easy prospect on a track like this where the pit exit immediately opens up onto a twisty section with walls on either side. That quickly became evident two laps later when Charles Armstrong experienced a rare mistake, clattering into the wall on cold tyres and bringing out the caution once again.
"Safety car again?" I asked over the radio, wondering if this was usual for the Indycar series.
"There's a saying over here than yellows breed yellows. That's even more true now that we're getting close to the end of the race. Keep your head on a swivel." Jacob warned, making it clear that, while this stuff didn't always happen, when an Indycar race got chaotic, it got very chaotic. I sighed and got ready, spending six laps behind the pace car as the #9 Target Chip Ganassi Honda was cleaned up and pulled off the track, and then getting ready for the restart. I put my foot down and charged after Gordon Rahal for seventh place, but the American was having none of it, already having lost enough places in turn one for today. I backed out of it, seeing the firm but fair more from Rahal, and simply tucking in behind him instead. The cars behind us weren't quite so lucky though, because an aggressive attempt by Haruki Tanaka to overtake Callum Walters on the outside ended with both cars retiring out of the race, bringing the yellow flag back out mere moments after the last caution just ended. Yellows breed yellows indeed, and now there were only three Andretti Green Racing cars left in the race.
Three would turn into two when Mario Andretti III bumped the wall, broke his suspension, and took to the escape road on the restart, but mercifully that didn't bring the safety car out again. Instead, I was able to get back into the groove of things, pulling alongside Rahal in the twisty bit at the top of the track, and then overtaking him coming out of turn nine and onto Bayshore drive. Now it was Penske-Andretti-Coyne-Ganassi-Penske-Andretti as the top three teams in Indycar right now, along with the ambitious minnow that is Dale Coyne Racing, ran at the front of the race. Running out of time, I tuned out everything else, not caring about the order of the race, not caring about the car behind me, and ignoring the voice of DeStefano in my ear, instead, all I was focusing on was the track around me and the car ahead of me. The whole top ten seemed to be within five seconds of each other in a way I haven't really gotten experience since karting, so just like karting, I sunk fully into the zone, letting that hunger for a good result - that hunger for maybe even a win, take over and letting it guide me. Clip the kerb, skirt as close to the wall as possible, get on the throttle as soon as the rear grip will allow, and braking as late as possible, and doing this over and over and over again until, on the final lap, I pulled alongside the Brazilian in turn one. A game of chicken, Penske vs. Andretti, two cars going into one lane - one a young rookie in her first Indycar race, the other an experienced veteran in his tenth season with Team Penske at the top of the Indycar world - and, as it often does, experience lead to caution. Colombo knows that two cars can't go into this corner, and he knows that, with Penske, he's competing for a season championship, while I'm just doing a handful of races. For what I'm doing, a fifth place means a lot, but for what he's doing? He needs to collect consistent points over and over again, so he settled for sixth. 1.8 miles later, we crossed the finish line to complete the race, and fifth place was mine.
The top ten of the 2009 Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg reads as follows:
1: Damian Peters - Brisbane, Australia - Marlboro Team Penske - 50 points.
2: Afonso Wagner - Sao Paulo, Brazil - Itaipava Andretti Green Racing - 40 points.
3: Johnny Willis - Rotherham, Great Britain - Z Line Furniture Dale Coyne Racing - 35 points + 2 for leading the most laps.
4: Marino Franzese - Edinburgh, Great Britain - Target Chip Ganassi Racing - 32 points.
5: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Almaty, Kazakhstan - Kaspersky Lab Andretti Green Racing - 30 points.
6: Demetrio Colombo - Sao Paulo, Brazil - Marlboro Team Penske - 28 points.
7: Gordon Rahal - Columbus, Ohio - McDonalds Rahal-Letterman - 26 points + 1 for pole position.
8: Derrick Munnings - Harrogate, Great Britain - Charter Dreyer & Reinbold Racing - 24 points.
9: Vittorio Marques - Brasilia, Brazil - ABC Supply Co. AJ Foyt Enterprises - 22 points.
10: Maximilien Trapani - Montreal, Canada - King Tut Conquest Racing - 20 points.
Indycar has a weird system where eleventh place then gets 19 points and it goes down sequentially to eighteenth place, at which point everyone at or below that mark gets twelve points. Well, eighteenth to twenty-fourth gets twelve and then twenty-fifth and below gets ten, but there were only twenty-two cars in the race today so that part doesn't matter. In addition to that, the driver who led the most laps - in this case Johnny Willis - receives two bonus points, while the driver who scored pole - in this case Gordon Rahal - receives a bonus point. I suppose if I was doing the full season, I might concern myself with the entire points situation and how the championship develops, but with what I'm doing, concerning myself with the top ten is enough. I'm only running half the schedule, so I don't factor into the championship situation, and Indycar doesn't have a team championship in the same way that Formula One does. Essentially, I get to act selfish in this series because all I'm really racing for is the glory, keeping my skills sharp and my name known in the world of motorsport while I try to find my way back into Formula One. In that respect, finishing fifth in my first Indycar race, less than three seconds off the lead? That was a wonderful start.
"Ugh," I made an elegant sound as I entered Daniella's bus and collapsed on the little couch she made in the motorhome's kitchen.
"Hey, I'm the one that crashed out, you got a top five in your first race, you don't get to make a bad noise." Dani argued, walking into the kitchen and looking down at me with a bemused expression on her face. The Motorola driver being amongst the first casualties of the race, and only having 12 points to her name despite the fact that she'll be contesting the whole series championship.
"The bad noise is for my arms, not the result. Everything hurts." I explained, feeling a dull ache all the way up my arms. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I'm realizng that every corner on that circuit I just did one-hundred times. Sure, something like a fourth of the race was spent under caution, but that still requires moving the car around with no power steering, even if it is at lower speed than the actual racing laps.
"Yeah, Indycar will do that to you. Not quite the posh world of Formula One, is it?" Dani smirked, mocking me.
"Says the one who was making excuses the second she got out of the car at her only F1 test." I noted, remembering that day at Suzuka where we had our first conversation, with me still reeling from being outed and Daniella being rewarded for having won for Honda at the Indy Japan at Motegi earlier than year. That's where she told me all that stuff about how she was more of an oval driver and being satisfied with racing in the US rather than dreaming about coming over to Europe.
"And what were you doing after qualifying?" Daniella retorted, smirk deepening.
"You're lucky I'm tired," I mock-threatened before turning onto my back and texting Roksana.
Finished the race. P5. Happy but very tired. I'll call you on Skype later. I sent, not having the energy in me for proper grammar.
Okay. Congrats! Roksana responded. I sighed with relief when she kept her response simple, not having the energy for a long text conversation right now.
"That bad, huh?" Dani asked from behind me.
"What do you mean?" I asked, confused.
"That was a pretty happy sigh for someone who just finished talking to their girlfriend." Dani pointed out, hinting that maybe me and Roksana's relationship wasn't going well. I narrowed my eyes at her, thinking it was a bit presumptuous of her to be commenting on my love life like this.
"It's not like that. I just don't have the energy to text her right now, I'll call her later when I feel better." I countered, dismissing any notion that things weren't going well. Yes, it was different to be long distance now and yes, I could tell that sometimes Roksana wasn't particularly happy with it, but I wasn't all that happy either. This was a difficult time that we'd have to live through and then hopefully I'll get back to Formula One and everything will be back to the way it used to be. This is a temporary hurdle, nothing more, and it is perfectly natural to be socially drained sometimes, especially after more than two hours straight in a high intensity situation strapped in a race car that you're still not fully used to yet.
"Alright, alright." Daniella backed off before changing the subject "You gonna head back to your apartment to rest?"
"In a little bit..." I responded, just closing my eyes for a moment as I laid on the couch.
"If you say so..." the American girl shrugged, heading to the back of the motorhome, leaving me to nap in her kitchen.
"Hey, sorry I'm late. I just got home." I got on my laptop and started the video call before I was even settled into my apartment. I was still even wearing my black, white, and mint green Kaspersky Lab polo as I sat down.
"It's okay, how did the race go?" Roksana asked, keeping her voice even.
"Pretty good, I think. I worked my way up the field, stayed out of trouble, and got a good result because of it. The only downside is that my arms now feel like limp lead." I answered, proud of what I accomplished in the race, but exhausted regardless of that. Formula One could be exhausting too, but it was physical in another way - mainly asking your neck to take the kind of forces that a fighter jet pilot does over and over again - and requires a different set of muscles and skills than Indycar. In Formula One, it's important to be as light as possible to save weight, but to have a strong enough neck to bear the weight of the g forces through Maggots and Becketts, for instance, whereas with Indycar it's all upper body strength. An Indycar driver doesn't need to have as strong of a neck because their cars don't have the aerodynamics to reach the same g forces we do, however, with a heavy car and no power steering, they can also afford to be taller and more muscular than we are. On first glance, Indycar doesn't require the same fitness level as F1, but on closer examination, it requires just as much, if not more fitness, merely invested in different areas. There are drivers succeeding in Indycar who are at a height and weight that would almost disqualify them from Formula One competition simply because the teams would rather have a smaller driver to build some ballast around. A strategically placed weight is always better than the weight distribution of a person.
"After that, it was a matter of some media stuff, a few team meetings, and then I went to Dani's motorhome and just crashed there until I had the energy to drag myself back here." I continued, getting into the post-race aspect of the day.
"Who's Dani?" Roksana perked up, face colored with suspicion in a way that made me want to role my eyes.
"My teammate Roksana, Daniella Pieri? We've talked about her before." I mentioned, quickly moving to shoot down any jealousy and make it clear that we were just friends - and even then, that had more to do with Dani's insistence on getting to know me and befriending me - part of me felt opposed to even entertaining this line of question, but I suppose that if I can make her feel better, I can tolerate explaining myself one more time.
"Oh, sorry. I don't mean to be suspicious; I just get worried with me being here and you, well...being over there." Yurasova responded, bringing all of this back to the core issue at hand: the fact that Roksana is in Europe and I'm in the United States where we can't really do much to help the other.
"Look, I'm not happy about it either. In a perfect world, I'd still be in F1, racing for Williams, living out of Monaco, all of that. But I can't have that right now, and this is the next best thing. I finished fourth at the 12 Hours of Sebring and fifth here in Long Beach, these are the best results I've been getting since I've been in GP2 Asia, and it's getting some kind of attention. My name is in magazines and on websites again, and you have to admit that's progress." I explained, trying to drill the idea into her head that this was an unfortunate necessity for my career. I won a race in A1GP and that helped reinforce my confidence, but the truth is it didn't get any media attention. Nothing matches the level of media attention in F1, at least not in terms of motorsport coverage, but these big endurance races and Indycar? It gets eyes, and some of those eyes happen to be in the Formula One paddock.
There weren't any seat changes in 2008 - other than Super Aguri collapsing I suppose - and I couldn't find a seat at the end of the season other than Force India, but in 2009? There seems to be blood in the water in a way that there hadn't been before. Filipe Yannick was somewhat underwhelming in 2008 and he hasn't scored points in either of the first two races, while Felipe Alvarez had a fifth place from Australia. In the past few years, Bernardo Fulvia has demonstrated that he is willing to drop a driver midseason - he did it to Ivan Tripoli in 2004 after all - so Renault might just be open. Then there is Maximilien Lecroix has likewise had underwhelming results in F1, and he already has one foot in endurance racing anyway, so there might be an opening there as well. A backmarker team like Force India or Toro Rosso is unacceptable for my future, but as a stopgap on the way to a seat elsewhere? I think I could live with that. If Toro Rosso meant a strong chance of getting into Red Bull Racing or if Force India meant a chance of getting into their technical partners McLaren - something I considered once before - then that would be acceptable. The reason I avoided Force India is because I don't want to become known as a backmarker, but in this theoretical situation, I could become known as the future of a bigger team.
"I know, I know, I know. Your career, your progress." Roksana practically spat the words.
"What's that supposed to mean? You knew from the start that I was a racing driver, you knew from the start that I've spent my whole life trying to be the best racing driver I can be. Asking me not to do everything I can to get back into F1 would be like asking you to close your magazine." I countered, not liking the fact that she was being so dismissive of my career. That's what I didn't get about this whole dispute - what did Roksana want? I understood that she wanted me to be home more and for this desperate, obsessive period of trying to claw my way back into the sport to end, but I wanted it to end too. Did she think that I enjoyed being outside of F1? Like I said, if it were up to me, I'd still be at my Williams and I would have sat on the grid in Malaysia during that long, long rain delay that finally lead to them stopping the race after 31 laps and awarding half points.
"It's more than just careers or magazines Tamara, we're supposed to be together. Since losing your seat, you've gone to southeast Asia to race in a series you didn't even like all that much, and now you've put an ocean between us." Roksana pointed out. In retrospect, I suppose she was right about the A1GP thing, the World Cup of Motorsport really didn't work out the way I was hoping for, and while there was definitely some talent there and an intriguing concept in theory, it just wasn't the caliber of racing I was looking for in practice. That being said...how was I supposed to know that at the time? I went out to China and Malaysia with the express purpose of taking advantage of an opportunity and, in that pursuit, I won a race. It ended up not being something I wanted to continue or something that did all that much for my career - other than facilitating the introduction between me and MJ Andretti - but Ernesto Signorelli was able to put it together for me a week after the end of the F1 season. So yes, it didn't turn around the way I wanted to and it put a strain on our relationship, I admit that, but it all came for a reason. This came for a reason as well, and I already feel better about it after a single endurance race and a single Indycar race than I did after four races across two rounds of A1GP.
"I know, I know. I hear you, and like I said, I don't like it either. It's for a reason though, and in a few weeks, I'll be back in Europe for Spa and Le Mans. We'll be back together in Monaco, and I'll spend as much time with you as I can." I tried to be as persuasive as possible, making it clear I was listening to her, explaining myself, and giving a solution in sight.
"You promise?" Roksana asked with a sigh, probably not believing me entirely, but willing to give it a shot.
"I promise." I nodded, meaning every word of it. This turned into a pretty heated argument for a long-distance video call on a Sunday afternoon, but I think we ended on a pretty good note considering the lows we reached in this discussion. This isn't easy for me either, believe me, I would much rather be at home with my beautiful girlfriend than at this strange St. Petersburg apartment with its spartan furniture.
"Can you make it out to James?" asked an English accent of all things as we made our way through the paddock here in Long Beach two weeks later. Rio was taking pictures with some fans to my left, Dani was throwing caps into the crowd for fans to take as souvenirs, while here a teenager was asking me to sign a Williams hat for him. It wasn't necessarily what I expected to see in California, but I suppose he's a transplant from England to begin with. Furthermore, even if there is no USGP on the calendar right now, having an American champion in the form of Anthony Harrison is surely growing the sport. Also, while I'm not sure how this is looking with the global economic situation, but the plan for Vision60 was to have two new races in the US - an American Grand Prix just across the river from New York City in Port Imperial, New Jersey, and a Grand Prix in Miami, taking the sport to the area that Harrison calls home - so surely that means that F1 sees a growing audience here as well. Considering that I got a lot of attention simply because I was the only girl in the sport and turned out to be competitive, I shouldn't be too surprised that people recognize me for my F1 success, even if I am coming over to race at a different series. Maybe it would be different if it was the domestic behemoth that is NASCAR, but at least in the world of Indycar, people do seem to be aware of the other series going on in the world. The fact that Indycar has a very international field probably doesn't hurt either in that regard.
"Of course." I accepted, signing my name across the blue part of the cap. It was a new cap too, because the cyan was gone - all traces of Kazakhoil removed after they dropped their sponsorship towards the end of last season - and the blue was a bit more vibrant. Other than that, still FedEx Williams-Toyota...and it was easy to imagine that I could be wearing one of those hats as well. In any case, I signed it, returned it to the young fan named James, and tried not to let my inner turmoil show on my face as I gave him a polite smile before continuing down along the perimeter wall in this fan area.
"Hey, there's Tatiana." Dani got my attention and pointed me over to the drivers entering the area behind us. Up front in the red, black, and white Marlboro Team Penske overalls were #3 Demetrio Colombo of Brazil and #12 Damian Peters of Australia, but Penske was running a third car today - and they will also run her at the Indianapolis 500 and select other races this year - that being the #22 Penske Truck Rentals Team Penske Honda of Tatiana Vynnychenko. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine and raised in Edmonton, Canada, the dual national blonde got her first Indycar race a year ago. A scheduling clash during the 2008 open wheel reunification meant that the Honda Indy Japan at Motegi and the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach would be on the same weekend, so Long Beach turned into a Champ Car finale, while the 2007 IRL teams ran at Motegi to fulfill contractual obligations. That is the weekend where Dani won her first and so far, only race, but it also saw Damian Peters win in Long Beach...albeit not for Team Penske, his current team. Peters had committed to jumping ship to IRL for 2008 but when it became apparent that Champ Car was ending and its DP01 chassis would see one final race at this split weekend, Roger Penske granted him special dispensation to drive in Long Beach, drafting in development driver Vynnychenko for Motegi. Tatiana had competed in the 2007 Champ Car Atlantic series, and competed well despite driving for an underfunded team, and she spent 2008 as Penske's junior driver. Now it seems like in 2009 she'll be getting some seat time.
"Hello, I've heard a lot about you." I approached her, trying to be friendly. I saw her blue eyes widen as she saw who I was.
"Wow...I didn't expect you to recognize me." she admitted, blushing a bit "It's not every day you get recognized by a Formula One driver."
"Well...I'm not exactly an F1 driver right now, am I?" I pointed out, trying to help her relax...I'm just me, there is no reason for her to be starstruck, in fact it's making me more awkward to see someone reacting to me in that way "Here we're equals, and from what I hear, you went from last to ninth in your first oval race."
"Oh, that? It was a good car, and I did what I had to do. Shame qualifying was cancelled, and we had to start at the back." she answered casually, having taken a deep breath and composed herself a little bit more. That threw me for a loop to be honest, the fact that she is starstruck at me but thinks back to her first Indycar result and thinks she could have done better? That either means a youthful arrogance that I honestly don't see now, or that this kid really has something.
"How do you think you'll do on the street circuit?" I asked, trying to get a feeling for where she'll be in her second race.
"I don't know. I finished fifth here in 2007 but that was a very different series and a very different car. I think I'll have a better idea of what to expect after qualifying." she answered, giving a surprisingly mature answer for someone who was one: legitimately a teenager, and two: only in her second Indycar race. Then again, the same could be said about Natasha Tsirinskaya. The Kyrgyzstani Honda development driver that I call my cousin is still racing out of Europe, driving for Trident in the GP2 Asia series for a second consecutive season. This time around, Natasha only has two years so far, but with those wins being the feature race at Dubai and the feature in Sepang, along with incredibly consistent results other than that, has given her a commanding lead with just two rounds remaining. For the 2009 GP2 Asia series, the season opened with a race in Dubai, then the Losail International Circuit in nearby Qatar, the Sentul circuit in Indonesia, and the Kari Motor Speedway in India. The second half of the season then consisted of support races for the opening flyaway of F1 - Australia, Malaysia, China, and Bahrain. The year has largely been defined by last year's rookies taking over, with Natasha Tsirinskaya of Trident, Vladimir Alexandrov of ART Grand Prix, and Alfonse Jauffret for DAMS all battling for the title. The experienced trio is joined by a talented rookie class consisting of their teammates, mainly Dubai-born Italian driver Andrea Stratioti for Trident, Mexican Alejandro Gomez for ART, and Brazilian Diogo Magalhaes for DAMS. Experienced drivers Ezequiel Martinez for Coloni-PASS and Vittorio De Filippis for Durango, along with Brazilian Arden rookie Thiago Szymanski, have also shown promise at times, but thus far, Natasha's consistency has kept all the other challengers at bay.
Natasha has won less races than she did last year, but with Honda support and the Trident GP2 Asia program under family friend Giorgio Arezzi really coming into its own, they really have just been at it every weekend. A first and a fourth from Dubai, she would retire from the sprint race at Dubai but a fourth place in the feature race for five points kept her momentum positive, and then she took a pair of third places from the Indonesian round. Second and fourth from Kari Motor Speedway ensured that Tsirinskaya took another eleven points from the south Indian race, followed by two second places during the Melbourne round, adding to Honda's jubilation considering this was the same weekend where James Buxton won the F1 season opener. Given that Andrea Stratioti won the Kari feature race and the Melbourne sprint race, this actually means that Trident has taken a pair of one-two finishes, a remarkable achievement considering that the GP2 Asia program was really only in its second season. A win at the Sepang feature race and a fifth place in the sprint race ensured that Natasha had a strong lead, only failing to score points once. Vladimir Alexandrov and Alejandro Gomez have shown speed for ART at times, being clearly the faster team at times, but they just haven't been able to capitalize on their pace as well as their Italian rivals have. As for DAMS, well the team that took me to the 2006 GP2 Asia title and Yoshikazu Higashiyama to the 2008 title, they seem to have taken a step backwards this season, even with the team having taken three wins thus far this year. In any case, the point of all of this is to say that a teenage driver can be highly impressive with a team that they have been molded into. Tatiana Vynnychenko hasn't been racing as much as she wanted to in 2008, but she has been turned into a proper Penske driver, and the very good, very reasonable driver reflects that. The same kind of growing maturity I've seen from Natasha in the least two years.
"Good answer. Hope you do well out there." I smiled, patting her on the back before we both had to return to our media duties for the day, me following my Andretti teammates, her with her Penske teams. Penske, Andretti, Ganassi, the big three teams of Indycar right now, the ones who have won the 2006, 2007, and 2008 championships, respectively. The three biggest teams in this sport - some of the biggest race teams in America period - and two of them now had female drivers in their lineup. In the case of Andretti Green Racing on road and street courses, we had two women driving. Maybe the problem wasn't the lack of successful women in racing at all, maybe it's just that the female talent was never making it to Formula One. As much as I was able to make a rapid rise to Formula One, Natasha was never all that far behind me, and in the last two years, she has really blossomed into a mighty racing driver. As for Vynnychenko, while Tatiana may look up to me, while she may even consider me an inspiration in a way, the fact remains, by the time I got to F1, she was already in the second tier of Champ Car racing. Had it not been for the series going bankrupt, she very well may have been on the Champ Car grid for 2008. That didn't happen though, Tatiana Vynnychenko only had one major race to her name in 2008, but in 2009, the Canadian-Ukrainian driver is getting an opportunity to show what she could do.
So, what could she do? Qualify on pole apparently. Perhaps it's not too surprising, I mean Team Penske won the first race of the year, and her teammates were both in the top ten as well, but it was still a hugely impressive performance by the rookie. With Marino Franzese in second and Afonso Wagner in third once again, she was certainly in esteemed company at the sharp end of the field. As for me, I got outqualified by the Brazilian yet again, but with my car lining up eleventh on the grid, the margin hadn't been quite as offensive as it was in St. Petersburg. So, on a modified version of the same track that once hosted the United States Grand Prix West, I had the reigning race winner ahead of me - Damian Peters in the #12 Penske, who won both the Long Beach Grand Prix last year and the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg last time out in Indycar - and a young American gunner behind me in the form of Hunter Richardson for Vision Racing. We rolled out of the hairpin and onto Shoreline drive to begin the race, the anticipation building during the rolling start, all of us waiting to see when exactly Tatiana Vynnychenko would start the race. Some drivers, like Rafael Martins, had raced Tatiana in the 2007 Champ Car series, others got to experience her charge up the field in the 2008 Honda Indy Japan at Motegi, but here in the 2009 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach? None of us were quite sure how the rookie driver would handle the start.
Quite well, seemed to be the initial verdict as she secured the lead and forced Marino Franzese to settle for second place through the long, sweeping straight that is Shoreline Drive. Meanwhile, my attention turned from the front of the grid to the middle of the pack where I was, since I swept through the straight behind Damian Peters, and then as it straightened out, I popped into the draft of the Penske. Honda, Mobil 1, Marlboro, and Hugo Boss, combined with the somewhat old school design of the Dallara IR05 chassis, made for a Penske car that looked not too dissimilar to the kind of McLaren Honda that Ayrton Senna would have driven twenty years ago. The challenger looked somewhat newer though, because of the black and white design with the mint green and red Kaspersky Lab logo, my Andretti Green Racing entry was an unmistakably modern entry, and that entry went to the left, outbraked the Penske, and took the position going into the left-hander of turn one. The walls tightened in on either side coming onto Aquarium Way before turn two to the left and turn three to the right through the fountain roundabout took us through one of the most iconic sections of the Indycar version of the Long Beach track. It was iconic, but it was also hard to race here, so through the fountain turns, through turn four to the right, and ten through the faster turn five onto West Shoreline Drive, I was able to solidify my position.
Now back onto another straight, I checked my mirrors for the Penske behind, made sure he wasn't an imminent threat, and then turned my attention to the ninety-degree left-hander of turn six. Turn seven was a slight kink realigning the straight but, ultimately, it was a nothing corner. Then the ninety-degree right-hander of turn eight took us onto East Seaside Way, taking us onto a narrow straight, surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings. It was possible to overtake down here, but it wasn't the easiest point on the track, and nobody was close enough behind me - nor was I close enough to any of the cars ahead - to take the risk on lap one. The East Seaside Way straight ended in the ninety-degree right-hander of turn nine, then we sped out of the corner, throwing them into the left-hand kink of turn nine, consisting of two apexes before finally depositing us into the braking zone for the final hairpin of turn ten. Coming out of the tight hairpin, the pit entry was on the right-hand side, but I continued on down Shoreline Drive to cross the start-finish line to begin lap two. Tatiana Vynnychenko led the race, Marino Franzese was second, and Afonso Wagner was still running in third, while I was down in tenth, staying close to the top pack and waiting to see when I could strike with strategy.
"Box, box, box!" Jacob DeStefano commanded on lap fifteen, slowing starting to use more of the European terminology that I was used to rather than some of the American racing terminology that, sometimes, could come across as being different just for the sake of being different. In any case, with seventy laps remaining, a number of cars that started on the Firestone reds pitted, including myself and Marino Franzese in second. The Target Chip Ganassi Racing #10 and the Kaspersky Andretti Green Racing #25 came back onto track, getting our tyres up to temperature just in time for the first caution of the race. Jose Estevez Jr. of Venezuela, who had been running in fourth for HVM Racing, crashed out on worn tyres before he could pit, screwing over the other cars that intended to pit on lap sixteen - including the likes of Tatiana Vynnychenko. Indycar had a rule that the pits were closed under caution, at least until the whole field bunched up together, and at that point, pitting would lose you a whole bunch of positions and potentially ruin a race. At that point, if you had a fast car and enough fuel to pull it off, it might be better to stay out, chance it, and hopefully build a bit of a gap before pitting. Of course, with frontrunning cars like Marino Franzese behind on fresh tyres, Vynnychenko might not be able to accomplish that.
Tatiana Vynnychenko did exactly what I said and tried to keep it out on track, but reigning Indycar champion Charles Armstrong turned out to be the big loser in all of this, since he needed to pit because of his fuel situation, so the #9 Chip Ganassi Racing entry fell to the back of the field. Estevez crashed out, Armstrong had to pit under caution and suffered for it, so when things were shaking out right before the green flag, the field looked a little bit like this: Tatiana Vynnychenko up front, Afonso Wagner in second who hadn't pit either, Johnny Willis in third, Demetrio Colombo in fourth, Marino Franzese in fifth, Gordon Rahal was in sixth, Maximilien Trapani in seventh, and myself in eighth. A lot of the cars ahead of me were still on worn tyres, meaning that they would either be vulnerable to getting overtaken, or would have to pit soon enough anyway, so the race restarted with Marino and I both attacking. My goal was to get past Trapani and Rahal as soon as possible to then try to coordinate my charge with the Italo-Scottish series champion. The Conquest Racing part-time entry of the Canadian veteran was my first target, and I tried first in turn one, pulled side by side through the tight section - threading the needle through there in rather impressive fashion - before overtaking into the fountain section. I outbraked the Montreal-born driver, took to the kerb, and pulled ahead through turn three, taking the position.
"Nice one, keep moving forward." Jacob encouraged, motivating me to move forward, demonstrating the mental duties of a race engineer. I pursued Rahal through turns four and five, emerging onto West Shoreline Drive in the draft of the McDonalds car, following him through the braking zone of turn six. A moment heading north on the straight before throwing the car to the right onto East Seaside Way, Firestone tyres inches from the barrier as Andretti Green Racing and Rahal Letterman Lanigan went toe to toe down the narrow back straight of the track. It was narrow and not the easiest spot to overtake, but it wasn't exactly easy to pass anywhere around this track, so when we got to the end of the straight, I pulled to the right, outbraked the McDonalds car, and used the twisty bit to consolidate the position. Two positions in the space of one lap, but the next lap would be spent in pursuit of the cars ahead, as Marino Franzese built up a bit of a gap to me in the last lap, but it was erased now because Demetrio Colombo was making it hard on him to pass. These two have been racing each other hard for over a decade - they've been racing each other for so long that the series they race in has changed, both going from CART to the IRL, now unified into the IRL Indycar series. Ten years ago, Marino Franzese was driving for KOOL Team Green, driving a white, green, and cold cigarette sponsored Reynard 99i Honda, while Demetrio Colombo, at the end of the 1999 season, would sign for Marlboro Team Penske. The late 1990s were a low point for Team Penske, struggling with their own factory chassis and the Mercedes-Benz engine program, but with a switch to a heavily modified Reynard chassis for 2000, along with Honda engines, and Demetrio Colombo coming into the team, Penske would begin a resurgence. This resurgence would bring Penske the 2000 and 2001 CART championships, the 2001, 2002, and 2003 Indianapolis 500s - the first two courtesy of Colombo - and would continue even as Team Penske changed allegiances from CART to IRL for the 2002 season.
Indycar is something different now in 2009. Marino Franzese has gone from the Andretti Green Racing team that gave him his 2007 championship to Chip Ganassi Racing, initially racing for their NASCAR team in 2008, but now spearheading their Indycar program alongside the reigning champion. Charles Armstrong wasn't a factor in this race anymore after a strategic blunder, thus it was all Franzese today. Colombo was trying to change that, less for his own sake, more for the fact that his young rookie teammate, Tatiana Vynnychenko, is in a position to win the Long Beach Grand Prix for the captain. Colombo is an experienced driver, a two-time Indy 500 winner, and a team player, and no amount of series switches, cigarette sponsorship controversies, or tax disputes was going to change that. Thus, Demetrio held up Marino as long as possible, and they were now both holding me up now that I arrived on the scene heading in the fountain section. Marlboro, Target, and Kaspersky Labs, an unlikely set of sponsors and a wide variety of liveries, but these were the cars doing battle on the streets of Long Beach, and that battle took us all the way into the next pitstop. Three cars poured into the pits, three cars went up on the jacks, and three sets of tyres were replaced as we all dropped onto the track. Marino and I were both on the Firestone reds to facilitate the final charge, while Demetrio was meant to be on the red as well, except that he experienced a rare mistake on the pitstop, keeping him up on the jacks for a moment longer, a critical moment that was just long enough for him to lose places to us both.
"Walters coming up behind but you should be clear, Afonso is the next car up the road. He's already pitted for the blacks and he's fighting his own fight, but he might help you if it comes down to that." Jacob explained over the radio as Marino Franzese exited the pits, I followed, and Demetrio came out a few seconds behind, the gap just big enough for Englishman Callum Walters to slot in in-between. Tatiana still had the lead for the moment, having yet to pit, while Wagner was second, and Marino and I were racing for third. The fight continued all the way around the circuit, the Andretti car clearly having better pace around Long Beach than we did around St. Petersburg, but would it be enough with laps running out of the race? I wasn't sure. The storylines of the race also seemed to converge as we caught up to Afonso Wagner right as Tatiana Vynnychenko took her pitstop. Coming out onto East Shoreline Drive, the Ukrainian girl was coming out of pit exit, Wagner was coming all he could to block Franzese, and I was trying to get a run going on both of them going into turn one. I committed to the outside once it seemed like Afonso was drifting to the left to create a space for me, but he was stopped as Marino stuck his nose in on the far left anyway, three cars going three-wide with the yellow, white and blue Penske Truck Rentals #22 of Tatiana Vynnychenko mere feet in front of us.
Franzese took the inside in the braking zone, taking advantage of the positioning, while I had to brake earliest thanks to my compromised position. I will give credit to the Scottish driver, Marino saw was Afonso, and I were trying to do, and he quickly turned it against us, taking the position and leaving me to negotiate the fountain section stuck immediately behind my teammate on the worst tyres. As for Franzese, well, he was on warmed up tyres, on the faster of the two compounds, and on this slow section that was dependent on mechanical grip, Franzese closed right up to the back of Tatiana's car. As we came onto West Shoreline Drive, I could look over the car ahead of me to see the Chip Ganassi #10 overtaking Vynnychenko through turn six. Poor girl, she took pole position in her second race, she lead the majority of the race up until this point, but thanks to Marino and I getting essentially free pitstops at the beginning of the race, her strategy was compromised from the very start. Vynnychenko did everything in her power to build a gap, even managing to get her pitstop done before any of us passed her, but it just wasn't enough of a gap to cushion the suffering phase coming out on the new tyres, trying to get them up to temperature. It was a shame for her, but the race goes on, and right now, it's me and my teammate competing for the podium.
Afonso Wagner is as close to a team leader as Andretti Green Racing has. He's the oldest active driver, has the most wins, and the Judeo-Brazilian driver is one of the most liked and respected drivers in Indycar period. Wagner comfortably outqualified me in St. Petersburg and here in Long Beach, but I was always, always better in the race than in qualifying, and here, even as my arms are beginning to ache and the physical aspect of Indycar was starting to take its toll on my puny little body - at least compared to some of the strong, relatively muscular drivers in Indycar, at least when compared to something like Formula One where lightness is emphasized over raw strength - I was determined to show why I had that reputation. So, on the very next lap, coming onto East Shoreline Drive on the run down to turn one, I got firmly in Afonso's slipstream, dumped the last of my push-to-pass into the overtake, and pulled ahead, getting the move done before I even reached the braking zone, and then getting on the brakes later than he did just to guarantee he didn't have a chance. After that, it was a matter of checking my mirrors, keeping the car out of the walls, and crossing the finish line to end my first ever Long Beach Grand Prix - and my second Indycar race - in third position.
The top ten of the 2009 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach read as follows:
1: Marino Franzese - Edinburgh, Great Britain - Target Chip Ganassi Racing - 50 points.
2: Tatiana Vynnychenko - Kyiv, Ukraine - Penske Truck Rentals Team Penske - 40 points + 1 for pole position, + 2 for leading the most laps.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Almaty, Kazakhstan - Kaspersky Andretti Green Racing - 35 points.
4: Afonso Wagner - Sao Paulo, Brazil - Itaipava Andretti Green Racing - 32 points.
5: Callum Walters - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - National Guard Panther Racing - 30 points.
6: Mario Andretti III - Nazareth, Pennsylvania - 7/11 Andretti Green Racing - 28 points.
7: Demetrio Colombo - Sao Paulo, Brazil - Marlboro Team Penske - 26 points.
8: Daniella Pieri - Chicago, Illinois - Motorola Andretti Green Racing - 24 points.
9: Robert Deschamps - Rotterdam, Netherlands - Hole in the Wall Rahal Letterman - 22 points.
10: Maximilien Trapani - Montreal, Canada - King Tut Conquest Racing - 20 points.
"Woo! Good race everybody, good race. We really can come through the field on these races, really happy with that. Thank you." I thanked the team as I pulled into the pits at the end of the race, very satisfied with my performance, and well aware of the fact that this was going to be our last race together for the next while as Indycar went on a string of oval races, while I headed back to Europe to work with Peugeot on the Spa 1000km and, after that, on the big one, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The team seemed to know that well, because as I pulled the car to a stop and shut off the engine, members of the team were there to greet me. I was already getting pat on the back and congratulated by mechanics as I was standing up in the car and putting the steering wheel back on, and things only went up from there, getting two hugs from mechanics before shaking hands with Jacob DeStefano.
"Nice job kid, this way." MJ Andretti stepped into the picture, congratulated me before ushering me over to the series officials as I joined the podium three in the various media interviews. Marino looked happy and pumped-up after a good performance, taking his first victory since his return to Indycar racing, while Tatiana Vynnychenko looked more stoic than anything. The blonde did offer me a nod and a smile as she was getting her radio ear buds out and wiping the sweat from her face. I didn't get the chance to look at her for long though, because moments later they put me in front of a microphone and a network TV reporter.
"Good race for you Tamara, you came from eleventh to third and defeated your teammate to take the final spot on the podium, how does it feel?" he asked.
"Well...it feels good. These were my first two races, but this is also a significant percentage of my season. I am only doing the road and street courses, so I really need to maximize these results, so scoring a fifth and a third is definitely the best way to do that. The uhh...the #25 Kaspersky Lab Honda really is an impressive machine, and I can't wait to be back in the car in July." I answered. I did blush in embarrassment just a little bit as MJ Andretti gave me a look mid interview, reminding me to mention the team's sponsor. American motorsport had this weird thing where it was customary to mention the title sponsor during interviews, and in this case, the ones paying the bills were my car sponsor, Kaspersky, and our engine partner, Honda. Considering that Honda is the only engine provider in this series, I did question why it was necessary to mention that we got engines from them, but as it turns out, Penske, Chip Ganassi, Andretti, and RLL all have technical alliances with Honda, meaning that we get our engines for free rather than needing to lease them like everyone else does. That did make more sense to me, but I think it also went some distance towards explaining why these four teams happened to be among the top contenders in this spec series famed for its parity.
"Thank you Tamara, and congratulations on being part of the first ever top-level motorsports podium to include two women." the interviewer congratulated. Hmm. I glanced over at Tatiana Vynnychenko, a young, successful driver of a similar background to me, and she got to share a podium with me. That actually made this moment somewhat bittersweet, because, while I am very proud to not only prove that women can stand on an Indycar podium, but that multiple women can stand on the very same podium, I wanted to share my first female podium with Natasha Tsirinskaya. I may still get that opportunity one day, but today, it seems like it's similar enough, and the fact that it is similar actually does more harm than good. Same birth year, same general ethnicity, even some similarities in how they conduct themselves, but not that family relation that I wanted to see the first time I shared a podium with a woman. I suppose that's one of the reasons why I was a bit tense around Daniella Pieri at first as well, but only because she's succeeding in areas where I wanted to be the one to succeed in as a woman, but I also wanted Natasha to be right there alongside me, if not immediately matching my records, then setting some in her own right. It's been a family dream ever since we were kids, and this just seems like it's going to make that opportunity less special. There have been family members to share a podium before - my boss is one of them - but it hadn't been women before. Natasha and I wanted to have that statistic, and now I suppose we'll have to something else. Perhaps the pair of women to win Formula One races...
Speculation about the future aside, there's no reason to be upset. I'm on the podium in just my second race, I get to share that podium with a very young, very impressive female driver who now firmly has her foot in the door for Team Penske - one of the best organizations in American motorsports with programs in NASCAR, Indycar, and the Rolex Sports Car series that competes with the ALMS which I race in - while on top of that podium is one of the modern legends of the sport. Marino Franzese, a driver who has been here for over a decade, the driver who battled Juan Pablo Montoya for the 1999 CART title, and a driver who raced against those powerful, iconic Target Chip Ganassi Racing cars for so long that now, he's the Target Chip Ganassi driver. Marino Franzese, teammate of the reigning series champion, the champion who hasn't managed to finish in the top ten of either of the first two races.
Stories are developing in Indycar, but for better or worse, for the next few weeks, I won't be a part of it.
Notes:
Endurance racing next.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 24: The Greatest Race in the World
Notes:
So, here we go with chapter twenty-four of LatSoF1.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXIV.
The Greatest Race in the World.
"Are you going to watch the 500?" Daniella asked as we both headed to the airport. With me heading back to Europe, and Indycar scheduling a race in Kansas just a week after Long Beach, we both needed a flight. Dani had someone driving her RV over to Kansas Speedway for her, so it'll be there by the race weekend, but she had media commitments that required her to get to Kansas City faster than she could possibly drive. For better or worse, the female driver effect was true for her as well, and she was currently at the heart of Indycar marketing. I acknowledged I was also heavily used in F1 marketing - more heavily than the team I raced for or the country I was from would normally suggest anyway - but with me, I was the only female driver in the series in quite some time, so that made sense. Daniella Pieri though, she managed to explode into superstardom despite not being the only woman in the series, not even the only competitive one in this sport, either now or in the recent past. I suppose that the fact that she's an attractive young woman whose first team - Rahal Letterman Racing - facilitated several appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman early on in her career helped. But is late night television really that powerful in America? I legitimately don't have an answer to that, I suppose Letterman and rival Jay Leno are international celebrities at this point but is that enough to make Pieri to most popular driver in Indycar despite the fact that there are more successful drivers at the same time and there are worthwhile female talents that predate her.
"Uhh...I think so? I'm sure it's on French TV somewhere." I answered, legitimately not knowing if I could watch it live, but reasoning that I would have access to it somehow. Maybe Eurosport carried an international feed of it. They definitely broadcast the entirety of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
"I didn't mean TV, I meant on the track. You're more than invited to come." Dani explained. Just like at that dinner she took me to during the Long Beach Grand Prix weekend, she was trying to incorporate me into the team, bring me into that sense of camaraderie they seemed to have together. That actually brings me to one of the fringe aspects of the Indycar calendar I've noticed - the grid is a lot more friendly to each other - perhaps it's the fact that the money isn't quite as intense, or the seats aren't as cutthroat. There are friendships in F1, of course, but everything is painted with rivalry because there are only so many competitive cars and there are only a pair of drivers that could drive each competitive machine. In Indycar, there are a number of top teams, and the other teams are a lot closer to the top teams because of the spec aspect of the series, and each team could theoretically add cars whenever they have a competitive driver. On the road and street circuits this year, Andretti Green Racing is going to be running five cars, while Team Penske saw that they had a talented young driver on their hands in the form of Tatiana Vynnychenko, so they just decided to create a third car especially for her. Formula One couldn't do that.
If it was possible, I would imagine that Williams would have created such an entry for me in 2009. Actually, if three cars per team was possible in Formula One, I could imagine that all the way back in 2007, Williams would have run Tommy Koskinen in the lead car, then me, then Kitagawa in a third entry, that way Williams could have had the Kazakhoil sponsorship and the free engines plus cash deal they eventually offered for their Japanese protege. Of course, I say that, but Williams is a small time struggling under the economic crash, so they may have been forced to drop me once I lost my sponsorship regardless, shrinking back down to a two car team...or even worse, maybe in this scenario, Williams dumps me and signs another paydriver in my place. That would leave Tommy as Williams' only real fighter, with Hideki just there to keep Toyota happy, and this hypothetical third driver just there to bring in even more money. That was a pessimistic way of thinking, I suppose, but it was also the reality with some of these smaller Indycar teams. The Dallara IR05 chassis is old, with cars from as early as 2003 being easily retrofitted to the new formula, so that means plenty of cars are floating around, while the engines are relatively cheap and easy to build, meaning in this sport, it is quite literally possible that the entire program is funded by a single paydriver. This is especially the case with European or South American drivers who, having been targeting a Formula One seat, can often end up with a budget that ends up being astronomical for Indycar despite meaning little to an F1 team. And not for nothing, but at least some of that cost goes nowhere in F1. Yes, yes, the travel expenses are obviously much larger, and the teams construct the whole car themselves, but the point remains, there are ways in which F1 teams are needlessly inefficient and bring about their own economic ruin. Though I suppose thinking about Formula One finances in LAX isn't exactly efficient either.
"I...I don't know." I answered Dani's question "I have the 1000km of Spa on May 10th, one of the English commentary teams for F1 wants me in Monaco on the 21st for a segment they're gonna air in the lead up to the Grand Prix on Sunday, then the whole week of the 8th to the 14th of June I'm going to be in France for the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Depending on how that goes, I have no idea of what's going to happen next. Then by July I'm going to be back here...I don't exactly have a lot of free time to work in a quick trip back to the US, especially with Roksana having basically given me an ultimatum."
"Sorry to hear it's gone this way." Dani grimaced as I sighed.
"I wonder if maybe it was better before I knew about my sexuality. I could have been safe and ignorant when it comes to this shit while continuing my career in F1." I complained, though at the same time I tried not to go down this route too much. First of all, because i acknowledged it was toxic, irresponsible, and downright illogical to blame Roksana for what happened to my career. Second of all, because I got the impression that Nazarbayev was trying to cut back on the Kazakhoil sponsorship to begin with, and when my sexuality ticked off Abdullayev's homophobia, I lost the main force in Nazarbayev's inner circle that was pushing for the sponsorship to continue. That was yet another reason not to resent my girlfriend. Though then again, I suppose that if I remained in the dark about being a lesbian, I wouldn't have responded to Roksana's advances, and we never would have gotten this far. There would be nobody to resent and no feelings to get hurt. Oh well, we're long past this point, and I still love and want to be with Roksana; I want this to be a real opportunity to get things back on track.
"Come on, don't talk like that. You would've noticed something was missing eventually, ended up feeling empty and like all the effort wasn't worth it." Dani argued, a play on the classic money doesn't buy you happiness argument I suppose. it was a bit cliche, but I did see what she was getting at - money, success, wins, all the things that F1 could theoretically mean for me, don't mean a damn thing if I don't have anyone to enjoy it with - if you want recognition, you need to have someone there to be able to recognize you after all. Roksana continued once we reached the bottom of the escalator, rolling out suitcases off of the steps behind us as we walked, about to diverge as she headed for the domestic terminal, while I continued on towards the international flights "Besides, the only way this stuff is ever going to get better in motorsport - in sport in general - is if there are people like us making a difference."
"...us?" I noticed her wording, but Daniella didn't hear me, already walking off towards the part of the airport she needed to get to, leaving me to wonder whether she rushed off because this was common knowledge, or because she just revealed something for the first time and was scared to see the reaction. I didn't have an answer right now, and with the clock ticking down towards my flight, I didn't have the chance to really contemplate it right now. I also didn't have enough information to go on right now, and I didn't want to make things awkward if I was wrong. I assumed the us meant lesbians, but perhaps she just meant people that are pro-homosexuality, or maybe she was moving beyond the sexuality thing and talking about minority drivers to begin with. Maybe minority is the wrong word for it, but at the same time, women are definitely a minority in motorsport, white or otherwise. In any case, I let Daniella go for now, but I filed away what she had told me for the future, knowing I'd be back in America sooner rather than later.
The Peugeot 908 HDi FAP was a dark metallic blue, white, and black car with red trim. The nose of the car narrowed to a point and then connected to the splitter by two widening pylons not unlike some of the McLarens and Renaults from the 2006 to 2008 era of Formula One, the era I like to call the spaceship era. Then the nose lead down to the cockpit, the LMP1 style bubble top, but proportionally low and wide for the series, making it look good. Then on either side, the long, flat sides included some tall, flared fenders that formed an attractive side profile. On the top of the left fender, was the car's number, in this case, #9, and then on the opposite fender, was the French flag - fitting for a French car with French fuel and a French engine. Then on the back of the car, mounted on two pylons, was a tall, wide rear wing with the Peugeot name written across it. Across the livery, various stickers for Peugeot, Playstation, Total, Michelin, and Bosch decorated the car, but overall, it was a factory effort. A factory effort with a verified armada of drivers. In my car, all three drivers had Formula One experience and all three drivers took this car to fourth place at the 12 Hours of Sebring earlier this year. We had James Brabham of Australia, Miquel Guerrero of Spain, and myself, Tamara Shchegolyayeva of Kazakhstan.
"So...what do all the letters stand for anyway?" a woman approached me, dressed in jean shorts, a cap, sunglasses, and a pale blue and orange Gulf Oil Aston Martin Racing polo. So, she wasn't a fan, she definitely had a reason to be walking through the paddock here at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, the site of the 2009 1000km of Spa. A major endurance race in its own right and the effective test session before the 24 Hours of Le Mans in just over a month. All three Peugeot cars had been present at Sebring, so we already have experience, but we were going to be racing about the Aston Martin Lolas for the first time. We knew the Audis were quick and they beat us at Sebring, but the Aston Martins? They were a bit of an unknown. I suspected that the battle at Le Mans would be between us and Audi, but Aston had a strong car in the European Le Mans Series, and the factory Audis weren't here today, so we'd have to judge our performance relative to these Gulf Oil painted entries.
"Well...I honestly have no idea. Something about direct injection I think." I answered, referring to the long list of letters at the end of the name. I'm certain someone told me what it stands for during that whole Sebring adventure, but after twelve hours of that, a month of Indycar racing, and the relationship drama going around in the background during all this, I've forgotten.
"Could be worse, they can't even decide what to call my car. Lola calls it the B09/60, Aston Martin calls it the DBR1-2." she smirked, apparently LMP1 car names get rather lengthy and complex. That being said, while she was clearly a team member, the fact that she called it her car suggests that she has a more intimate involvement than just a PR girl or anything like that. I took an interest, especially because her accent, while not entirely similar to things I've heard before, definitely seems more Eastern European than anything else. First Tatiana Vynnychenko in America and now this...are we completing the trio of young female talents from beyond the Berlin Wall? Well, either she decided to be polite, or she realized I was trying to figure her out, because she introduced herself "Oh, right...Viktorija Urbonaviciute, I'm the third driver for AMR Eastern Europe, the #007 car."
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva," I greeted, shaking hands with my Lithuanian counterpart. AMR Eastern Europe was a continuation of the Charouz Racing Systems program with Lola, now absorbed into Aston Martin Racing with the factory effort. Their car had a 6.0L naturally aspirated V12 to answer to our 5.5L Twin Turbo V12 diesel. Both were a pair of very large, very interesting engines of rather exotic nature. Come to think of it, the similarities weren't limited to the V12 configuration, because the Astons were running the numbers #007 and #008, with an #009 car joining for Le Mans...while we have #7, #8, and #9. To make things even more complicated, when we were running in America for the 12 Hours of Sebring and the Petit Le Mans at the end of the year, we'll be running the #07, #08, and #09. All rather complicated and I'm sure it'll be a great time for the commentators, but then again, I'm sure that the viewers can make a difference between the Gulf Oil livery of the Astons and the metallic blue, white, and black French scheme on the Peugeot entries.
"Yeah...I kinda figured. You're a bit famous, you know?" Urbonaviciute pointed out. I blushed a bit, not used to hearing about myself being famous - though on the other hand, I suppose it was refreshing in a way. At least this way I didn't have to wonder whether or not she knew all about me and the being outed business and all of that. I like having Daniella Pieri as a teammate in America for the Indycar stuff, but she can be a bit hard to read sometimes, and the us comment at the airport is just the latest in a series of events I'm not quite sure how to interpret. On the inverse side, I'm not entirely comfortable with what Tatiana Vynnychenko provided - it feels weird to have been an inspiration or a hero to someone, especially what that someone is only a few years younger than me and has proven herself to be just as fast, if not faster than me, in basically the exact same machinery. Nevertheless, Tatiana clearly looks up to me in a way and was starstruck when we met, and that has made me feel awkward ever since. With Viktorija, there is definitely an acknowledgement that I'm the Formula One driver that caught a disproportionate amount of media attention in 2007 and 2008 - she definitely knows who I am and what I can do - but it's not hero worship, at least not as blatantly as with Vynnychenko.
"So I'm told," I laughed a bit nervously, without humor, before deflecting back onto her "I haven't heard about you before, what have you done?"
"Well, I was in the single-seater ladder in Germany up until a few years ago, but I wasn't getting into good enough rides and my family was running out of money. Then a stroke of luck hits, Johannes Koskinen sees one of my results, and asks me if I want to test in his DTM program. I give it a shot, I do well, and I eventually get to do part of the 2008 season with Audi and Team Koskinen there. I was grateful that Johannes gave me the option, but he wasn't giving me a secure, long-term contract either, so I had to look for something else. Eventually, Jan Charouz, who I had raced for in the past, asks if I want to be part of his all-Eastern European lineup for Aston Martin. I accepted and we ended up winning the first race of the ELMS calendar. Now we're at the second race and a bunch of Frenchies have shown up with a fast car." she explained. So...it seems that she is the female driver Ernesto mentioned, the one that had been affiliated with Team Koskinen for a time, but that affiliation seems to have come to an end regardless of my actions. That being said, it does definitely seem to ring true to many driver stories I've heard in the past: not every driver is going to have earth-shattering results, and more than that, not every driver is going to catch a lucky break. Considering that she managed to help win at the 1000km of Catalunya earlier this year, she'd a solid driver, one who probably deserved to have at least made it onto the European junior racing scene rather than just trundling along in Germany until her career path diverged rapidly. For all we know, Viktorija Urbonaviciute is the best single-seater driver in the world in the right equipment, but with the world being cruel and unfair in its usual way, she was considered an open wheel failure and was forced to rebuild her career in the tin tops. The 2008 DTM season was a good first step for her, but now she's driving a prototype - not a prototype dressed up to look like a road car, but an honest, purpose built Le Mans car, and it will be interesting to see if she can keep up her Catalunya pace across the distance of a long season. I certainly hope she will, but then again, here she will be in direct competition with me. I suppose this comes down to the standard racing driver dynamic of wanting your friends to do well...just not better than you.
"Johannes Koskinen is a fair judge of talent. He was one of the first people in F1 to recognize my talent." I added, thinking back to that faithful day early in 2007 when I was on my first flight with the Koskinen family. That was another thing I missed. I get to drive fast open wheelers, I get to be a part of a powerful factory effort with Peugeot, and I get to live out my life as a racing driver - so I can't really complain about my life - but those flights from race to race with Tommy and Johannes? That's gone. Johannes won a championship against the likes of Alain Prost, Niki Lauda, and Nelson Piquet, he raced some of the most powerful engines ever constructed, and he used the earnings from that career to establish an impressive racing team of his own. The DTM team is one of the strongest teams in Audi's stable, the formula program helped drivers like Tommy Koskinen and even Anthony Harrison, find their way to Formula One, and the team kept Koskinen in the world of motorsports long after his driving career ended. All of that is to say that I highly respected Johannes, and I respected Tommy as well. While I did beat him and resent the fact that Williams still sees him as their only shot for the future, Tommy Koskinen is a very impressive young driver with a bright future ahead of him. In the right machinery, he will win races, even championships potentially, so he proved to be an excellent benchmark to test myself against when we were teammates in Formula One. I don't know how or when I will engage with the world of F1 again, but I know that even when I do, things won't be quite the same, and I probably won't ever be as close to the Koskinens again. That's a shame, really.
"He was always fair to me, worthy of respect. He can't be blamed for why things didn't work out. It just wasn't meant to be, but endurance racing? That seems to be working for me." Viktorija shrugged off the subject, not particularly concerned about moving on from Koskinen. I suppose that she doesn't have to wonder what might have been in the way that I need to with Williams, and now getting a chance with Aston Martin Lola, she hardly had a reason to worry about it. If anything, I would imagine she's more upset about having run out of money in the open wheel racing ladder rather than her brief experiences in DTM. It was something that happened to the vast majority of drivers - not just women, men too - the money dries up and the costs become too much for any family to bear, and if you can't secure a strong sponsor or get picked up by a junior program, you have to abandon the dream. I was on the absolute limit that my father could provide when I finally picked up the Kazakhoil sponsorship that propelled my career forward. Viktorija was not so lucky, and it doesn't help that she's from a country that one: doesn't have a lot of money, and two: doesn't have an elite class that's willing to spend money despite the limited wealth of the nation. I suppose that's part of the reason why so many racing drivers end up being from the same couple of European or otherwise western countries, that's where the sponsorship money is.
"I'm sure. I'll see you on the track, okay?" I responded, needing to go, but having appreciated this encounter with the woman driving the blue and orange car.
"Yes, likewise." Urbonaviciute smiled, giving me a nod. We got here different ways - I got breaks that she didn't, she had experiences that I didn't - but we were in the same place now, and we would have to see how things shake out on track. Peugeot and Aston Martin, neither of them is the premier name in endurance racing, that much is true, but at the same time, both of them have history and success to their names, and both would very much like to take the crown at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Audi has been dominant in the last decade, that much is true, but with twenty-four hours of racing, pressure coming in the form of not just speed, but reliability, consistency, and adaptability, anyone has a chance to win the great endurance race. That's a big part of why we're here after all - to do everything in our power to prepare for one of the greatest races in the world, right there on the horizon.
With the #7 in first and our #9 in second, it was an all-Peugeot front row, but the two Aston Martins got in front of the #8. Having gotten used to the car at Sebring and in the course of the practice sessions leading up to this - as well as the fact that, unlike Sebring, Spa was a track that I knew intimately well - I volunteered to take the start this time, knowing that the team would probably want one of the more experienced guys to do it at Le Mans itself. Thus, as we came out of the bus stop chicane, we were side by side, the leading car just a nose ahead, and the La Source hairpin up ahead. It was a rolling start here in endurance racing, and the #7 would be the one to decide when the start would be taken. Waiting, waiting, and waiting, eventually our teammates bolted shortly before the line, forcing me and all the other cars behind to scramble to adapt. I shifted up the gears, built up speed, and checked the mirrors to make sure I was clear of the Astons before braking and turning to the right through the tight turn. No one was trying a move on the inside on the first lap of a thousand-kilometer race. Coming out of La Source, the most iconic feature of the track loomed in front of us: Eau Rouge and Raidillon, the fast blast up hill and over a stream to get us onto the Kemmel Straight.
Throw the car to the left and then lift slightly to the right before flicking it back to the left as you crest the hill and get back on the power. With the level of downforce these things have compared to F1, it wasn't quite possible to take Eau Rouge flat-out, at least not on full fuel and relatively cold tyres at the beginning of the stint. Besides, I wasn't actually trying to go for the lead right now, not yet anyway. The fact of the matter is that this is an endurance race and I'm part of a multi-car effort, so, it is in our interest to break away from the field and build a gap before starting to really battle the leading #7. In a perfect world, the #7 would lead, I would be within a second behind in the #9, and the #8 would break through the Aston Martins so we had all three podium positions of the race. In that scenario, we would be able to control the speed of the race while having the all-French #8 entry protect us from any threats from behind, and not only that, but if something were to happen, then we would have three chances to defend our lead of the race. That wasn't the scenario though, because all the way down the Kemmel straight, it was the #7 Peugeot of Pierre Karatchian, Nicolau Morais, and Christopher Koenigsmann was leading, followed shortly by the #8 Peugeot of James Brabham, Miquel Guerrero, and myself, and then in third place came the #009 Aston Martin, driven by a selection of highly-rated Aston Martin factory drivers - none of whom are familiar to me but they clearly know how to throw a car around.
In fourth place was the #007 AMR Eastern Europe entry, driven by Jan Charouz, the son of the founder of Charouz Racing Systems, who runs the AMR Eastern Europe team and has worked with the Lola chassis for a few years now - hence they became the flagship Aston Martin Racing entry. Next there is Tomas Enge, another Czech driver, an experienced Aston Martin driver from their GT1 program, and even a one-time Formula One driver, having done three races for Prost at the end of the 2001 World Championship season. That just leaves their third driver, Viktorija Urbonaviciute, whose history I've already acknowledged. The same goes for the car that is right behind the #007 going into Les Combes, that being the #8 Peugeot, our all-French entry. The drivers being Jean-Marc Mazzarino, Francois Montclair, and - filling in for Maximilien Lecroix this particular weekend - is Norman Simonnet. Simonnet has endurance racing experience with De Ferran Motorsports in the American Le Mans Series, as well as a history in open wheelers, being the 2006 Champ Car Atlantic champion and then having raced in the premier Champ Car World Series in 2007. Simonnet is a talented young driver and a worthy replacement for Lecroix, who is preoccupied with F1 commitments at the Spanish Grand Prix.
As for the aforementioned Les Combes series of corners, it begins with a hard braking zone, scrubbing off all the speed of the Kemmel Straight in seconds before growing the car to the right only to immediately turn back to the left, and finally to the right once more, riding out onto the kerb as the plunge downhill began. First came the Bruxelles hairpin at turn ten, rather wide but tightening as it descends down to the right. Descending into the relatively fast but ninety-degree no-name corner of turn eleven. The ground straightened out ever so slightly heading from no-name into Pouhon, but we were still very much on the down section of this particular rollercoaster. Speaking of, Pouhon can be damn-near flat to flat-out depending on the car in Formula One, but in this big prototype? A lift was necessary, especially considering I was very much in the dirty air of my teammate ahead. We hit the second apex of Pouhon on the left-hand side and just let the speed build up before running into turns thirteen and fourteen like synchronized swimmers. Two cars, identical save for number, in the exact same maneuvers through the ninety-degree right-hander of turn thirteen and then the complimentary left-hander that formed Campus. The ground was almost entirely level by this point, and the circuit designers took advantage of that to build a rather generous exit kerb on the outside of Stavelot. Brake, hit the apex on the right, then ride out to the kerb and accelerate on it just in time for the next turn. The kerb is generous but that only makes some drivers want more, hence, behind me, I could see a driver kick up a cloud of dust after sticking a wheel onto the gravel. That was a problem behind me though, because I just completed Formula One sector two, and that meant I was nearly done with the first lap of this 1000km race.
Like I said, I rode onto the exit kerb coming out of Stavelot and that gave me as wide of an entry into turn sixteen as possible. Cutting across the road with a lift, hitting the apex kerb, and then throwing it out towards the exit, accelerating as soon as I was sure I wouldn't hit the black, gold, and red tyre wall on exit - the colors of the Belgian flag, naturally. Building up speed, the two apexes of Blanchimont neared close, throwing the car to the left flat out the first time, but then having to list the second time to avoid going off into the generous paved runoff. It wouldn't cost me time per say, but this early in the race, it was important to keep it clean and avoiding doing anything that might result in a penalty. So, keeping the car between the white lines, we arrived at the most recent addition to the track. The Formula One Grand Prix and, indeed, most racing at Spa-Francorchamps was shut down in 2006 during renovations and a reconfiguration, the result of which was the modern iteration of the bus stop chicane. Braking hard, turning to the right in a corner so acute it was almost a hairpin, and then the following corner to the left was only slightly faster. Accelerating out of it, it was still Peugeot-Peugeot-Aston Martin to complete the first lap.
The Aston Martin was a few car lengths behind though, and the first stint of the race was defined by us two lead Peugeots building a gap on the field. The #8 car, meanwhile, was still stuck behind the Aston Martins, so they were falling a bit behind. I wasn't too concerned though, because this was the same car that had a spin and fell all the way to the back of the field only to come back and finish a strong second place at Sebring, so I expected them to be able to recover later in the race. This was especially the case because, so far this weekend, Norman Simonnet was proving a very capable and impressive stand-in for Maximilien Lecroix. Another reason why I had faith in the all-French #8 entry recovering is that we still had our ace in the hole from Sebring - double-stinting the tyres. Everyone came in around the same time for their first stop, us taking Total diesel fuel, and the Astons Gulf gas, but in addition to that, the Aston Martins had to take new Michelin tyres. All three of our entries managed to be substantially easier on our Michelin tyres, so all our pitstops were quicker, and that enabled us to get into the top three positions of the race. We were now firmly in control here at Spa, and this wasn't the kind of advantage that we'd trade away. Yes, the Astons would have fresher, faster tyres for now, but as soon as they caught up, we'd all need to come in for our second stops anyway. This time we would need to take tyres, yes, but so would our competitors, so it wouldn't much matter. At Sebring the Audis won out because they had the faster car and because all three of our cars would have issues throughout the race - and even then, the #08 entry still finished on the lead lap, not very far off the lead at all - while the Astons didn't quite have the pace to match us.
Thus, I sat back - figuratively speaking - and enjoyed the race, knowing that my job right now was just to make sure we stayed close to the #7 ahead and in contention for the lead. I was a Formula One driver, sure, but I was also the endurance driver for this time - I had the least experience in this type of car and I was only at this particular race since we were using it as a practice session for the 24 Hours of Le Mans coming up soon - and the one opening the race. All of that was to say that I wasn't the one who was supposed to overtake, taking risks wasn't my job. It was a bit of a difficult mindset to get into coming from the world of F1 and Indycar, but the way I've rationalized it is that I would completely hate it if someone else got into my car and took on a risky, low percentage move that ended up going wrong. Yet that is essentially what I'm doing here, because Brabham and Guerrero have been Peugeot endurance drivers for longer than I have. We're all doing the same amount of races this season, but I'm very much a guest in their space. The fac that the #7 ahead was another Peugeot compounded that, because they were my teammates too, so if I went for a pass now and it didn't work out, I would potentially be ruining things for five of my teammates. I felt bad enough in Spain 2007, Australia 2008, and Canada 2008 when I got tangled up in crashes during my F1 career, doing it with shared driver duties would be even worse. So yeah, it felt like I was leaving a bit of potential on the table, and yeah, it felt like I wasn't being as brave as I could have been, but I was also doing what the team expected me to do. This is a factory effort, a corporate affair, and a machine with many cogs, so while F1 might be a setting that incentivizes individualism, this is a setting that incentivizes consistency and harmony.
"Traffic up ahead, be mindful." my race engineer announced as we began the defining motorsport feature of lapping cars. It started with the GT2 class at the back of the field - Ferrari F430s, Lamborghini Gallardos, Porsche 911s, an Aston Martin V8 Vantage, and even a Spyker C8. Next up, we would lap the small number of GT1 cars in this race, consisting of a V12 Aston Martin DBR9, a Lamborghini Murcielago R-GT, and a Chevrolet Corvette C6.R at the front of the field. This was the beauty of endurance racing, particularly in the GT class, and that was the sheer diversity in brands and engine configurations. Formula One has probably the most manufacturers now that it has in decades, with Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Renault, Toyota, and Honda all supplying engines - with Cosworth having a modern spec 2.4L V8 on offer as well - but they were the exact same type of engine, and all generally functioned the same way. The fact that F1 had a development freeze on the engines didn't help matters, because that ensured things would stay the same with the trade-off of improving competition and reducing costs. It was a lot of brands and it resulted in a pretty good product, I think, but it was still rather limited. GT racing, meanwhile, was so diverse that, between GT2, GT1, LMP2, and LMP1, the Volkswagen group was fielding four different engines with a 4.0L Flat-6 in the GT2 Porsches, the 6.0L V12 for the sole Lamborghini in the GT1 class, then a 3.4L V8 in a privateer Porsche Penske RS Spyder for Team Essex in LMP2, and finally the two privateer Audi R10 TDI entries run by Kolles in the LMP1 class with their 5.5L V12 turbodiesel motors.
The Audi factory program wasn't here today, running only Sebring and Le Mans in 2009. The R15 TDI has a smaller, more efficient V10 turbodiesel - which also happens to be the largest configuration available for a commercially available Volkswagen group turbodiesel engine - and manages to be faster than the previous car in spite of that. Nevertheless, the R10 is still a competitive car, so the privateer Kolles team was battling with the Oreca and Pescarolo entries in the second half of the LMP1 field, not very far behind the lead pack of the Peugeots and Aston Martins. Thus, the race was developing well, but with a length of only 1000km - expected to take a little under six hours given how these races usually went - that meant I was only in the car for a few stints, stepping out of the car after a little over an hour and a half. I stopped the car in the pitlane, it went up on jacks, and the team got to work changing the tyres while I was already undoing my belts and climbing out. At the same time, Miquel Guerrero was getting in the car and getting strapped in - the key was for back actions to be nearly simultaneous - which brings to mind an odd but potentially interesting detail about driver belts. To get them off is just a quick release fastener but getting them on correctly requires outside assistance. I probably mentioned that before, but where it factors into endurance racing is that it means getting the finished driver out is actually faster than getting the new driver in.
As the Catalan rolled off to start his stint, I joined James Brabham in the garage, becoming a spectator. I took my gloves and helmet off, but I was still in my suit, and those were still on hand, because while the plan was for Guerrero to complete the middle stint and then for James Brabham to do his thing and close out the race, anything and everything could happen in motorsport, so I needed to be prepared to get back into the car if the situation demanded. There were various upper time limits placed on drivers to avoid anyone exhausting themselves on the long endurance races, but we had three drivers here while many of the smaller teams were still just doing it with two - especially those who don't have realistic prospects of winning Le Mans, so that isn't a real concern here. Nothing is stopping me from getting back in the car and playing the role of the team player if the situation demands, I just hope it doesn't have to go that way. Everyone wants things to go perfectly in motorsport, but that is so not the case. For example, everything seemed to be going well for us here in the Ardennes Forest, with my stint putting us in contention for the lead, and Miquel Guerrero managing to take it outright thanks to a slow stop for the #7 towards the end of his time in the car, but then, our luck started to run out. While we were doing the driver swap from Guerrero to Brabham for the final stint, the car ground to a halt coming out of the pitlane, with the Australian eventually needing to pull off to the side and find neutral so the crew could wheel the car back to the box.
"No, no, no! Goddammit!" Guerrero cursed and impotently kicked an innocent trashcan in the back of the garage area as we helplessly watched the crew start pulling panels off the car in an attempt to get at the engine and fix it. It was futile though, because with so few people allowed in the pitlane at a time and the problem clearly being something buried deep within the engine, we had no choice but the pull the car into the garage for repairs. In Formula One, this would have been game over - hell, here in a 1000km race, it realistically is game over as well - but in endurance racing, we had a chance. The crew got to work, eventually identifying that it was a turbocharger failure, and I had to admit I have massive respect for the crew, watching them replace the turbocharger as quickly as they physically could, reattach all the panels that came off of the car, got James Brabham strapped back in, and released the car into the pitlane, back into the race. We lost a lot of time and fell to the back of the LMP1 field, now we had less than an hour and a half most likely, to make that back, so it was realistically over. That being said, it provided us with a lot of useful practice, and at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, with a whole day to make up for mistakes, being able to effectively do the automotive equivalent of open-heart surgery in about half an hour was the kind of work that could still result in a win if everyone else was suffering the same way. We weren't part of the lead pack of LMP1 cars - we even had some LMP2 cars ahead of us - but we showed a really, really strong performance in the first two-thirds of the race, lead laps, and showed a remarkable ability to recover from a bad situation and fix a problem that, for all we know, may come up again during the full day of racing that is Le Mans.
In any case, the LMP1 results of the 2009 1000km of Spa read as follows:
1: #7 Team Peugeot Total - Peugeot 908 HDi FAP - 143 laps.
2: #8 Team Peugeot Total - Peugeot 908 HDi FAP - 143 laps.
3: #007 AMR Eastern Europe - Aston Martin Lola DBR1-2 - 143 laps.
4: #16 Pescarolo Sport - Pescarolo 01 - 142 laps.
5: #11 Team Oreca Matmut - Oreca 01 - 142 laps.
6: #008 Aston Martin Racing - Aston Martin Lola DBR1-2 - 142 laps.
7: #14 Kolles - Audi R10 TDI - 141 laps.
8: #15 Kolles - Audi R10 TDI - 139 laps.
9: #13 Speedy Racing Team -Lola B08/60 - 139 laps.
10: #12 Signature Plus - Courage-Oreca LC70E - 138 laps.
11: #9 Team Peugeot Total - Peugeot 908 HDi FAP - 136 laps.
12: #22 Strakka Racing - Ginetta-Zytek GZ09S - 130 laps.
13: #23 Strakka Racing - Ginetta-Zytek GZ09S - 129 laps.
14: #10 Team Oreca Matmut - Oreca 01 - 129 laps.
15: #17 Pescarolo Sport - Pescarolo 01 - 53 laps.
16: #3 Scuderia Lavaggi - Lavaggi LS1 - 49 laps.
So...in Europe, compared to America, the LMP1 field is substantially larger, but in this case, I'm not sure if it's any more competitive because of it. Here, the Peugeots and the Aston Martins represented the top cars, with the Pescarolos, Orecas, and year-old Kolles Audis representing cars that could compete beyond that. Once you get deeper than that, it becomes a collection of very random cars, as well as a handful of top cars that suffered substantial issue...our little #9 among them. The other class winners for the 2009 Spa 1000km then read as follows:
LMP2: #31 Team Essex - Penske Porsche RS Spyder Evo - 139 laps.
GT1: #72 Luc Alphand Adventures - Chevrolet Corvette C6.R - 132 laps.
GT2: #77 Proton Competition - Porsche 997 GT3-RSR - 129 laps.
The Porsche Penske partnership may be over with, but nothing seems to be able to keep the RS Spyder from winning, and the 2009 1000km of Spa is no exception. Similarly, Corvette wins the GT1 class, even when in the hands of a retired French alpine ski racer. As for GT2, at the end of all that diversity and competition, a Porsche pulled out ahead, even managing to finish ahead of a handful of LMP1 cars. So what to make of my first endurance racing experience in Europe? Well, while the 12 Hours of Sebring is an amazing event, it is clear that American sports car racing is suffering the effects of the Grand Am - American Le Mans Series split, because there is no reason why the 1000km of Spa should be pulling a larger premier class grid than one of the triple crown events. The overall motor racing triple crown consists of the greatest races in the world, that being the Monaco Grand Prix for F1, the 24 Hours of Le Mans for sports car racing, and the Indianapolis 500 for Indycar racing, but there is also a triple crown within endurance racing itself. That being the 12 Hours of Sebring combined with the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Rolex 24 at Daytona. The difficult side of this is that all three series are owned by different people, have different regulations and rules, and that means that winning the triple crown is quite hard to pull off now. For instance, while we could have won at Sebring and may still be able to perform well at Le Mans, there is no way to make the Peugeot 908 HDi Fap legal to Grand Am regulations, and that small bit of procedural difference has kept endurance racing divided, more so than it already is with the top event being in France while the other two prime events are both in the United States.
As for the Daytona Prototypes - those who actually appear in Grand Am Racing - the formula seems to be to build the ugliest car. I am exaggerating, of course, but there are some properly hideous cars in that series, and I think that even the people that need to drive them would acknowledge that. Everyone wants to be a racing driver, and I'm sure plenty of people resent the fact that I get to be one - a somewhat successful one too, if I do say so myself - but everyone also wants to be a racing driver for a good-looking car or team. People get excited about being part of Ferrari, about getting to show that they're part of that prestige, not so much if the team in question were something like Force India. Though that being said, unlike most people, I actually don't mind the new white, green, and orange livery they have adopted for the 2009 car, in tribute to the Indian flag. It's definitely unique and sticks out, but I consider that a good thing. And even if their livery truly was that bad, it's hardly their greatest problem, as the team currently sits bottom of the constructors' championship, having to failed to score points in any of the first five races and having a best placed finish of ninth at the Australian Grand Prix, courtesy of Lorenzo Barbaro. I don't exactly regret turning down Force India now, because while it meant I'm not in F1 for 2009, being part of the team going into the 24 Hours of Le Mans with a race-winning car is better than being at the ass end of the grid. Of course I say that now, but with my luck, by the time F1 gets to Spa, Force India will put a car on pole. We're living in a world where Honda is dominating the season, so who knows what'll happen next.
In any case, for me it's time to head back to Monaco and spend some time with my girlfriend.
"Hey," I smiled groggily as I woke up, knowing that Roksana was already awake. The grey-eyed blonde laid next to me on the bed, having been the smaller spoon last night, but having turned around to face me since then.
"Hey," she responded, just as eloquently. I chuckled to myself as a smile graced her lips, Roksana looking and feeling the best she has in months from what I could tell. I wasn't quite sure how I felt about that - wait, that sounded harsher than I intended, because obviously I'm glad that she's happy, it's just...complicated - because I know that, by July, I need to be back in America, and with only one oval race in that July-August stretch, I will realistically have to be there for two months. I'm worried that if she's going to be clinging onto me like this, it's only going to make things more difficult for the both of us. If she's always had these tendencies in a relationship, it didn't much matter because, while my job always required traveling the world, I'd come back home whenever possible. Not only that, but I've always been the type to enjoy being at home and not seeking the attention or stardom. I'm still not seeking that, in fact, when I do go back to America and find a new apartment or whatever, I'll probably end up spending the majority of my time there. The problem is that she wants to remain here in Europe - understandable, given that she is from here and her magazine is here - while my job requires me to be in America.
Case in point, the race in Watkins Glen is on July 5th, followed by a race in Toronto, Canada on a street circuit on the 12th...it doesn't make any sense to fly from upstate New York to Monaco just to go to Canada literally a day and a half later. I can't make time after that either because two weeks after Toronto is a race in Edmonton, a week later is an oval race in Kentucky that I'll be able to miss, but a week after that is another road course in the form of Mid-Ohio, so I'll have to be there anyway. So of course, I'm going to stay in America between the Indycar races, and of course she is going to stay in Europe to manage both the passion project that is her own magazine, and the various free-lance articles and columns that actually make up her livelihood. Effectively, it's an unstoppable force and an immovable object. I can stand the pain and the distance because I know it's temporary and I know it's for a greater purpose but based on how her mental state has been the past few months compared to how it is now...I'm not sure if she can. Maybe that's why she was single before she met me, because she has these obsessive tendencies in relationships that only serve to complicate everything. On the other hand, it's not fair to say that either, because it's not like any of this is her fault. I can understand her position, even if it frustrates me, I just don't see a solution because our careers mean that neither of us is in a position to compromise. I can't ask her to give up her career either, just like she can't ask me to do that, because we're both living out a version of our dream jobs...it just so happens that our dreams seem to be incompatible right now.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked me, shifting in such a way that she could reach and touch my cheek. Doing so gave me a glimpse over her bare shoulder at the digital alarm clock on her end table, and I froze up when I saw the time "Tamara? What's going on?"
"Shit...I need to start getting ready." I announced as I pulled away, got out of bed, and started rummaging through my dresser for some fresh clothes nice enough to look the part. Roksana laid in bed with the covers on her looking like a kicked puppy as I explained "Today's the 21st and I got to do that thing we talked about for English TV...I really should've been at the track right now...why didn't my alarm go off?"
"Did you charge your phone last night?" Roksana asked. I glanced over to the end table and saw my iPhone, sitting there next to its charging cable, the port bare as I am now and the battery as dead as I'm going to feel after all of this. For as much of a so-called "revolution" as this phone is, it sure goes through its battery life quickly and that's only been getting worse the last few months. Am I going to need to change that too? Just another thing on my plate in what is turning out to be a packed and busy end of May. Which, I suppose, also brings to mind another reason why Roksana might be over there looking like a kicked puppy, the fact that I am taking a quick flight over to Indianapolis this weekend to support my team for the 500. The trip isn't going to be very long, and it is wasteful to some extent, but it's the crown jewel event for Indycar, the thing that my teammates live for, so I suppose it would mean a lot to them if I was there, Daniella included.
"No...dammit. I gotta go shower. I'll be back as soon as the interview is over, I promise." I told her over my shoulder as I rushed off into the bathroom, needing to prepare for this, but also wanting to spend as much time with Roksana as possible before this American diversion puts another strain on our relationship just over a month before I have to go back to the United States for the summer for what's going to be the real test of all this.
"So, for an expert analysis of what to expect this weekend, we turn to someone who does know better," the English-accented commentator's voice came over with a hint of self-deprecating humor before introducing me "Tamara Shchegolyayeva, who drove for Williams in 2007 and 2008. Tamara, what do you make of the sessions so far and what do you see happening in the race itself?"
"Well, I think it's going to be very hard to beat Honda. James Buxton has been unstoppable thus far this season and Rudolfo Goncalves has been right there with him every step of the way. One thing that I think might be different is that I expect Goncalves to be stronger here. He's on top of the FP1 standings right now and Buxton stepped aside this session to give Natasha Tsirinskaya some track time, and that experience is very important. This season more than any other because there are new regulations in place, and Monaco is always a challenge." I gave my first bit of insight. I felt a bit awkward and like I was rambling, but I also didn't think it went terribly. Now, don't get me wrong, I wasn't about to quit my day job and take up punditry, but I don't think I was doing the worst performance as a driver providing commentary. Of course, considering this was a Thursday rather than the typical Friday - long story short, Monaco holds practice on Thursday so they can open the roads back up on Friday to avoid three consecutive days of the center of the country being shut down - so who knows if anyone is actually tuning in to watch this?
"You rate Honda's chances highly, but Maximilian Renner sits third in the championship and Red Bull is just now trialing their version of the double-diffuser, how do you think that's going to affect things?" another voice, this one with a slight Scottish tinge to it, chipped in and asked.
"That is true but, right now, the numbers don't lie, and Honda is still ahead. The double-diffuser is going to help Red Bull, I think, but they're just incorporating it into their existing concept. Honda has a car built around the double-diffuser and that means they're going to get more out of it. Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren, they're not just going to be able to cobble together a replica of what Honda has and instantly be competitive with it." I countered, making, what I think, was an educated and reasonable stance on F1's most recent scandal. Well, I say it's the most recent scandal, but Ferrari and BMW just threatened to pull out of the sport for a second time this season in protest to a planned budget cap for the 2010 season, so maybe the double-diffuser is going to seem like a trivial issue in a week's time compared to the great Formula One Teams' Association scandal of 2009. Who knows?
"Do you think it's wise for Honda to take their championship leader to offer seat time to a junior driver?" the first voice asked, referring to Natasha Tsirinskaya's efforts in the 2009 Honda at the moment.
"I think it's always nice to see a competitive team giving FP1 outings to a young driver. I benefitted hugely from FP1s with Williams during the 2006 season and it made be a better driver going into my debut season. I might be biased here, but Natasha Tsirinskaya is a brilliant driver - she just won the GP2 Asia title in dominant fashion for a team like Trident - so Honda definitely has an asset they should be building towards for the future. As for the short term, well, I think James Buxton is experienced enough that he can hop into the car in FP2 and get back up to speed pretty quickly. Really, I just don't see a downside to this." I answered. I always liked to see young drivers getting time in a current F1 car and that was becoming a rarer and rarer thing these days thanks to ever tightening restrictions on testing, all with the goal of trying to reduce the dominance of the top teams with the most money...not that it ever seems to stop them from winning for long. Sure, Honda is playing the rule of the exception this season, but one: an exception hardly breaks the rule, and two: on sale or not, the team is still called Honda and funded by the automotive giant. It's difficult for me to see Honda as the underdog when they're big enough to be the sole engine supplier for the Indycar series I race with on the regular.
"Okay, we got time for one last question for you Tamara, do you see yourself getting back into F1 any time soon?" the inevitable question came with a bit of a rush. Perhaps they were running out of time for this segment, and maybe I was rambling on too much, so I tried to give a shorter answer for the next one.
"That's the plan. An opportunity hasn't risen up yet but I'm willing and able." I answered with a nod.
"Very able if i do say so myself. Thank you very much Tamara Shchegolyayeva, one quick break and we'll be back with Free Practice 1 coverage from here in the streets of Monte Carlo." the main announcer signed off quickly and the feed went to a commercial. I thought that was mostly an American thing, but I suppose it's affecting the smaller channels in the UK as well, and practice sessions didn't draw the same demand for commercial-free coverage that a live race demanded. In any case, I did what was asked for me, providing analysis and answering questions for the commentary team, so I breathed a sigh of relief. one down, two to go. It was interesting I suppose, because in the next few weeks, as a commentator, a spectator, and a driver, I'll be involved in the three biggest events in motorsport.
For the United States, the Monaco Grand Prix - and indeed most European races - were early in the morning, so just after watching the race from Dani's bus as she prepared for America's greatest spectacle in racing, I made my way over to the pit wall to join Dani's crew. On the F1 side of things, James Buxton won despite missing out on FP1, but Rudolfo Goncalves was in second, followed by the two Ferraris, with Matti Hamalainen in third and Henrique de Matteo in fourth, followed by Martin Weaver in fifth for Red Bull. Tommy Koskinen was sixth for Williams - Hideki Kitagawa had yet to score, mind you - Felipe Alvarez was seventh for Renault, and Maximilien Lecroix was eighth for Scuderia Toro Rosso. At the moment, Hideki Kitagawa is only ahead of Filipe Yannick and the Force Indias in the championship, and considering where their Williams and Renault teammates were, that might open up an opportunity to get back into Formula One.
The bridge to Williams is probably burned, but Renault? Well, they took Felipe Alvarez back and Yannick's performances might scare them off of junior drivers for a time, so maybe Bernardo Fulvia will be willing to swallow his pride and give me another chance. If not, what are his options, really? Bernard Audinet? Vladimir Alexandrov? A handful of other Renault affiliated drivers of similar quality? No one that is setting the junior series scene alight is my point. I have Formula One experience, I have podiums to my name, and millions of dollars are on the line as BMW Sauber, Williams, and Renault all fight for sixth, seventh, and eighth in the constructor's championship, far below what any of them would have wanted for the new regulations. In BMW Sauber's case, it's not even a driver issue - both Piotr Kaminski and Victor Hartmann have showed pace this season - they just have a slow car. I can't imagine the boardroom in Munich is particularly happy about how they stopped developing the F1.08 after the Canadian Grand Prix win in order to focus on the 2009 season. Now they suck in 2009 and it seems that they are among the least satisfied with the FIA's proposals for the new Concorde Agreement, so it seems that BMW has thrown away the chance to challenge for the 2008 World Championship and is on the way out of Formula One not even a whole year after that fact. That's enough about F1 though, because I'm sitting on the pitwall for a competitive driver entering the final phases of the Indianapolis 500.
The 200-lap race was just coming out of a long caution with 15 laps to go after a horror crash. the AJ Foyt Enterprises entry of Vittorio Marques and the Dragon Racing entry of Rafael Martins collided on lap 173 in a fiery crash that involved the Foyt car sliding sideways along the wall halfway down to turn two before finally settling down on its side and coming to a stop. Both drivers were taken to the infield care center and Marques was later taken to hospital for precautionary checks on his spine but seeing that crash seemed to confirm my decision not to race the ovals. There are moments of this race that have been exhilarating, moments that have defined close, hard racing between some of the greatest drivers in the world, but there were also moments that screamed life-threatening danger. That was enough to stop me, but it wasn't quite enough to stop the likes of Daniella Pieri, as the Italian-American woman was sitting in third, with only 2005 Indianapolis 500 winner Callum Walters in second, and 2001 and 2001 winner Demetrio Colombo in the lead. As the green flag came down to restart the race, Colombo blasted off into the distance while Walters had to turn his attention from offense to defense as countless cars were gathering directly behind him just like hungry predators.
First was Daniella Pieri, the Andretti Green Racing driver - running her black and orange Boost Mobile car today - hungry to become the first woman to win the Indianapolis 500 a mere year after winning her first Indycar race. In fourth place was Benjamin Leigh, the American working hard to turn the prominent Champ Car outfit KV Technology Racing into a viable Indycar team, and what better stage to do that than the crown jewel of American motorsport? Well, he'll have competition there, because Tatiana Vynnychenko is once again in a third Penske entry, and she is showing immense, immense speed here at the superspeedway, running in the tight back behind Walters in the battle for second. Behind her were the two Target Chip Ganassi Racing cars, both having led laps today, but having dropped back in these final stints of the race - the same could be said for Damian Peters, as the Australian had led eleven laps earlier in the day but had since fallen out of the top ten. Peters was fighting was way back forward but with so much talent ahead of him, even a driver that fast at the mighty Team Penske couldn't break into the top fifteen. Likewise, at the front of the field, Colombo pulled out an eight-car length gap and was just controlling the pace ahead of Walters, while Pieri, Leigh, and Vynnychenko were all setting identical lap times behind him, ensuring that the British driver couldn't just throw everything at winning because he might lose out on second place because of it.
Round and round and round they went, setting thirty second lap times and getting closer and closer to that 500-mile mark. They got perilously close to the walls here at this rectangular oval, with banks impressively high by the standards of openly wheel racing, but next to nothing compared to some of the dramatic, high banks of NASCAR venues like Daytona or Talladega. They passed the iconic pagoda tower that was redesigned in 2000 for the United States Grand Prix during the unfortunately all-too-short stint F1 had at the brickyard, they rode over that famous yard of bricks that preserved the original surface of the track. Once it was all made out of bricks, then just the straights were, then less and less until all that was left was the start-finish line, the rest being a perfectly textured, scientific asphalt racing surface, a surface that caused the controversial 2005 USGP disaster which basically killed the F1 Indianapolis race before I even got to race my first event. There is so much history in this venue, good and bad, home to both triumph and tragedy, both the greatest moments in the lives of the drivers that raced here, and the very worst. For three drivers though, today was undeniably one of the greatest days of their lives. For Demetrio Colombo, the Brazilian won his third Indianapolis 500 and the South American became the very first foreigner to do that feat at the great American race. Not only that, but Colombo won all three of those 500s in a single decade, having won back-to-back in 2001 and 2002 at the beginning of the decade, and now closing out the decade with another win, all three of which were for team Penske.
The very first win came in 2001, with Marlboro Team Penske trying to repeat the success that Target Chip Ganassi Racing had a year prior with Juan Pablo Montoya. Thus, that iconic Marlboro livery that has graced countless race cars with such a beautiful livery representing something as awful as tobacco, joined with Team Penske, perhaps the greatest organization in American motorsport, paired with an Oldsmobile engine, came over and dominated the event. Then, in 2002, now with Chevrolet power, Penske was a full-time team, having defected from CART over to the IRL series, Demetrio Colombo made it two in a row, instantly making the Brazilian a legend in the sport. Now in 2009, despite the tax dispute in the offseason, despite having these young gun teammates like Damian Peters and Tatiana Vynnychenko threatening to disrupt Colombo's leadership of the team, he's gone and won the Indianapolis 500 for a third time, this time doing it with Honda. Harsher and harsher advertising regulations mean that tobacco sponsors are going away - no matter how much the likes of Ferrari, Ducati, or indeed Penske may fight it - and that's probably justified. Smoking is disgusting and deadly, and the tobacco industry has been relentless in pushing their product despite that. Nevertheless, in pushing that awful product, they have also done amazing things for motorsport, and F1 teams are clearly feeling the pinch of losing that tobacco money now that we're in a recession. All of that is to say that this might be Marlboro's final Indianapolis 500, hell, it might even be Marlboro's last major win in motorsports. So yes, I'm not going to uncritically praise Marlboro, they don't deserve that, but it is bittersweet in a way to think that the iconic white and red chevron livery might be taking its final victory lap.
As for the other two, well, Callum Walters proved that no matter what team he's at, no matter where he starts - eighteenth in this case - he is always a threat at the Indianapolis 500. Panther is a minnow of a team and time and time again this year, Callum has made them come across as a winner, and here at Indianapolis, they nearly were. While in third place, Daniella Pieri, quite simply, proved that girls could do it too. She was in third and she was fighting for second, she defended her position from some big, big names behind her - including the three main championship contenders in the form of Armstrong, Franzese, and Peters - and while she didn't lead laps, she gave us no reason to believe that she couldn't have.
So, while I wasn't racing today, the results of the 93rd Indianapolis 500 read as follows:
1: Demetrio Colombo - Sao Paulo, Brazil - Marlboro Team Penske - 50 points + 1 for pole position.
2: Callum Walters - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - National Guard Panther Racing - 40 points.
3: Daniella Pieri - Chicago, Illinois - Boost Mobile Andretti Green Racing - 35 points.
4: Benjamin Leigh - San Francisco, California - Herbalife KV Technology Racing - 32 points.
5: Tatiana Vynnychenko - Kyiv, Ukraine - Penske Truck Rentals Team Penske - 30 points.
6: Charles Armstrong - Christchurch, New Zealand - Target Chip Ganassi Racing - 28 points + 2 for leading the most laps.
7: Marino Franzese - Edinburgh, Great Britain - Target Chip Ganassi Racing - 26 points.
8: Everette Carpentier - Indianapolis, Indiana - Menards Carpentier Racing - 24 points.
9: Anthony Patrick - Toronto, Canada - Geico KV Technology Racing - 22 points.
10: Haruki Tanaka - Tokyo, Japan - Panasonic Andretti Green Racing - 20 points.
Not only did Dani finish on the podium and leave all of us on her pitwall jumping for joy, but just a couple of car lengths behind her, Tatiana Vynnychenko finished in fifth place. If at any moment Demetrio Colombo faltered, Tatiana went from ninth on the grid to a position where she was well placed to pounce for Team Penske. Two women in the top five, and with Everette Carpentier showing her oval skills, she ensured that it was three women in the top ten. The daughter of a French-Canadian CART driver, Everette has made Indianapolis her home, and today, she very much made Indiana proud. The fact that women did this well at Indianapolis made me wonder just what I could do at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. I knew I had an excellent car with the Peugeot - we competed for the win all the way at Sebring and the team scored a one-two at Spa-Francorchamps even if my car in particular faltered that day - and maybe, just maybe, a French car, with French tyres, at the quintessential French track, could make a young girl born in Kazakhstan a Le Mans winner.
"In, in, in!" shouted a crew member as they threw me into the car to replace James Brabham. I got strapped in as the team switched out the Michelin tyres and loaded us up with Total fuel. Peugeot had brought an utter armada to this race - first there was the #8 Peugeot driven by Jean-Marc Mazzarino, Francois Montclair, and Maximilien Lecroix - the all-French car - had started on pole and still led the race. The #7 Peugeot started in third, driven by Pierre Karatchian, Nicolau Morais, and Christopher Koenigsmann, but had crashed into a privateer Peugeot run by Pescarolo Sport and picked up a puncture. Said Pescarolo Peugeot was a 2008-spec 908 HDi FAP that Pescarolo was running in addition to their own bespoke prototypes, but the 908 was clearly faster, and in the hands of promising French endurance racer Norman Simonnet - who had impressed filling in for Lecroix - helping put that car fourth on the grid. The Pescarolo car also suffered from that accident, so it cleared the way for our car to go from fifth to fighting for the third-place spot. As I exited the pits, the #8 was leading the race, the #2 Audi was second having yet to make their pitstop, and the #1 Audi - who had stopped - was going into the Dunlop chicane as I exited the pitlane, just five seconds or so ahead. Speeding up through the fast right-hand Dunlop curve, I rejoined the track in time to turn left and then right through the chicane, speeding up and cresting the hill as I came under the iconic Dunlop bridge that defined the opening section of the lap here at the Circuit de la Sarthe here in Le Mans.
Beginning the ride downhill, first it was a slight kink to the left followed by a more substantial kink to the right. Then on the brakes for a left-hander here in the Esses section, finally coming out of it with a somewhat faster right hander. A brief straight followed before throwing the car to the right, riding out on the generous - and iconic - blue and yellow kerbs to come onto the Mulsanne straight. In 1988, the year I was born, a privateer Peugeot P88 set the record speed of 252 miles per hour down this very straight, leading to the current chicanes being added to the straight to reduce speed and prevent what would practically be an airplane crash if two cars came together. That's not to say that the cars didn't spend a long time on throttle and didn't have a long, long run down to the first chicane here, because the straight was still the entire length of the track. This gave me the chance to think about a few things about the race thus far - first of all, Pietro Ferrari, the second son of the great Enzo Ferrari, waved the flag at the beginning of the race on the sixtieth anniversary of Ferrari's first Le Mans win. Second of all, much like Sebring, the team was planning to minimize my running at the glare-filled, transitional zones of dusk and dawn, hence I was driving second, ready to hand the car over to Miquel Guerrero for the sunset stint. I would be back in the car at night once the conditions were consistently dark, as driving at night was unavoidable, then I would probably do a third stint in the morning in the closing stages of the race. It was a full day of racing after all.
Braking for the first of the two Mulsanne chicanes, it was right, then left, then a slight kink to the right to straighten things out at the end, accelerating in the second bit of the straight. By now, the sheer turbo V12 power in the back of my car, combined with the light weight, meant we were catching up with GT cars ahead...and doing it in a more convenient place than the Audi ahead had. Clearing backmarkers and closing in on the #1 Audi Sport Team Joest entry, we reached the second chicane, this one going first left, then right, then straight to effectively mirror the previous chicane. Now, speeding out of it, a Ferrari F430 gave way on the exit so I could pass, meaning there wasn't anything between me and the Audi anymore. I wasn't quite going to overtake, since there were still five or so car lengths in between us, but it was still the car directly ahead, the target firmly in my sights. At the end of the Mulsanne, a slight kink to the right redirected us to avoid the roundabout that now stood at the initial sport of Mulsanne corner. The current design of the corner was a tight ninety-degree right-hander with gravel just outside the exit kerb, but I negotiated it well. Going down the straight to Indianapolis corner, the Audi encountered traffic as an LMP2 was trying to lap the GT cars while us in the LMP1 cars were trying to lap all of them. This allowed me to close right up to the rear wing of the dominant German speedster as we swung through the right-hand kink before arriving at the ninety-degree corner to the left that formed Indianapolis itself, spitting us down into a ninety-degree right-hander in the form of Arnage.
It was Audi vs. Peugeot, Germany vs. France down the Arnage straight, both of us well aware of the fact that dirty air through the Porsche curves would make it difficult to follow closely. The Audi team had won in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 in complete dominance of this decade - and the 2003 win went to Bentley so it was still Volkswagen dominance - they knew if they could just keep the position going into the Porsche curves, they'd be safe for another lap, while I knew that if I could get ahead, then I'd be able to put a gap on the Audi instantly and turn my attention forward. Thus, with that goal clear, I feigned to the inside, got the Audi to defend, and then put on an audacious move on the outside going into the first right-hand element of the Porsche curves. I just barely kept it in the white lines and that meant, going into the fast left that followed, I slipped ahead into third place. It was left again, then right and right before straightening up to the left as the Porsche curves transitioned into the Corvette curves - this part of the Le Mans circuit had corners named for renowned manufacturers at the 24 Hours of Le Mans - the twisty bit finally came to an end with a slight left-right chicane leading onto a short straight. The pit entry was on the right-hand side - and the #2 Audi was taking it, completing its stint, ready to fall behind the both of us - while I turned left, then right, then left, then right again to complete the Ford chicanes and close out the lap. With the iconic Ferris Wheel behind me, the grandstand on my left, the pitlane on my right, and the Dunlop curve ahead of me, I was up into second place. Peugeot was leading 1-2 at the 2009 24 Hours of Le Mans, and I got to be a part of it.
There was a lot of pageantry in F1 - I would argue that the average F1 race has a ton more fanfare around it than the average Indycar or endurance race - however, these past few weeks I've experienced the real crown jewel events. Monaco is something special, and as someone who lives there, it is fascinating how, for a month out of the year, the entire country is transformed for what is really just a single weekend of racing. Fans descend upon the country, celebrities come to fill the grid before the race, and the Prince himself is devoted to the event - hell, this year they even filmed scenes for Iron Man 2 during the Monaco Grand Prix weekend - but seeing the Indianapolis 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans? That's something else. Driving for Peugeot at Le Mans in particular is something special, because after a decade of German dominance, people wanted to see a French team win, and the flags were everywhere during the pre-race parade. The same was true about Indianapolis as well. So during my stint, after it, and during my next stint, I was doing everything in my power to help Peugeot win.
There was a chance though, and that chance seemed to be getting higher and higher as our rivals fell away one by one. The #2 Audi was about a pitstop behind when I finished my stint and it only got worse during Guerrero's stint, before finally crashing out on lap 104 to fall out the race entirely. The #7 Peugeot and the #17 Pescarolo Peugeot had lost positions early on, the #2 was out of the race entirely and in the sunset stint, the #1 Audi lost it coming out of the chicane, hit the wall, and picked up damage that put it a lap down. Further technical issues later on in the night put the lead Audi out of contention entirely. The #3 Audi hadn't had the pace to stick with the leading pack all day long and, try as she and the Czechs may in the lead Aston Martin, Viktorija Urbonaviciute and the AMR Eastern Europe team just didn't have the pace to stick with the lead pack. I remember at one point in the night, when we were both in the car, I was in the lead on strategy and put the #007 Aston Martin another lap down between the Mulsanne chicanes. The #8 Peugeot and our #9 Peugeot were the only cars left in contention, and our lead on strategy turned into a solid lead when a brake issue sent the #8 Peugeot a lap down early in the morning. Miquel Guerrero completed the sunrise stint, I managed the gap in the morning stint and handed over the car in perfect condition to James Brabham, the Australian being the one to coast on the lead lap to allow the French #8 entry to catch back up so both Peugeots could cross the finish line side by side for a photo finish. At the great French race, with French tyres, the French team had done it.
The LMP1 results from the 2009 24 Hours of Le Mans read as follows:
1: #9 Team Peugeot Total - Peugeot 908 HDi FAP - 382 laps.
2: #8 Team Peugeot Total - Peugeot 908 HDi FAP - 381 laps.
3: #1 Audi Sport Team Joest - Audi R15 TDI - 376 laps.
4: #007 AMR Eastern Europe - Aston Martin DBR1-2 - 373 laps.
5: #11 Team Oreca Matmut - Oreca 01 - 370 laps.
6: #7 Team Peugeot Total - Peugeot 908 HDi FAP - 369 laps.
7: #14 Kolles - Audi R10 TDI - 369 laps.
8: #16 Pescarolo Sport - Pescarolo 01 - 368 laps.
9: #15 Kolles - Audi R10 TDI - 360 laps.
10: #12 Signature Plus - Courage-Oreca LC70E - 344 laps.
11: #008 Aston Martin Racing - Aston Martin DBR1-2 - 342 laps.
12: #13 Speedy Racing Team - Lola B08/60 - 342 laps.
13: #3 Audi Sport Team Joest - Audi R15 TDI - 333 laps.
14: #22 Strakka Racing - Ginetta-Zytek GZ09S - 325 laps.
15: #4 Creation Autosportif - Creation CA07 - 319 laps.
16: #009 Aston Martin Racing - Aston Martin DBR1-2 - 252 laps
17: #10 Team Oreca Matmut - Oreca - 219 laps.
18: #17 Pescarolo Sport - Peugeot 908 HDi FAP - 210 laps.
19: #23 Strakka Racing - Ginetta-Zytek GZ09S - 178 laps.
20: #2 Audi Sport North America - Audi R15 TDI - 104 laps.
Twenty LMP1 cars, three major manufacturers and a smattering of boutique race teams of varying quality, but only one car could be overall winner. In 2009, that was the #9 Peugeot and among its drivers, I became the first woman to take the overall win at one of the greatest races in the world. I scored points in the Monaco Grand Prix both times that I competed, I just watched Daniella Pieri finish third at the Indianapolis 500 a few weeks ago, but today, on June 14th, 2009, I was the first woman to win one of the triple crown races. At the end of 2008, I thought my career was over, I got outed, lost my sponsor, and Williams dropped me from Formula One with no time to find a competitive ride, and I was left scrambling to find something, anything I could do to rebuild my career. I wanted to change the narrative, make sure that, when F1 bosses saw my name, they didn't think of the controversy, instead, their minds went straight to my success. Today, I think I finally pulled it off. I won a race in A1GP, I proved competitive in Indycar and even took a podium at Long Beach, but winning Le Mans? That was something that couldn't be ignored. Le Mans had a way of spreading the love though, so I wasn't the only winner today; the class winners in the other series read as follows:
LMP2: #31 Team Essex - Penske Porsche RS Spyder Evo - 357 laps.
GT1: #63 Corvette Racing - Chevrolet Corvette C6.R - 342 laps.
GT2: #82 Risi Competizione - Ferrari F430 GT2 - 329 laps.
So, Team Essex wins their second endurance race in a row, proving that the Penske Porsche Spyder is still a dominant car all these years later, while in GT1 Corvette Racing demonstrated why they're held in the same esteem as mighty Porsche and the famous Ford GT40, in getting corner names at the Circuit de la Sarthe. Finally, for the 60th anniversary of Ferrari's first Le Mans win, the #82 Risi Competizione won, followed by the #97 BMS Scuderia Italia, the #83 Risi Competizione, and the #92 JMW Motorsport for an all-Ferrari top four in the larger of the two GT classes. In a year where Ferrari is struggling in Formula One thanks to the regulation change and Honda's dominant double-diffuser RA109, I have to imagine that Pietro Ferrari will be pleased with that.
The real pleasure goes to Peugeot though, and within a week, Peugeot had the three of us driving down the streets of Paris in a concept car called the 908 RC Landaulet. Effectively, it was a luxury sedan that will never be made using the same 5.5L V12 turbodiesel as the car we won the race in, made in a landaulet style like a classical luxury vehicle from the interwar era. Guerrero, Brabham, and I sat side by side in the car, waving at fans waving French flags, and eventually being congratulated by the French President in a photo shoot that included us, the concept car, the race car, the trophy from Le Mans, the French President, and several top executives from PSA Peugeot-Citroen. It was pretty similar to the showcase event Williams and I did in Astana, except without any of the guilt - this was fine, it was a modern democracy, and the attention wasn't all on me, because this was a group effort. In Kazakhstan I was alone, here I was with Brabham and Guerrero.
Notes:
Ciao!
Chapter 25: The Women of Motorsport
Notes:
Hello everyone! This is going to be a rather densely packed chapter.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXV.
The Women of Motorsport.
"...I'm just saying, you've already won Le Mans, wouldn't it be better to just stay in Europe and start calling up those teams with vulnerable drivers?" Roksana argued, which was becoming somewhat of a recurring theme in my life. I had just spent May and June in Monaco with her, but now it was coming up on July, and just as we had previously discussed, I was going to go back to America for my Indycar race commitments. Yet here she is, once again causing an argument about this. I understood that she wanted me here, I wanted to be here too, but with where my career is, I've taken the steps that I feel are necessary to bring me back into Formula One. Being part of the three-driver team that won the 2009 24 Hours of Le Mans for Peugeot helps - it helps a lot actually - but until I have an actual offer from an F1 team, I cannot let off the throttle, I cannot let them forget about me. I need to be relentless, I need to provide F1 teams with reason after reason after reason to put me in the car, especially if, like she says, my objective is to get into a car midseason. I was targeting a return in 2010, I thought that 2009 was written off, but if a 2009 return is possible, that just means I need to work even harder to prove my skill as a driver. In effect, I need to make myself a driver that cannot be ignored.
"I have a contract to honor in America. Besides, last year there wasn't a single driver change, so I can't depend on an F1 team meeting me halfway. The only way I'm going to get back into F1 is if I'm the master of my own destiny, and the best way to do that right now is to continue racing well in Indycar." I explained, making it clear that I couldn't depend on anyone else's generosity or an F1 team choosing to drop one of their drivers. If something was going to happen, particularly for the end of the 2009 season, it needed to happen because I forced it to happen. I've won Le Mans, that's a big point in my favor, but imagine if I could go to an F1 team and say that I've won Le Mans, I've won in an Indycar race, and I have two years of experience in the sport already? That is what I mean by being impossible to ignore: having career statistics that put me above everyone else, that make me that anomaly of a driver that they have no choice but to sign. Nobody has done this in the modern era, Maximilien Lecroix has come closest, but nobody has managed to do both since, what, Mario Andretti? Graham Hill? The point is that I'm trying to do something special, something that would benefit my career even if it doesn't immediately translate into an F1 return.
"Why though? Do you really think anyone in F1 cares if you can drive a worse type of car around circuits they haven't driven on in decades, if at all?" she argued, pointing out the fact that F1 has, historically, raced at modern Indycar venues like Long Beach and Watkins Glen only to grow out of them, with Indycar having picked up the pieces. Similarly, in the 1980s, as F1 left the Caesar's Palace Grand Prix circuit, CART took up the torch for a little while longer, later doing the same at the Detroit Grand Prix circuit in downtown, eventually abandoning the latter in favor of a new circuit on Belle Isle right on the river that forms the US-Canada border. Indycar, unfortunately, isn't racing at Belle Isle or anywhere in Detroit this year, which is a shame, because the track seems interesting. In any case, on some level, yes, I get the argument, success in Indycar doesn't necessarily translate to success in F1 cars, that's true, but only to an extent. There is a point where being a good driver and scoring impressive results in multiple types of cars only serves to spell out your success and versatility as a racing driver.
"Do you have to question me now? Really? I've explained why I'm doing this over and over and I've explained that I want things to go back to normal as soon as possible, can we please just get on with it instead of fighting all the time?" I argued back, getting frustrated. What more could I say? How many more ways did I need to convey this argument for her to finally get it? I'm getting tired of this argument and I'm getting tired of it fast.
"I'm not questioning you!" she yelled, getting frustrated too "I just don't think you know what you want! You're flying off to America to race in a series that is half ovals thinking that's the best way to get back into F1? I don't get it! Your logic doesn't make sense to me, nor did it make sense when you went to China for the A1GP stuff. I'm sorry but you're going to all these places so far away from me and the best explanation you can give is some desperate spiel about how you think this is the only way to get back into F1. Sure, nothing changed in 2008 but think of 2007. Tamara, you've literally raced against people that haven't been in the years only to return. Hell, Felipe Alvarez and Henrique de Matteo both had a year off at the beginning of their career and they're perfectly fine. Stop panicking, stop flying off wherever there's a series that looks faintly like an F1 car, and instead start thinking logically."
"For all the drivers that survive a year off or return at some desperate backmarker team, there are dozens that never make it back to F1. Just look at Robert Deschamps." I argued back, calming down a little bit now that she finally articulated a half-sensible position, but still refusing to back down from my beliefs.
"So your solution is to race in the exact same series as Deschamps?" she pointed out, cutting into my logic.
"Well, what would you have me do instead? Call up Renault until something happens?" I asked, wondering what alternative she had, because as far as I was concerned, the best way to become a high-level racing driver is to prove I can race at a high level.
"Why not? Do you honestly think they're in such a borderline position that they'll finally be convinced to hire you if you win an Indycar race? They either want you or they don't, and if by some miracle they're actually in such an indecisive position, you should be able to do just as much good convincing them in negotiations as you could do by winning a race some place in upstate New York." she argued. I don't know whether she felt like this all the time or if she was doing research between arguments to come up with something better, because this is the most sense she's made during the whole saga.
"Look, even if I could convince them to hire me over the phone, I still have a contract with Andretti." I sighed. Maybe, just maybe Bernardo Fulvia is fed up enough with Filipe Yannick to break his contract, or maybe the Red Bull program really is as ruthless as they say and they're about to drop Maximilien Lecroix for good, or maybe an opening is about to show up someplace else, maybe that's true, but are any of them willing to break two contracts? I don't know, and I know there must be drivers waiting in the wings who don't have the baggage of having signed a contract in a completely different country for a completely different series.
"So after all of that, it's still going to be like that?" an absolutely drained Roksana asked.
"I suppose it is." I responded, sounding just as drained by now. I sighed again, looked around the apartment one more time - seeing Roksana standing with her arms crossed looking away from me and the now cleared podium I set for when my replica of the Le Mans trophy is completed - and decided it was time to go "Look, I gotta get to the airport, I'll text you when I land in America."
"Sure," was her half-hearted response, not saying anything else or even turning to face me as I left the apartment. There were probably half a dozen different ways I could have handled that argument, many of which involve giving up on my stint in Indycar and facing whatever financial repercussions come with that, and there's probably a few that let me continue in Indycar but leave Monaco on a better note that this, but the option I picked? I get the sense that it may be the worst possible outcome. Nevertheless, I have a career and I have a deal that I made in America, so I can't ignore that either. I'll finish out July and August in America on a high note, return to Monaco for a month, then just quickly fly back to the US for the Petit Le Mans at the end of September, and then hopefully return to Monaco for good. A full season of racing, hopefully a season of continue success that eventually brings multiple wins, and if that isn't enough to convince a decent F1 team to take me for 2010, I don't know what more I could possibly do. All I know is that F1 or not, I need to figure out something permanent for 2010, because Roksana and I's relationship won't be able to survive much more of this. Naive as I am about all this, even I can tell we're at our limit here.
America is a strange country. The plane I was on was coming in for a landing in Chicago - I couldn't find a direct flight from Nice to Indianapolis, fortunately, Dani Pieri is a Chicago native and offered to pick me up from the airport - and I was just alarmed by the sheer amount of flat space. I understood the concept of flyover states, I did, but the midwest really is just an endless, flat expanse of perfect green and brown plots of the world's agricultural production. I thought that Chicago, a major city on the lake, would be different, but coming in for a landing at O'Hare Airport, the perfect green and brown plots of land were exchanged for perfectly straight roads. All the way from where I was above the western fringe of the city to the lake, these east-west streets passed one above the other, crisscrossed with north-south streets in a perfect, endless grid. I couldn't see a hill, roundabout, or curve in sight. There were a handful of diagonal streets, sure, and the typical American highway system converged in the center to produce one big traffic jam, but other than those minor interruptions, it was just another twist on flyover country. I'm sure there is a certain logic to building an expanding a city like this, and I suppose it probably has a certain charm to it as well, but it is so strikingly different than Monaco. My racing career has brought me to a lot of places very different from Monaco, cities, towns, and villages of every size imaginable, but none have been quite as strikingly different as Chicago.
I came outside the terminal to see dozens of honking cars and taxis gathered up in front of the arrivals. I instinctively sunk my shoulders in a bit at the crowds and the noise, but no one recognized me here - one of the fringe benefits of being a driver most known for F1 when F1 doesn't even have a race in America I suppose - and, in fact, as I passed through the people, I caught a few words in Russian, or at least in fairly similar languages like Polish and Ukrainian. It was crowded and noisy, sure, but so far, I hadn't seen anything to justify why Chicago had the reputation that it did. Even in Europe I've heard things about the city being obnoxiously corrupt and filled with crime, but it seems they at least keep that away from the airport. I suppose I can't be too judgmental, after all, I've raced in places like Sao Paulo and, more recently, in Long Beach, California, and I didn't see any drama in the LBC. I did, however, finally see Dani waiting for me in a white Honda Accord. Right, Indycar is a Honda series, Andretti is one of Honda's premier partners within Indycar, and Daniella is perhaps Andretti Green Racing's most marketable driver, so of course they make sure she drives a Honda whenever possible. Of course, a white Honda sedan also tends to be a rather unassuming vehicle, so it wasn't drawing any unwanted attention. I was able to get to the car, load my bags in the trunk, and hop into the passenger seat without any trouble.
"Well...that was entirely too many people." I announced as I sat down in the car.
"The F1 driver complaining about crowds?" she smirked.
"Look, you've seen me in crowds of fans. I try to give back and be nice to them, but it can be so exhausting and socially draining for someone like me. Besides, I draw some sense of comfort from having a barrier between me and the fans. I don't expect anything to go wrong or for anyone to try anything, but it just feels better knowing that, if I want to, all I need to do is take a few steps back and be in a quieter situation." I explained, trying to articulate the feeling of being somewhat of an introvert while also making it clear that I do appreciate the fans and try to give back to them.
"Have I ever mentioned that your English is obnoxiously good?" Dani complained as we got onto the highway, heading into the city.
"What do you mean obnoxiously good?" I laughed.
"Well, you're literally from Kazakhstan, you grew up in Monaco, and sometimes it seems like you have a better grasp of the English language than some of the mechanics I work with - and they're all from here!" she noted.
"Oh. Well...I don't know. I did get to go to a good school, and I started learning English and Italian from a young age. It helps that in my professional life, I've used English more than any other language. Since F1 and the other major international series use English, even when I was in the top-level French series, we were already communicating in English more than any other language. The whole Le Mans program too, it was so French that we got congratulated by Sarkozy but the lingua franca in that team was English." I noted, referencing the Parian parade and the congratulations we received from the French President.
"Oh, congratulations on that by the way, you did something really impressive there." Dani said, not facing me because she was driving. I was grateful for that, because my cheeks did flush a bit when she's said that. As much as I've grown more confident in my abilities since the beginning of the 2007 season, I still haven't gotten used to hearing other drivers that I respect speak of my positively.
"Well, honors go both ways here, because I hear you won your second Indycar race." I pointed out, on one hand deflecting the attention from me, on the other hand genuinely meaning the praise. Said praise was for the fact that, fresh off a third-place finish in the Indianapolis 500, Daniella Pieri went and won the very next race, winning at the Milwaukee Mile. Demetrio Colombo would go on to take his second win of the season at Texas, propelling himself back into the championship hunt, while Marino Franzese won at Iowa, and Charles Armstrong won at Richmond International Raceway. All the while, Damian Peters went on a tear for Team Penske and took second place in three consecutive races to keep himself in the hunt and recover from a disappointing Indy 500 for the Australian. All of that means that, while it was still the Penske and Ganassi show going into the next race at Watkins Glen, Daniella Pieri made Andretti Green Racing shine for two races in a row by taking a historic podium finish at Indianapolis followed by a second win at the one track in America that has a legitimate claim to being older than Indy.
"Yeah, that was a hard one. Armstrong, Franzese, and Peters all had a shot at me at one point or another, but I managed to hold them all off at the mile and took a good result for the team. I think we need it too, because we've gone from a championship contender to a distant third at a fast rate these past few years." Dani answered, her own nervousness showing by the fact that she gave me a bit of the driver interview spiel, but she seemed to relax and remember that she was with a teammate and a friend, since she threw in some private business as well. Andretti Green Racing won the championship with Marino Franzese in 2007 before he went off and played around in NASCAR for a year, while 2008 and now 2009 have been less impressive years. Still though, seeing Daniella Pieri winning her first race in 2008 and now winning another race here in 2009, that's giving the team some hope, some that there's still a spark of performance if they can get it working consistently. I say they, but for the next few races, it's we, since I'll be racing in Watkins Glen, as well as the following two races in Canada at Toronto and Edmonton, followed by a week-long break for the Kentucky oval before a return to road course racing for Mid-Ohio and Laguna Seca.
Dressed in my black, white, and minty green Kaspersky Lab racing suit, I made my way from Daniella's bus - her RV where I was staying for the duration of the weekend, given that Watkins Glen had such a strong camping atmosphere around it that the title sponsor of this race was literally a company called Camping World - to the pitlane as I began my preparations for the race. Briefings, wheeling the car out to the grid, my own mental preparations, and the team doing some last-minute work on the car all combined to eat into the few hours we had left before the race. Soon enough, we were going through all the standard American race procedures - including, of all things, a prayer, which Daniella Pieri assures me is very much the norm in this kind of racing - followed swiftly by the national anthem, meaning the race was moments away from beginning. So, once the anthem ended, drivers began a just barely controlled scramble up and down the pits to our cars, climbing in and getting as comfortable as you could in a purpose-built race car before the call went out to start our Honda engines.
The grid looked a little something like this: Damian Peters took pole position for the #12 Penske crew, followed by the #18 Z-Line Furniture Dale Coyne Racing car of Johnny Willis. Charles Armstrong lined up third in the #9 Target Chip Ganassi car, while Lorenzo Magalhaes of all people split the Ganassi cars in his KV Technology Racing car, qualifying fourth ahead of the #10 Target Chip Ganassi of Marino Franzese in fifth. The man that Natasha Tsirinskaya has largely replaced as Honda test driver, Charlie Michaels, meanwhile, lines up an impressive sixth for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing, keeping things in the Honda family. Then, in seventh place was Daniella Pieri, keeping the momentum from her podium at Indianapolis, her win at Milwaukee, and her fifth-place last time out on the Richmond oval to be the lead Andretti at this race - fitting as she's also the clear leader of the team in the championship standings - but the rest of the team wasn't all that far behind her. Rio Andretti lined up next to her in eighth, while I was directly behind her in ninth place, my best Indycar qualifying thus far. Further back, Haruki Tanaka was twelfth while Afonso Wagner, in contrast to his usual strong qualifying performance, was the last-placed Andretti today, starting down in sixteenth.
A few reconnaissance laps through the forests of New York state later, it was time for the race itself to begin. Two by two the cars launched down the main straight and downhill into turn one. A strange corner, it was a ninety-degree right-hander on paper, but in practice, with generous kerbs and paved runoff beyond that, the corner could be as wide as you needed it to be. That being said, we were encouraged to keep it between the white lines at all times and especially on the start, so nobody was quite willing to abuse the safety feature for performance's sake just yet. Not that you'd believe that from the driving, because as the grid converged on one piece of tarmac, all hell broke loose. First there was the fact that the #3 Penske of Demetrio Colombo, all the way back from thirteenth on the grid, had a cracking start and sent one inside of me going into the corner, compromising my line and making me lose a position to someone else as well. So, not only did I lose two positions to fall down to eleventh, but this bunched things up behind us as well, contributing to an accident that took Afonso out of the race. From where I was sitting - given I was trying to salvage my position as well - I couldn't see exactly what happened to my Brazilian teammate, but I imagine it was the result of way too many cars in one place and needing to squeeze into even less space than expected because my car wasn't where they thought it was going to be. So, the #29 car, sharing the 7/11 livery with Rio Andretti this weekend, was out of the race in the paved runoff of turn one, but there wasn't a caution flag out yet, so the rest of us had no choice but to focus on the rest of the lap and leave him behind.
A short shoot followed turn one before another turn to the right, swinging uphill through turn two and then throwing it to the left at the crest for turn three. Bluish gray armco barriers on either side with the distinctive Watkins Glen catch fencing above it filled my peripheral vision before reaching the kink of turn four, throwing the car to the right and onto the back straight. Here I was able to get my bearings for a moment, seeing that the car ahead of me was the Venezuelan HVM Racing entry of Jose Estevez Jr. Estevez must have been the car that slipped around the outside of me while my braking was compromised by Colombo divebombing the piece of tarmac I was trying to put my car into. That particular moment of passivity won't happen again, because I intend to regain position and do it quickly. Not quite now though, because I didn't get enough of a run on Jose going into the chicane. Left, then right, then straight, then left, and then finally straighten up back to the right just in time for the braking zone for the outer loop. On the original F1 layout - and actually on the modern NASCAR layout as the short circuit - the long right hander wound tighter and shot the cars onto the infield straight, here though, the outer loop opened up a bit on exit and shot us downhill onto a short straight that they literally call the chute. I suppose that brings the question...have I been saying shoot all this time when it's really chute? I wasn't sure, maybe Daniella was overestimating my grasp of the English language, maybe there's a nuanced difference I'm not picking up, but regardless of the grammatical complexities of this odd little half-Germanic, half-French language we call English, there's a motor race going on.
The chute, shoot, or whatever it's actually called plunges us down into turn six, a complimentary left-hander to the outer loop, this unleashes our V8 motors down onto a short straight that forms the run down to toe, a long, carrousel corner bringing us around to the bottom edge of the track. This whole sequence of corners formed a section called the boot, because, when it was added onto the F1 circuit in 1975 or so as a safety improvement, someone noted the fact that it looked like a boot sticking out from the bottom edge of the track map. Well, if this section was indeed a boot, then turn eight was the heel, as the tight, acute-angled right-hander began a run back up hill and towards the braking zone of turn nine. Hitting the brakes, shifting down using the - relatively new for Indycar - paddle-shift gearbox, and then throwing the car to the left onto a brief full throttle straight at the top of the hill to rejoin the old circuit, with the distinctive barriers once again closing in on either side. It was almost like an oval with the catch fencing, towering high above the cars and then curved in at the top to protect the spectators, but I suppose that makes sense to an extent. After all, between Indycar and NASCAR, the top series that race at Watkins Glen in the modern era consist of a pair of oval racing series. Watkins Glen and Sonoma form the only road courses on the NASCAR schedule, while Watkins Glen was one of the first road courses to join the IRL series calendar. Sonoma - or Infineon Raceway as it's known for sponsorship reasons - was also on the IRL calendar for those years, but with the merger of IRL and CART, there wasn't enough audience for two races in northern California, and Laguna Seca was deemed to be more historic and important to Indycar history.
In any case, turn ten came up fast, so on the brakes again for a corner that was just a little bit more open, a little bit faster than ninety-degrees, but not by much. This third sector also had another distinctive feature of Watkins Glen on display - the red and orange kerbs - I suppose it wasn't all that unique given that I just came from Le Mans with blue and yellow kerbs, but it is an interesting contrast to the typical red and white kerbing found at racetracks. Obviously red and white kerbs do the job just fine and it's more about function than form with something like that, but I personally tend to enjoy it when a track has something unique. Anyway, turn ten was the penultimate corner, spitting us out onto another short straight followed by one final ninety degree right in the form of turn eleven. Now back on the start finish straight, I got a good run on Jose Estevez Jr. ahead, taking the draft and then waiting until the last possible moment before diving into the right in turn one and taking the position. I didn't want to do anything to indicate what exactly I was going to do, because that would make a driver go defensive, and on the relatively short straights of Watkins Glen, I needed every advantage I could get. Hence, showing nothing until it was time to execute, I managed to engineer the easiest possible overtake and get back into ninth place. As I began lap two and my hunt to close up to Colombo ahead, Afonso Wagner made it back to the pits. The marshals were able to get his car going again - likely the reason we didn't see a yellow flag when we returned to the scene of the accident - but his rear suspension was damaged beyond repair, thus the Brazilian was left with no choice but to retire the car. One Andretti Green Racing car down, but the rest were doing well.
That continued to be the case throughout the race, with Dani and especially Rio having fast, fast cars in the race - albeit not quite as fast as the Penske of Demetrio Colombo, who was using a combination of speed and strategy to close back up to the lead pack. In fact, Colombo was actually leading the race at one point as he took a longer first stint than either his teammate, the Chip Ganassi cars, or Johnny Willis who was managing to stick with the lead pack lap after lap after lap. Dale Coyne Racing is a team with an impressive history and certainly has a lot to be proud of, but they're not the modern giants of Penske or Ganassi, so that really is a testament to what the British driver can do in that Z-Line Furniture car. As for me, I was still in the points, I was running well, but I wasn't quite where I wanted to be. That situation was compounded by a mid-race caution coming out thanks to a crash from Toronto's finest, Anthony Patrick - I joke, while AP is a bit past his sell date and does have a controversial reputation in Indycar, to say the least, the Canadian has also demonstrated immense speed across multiple decades - a caution that seemed to benefit Rio Andretti, propelling him into a lead by the time of the restart, but it left me and especially Dani Pieri on the backfoot. This mid-strategy caution is how I found myself, once again, behind Jose Estevez Jr. but, paradoxically, ahead of Daniella Pieri who fell out of the top ten as a result of all this.
Mario Andretti III was expected to be somewhat of a sitting duck when the race restarted but, to his credit, he managed to keep position for the first lap and even the second after the restart, and when he did finally get overtaken, it wasn't by Damian Peters, the Penske who had restarted the race in second, but rather by Johnny Willis, who slipped past both of them to take the lead. The Brit would build that lead thanks to the fact that Peters found himself still stuck behind the #26 7/11 car, but Rio couldn't hold on to second forever, so over the closing stint of the race, he would lose second to Peters, third to Armstrong, and fourth to Colombo. The Dale Coyne Racing driver would go on to win the race at the former Formula One track, while I was down in eighth, only managing to improve one position from my start after that strategic upset thanks to the caution. On one hand, I couldn't be too mad if my worst finish in the Indycar series thus far was an eighth place, but on the other hand, when I've just won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, it's hard for my very next race to be a comparative mediocrity when it seemed like something impressive was on the cards. Considering that I've managed to take fifth place at St. Petersburg and a podium at Long Beach from worse starting positions, eighth at Watkins Glen was a bit of a letdown. This is especially the case because, on some sentimental level, it would have been nice to win at a track that was so associated with F1 from the 1960s all the way to the early 1980s.
In any case, the top ten of the 2009 Camping World Grand Prix at the Glen read as follows:
1: Johnny Willis - Rotherham, Great Britain - Z-Line Furniture Dale Coyne Racing - 50 points + 2 for leading the most laps.
2: Damian Peters - Brisbane, Australia - Marlboro Team Penske - 40 points + 1 for pole position.
3: Charles Armstrong - Christchurch, New Zealand - Target Chip Ganassi Racing - 35 points.
4: Demetrio Colombo - Sao Paulo, Brazil - Marlboro Team Penske - 32 points.
5: Mario Andretti III - Nazareth, Pennsylvania - 7/11 Andretti Green Racing - 30 points.
6: Charlie Michaels - Bromley, Great Britain - Purex Dreyer & Reinbold Racing - 28 points.
7: Jose Estevez Jr. - Caracas, Venezuela - PDVSA HVM Racing - 26 points.
8: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Almaty, Kazakhstan - Kaspersky Lab Andretti Green Racing - 24 points.
9: Robert Deschamps - Rotterdam, Netherlands - Hole in the Wall Rahal Letterman Racing - 22 points.
10: Callum Walters - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - National Guard Panther Racing - 20 points.
So, at the end of the day, I finish behind the Venezuelan and ahead of the Dutch-born Belgian. As I've said, it's hardly the perfect result that I was hoping for, but it's not a bad result either, and I think that I can be fairly proud of my first three Indycar races: 5th, 3rd, and 8th. If I was doing a full season and I was able to keep up those results consistently, as well as peppering in a win or two per season, these were the kind of results that could make me a championship contender in a series as competitive and unpredictable as Indycar. I mean, here in this race you had Colombo starting way back in the pack and Peters starting on pole poised to dominate the race, and instead, Johnny Willis won for a minnow of a team while Demetrio Colombo was just two places behind his teammate. Colombo is getting a bit older, and Peters has definitely been the primary championship contender for Penske this year, but with an Indianapolis 500 win, a win at Texas, and a thirteenth to fourth run at a race where I wasn't able to make up any progress, Demetrio Colombo is definitely showing off some impressive credentials here.
"Well...I've felt better," I sighed to Daniella later that afternoon, after all the briefings, interviews, and media commitments when we both got to change into some casual clothes and relax in her motorhome.
"Tell me about it, I started ahead of you and still managed to finish behind you. I finally feel like I'm starting to do good on a road course and the best I can pull off is eleventh place." Dani echoed my sentiments. She was two podiums and a win from ovals this year, while on road courses, she retired from St. Petersburg in a crash that wasn't her fault, finished eighth in Long Beach, and finished eleventh here in Watkins Glen. Those were hardly the worst numbers in the series, and she was still getting a decent haul of points from road course events, but it just paled in comparison to her oval results. If this was still the IRL and primarily an oval series, she'd absolutely be a championship contender, but with the reunified Indycar series and an increasing number of road and street races, she may have a ceiling on her career which is rather unfortunate. I was eighth, Daniella was eleventh, Evie Carpentier was sixteenth, and Marina Dominguez of Venezuela was seventeenth for Dreyer & Reinbold. Everette at least has the excuse that she started last and recovered fairly well for someone who is even more of an oval racer than Dani is, but still, the point remains, this wasn't the best day for the women of the Indycar field. Of course, it didn't help that Tatiana Vynnychenko wasn't racing today, because based on the pace of the Penske cars today, the Ukrainian-Canadian driver may have just had the pace to dominate the race. That would have certainly improved the picture for women in motorsport, but then again, I suppose having another fast car ahead of me would've likely demoted me down to ninth. Of course, we're playing with theoretical situations here, and who knows what affect adding another car to this field would have had on the race. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and all that.
It was a quick, one-week turnaround between Watkins Glen and Toronto, so there was no going back to Chicago for us. In fact, for some members of the team, there was no going anywhere, because they got on the trucks in New York and carried on straight to Canada as soon as the race was over, just in case they encountered any difficulties in customs. For us though, we had just enough time - barely - to stop by the team shop in Indianapolis. Us drivers had stopped by the team base before heading back up to Toronto for a quick briefing, mostly having to do with how we wanted the suspension set up for Toronto and Edmonton, with the harsh, bumpy roads of Toronto and the airfield surface of Edmonton being more like the Sebring test and the first two races at St. Petersburg and Long Beach than our last experience out at a permanent road course in Watkins Glen. I was a bit in over my head with the technical details of an Indycar - as was Dani for that matter, as she definitely wasn't much of an engineer - but Afonso and Rio had clear ideas of what they wanted, so it seemed like Dani, Haruki, and I were just going to go along with what they wanted and maybe adapt it to our individual tastes when we got to Toronto. Afonso Wagner clearly had the most experience with this stuff out of us all, while Rio Andretti also had the benefit of being raised in this American racing world, so they obviously held sway over the development of the car.
Then, once they were satisfied with the plans for the Canadian rounds, Afonso and Rio began talking to the engineers about Kentucky, the oval race following the week after Edmonton. I took the opportunity to slip out of the meeting at this stage, since I didn't have anything to contribute to begin with and the oval race didn't affect me, but I also couldn't leave since Dani was my ride to Toronto. The end result of all of that was that I was waiting outside the office looking out at the race shop. Five slots were reserved for the Indycars - four on the right represented the flagship armada of Andretti Green Racing cars, whilst the space for my car was one of two spaces on the left, which I quickly deduced used to be where the Acura LMP1 cars went last year when Andretti had the ALMS program - but all of those were empty, given that the cars were in transit. Indeed, the only car that was actually in the shop right now was a somewhat neglected Team America A1GP car, its future unclear thanks to some financial problems emerging with the series, and the fact that even if it is fiscally fine, the start of the season is still months away. There was something else though, because one of the walls of the shop floor had a nameplate along the top reading Andretti Green Racing, and below this nameplate there were the logos of all the brands that Andretti has worked with or currently does work with, effectively serving as a visual history of the team.
There was Honda, obviously, representing the current Indycar program, but Honda was joined by its sister brand Acura, representing the aforementioned American Le Mans Series program. Next to the two Japanese brand was a third Japanese brand, albeit one separate from the Honda conglomerate, and that was Infiniti. A division of Nissan Motor Company, Infiniti provided the engines for the spec Indy Lights support series. The two slots for the Indy Lights cars were behind me, but the cars were absent as well, since Indy Lights supported both the Watkins Glen race and the Toronto race, meaning they too were in transit. Then, the fourth logo was that of Ferrari, representing the A1GP program. These four logos were lined up together and were the largest, so I took it as those were the partners Andretti had when this wall exhibit was made - probably in 2008 - but below the four main partners, there were the logos of Andretti's historic partners, some of which date back to the time where it was still Team Green. These included Ford, from the team's first three seasons in CART before its long-running partnership with Honda began. Then there was Oldsmobile and Chevrolet, the American manufacturers that powered Team Green's Indianapolis 500 appearances in 2001 and 2002 before Honda and the team switched full time over to the IRL series for the 2003 season. It wasn't the longest list of manufacturers - I imagine the American giants of Penske or indeed even some privateer F1 teams can boast a greater list of historic partners - but it represents a growing team with more and more connections around the world. Not even a decade ago, Team Green found themselves in CART on the losing end of the CART-IRL split, but with MJ Andretti buying into the team, the switch to IRL, and its ties to Honda paying off to have made Andretti Green Racing one of the initial partners of the Acura ALMS program, Andretti is now firmly intrenched in motorsport, racing around the world.
"Well...that was long and boring." Dani sighed as she finally left the office and appeared at my side "Ready to get going?"
"I am," I responded, and we began heading out of the factory, giving appropriate nods and waves at some of the non-traveling staff that was still at the factory as we passed them. Once we were outside and heading towards the RV that formed our shared home during this relentless run of races, I spoke "You know, we really should find a more permanent solution. I appreciate the spare room and getting to stay in your bus, but I need to get a place of my own.
"Don't feel like you need to rush on my account. I bought way too big of an apartment because it was the thing to do when you got good money from racing, and I bought a bus way too big for me because, again, it was the thing to do when you get money in Indycar. There's a lot of drivers that have the same size bus as me that have their whole family with them at the races, plus a bus driver, plus a personal assistant. I'm alone in both, so you being here really doesn't bother me. I mean, you saw for myself that I wasn't using any of what you're using." Dani shrugged. I suppose that was true, after all, the guest bedroom I was sleeping in was just one of many under furnished rooms in Dani's spacious downtown Chicago penthouse, while in her RV, in addition to the master bedroom she had at the back of it, there were bunks built into the side next to the bathroom, as well as a retractable bed over the driver's compartment. The latter was where I was sleeping during the race weekends, finding it more spacious than a cutout in the wall, and also feeling like I was intruding less on her space if I was on the opposite side of the vehicle.
"Well thank you, I do appreciate it." I meant it with sincerity. We'll see what happens in Toronto though, because it can be a pain in the ass to bring an RV into another country from what I here, and the urban environment means there isn't much space for a bus lot like there usually is at the Indycar circuits, so yeah, maybe there I'll have to stay at a hotel. It was weird, because I've stayed at hotels for my entire life as a traveling race car driver and now in F1, but in just a handful of races over in the US, I've gotten used to this whole RV, camping thing a lot quicker than I thought I would. Of course, it helps that every vehicle in this Indycar bus lot is basically a state-of-the-art home on wheels with all the creature comforts one could imagine, but it's still a different feeling to see a whole life in the confines that can fit the confines of an American highway lane. I'm sure one could go stir crazy after awhile in here, so I imagine Dani's massive apartment is a welcome place during some of the longer gaps in the calendar, but it's not bad. My ultimate verdict on the bus thing is that I've already experienced the worst parts of it - I've seen Dani pay exorbitant fees to track owners looking to cash in on the driver bus phenomenon, I've seen her looking for a place to plug in her bus to get electricity, and I've seen her have to dump the dirty water from the shower, sink, and, indeed, toilet systems - and survived that, so maybe it would be possible to whether a whole season like this.
The Honda Indy Toronto was held on a temporary street circuit in a part of Toronto called Exhibition Place. The site of a World's Fair style event called the British Empire Exhibition, the area now includes a Major League Soccer stadium, an indoor arena they had the nerve to call a Coliseum, and, surprisingly enough, a neoclassical triumphal arch flanked on either side by a colonnade. It is probably one of the strangest structures to see at a North American street circuit but heading down into the braking zone of turn one, we see the Prince's Gate, with its two Corinthian columns and the winged goddess of victory staring down the start-finish straight, as if she was asking which one of us was going to win the race. Needlessly poetic descriptions of a piece of architecture aside, I thought back to my qualifying lap, when I had to turn my attention away from the architecture on my left and towards the apex of the corner on the right, negotiating the ninety-degree right-hander and just barely avoiding the concrete wall on corner exit. Turn two was a bit more open and thus faster, swinging the car to the right and accelerating onto Lake Shore Boulevard, speeding down what was, by far, the longest straight on the track and thus the fastest section of it. The main overtaking zone, turn three, brought things way down, a hard braking zone before a hairpin to the right. Protective tyre walls surrounded corner exit in the event of the seemingly inevitable accident that will happen here during the race, but in qualifying it was survivable, and thus I began a twisty bit of track beginning with a kink to the right and then a kink to the left to form turn four.
A brief bit of straight track followed but only for a moment, as the run down Quebec Drive was quickly followed by braking for a ninety-degree left-hander onto a piece of Princes Boulevard. The bit of boulevard was even shorter than Ontario Drive, because the relatively fast curve of turn six swung me onto Manitoba drive. A kink in turn seven brought the diagonal Manitoba back in line with the typical North American grid system just for another hard braking zone before a ninety-degree corner onto Nova Scotia Avenue in the form of turn eight. Turn eight was a corner to the right but shortly after it, turn nine was to the left, beginning a sort of S section with the pitlane entry on the outside. When confronted with a turn onto New Brunswick Way, turn ten instead turned us to the right for the central element of the series of ninety-degree bends forming the shape of the letter S, while turn eleven was the final corner. Eleven was a ninety-degree corner to the left that concluded our tour of the Canadian provinces and brought us back onto Princes Boulevard to complete the lap under the supervision of the winged goddess. My lap of the Canadian street circuit was good enough for sixth place, putting me behind the Target Chip Ganassi of Marino Franzese that started on pole, the Penske Truck Rentals Penske of the returning Tatiana Vynnychenko, the Rahal Letterman Lanigan McDonalds car of Gordon Rahal in third, the Z-Line furniture Dale Coyne racing car of defending race winner Johnny Willis in fourth, and the Conquest Racing entry of French-Canadian talent Maximilien Trapani...who for some reason was wearing a mummy headdress in pitlane.
"Look, I've had sponsors from cigarettes, oil companies, chain companies, all of that, but now I have the King Tut exhibition. It's something fun, it's new, why not enjoy it?" Trapani explained, justifying his decision to the group of bemused drivers gathered around him. The French-Canadian driver was sponsored by the Tutankhamen: The Golden King exhibition at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. I suppose that was a fair thing to say, I mean, looking around the group of us, I was sponsored by a Russian cybersecurity company, Tatiana Vynnychenko was sponsored by Penske Truck Rentals - literally a company owned by her team owner, Roger Penske, Gordon Rahal was sponsored by McDonalds, Daniella Pieri was sponsored by telecommunications giant Motorola, and Rio Andretti was sponsored by 7/11, a chain of convenience stores. The King Tut exhibit was definitely the most interesting of all those sponsors, and the white, black, and gold livery on the car was rather striking. All of that was all well and good, but there was still the matter of the headdress...
"But...you're still a white guy dressed like an Egyptian." Dani pointed out the elephant in the room.
"Eh, come on, I don't mean anything by it!" Trapani argued "It's just a fun thing to do for a children's museum."
"Look, I give him a pass on this, don't worry about it." Gordon interjected.
"A pass? What are you talking about?" Tatiana asked, which I was grateful for, because I was just as lost as she was.
"Hello? Rahal? I'm part-Lebanese." Gordon explained, reminding me of a factoid I had stored away somewhere in my brain that, in the 2005-2006 A1GP season, Gordon Rahal filled in for Team Lebanon, finishing out the season for them after they already went through two drivers earlier in the year. I suppose Rahal is one of those names that doesn't seem very ethnic, but actually is of foreign origin.
"Hey! I need your signatures, all of you." Anthony Patrick butted into the conversation, dressed in a race suit covered with signatures and holding out a sharpie for us. The CART veteran was back running a partial schedule this year, and here at his home race, he was auctioning off a race suit covered with signatures from drivers all across his racing career, with all the proceeds going towards a local charity. Today, that included all of us, which would've been fine, if not for the fact that Patrick had been sloppy about getting signatures from the current grid, meaning he's running up and down the grid hunting down drivers. Here he found a big group of us and was getting the signatures he needed.
"I hope you have a big space left...I have a long name." Tatiana nervously chuckled when she got the sharpie, scribbling a signature onto the Toronto native's shoulder.
"Long name? How do you think I feel?" I teased as I got the marker and found a space on the edge of Anthony Patrick's shoulder. It wasn't exactly the prettiest signature, but I got the job done and this wasn't about me, it was about charity. The Indycar grid was a tight community as all of this revealed, with drivers of all ages racing as equals, and everyone deserving to be here. Anthony Patrick raced in Indycars as early as 1991 and was the 2003 CART champion, but he values us as a part of his career, just as much as his great rivals from earlier on when he was fighting for champions. Perhaps for good reasons though, because, right up until the last possible moment when Marino Franzese pipped her lap time, the young rookie Vynnychenko was on pole. Even now she's starting on the front row, and while she was born in Ukraine, she was raised in Edmonton, Canada, and thus is somewhat of the future of Canadian motorsport while Patrick and Trapani.
In any case, after a last second meeting with my car's crew, getting into the car, a call to start our Honda engines from Gene Simmons of all people, and a few reconnaissance laps, we were ready to get going. The pace car pulled into the pitlane, the cars came onto Princes Boulevard staring down the gate...and the green flag dropped to begin the 2009 Honda Indy Toronto! Trapani took off with a powerful start and I ducked in behind him to follow, while Tatiana had a bad start and got nicked on the left rear tyre by the edge of Gordon Rahal's front wing, picking up a puncture. The Penske rookie fell all the way down the field going into the Princes Gate but, crucially, managed to keep it on the lead lap as she took her pitstop for new tyres and came out. Meanwhile, I found myself in third place, with Franzese leading in the Target Chip Ganassi Racing car while Maximilien Trapani was second in the aforementioned King Tut Conquest Racing entry. This was the case, at least, until lap eight, when Callum Walters spun going out of turn three and ended up with the back of his car buried in the tyre barrier, bringing out the yellow even if he was, eventually, able to keep going. This slowed things right back down, brought out the pace car again, and let Tatiana Vynnychenko close up to the back of the grid. It wasn't a long caution though, thanks to the fact that Walters managed to keep going, but some cars did take the opportunity to go onto an alternate strategy.
"Caution, caution! Carpentier has spun." literally within corners of the restart, the caution was back out. I suppose that wasn't all that surprising - after all, yellows breed yellows - given that the cars were all bunched up and Evie was likely trying to elevate herself up the grid.
"Do we pit?" I asked, noting that cars were pitting under caution here thanks to the fact that yellows were common, and cars weren't dropping off the lead lap.
"Not yet. If there's another one, we pit then." Jacob explained. Perhaps they were listening to our radio, or perhaps they came to the same conclusion as we did independently, because neither Franzese nor Trapani pitted. This largely defined the course of the first half of the race once we got going again, as Franzese initially had the speed and built a gap, but once the Ganassi crew started talking about pitstops, Trapani started lapping faster, elevating me as well. The French-Canadian could smell blood in the water, and I was benefitting from it by staying close enough to get his draft. Well, when Evie Carpentier had her second spin of the day in turn eight on lap twenty-six, Chip Ganassi Racing must have expected a caution, because they pulled the trigger and called the #10 car into the pits. So, not only was Franzese pitting, but the Ganassi crew experienced a rare mistake, losing even more time.
The order was now Trapani in the lead, myself in second, Charles Armstrong in third in the #9 Ganassi, and Anthony Patrick of all people on a charge for KV Technology Racing. On lap thirty, Patrick impressively overtook Armstrong to get up into third place - well, perhaps less impressively, because Armstrong pit at the end of the lap, so perhaps he was just slowing down at the end of his stint - leaving me the villain currently preventing a Canadian one-two. That didn't last long though, because on the very next lap going into turn three, Patrick overtook me and came up into second to the delight of the crowd. Anthony was on a charge and my strategy didn't seem to be working, because the yellow flag we were hoping for just wasn't happening.
"Box, box." DeStefano called on lap thirty-two, changing our strategy. I would actually get back ahead of Patrick when he pit the next lap, but concerningly for all of us, Trapani had yet to stop, and he was still setting his personal best lap times of the day. These were not the ultimate best lap times though, because that honor went to Tatiana Vynnychenko, who was flying her way up the field. I had pit, Patrick had pit, and finally Maximilien Trapani pit on lap thirty-five. This relinquished the lead to some cars off strategy, but the true battle of the lead was right here: between me, Trapani, Patrick, and the two Ganassi cars, with Charles Armstrong currently ahead of Marino Franzese after that earlier mistake. That being said, Tatiana Vynnychenko had been flying and she did, technically, already take her first stop, and on top of all that, she was currently running in third place. I know in my mind that she'll have to pit again to make this strategy work, but I can't deny the fact that I'm concerned to have seen her go from all the way at the back of the field at the end of lap one to third place forty laps later.
It was such an odd race, because we saw two cautions within the first twenty laps of the race, but it's been completely quiet for the next twenty laps. Colombo was in the lead and Penske teammate Vynnychenko was in second at this stage, and I was beginning to fear that the Ukrainian girl would do something audacious and go on to lead laps after that horror start to the race, but my fears were alleviated when Vynnychenko pit before Colombo. Now it was a Brazilian one-two, with Demetrio Colombo of Team Penske ahead of my teammate Afonso Wagner, but both of them were off strategy. Some distance behind the Brazilians, Maximilien Trapani was in third, I was in fourth, and Anthony Patrick was in fifth - we were provisional first, second, and third in reality - just waiting for the Penske and the Andretti to pit. Wagner bit first on lap forty-seven, then Colombo followed on the very next lap, meaning we were now battling for the undisputed race lead. Practical wisdom dictates that it was always going to end this way, but with racing, cautions, and all that, who knows who knows what could've happened.
"Slow lap for Trapani, reporting vibrations, possible puncture...go get him." Jacob offered me all the motivation I needed to go for the lead. I had noticed that Trapani had gone slower that lap, but I couldn't see a rapid delamination or anything like that, so maybe it was a slow puncture or something like that. Regardless of what it was or wasn't, I wasn't sticking around to find out, because as we pulled onto Lake Shore Boulevard, I rode out the draft of the French-Canadian driver and overtook him into turn three, taking the lead much to the moans of the partisan crowd. Trapani was in second and Anthony Patrick was closing up to him in third, so the fans saw the potential for a Canadian winner at one of the two Canadian races on the Indycar calendar. I knew what the crowd wanted, and, to an extent, I felt bad about denying them that, but with thirty laps remaining, I saw the chance for my first win in the Indycar series. Not only would that increase my chances of getting back into Formula One, but it would give me something to point to in order to justify all of this to Roksana.
The race would try and test me. First Anthony Patrick would pit earlier than me to try and go for the undercut, but another pitstop mistake meant that the local favorite lost a lot of time and lost a lot of positions, undermining his undercut before it could properly begin. Next, just after my final pitstop, Gordon Rahal would crash out and bring out a yellow just as Marino Franzese committed to pitlane, giving the Scottish driver a free pitstop that instantly undid the damage of his earlier botched pitstop and propelled him back into contention. Next Anthony Patrick and Demetrio Colombo would bring out yet another caution by going side by side through turn four and taking each other out, Colombo crunching Patrick against the wall while the Canadian refused to give way. This would actually remove some of the stigma from my overtaking the Canadians later in the race, because Colombo was now the one getting the boos and jeers from the crowd as he drove his broken car into the pitlane and retired. Finally, Tatiana Vynnychenko would charge her way past my teammates and both Ganassi cars to challenge for the lead, coming from nowhere at the end of lap one to within two seconds of the lead at the end of the race. Difficulty after difficulty would get thrown my way but, at the end of the eighty-five-lap race, I was the winner.
The top ten of the 2009 Honda Indy Toronto read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Almaty, Kazakhstan - Kaspersky Lab Andretti Green Racing - 50 points + 2 for leading the most laps.
2: Damian Peters - Brisbane, Australia - Marlboro Team Penske - 40 points.
3: Tatiana Vynnychenko - Kyiv, Ukraine - Penske Truck Rentals Team Penske - 35 points.
4: Marino Franzese - Edinburgh, Scotland - Target Chip Ganassi Racing - 32 points + 1 for pole position.
5: Johnny Willis - Rotherham, Great Britain - Z-Line Furniture Dale Coyne Racing - 30 points.
6: Charles Armstrong - Christchurch, New Zealand - Target Chip Ganassi Racing - 28 points.
7: Daniella Pieri - Chicago, Illinois - Motorola Andretti Green Racing - 26 points.
8: Afonso Wagner - Sao Paulo, Brazil - Itaipava Andretti Green Racing - 24 points.
9: Mario Andretti III - Nazareth, Pennsylvania - 7/11 Andretti Green Racing - 22 points.
10: Maximilien Trapani - Montreal, Canada - King Tut Conquest Racing - 20 points.
"Woo! Thank you, guys! Thank you. That was very good. They said our car wasn't going to be good today, but it felt wonderful, you guys gave me everything today and I'm so glad I was able to get you the win. Thank you, thank you." I thanked the team over the radio as I pulled into the pitlane and pumped a fist in the air in celebration. I stopped the car in the designated spot for the race winner, switched off the engine and climbed out of the car, standing up and pumped both fists in the air. Women have won in Indycar before - Daniella Pieri specifically, winning Motegi 2008 and Milwaukee 2009 - but this time, the third win for women in Indycar was mine. Toronto 2009, the famous Canadian street course race, was mine. I got away from the car and rushed over to the crew, hugging my team personnel and shaking hands with MJ Andretti. The team owner and son of the great Mario Andretti congratulated me on a job well done.
"Good work kiddo. I loved this place when I was a driver and now, I get to enjoy it as a team owner. Great job." MJ congratulated me, noting the fact that he won this race seven times between 1989 and 2001 when it was a CART race, the last of which was in the Team Motorola satellite team run as a side project of Team Green. That 2001 Motorola car was the origin of the Andretti Green Racing team at the beginning of this decade, and now at the end of the decade, I gave them another win at the track that started it all.
"Hey, congratulations," Tatiana smiled, the blonde in the yellow overalls with blue trims - the colors of Penske Truck Rentals, and coincidentally enough, also the colors of the Ukrainian flag - being the first driver to congratulate me. I suppose that was fitting given that she was also on the podium, so she was in the same part of the pitlane.
"You were so damn fast there at the end...you could've won that." I pointed out, not ashamed to admit that, in the closing laps, Tatiana was the driver I considered the greatest threat to my chances of winning the race, even if she did finish with her teammate between us.
"Well...I did what the team needed me to do. Damian is the championship fight and I needed to keep the Ganassis behind." Tatiana sighed, her smile fading just a little bit as she hinted that she very much could have won if she wasn't the part-time driver needing to benefit the full-time driver directly ahead of her. I didn't know about that, but she did definitely play the team player role, as she made sure that neither Franzese nor Armstrong could attack their championship rival at the end of the race, with the latter even falling behind Willis in the process. So, Peters establishes himself as Penske's main championship hope thanks to Demetrio Colombo crashing out earlier, Tatiana Vynnychenko demonstrates both speed and maturity in a massively impressive recovery drive, building up a great case for her to get a full-time seat for the 2010 season, while me? I won an Indycar race in the same year that I won the 24 Hours of Le Mans. I can't imagine what Sir Frank Williams is thinking of right now, if he even knows about the result of the Indycar race yet, but I do know that Hideki Kitagawa has yet to score a point in F1.
I could come up with an excuse. I could say that I drank a bit too much between the champagne on the podium and the various types of alcohol at the post race celebrations the team had. I could say that, on top of that, I was on an emotional high and thus wasn't predisposed towards thinking about the consequences of my actions. I could even try and say that the guilt was more on her than it was on me. These were all things that I could do, but ultimately, I knew I wasn't drunk enough to excuse my actions, I knew that my emotional state shouldn't have made a difference either way, and I know that, while she's not exactly innocent in all of this, I can't use her to erase my own responsibility. So, enough pussyfooting around the issue: I woke up naked in Daniella's bed, tangled up with the Italian-American brunette.
"Fuck," speak of the devil and she shall appear - Dani groaned as she woke up and, before even opening her eyes, realized exactly what had happened.
"Yup, that pretty much covers it up." I responded with biting sarcasm, not exactly making the situation any better, but at least getting to vent some of my emotions.
"It doesn't have to mean anything. It was a stupid mistake, it shouldn't have happened, and we won't talk about it again." Dani answered right away as she sat up, panicking beneath her calm facade as she started looking for her clothes. I glanced at the floor, found the tank top she was wearing last night, and offered it to her. She reached for it, realized the magnitude of the situation, and just sighed as I handed her the offending clothing item. She sat back down on the bed and buried her head in her fans "Dammit...I'm sorry. This is my fault. I knew you had a girlfriend and I still got close to you, I still let you sleep in my bus, hell I flirted with you for Christ's sake. I knew I was inviting my own doom and I still let it all happen. Now I've dragged you down with me."
"Hey...stop that. You don't get to blame yourself, not entirely. I'm the one with a relationship, I'm the one who went and cheated on my girlfriend. All you did was being the one to bring out my worst tendencies." I responded, not exactly reassuring her, more...sharing the misery? I absolutely shared part of the blame, because this time three years ago I had no interest in relationships and only had the faintest possible idea of how two women might have sex, but now not only have I gotten myself into a relationship, I appear to have found a way to ruin it as well. I thought that by being an adult experiencing this for the first time I could maybe avoid some of the stupidity and the bullshit that comes from teenagers in love and lust, but...it appears not. I sighed too, not having an idea of how I was going to tell Roksana about this, only knowing that it would go poorly. A deserved poorly, mind you, but poorly nonetheless "You know...I wasn't even sure you were gay before now."
"Oh, oh wow." Daniella responded, as if she was shocked at the idea that I hadn't figured out were attraction to me, maybe it really had been that obvious. I mean, based on my interactions with Roksana, I do still have those naive moments from time to time. I can thankfully say those moments are getting rarer with time, but it seems that they haven't entirely been eliminated. Oh, poor Roksana...she taught me everything I know about my sexuality and now I've gone and cheated on her. She enabled me to finally learn about this side of myself and I've already used it to betray her trust and hurt her. All the fights, all the distance, all the times that I maintained I was in the right, no matter how clearly she was upset at me...worth nothing now. I've destroyed all of it. Dani continued though, breaking the silence and the self-loathing "That's not quite true though, I'm bisexual. I like men and women."
"Yes, yes. I know what bisexual means." I learned about it in detail for the first time just a year and a half ago, but she doesn't need to know that part.
"Well, I've had flings with both, and it didn't mean anything those times. It doesn't have to mean anything this time either. We can work on getting you an apartment and your own bus, so we don't have to even risk it anymore." she announced, getting dressed and trying to come up with some simple game plan to fix all of this, but I just didn't think that kind of game plan existed.
"Maybe I should just go back to Europe..." I'm not sure if anything could fix things with Roksana at this stage, but I knew that I needed to be honest and tell her immediately, and that my best chance of any spark of this relationship remaining would be to fly back to Europe right now and tell her in person.
"Tamara no, don't say that. You are so tremendously good in an Indycar. You won your first race in your fourth attempt - do you have any idea how impressive that is? You've done something that most drivers spend their career hoping to achieve in just four races during a partial season. I don't care if you need to switch teams and never speak to me again, you need to stay in this series because you can make this series matter again. You can make it as big as it was in the glory years of CART and have just as much international attention too. We're about to go back to Brazil next year, we need a famous F1 talent like you to spearhead that charge." Daniella explained, passionately believing that I was the future of Indycar...which is interesting, because she has been such a huge part of Indycar marketing these past few years. In the wake of the split and the recession and NASCAR dominating motorsport in the US, Daniella Pieri has been the one thing that Indycar has going for it in terms of reaching out to the general populace...and she views me as the next step to all that.
"Dani...I'm not here to do that. I was never here to go that. I'm honored that you think that highly of me but this has always been a stopgap while I figure out how to ger myself back into F1." I answered, this conversation completely leaving the mistakes of last night and transitioning to one about the future. The irony of all this is that, as much as Roksana thinks that our future is being jeopardized by me racing in America, I really couldn't have a future with Daniella Pieri even if this wasn't a mistake, because I know I want to get back to Europe. Of course, I suppose that Roksana was also right, because in the course of racing in America, I've also gone and ruined our relationship. As soon as I find out there was this Roksana vs. Daniella dynamic, I seem to have handicapped my chances of ever being in a relationship with either of them.
"After all of that, even after winning, you're still thinking about what's across the sea?" Dani asked, somewhat incredulously.
"My life is across the sea Dani, so is - was - the woman I love. This was always something temporary.
"I just...I thought maybe at some point during all of this I changed your mind about that." Dani sighed.
"I mean...my opinion on Indycar is definitely more positive than it was, but that doesn't mean I've ever given up on F1. In fact, a return to F1 seems more realistic now than it did before Le Mans." I pointed out.
"Yeah well, I'm sorry that you feel that way. And...I'm sorry about being a homewrecker, it seems you and Roksana had something special." Dani apologized.
"We did...we did, and I went and threw it all away."
From the absolute highs of winning at Toronto to the absolute shame of what happened the morning after, the Honda Indy Toronto was followed by the Rexall Indy Edmonton. From the streets of the lakefront capital of Ontario to the cold, continental environs of a regional airport. That airport being Edmonton's City Center Airport. This time we were severely off the pace to begin the weekend, and, unlike Toronto, we didn't start picking up more pace as the weekend went on. In Toronto we were able to improve so much that, when I watched the replay, I heard the commentary team talking about how Andretti was off the pace this weekend as I was in contention for the lead and eventually emerging to lead the most laps out of anyone and win the race. We had no such luck, and yesterday, I qualified down in fifteenth, with Jose Estevez Jr. ahead of me and Johnny Willis directly behind while the Penskes dominated and took the first three slots with locally raided Tatiana Vynnychenko on pole, followed by Australian Damian Peters and Brazilian Demetrio Colombo. None of this exactly screamed repeat performance to me, but today is a new day, so who knows what will happen.
The situation was a lot like Toronto in a way, with a street race - of sorts - with the skyline of a Canadian city in the background. I suppose Edmonton wasn't exactly as impressive as Toronto but, well, at the risk of offending any and all Canadians, Toronto isn't exactly impressive either if you take away from CN Tower. There was quite a bit of a contrast between the tight streets of the Ontario city with the wide runways here in Alberta. The northwestern of the two runways formed the start-finish straights, where the race was about to begin. Damian Peters leads the championship at the moment but the Ganassi duo of Franzese and Armstrong is directly behind, and beneath the lead three, there is the fourth-place dual between Demetrio Colombo and Daniella Pieri. Colombo had a bit of a mixed start to the season - who could blame him given he spent the entire offseason in a tax dispute with the threat of deportation hovering over him - but won the Indianapolis 500 and has had a strong run of races since. As for Daniella Pieri, she was really strong during that spring to early summer run of ovals but, now that we've gotten back to the road courses, she's been losing ground to the resurgent Brazilian in the Penske. Colombo gave himself the best possible chance though, because while Daniella was buried down in the midfield, Colombo overtook Peters off the line, slotting into second behind the part-time Penske of Tatiana Vynnychenko.
Vynnychenko led the field as we turned right and narrowed from the wind runway to a relatively tight corner made from a taxiway. Turn one led into the briefest of straights that took us in just in time to spit us out into the chicane, consisting of turn two to the right and turn three to the left, swinging us onto a longer straight. I had gotten ahead of Estevez on the start but hadn't made much progress since then, and it didn't seem like I was going to make progress until we got back onto the runways. The fast turn four to the right entered a section that replaced the squared-off angles with more rounded corners, something less typical of an airport and more typical of a traditional race track. Turns five and six were both to the left and almost like two apexes of a single, long corner - like Pouhon at Spa - but just wasn't quite flowing enough to pull it off. Turn seven snapped us back to the right and then turn eight was a fast kink straightening us up at the top of the circuit, effectively completing a large S-shape. Cresting the top of the flat circuit, I dabbed the brakes and then turned right into turn nine, letting the Honda V8 behind me breath as we arrived onto the second of the two runways making up this track. The walls on either side a distant memory as I drove down a wide expanse of concrete, unending in either direction, and continuing that way all the way down to turn ten. A ninety-degree corner to the left in theory, but in practice, turn ten was wide enough that it was taken a lot faster than these types of corners tend to be. This runway at the tail end of the track soon gave way to a hairpin, made up of the wide turn eleven before narrowing into the tight turn twelve as we negotiated the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree corner to arrive onto the back straight. There was plenty of free concrete to my right to play with, but here at the bottom of the circuit, the outside walls weren't actually all that far away, so that reintroduced the possibility of danger.
Not for too long though, as the back straight was full throttle and the corners that followed it were pretty fast too. I did touch the brakes and bled off some speed as I threw the car to the right into turn thirteen, but then I got to the second element of the chicane, turn fourteen to the left, and I just didn't need to worry at that point. That's because turn fourteen took me back onto the start-finish straight, once again giving me an entire airport's width to extend the corner with, letting me carry so much speed through the end of the lap and across the line to complete the first lap. Believe it or not, three or four cars towards the back of the grid managed to make contact during the first lap. Fortunately, they didn't bring the caution out, so instead of focusing on a yellow lap, I focused on a yellow car. Since as I crossed the start-finish line, I could see Tatiana Vynnychenko throwing her yellow, blue, and white car into turn one, followed by her teammates in the red and white Marlboro chevron cars. That's where I wanted to be - that's where I proved I could be last time out in Toronto - but I just didn't have the pace to compete with the Penskes today. In fairness, nobody really did, because as the race developed, Tatiana Vynnychenko led ninety-laps out of ninety-five.
Her teammates, Demetrio Colombo and Damian Peters, would manage to lead two laps and a lap, respectively, thanks to pit rotation, while the Target Chip Ganassi Racing entry of Charles Armstrong managed to lead two laps thanks to an alternate strategy compared to the identical, yet staggered scheme the Penskes were running. As for Andretti, our cars could be found anywhere from as high as fifth to as low as fifteen throughout the day, but we were mostly on the fringes of the top ten. The exception to this would be Afonso Wagner who, in an attempt to secure something more for the team, would crash out on the back straight and bring out the caution flag that would, ultimately, bring an end to the race. The only notable development being that Charles Armstrong had managed to get ahead of Damian Peters before the caution came out, meaning that when the Brazilian did crash, he denied the Australian the chance of regaining the podium place from the New Zealander. Thus, by the skin of his teeth Armstrong managed to both deny Penske the chance of a perfect podium sweep and actually gain a handful of points on his championship rival. Nevertheless, the story of this race is perhaps the story of future championships rather than this one, because today was the story of Tatiana Vynnychenko. Vynnychenko demonstrated immense, immense speed already during her partial season but today, she won a race and she did it in dominant fashion. One way or another, Roger Penske needs to make that #22 car full time for 2010 and if he can do that, Peters, Colombo, Armstrong, Franzese, and any other title contenders from this year are going to have something to watch out for. Tatiana has proven that she can win races, and I have no doubt that next year she'll prove she can compete for titles.
On that note, the top ten results for the 2009 Rexall Edmonton Indy read as follows:
1: Tatiana Vynnychenko - Kyiv, Ukraine - Penske Truck Rentals Team Penske - 50 points + 1 for pole position + 2 for leading the most laps.
2: Demetrio Colombo - Sao Paulo, Brazil - Marlboro Team Penske - 40 points.
3: Charles Armstrong - Christchurch, New Zealand - Target Chip Ganassi Racing - 35 points.
4: Damian Peters - Brisbane, Australia - Marlboro Team Penske - 32 points.
5: Marino Franzese - Edinburgh, Great Britain - Target Chip Ganassi Racing - 30 points.
6: Anthony Patrick - Toronto, Canada - KV Technology Racing - 28 points.
7: Gordon Rahal - Columbus, Ohio - McDonalds Rahal Letterman Lanigan - 26 points.
8: Johnny Willis - Rotherham, Great Britain - Z-Line Furniture Dale Coyne Racing - 24 points.
9: Robert Deschamps - Rotterdam, Netherlands - Hole in the Wall Camps Rahal Letterman Lanigan - 22 points.
10: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Almaty, Kazakhstan - Kaspersky Lab Andretti Green Racing - 20 points.
I made it a point to congratulate Vynnychenko after the race - just as she had done for me in Toronto - because this is also as close as she'll get to a home race. Indycar is never going to race in Kyiv - F1 is international but I don't see anyone on that side pushing for the creation of a race in Ukraine either - so she'll have to settle for the city she was raised in rather than the one she was born in. As someone who would one day like to win the Monaco Grand Prix, I can promise you that the city you were raised in matters too, in fact, some would consider that their hometown more than the place they were actually born in. In any case, for the story of Andretti, Rio and Dani Pieri were directly behind me in eleventh and twelfth respectively, Haruki Tanaka was all the way down in fifteenth, while Afonso Wagner was classified down in eighteenth after his retirement near the end of the race. Toronto had threatened to be a hard race for us and instead it proved to be one of the high points of our season, so I suppose it's only natural then that our next race would turn out to be disappointing.
"Well, wasn't the best race or the most eventful one for us, but I think we can be proud of ourselves when a tenth place is a bad day for us." Jacob DeStefano shrugged as I returned to my car after congratulating Tatiana. It's a similar thought I've had before, so I do agree with Jacob deep down, but that still doesn't mean that I am happy with the result. Being part-time is somewhat of a gift and a curse, because on one hand, it really doesn't matter how good or bad I do since I'm not part of the team's championship hopes, but on the other hand, that means I only have so many opportunities to impress. Take this season for example: I have two more races left in Indycar, one at Mid-Ohio and one at Laguna Seca, so with me aiming to finish the season on a strong note, I can't afford to be finishing tenth at this stage. At least, that was my concern at the moment, because seconds later, all my goals and ambitions for the 2009 season changed.
"Tamara?" I glanced over to see one of the guys on the team coming over holding my phone "It's your agent, he keeps calling."
"Ernesto? What is it?" I asked as soon as I grabbed the ringing phone from the Andretti Green Racing employee.
"Are you near a TV?" Ernesto Signorelli asked.
"No, I just finished the race, why?" I asked, wondering what this was about.
"This morning at the Hungarian Grand Prix there was an accident. Henrique de Matteo took a spring to the face - it punctured his visor and hit him just beneath the right temple. He was rushed to hospital and he's in stable condition right now. He's out for the summer break and at very least the next two races, most likely the rest of the season but we don't have the answers quite yet. All I know is that every other manager on the grid is calling Ferrari right now and offering their drivers' services. What are we going to do?" Ernesto reported. As he spoke, I rushed over to the pit garages and turned on one of the TVs we had tuned into the Speed Channel, finding them reporting the very same news - it was completely true.
"Yes, yes, of course, call them." I answered. Ernesto got to work, hanging up immediately so he could start blowing up Ferrari's phones instead of mine. I lowered my phone and held it limply in my hand as everything went through my head. Henrique de Matteo, someone I knew and raced against, was seriously injured and in a Hungarian hospital, but that also meant there was a high-quality seat open in F1. As callous as it sounds, Ernesto was right, everyone was inquiring about that seat, so if someone is going to profit from a fellow driver being injured, it might as well be me.
Forget Mid-Ohio and Laguna Seca, forget the Andretti contract, because for the first time in my life, I have a chance to drive for Scuderia Ferrari.
Notes:
I mean, would you even want to considering where they are right now? Jokes about modern Ferrari aside, I'm really excited about the next part of this story.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 26: Stringiamci a Coorte
Notes:
So...I finished this in literally less than a week because I was excited to get to this part of the story.
Anyway, there were some pretty big developments last chapter, now we get into the consequences.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXVI.
Stringiamci a Coorte.
I took a cab home from the airport. It was highly unnecessary, after all, all I was doing was delaying the inevitable...in fact, I seem to have made it worse.
"You're home!" Roksana smiled, wrapping her arms around me in the doorway, looking the happiest I've seen her in a while. Unfortunately, the contrast between me and her couldn't be more obvious, because I stood there stiffly, overcome with guilt, not wanting to touch her until the hard part is over with, and at that point she probably won't even want me to. Yurasova noticed this too, because she pulled away and asked "What's wrong?"
"I made a serious mistake in America." I started, cringing internally as I felt the mood shift around us "Can we please continue this inside?"
"Right, of course." Roksana stepped to the side, letting me into my own apartment, and closing the door behind her, then turning back to face me with a frown and her arms crossed. I sighed, I've already gone and ruined her good mood with the mere threat of what I was going to say - what was she going to think when I actually told her what was going to happen. I didn't know, but the moment was clearly upon us because she wanted to know "Well?"
"When I won in Toronto, we celebrated after the race. I got a little drunk, I got too uninhibited, and I kissed Daniella. One thing led to another, and we slept together that night. I didn't do anything after that and I've barely spoken to her since, but it happened, and I can't take it back now. I don't know what to-" I tried to continue on, but Roksana wasn't giving me the chance, she was too angry, too outraged already, and the worst part was that I couldn't even blame her.
"You slept with her? Why didn't you lead with that? You started telling me with the kiss to soften the blow and then you keep going afterwards thinking you could cover it up? No, you don't get to do that Tamara. You cheated on me; you don't get to gloss over that. You went to America when I didn't want you too, you spent time with Daniella when I was suspicious of her to begin with - with good reason as it turns out - and now you think that what, you'll be forgiven because you were drunk?" she instantly threw it all back at me, coming away from the door and marching towards me as she ranted, raising her voice as she did, which just twisted the knife more and more. Then she brought up the America thing and the Daniella thing as if her behavior all along was retroactively justified.
"Well hang on a second, don't act like you knew all along that this was going to happen. Neither of us had any way of even knowing that Dani was into women, let alone that any of this was going to happen." I shot back, not letting her have all of that.
"Yeah, well I didn't like her from the start and now I know why." Roksana shrugged it off.
"You didn't like anything I was doing in America; you hated every time I flew out there as if I didn't make time to come back here whenever it was reasonable. Maybe when I finally won a race in Indycar I wanted to celebrate it with someone that didn't make me feel guilty about my career." I pushed back.
"So it's my fault?" Roksana twisted my words.
"No! That's not what I'm saying! I'm saying that I spent my whole life trying to be a Formula One driver, I had it for two years, and then I lost it - partially because of you I might add - and then I go and take steps to try and get back there and you fight me every step of the way!" I raised my voice.
"So you resent me because some creep took photographs of us both? A reporter visited me at work! You're not the only one affected by this!" she spat back.
"I don't resent you, I just...I just...look, I want to be in F1, and I want to be with you. I've taken the steps to do that, and it seems that we finally have the opportunity to be back there. This should be a good time for us and I'm just trying to work through this last obstacle so that we can be in a healthy relationship again." I explained, trying to turn this away from a nasty argument and towards a potential solution, even if I didn't think that a solution was all that likely at this point. If we did work something out though, then maybe things could go back to the way they used to be. Despite the distance, the arguing, and the cheating, I haven't stopped loving Roksana, I haven't stopped wanting to be with her, and I really do want to see if we can come back from this, implausible as it may be.
"It's not just an obstacle Tamara. You put an ocean between us and instantly fell into the arms of another woman in the same profession as you, in the same world and mindset that you seem to think I can't understand. How am I ever supposed to think I'm good enough for you again?" she asked, bringing this back to the self-esteem question we broached a few arguments ago.
"Roksana...it's not like that at all. You are good enough for me, more than good enough. Daniella was a stupid mistake I made on an emotional high, you're the one who taught me about this whole side of myself, that's not something I'm going to forget about." I tried to reach out for her...
"You forgot about it when you cheated on me." ...but she didn't want it. I sighed and sat down on the couch, burying my head in my hands.
"Why couldn't you just come with me to America? Then all of this could've been avoided." I said with a sob, dreading how things were turning out.
"Because I don't want to be a vapid trophy wife dependent on you. I have my own life, my own dreams Tamara. I'm writing for my own magazine, I do columns about my favorite sport from French websites, and I'm the one who went and interviewed you. We know each other because of me, because I thought you'd make a good story for people like us living here in western Europe. You were supposed to be an inspirational story, nothing more, but then I saw a smart and humble young woman who wasn't letting the fame and the ambition get to her head. I was interested in you because I thought you were something other than the typical celebrity, and then I find out you're a lesbian too and I think that maybe, just maybe I found someone I love who I could be a real equal with, but then you go off and fuck somebody else in America. I want a relationship out of this, you just want a girlfriend - your actions have made that abundantly clear." she tore into me, making it clear that she didn't think that there was any going back. As far as she was concerned, I've gone and betrayed her trust completely and proven we were never on equal footing...and the worst part is that I couldn't necessarily say she was wrong. I complain about her not going to America, but she's already moved from Marseille to Monaco for me, already spending most of her time away from the office she's supposed to be working from. Yes, her career allows her to do work wherever her laptop is - at least for the most part - but it's undeniably harder for her, and I wanted to make it even harder for the sake of my career.
"So...what happens now?" I asked "I don't want to kick you out, but I plan on staying here again."
"I think it would be best if I went back to Marseille." she answered.
"You don't have to." I pleaded one last time, trying to avoid a complete separation.
"No...I think I do." she shook her head, severing the thread. Within a few days, she'd be gone, my apartment considerably emptier for it. The pillows and blanket she liked left my couches, her phone charger left my end table, her favorite foods slowly left my kitchen, and her laptop left its traditional spot on the coffee table. Soon enough, the only part of the apartment that was left untouched was my alcove with race suits, helmets, and trophies. The only thing she left alone was the monument to my career, as if she was trying to say that's all I had left.
Ironically enough, I was now back in Europe and - if things went well when I met with Ferrari - I'd be here for the foreseeable future. It was exactly what Roksana Yurasova wanted from me; it just came too late for her to still be part of my life.
My blue Alfa pulled up in front of the gates of the Ferrari factory in Maranello. The guard at the gate took a look at quick look at my ID and let me in, evidently having been informed that I was coming. I drove where he directed me and pulled up inside the compound that housed Ferrari's F1 factory, it's road car factory, and even the museum that housed a vast collection of race cars - one befitting the history and legacy of Scuderia Ferrari - parking the car just behind the black Maserati rental car that Ernesto Signorelli arrived in. The Italo-Argentine agent sitting on the hood of his car waiting for me.
"I talked to them as much as I could. I got you an interview with some of the top brass at Ferrari. They won't discuss money or anything specific today, they just want to hear you make your case, and they don't want me in there guiding you at all. You'll be on your own for this part." Ernesto explained. Obviously, my agent needed to be there for the actual contract negotiations, but it sounded like Ferrari wasn't at that stage yet. This was very much an informal interview, and they didn't want to get that spoiled by an experienced mind like Ernesto Signorelli influencing my answers. They wanted to hear what I had to say and what I could provide, not just hear whatever answers my agent felt would give me the highest chance of getting into a seat.
"Right. You got me a foot in the door though, you did your job." I nodded to Ernesto, satisfied with what he did for me, and headed inside the door. A Ferrari employee promptly guided me deeper into the factory. I caught glimpses of people in team gear walking around, of work being done on a car, and even of parts being fabricated, but the employee was heading forward at a brisk pace - something I imagined was intentional - denying me the chance to get closer looks. I eventually arrived in an office where three men sat: first there was Luca di Montezemolo, who was the Italian Chairman of Fiat and the President of Ferrari, then Milan Stefanovic, the Italian-born, Montenegrin Team Principal of Scuderia Ferrari, and finally, Pietro Ferrari, the heir to the great Enzo Ferrari himself. Luca di Montezemolo has had control of Ferrari for decades, even breaking up the great Ross Brawn, Jean Todt, Wilhelm Ziegler dream team when that was at the perceived end of its effectiveness. Luca's team went on to win two constructors' championships and the 2007 championship with Matti Hamalainen, but that was before the regulation change that has left Ferrari struggling in the midfield while Honda and Red Bull lead the charge this season. In contrast, Pietro Ferrari had that great name, and he was growing his name in his own right with appearances at the 24 Hours of Le Mans this year, so there have been suggestions that the Ferrari family has been trying to muscle their way back into the company, with Pietro having a very different vision than Montezemolo. Then there was Stefanovic, the unfortunate Team Principal of the race team who was stuck trying to navigate the treacherous waters of company politics.
"So," Pietro Ferrari began before Luca di Montezemolo could say anything, another example of this sort of macho politicking "We've had a lot of drivers come in before you did and all their agents, what do you have to offer?"
"I drove in Formula One in 2007 and 2008, I have podiums to my name, and I outscored my highly-rated teammate in our time together. I lost my seat because of reasons that have nothing to do with performance and, since then, I've signed for A1 Team Monaco, Peugeot, and Andretti Green Racing, and I've won a race for each of them, including an overall win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. I have experience on most of the circuits left in the season and I have more recent seat team in F1 than whatever other free agents you have available to you." I explained, bringing up my list of accomplishments and finishing off with the fact that I know the driver market well enough to say that there isn't really a better option out there. As far as I can tell, the best alternative out there is Maximilien Lecroix and one: Red Bull replaced him with a nineteen-year-old from the Basque country from the Hungarian Grand Prix onwards for a reason. Two: Lecroix has already indicated that he's targeting a move to Superleague Formula along with a more prominent seat at Peugeot - which neatly creates an opening for Norman Simonnet to replace me in the #9.
"None of your experience is relevant to the 2009 cars though." Luca di Montezemolo pointed out.
"With all due respect, between F1, Indycar, A1GP, and LMP1, I think I've proven that I can perform in any type of car." I argued. Montezemolo did have a point and I wasn't sure how I was going to deal with the taller, thinner rear wings combined with the wider, lower front wings, as well as the cleaner aero profile in general, but I've driven open wheelers with less aero than the spaceship era F1 cars I drove. Indycar is one such example with aerodynamics on par with a 1990s F1 car paired with a big, heavy chassis designed to withstand oval impacts, so I can't imagine that 2009 F1 cars would be even less pleasant than that. Granted, Ferrari has had some bad performances this year and they don't have an effective double diffuser solution like Honda does, but it's not exactly a terrible car either, so I definitely think that I could adapt to it if given the chance. Also, the fact of the matter is that the new cars haven't dramatically changed the performance levels between drivers - Maximilian Renner was promising with Toro Rosso and now he's won two of Red Bull's three races this season, Anthony Harrison is still comfortably faster than Jyri Kaasalainen, and Felipe Alvarez has even more comprehensively defeated Filipe Yannick - so the fact that I've proven I can perform in midfield cars in 2007 and 2008 should translate well to a 2009 Ferrari. I have F1 experience and international versatility on my side.
"If we give you the seat, what do you intend to get out of this?" Pietro Ferrari asked, seeming to show more openness towards me then he had with that rather brusque opening to this interview. I seemed to be winning over the famous name, but Montezemolo still wore a neutral expression, not giving away anything yet.
"First and foremost, my priority would be to perform well for Ferrari. Driving for the team would be a dream come true - like I'm sure it would be for countless other drivers - and to do well for Ferrari would be even better. Beyond that, well, yes, I would like to get a permanent seat in F1 again. I won't hide that." I admitted. I knew that everyone was going to talk about how much of an honor it was to race for Ferrari, but I also knew that I would be a mere stand-in for Henrique de Matteo, so I would have to find something else for 2010. Ferrari knew that too, so trying to hide behind that wouldn't do either of us any good. The best thing for me, I figure, would be to be honest with Ferrari instead of coming across like someone desperately lying for a seat.
"What about the controversy?" Luca di Montezemolo brought up another problem "The Ferrari name should not be dragged through tabloids because of a driver's personal life."
"My ex-girlfriend and I got together in June 2007 and our relationship was successfully hidden until September 2008. Even then, it was not revealed because of my actions, it was revealed because of an invasion of privacy." I answered, the term ex-girlfriend feeling a bit gross on my tongue, but I suppose it was the truth now with how things went with Roksana. As for the British tabloids themselves, I had considered taking legal action against them, but with British slander laws being the way they were, along with the fact that I was contracted with Andretti and Peugeot, I think that all I would have accomplished is wasting legal fees and keeping this controversy in the public eye. Instead, I left the F1 paddock for half a season, the story died out, and now I have the opportunity to return.
"With all due respect Luca, I think she is capable of keeping her personal life away from the track. Even in 2008 with the scandal she was still able to score a few strong results at the end of the season. All this time later? It won't be a problem." Pietro Ferrari chipped in, leading to Luca sending him a look, as if to say to quiet down for now. This is a conversation that will continue behind closed doors, but now I knew my suspicions were right, Pietro was on my side now.
"Enough," Luca continued "Milan, do you want her to test?"
"Yes, I would like to see her in the car." the team principal finally spoke up, getting to make his decision.
"Good. Be at Fiorano at 9:00 tomorrow. Bring a helmet and a race suit. You will be driving an F2008 with 2009-spec front and rear wings, it will serve as an approximation of the 2009 car." Pietro Ferrari decided, taking over from Luca di Montezemolo, much to the President's chagrin.
"Of course, thank you." I decided. Rising, shaking hands with the three men, and managing to surprise my smile until I left the room. That went pretty well I think, and I've evidently answered their questions well enough to get a chance in a mule car.
I used a changing room at the circuit to change into the Kaspersky Lab race suit I had from my time in Indycar. Then I unzipped the bag I had with me and retrieved my helmet, a plain cyan and gold design with the Kazakh sun on the top, the outline of a soaring eagle on either side, and a Honda logo on the forehead. Other than the Japanese company's badge and the Kaspersky Lab sponsorship across the visor, it was a plain helmet. With any luck, by the end of this, I'll be replacing this Indycar gear with a red race suit and a helmet covered in the logos of Ferrari's partners. Now dressed, I walked out of the room with my helmet underneath my arm and the HANS device held in my other hand, ready to be clipped on. I walked into the iconic Shell gas station that formed the pit structure here at Ferrari's private race track. The sound of a Formula One V8 going around the circuit reminded me of what I was missing, and what I was potentially returning to, and that feeling continued when I entered the garage. Sitting there in a seat with a doctor fussing around behind him, was Wilhelm Ziegler himself in a race suit.
"...too serious. I won't be able to clear you as it is right now." I heard the doctor say as I got closer.
"How long will it take to heal?" the German seven-time World Champion asked.
"A few months at least. With proper rest and care, you should be able to get better in time to train for the 2010 season, but if you try and get into the car in 2009, you will break your neck." the doctor warned, seemingly definitively ruling out Wilhelm's chances of getting into the car. I quickly realized what was going on here - Ziegler had driven first but wasn't able to continue, now long-time Ferrari test driver Baldassare Lori was in the car - meaning that I had been in competition with Ferrari's greatest driver of all time, but I had also won by default thanks to a neck injury. Now I just needed to beat Baldo Lori.
"Hello Tamara," he smiled, either remembering me from our brief meetings during the 2007 and 2008 season where he was a common fixture on Ferrari's pitwall, or simply being aware of me thanks to our mutual profession "I had a motorcycle injury a few months ago, I tried to drive anyway, but the pain got to be too much. Now my doctor isn't letting me drive again."
"Hello Wilhelm. Nothing makes a racing driver more than being in pain and still wanting to drive." I smiled, noting the fact that despite the fact that he admitted the pain was too much, he was still sad about his doctor not letting him drive.
"Ha, I suppose that's true. Never goes away, even all these years later. You know, I thought the passion went away after 2005, 2006 and those difficult years, but now? All I want is to get back there." Wilhelm sighed "Not yet though, I'll have to wait a few months longer."
"So you want a comeback even if this doesn't work out?" I asked, the implicit question being that would he being willing to come back even if Ferrari wasn't an option, because it seems that Ferrari is set to retain Hamalainen and Matteo in the future, provided that Henrique is able to recover.
"You know the hunger as well as I do. From what I hear you've been racing all over the world trying to get back here." Ziegler pointed out.
"Fair enough," I shrugged before asking about the remaining competition "How is Baldo doing?"
"Well...Baldassare was a great asset for the time during the championship years. He can do a hundred laps at the exact same pace. A perfect, consistent base for testing the car." Wilhelm praised his former teammate, noting the fact that Lori has been Ferrari's test driver since the 1990s. Wilhelm Ziegler allegedly pushed Ferrari hard all those years, making the team be a relentless force that was constantly improving, and Lori proved to be an integral part of that.
"A hundred laps at the exact same pace, but is it a good race pace?" I asked.
"Well...that's what we'll have to see, isn't it?" Wilhelm dodged the question, throwing it back at me as a sort of challenge, that I would have to prove I'm faster than Lori in the races if I wanted this seat. Well, soon enough, I would have the chance, because Baldo pulled into the pits a few minutes later, the thirty-nine-year-old who last raced for Minardi in the 1999 Japanese Grand Prix with his distinctive yellow race helmet climbed out of the car. The team removed his foam seat and instructed me to get in. Much like I had at Williams twice and Andretti once, I sat in the tub as the foam was shaped around my body to cradle me into the car, a temporary solution during this test and, if it worked out, a permanent seat would be made for me. Once the foam had me perfectly in position and I was strapped in, Ronnie Sanders - who was Henrique de Matteo's race engineer - contacted me over the radio.
"Alright Tamara, it's Ronnie. We're going to have you set five consecutive fast laps to start with. I want to see what you can do, got it?" the northern Englishman asked me.
"Copy. I'm ready." I answered affirmatively. A few moments later, the 2009-spec Bridgestone slick tyres were on the car - in contrast to the grooved tyres I had raced with - and the mechanics lowered the car to the ground, releasing me to begin my time on Fiorano. I started with an out lap, naturally, getting my bearings with the 2009 tyres and aero as I did it - it wasn't the same, obviously, as this was still a 2008 chassis with the 2009 wings attached, but it was as close as I was going to get with the in-season testing restrictions that existed in the sport meaning that, regardless of who Ferrari picked, they'd have a driver half a season behind the curve - before coming out of the parabolic turn thirteen and the right kink of turn fourteen. I crossed beneath the bridge and over the start-finish line to begin my first lap of the Fiorano Circuit. I powered down the straight and through the slight kink to the left that formed turn one before getting on the brakes for turn two at the top of the circuit. I turned to the right and then sped up as the circuit began gently sweeping to the right, continuing flat-out through turn three and requiring the slightest lift through four as I dived into the corner and then to the left through turn five to complete the S. Speeding out of the corner until I finally arrived at turn six, hitting the brakes, downshifting as I did it, and throwing the car to the right with the realization that a return to F1 - with Ferrari no less - was within my grasp.
Coming out of turn six the track plunged upwards to form the overpass before descending down again just in time for turn seven. A tap of the brakes to bring the car under control, two downshifts to get the power band where I wanted, then throwing the car to the right through the sweeping corner. Then getting back on the throttle in a controlled but decisive manner so that I was gaining speed again as I straightened up the car to the left through the kink of turn eight, setting me up for the approach to the hairpin of turn nine. All the speed I just gained was bled off as I slammed the brakes and clicked down the box for the left-hand hairpin, negotiating the corner and then speeding my way out of it. Turn ten was a nothing corner to the right bringing the car out to an elbow that was turn eleven, lifting as I swung the car at the apex and then getting back onto the power for turn twelve. Twelve was a kink to the right that mirrored turn ten and spit me out onto a short straight leading to the aforementioned turn fourteen. Braking, but then swinging the car to the left and getting onto the power - the shape was similar to turn nine, but it was big enough and wide enough that it was faster, being more of a parabola than a hairpin - completing the lap with the slight kink of turn fourteen. One down, four to go.
"Good evening, Tamara, Ernesto." Pietro Ferrari greeted the very same day that evening, having called us back to the factory after dinner. Signorelli felt that this was a good sign, and so did I when I saw that Pietro was the one to greet us "Follow me."
"Hello, sit down please." Luca di Montezemolo greeted as Pietro led us into the same office as earlier, now with two seats, one for me and one for my agent. Once we were seated, Montezemolo turned his attention to the team principal "We're ready to begin Milan."
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva, your five-lap stint average was exemplary. Your race stint average was exemplary, your qualifying simulation was satisfactory, and our engineers were satisfied to work with you. We propose the following offer." the Italo-Montenegrin team principal offered, sliding over a piece of paper to Ernesto and I. The Argentine looked over the paper first and then passed it to me. A contract through the end of the 2009 season, a salary that was five times more than what I was making with Andretti - which meant that the first time I would be paid for driving in Formula One would be as an emergency replacement for an injured Henrique de Matteo - and Ferrari would buy me out of my contracts with Andretti Green Racing and Peugeot. That was all good, what was less good - and what I imagine came from Luca di Montezemolo - was that Ferrari reserved the right to drop me at their discretion would I fail to meet their standards. In most ways, it was an immense improvement from what I had at Williams and a triumphant return to F1, but on the other hand, it was still the same type of situation: temporary and vulnerable. That being said, when I glanced over at Ernesto, I realized this was the best deal that he was able to negotiate, so I would have to live with it for the time being. Now what I had to do was perform well, impress, and maybe I'll be able to impress another team that had an opening for 2010. If not that, then maybe I would have to hope that Henrique de Matteo's injuries proved more serious than they had seemed. I didn't like hoping for another driver's misfortune, but with the contract offer I had, I didn't have a choice.
"I accept." I nodded, receiving a pen from Stefanovic and signing the contract. I was now a Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro driver.
"I look forward to what we can do together," Pietro Ferrari smiled, eager at having gotten his way with the team that wore his famous family name.
"The team is looking forward to a strong end of the season." Luca added, the best response he's given so far, but still laced with the threat that I would be dropped if I couldn't live up to the promise that Ferrari and Stefanovic seemed to see in me.
"Thank you...I can't wait to start." I smiled, meaning every word of it. Scuderia Ferrari...the most iconic, the most successful team in Formula One, and I was driving for them. I was born in 1988, McLaren won the championship that year and continued their success into the early 1990s before they were displaced by Williams. Williams was the dominant team of the 1990s overall, with a brief exception in 1994 and 1995 as Wilhelm Ziegler and Benetton emerged as a contender. Then in the 2000s, after McLaren reemerged in the late 1990s, Scuderia Ferrari began their reign of dominance. The 1999 constructors' championship and then both titles in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. 2005 and 2006 proved to be another interruption as Benetton's successor, Renault, won two doubles with the help of driver Felipe Alvarez, but thanks to McLaren's disqualification, Ferrari and new star driver Matti Hamalainen would win in 2007. Then last year, as Anthony Harrison won the drivers' championship for McLaren, Ferrari still won the constructors' championship. This year it seems that Honda is the dominant force, but up until now, F1 has been defined by Williams, Ferrari, and McLaren for my entire life. Now I've gotten the opportunity to drive for two of those teams, and I've managed to win the 2009 24 Hours of Le Mans with Peugeot, and I've gone over to Indycar and won a race there as well. I'm not just a token pay driver anymore; I am legitimately becoming something great now. I have entered the hallowed halls of drivers that have driven for the greatest team in Formula One.
"Hey," I called Daniella Pieri that night, which I suppose was afternoon for her over in Chicago.
"Hey," the American responded, not sure how to react.
"I signed a contract with Ferrari. I'm going to drive for them for the rest of the season." I told her, needing to get that off my chest.
"Congratulations, sounds like a dream come true for you." Dani responded, there was a bittersweet tinge to it, and I could tell she didn't entirely feel happy about it, but there was a genuine angle to it all as well.
"It really is." I answered, "I told Roksana about what happened...she didn't take it well."
"Oh God...I'm sorry Tamara." Dani cringed, regretting her actions.
"Yeah...I wish it had gone better. But what happened has happened, I can't change that." I sighed.
"Well yeah, but that doesn't mean it has to be something. I don't want to steal you away from Roksana or anything, it was a stupid crush that I should've just ignored instead of tempting myself over and over again like a moth to flame." she bemoaned her actions.
"Sure, but it's not like you forced me into anything, I was just as much a part of that as you were. I made the same mistakes." I admitted, refusing to let her take full responsibility for what happened.
"So, what happens now?" Daniella asked.
"I'm in Europe, you're still in Indycar, as far as I'm concerned, the only thing we can do is just be friends. I like you and I enjoy your company, but I don't want a relationship, I'm still guilty over how things went with Roksana and I think I need time to figure out how a relationship could mix with my career." I explained, making it clear that I wanted things to go back to status quo with Daniella. At the same time, I was also going to try and learn the lesson that Roksana gave me. We weren't real equals in that relationship, and I wasn't able to balance the demands of my career with her wants and needs. I need to be able to figure out how to have a healthy relationship as a Formula One driver before I can throw myself back into that particular world.
"That sounds very mature of you, and yeah, I'd like to go back to being friends." Dani accepted, seeming to smile over the phone.
"Thank you." I smiled too, glad to have a good ending to this even if I couldn't get a good ending to my story with Roksana.
"So...I take it your Indycar adventure is over?" she asked.
"Yeah, I'm going to talk to MJ and Kaspersky tomorrow. There's somebody I have in mind that I think has the talent to take up my seat nicely, I just have to make it happen." I revealed, filling her in on my plan to bring Viktorija Urbonaviciute over to Indycar. The Lithuanian driver had wanted an open wheel racing career before money and circumstances sent her first to DTM and then to endurance racing, but now I had the power to send her to a competitive open wheel racing seat where she'll be able to display her talents. I could've done the same thing for Natasha I suppose but she is a GP2 Asia champion and the test and reserve driver of the team currently shaping up to win the championship, so she's fine. Natasha doesn't need my help anymore because since racing in Italian Formula Three, she's grown and improved as a driver so much that she'll make it to Formula One on merit sooner rather than later. I don't need to help her, but I could help Viktorija.
"Well, good luck with that. And good luck with Ferrari too." Dani responded.
"Thank you, you too." I ended the call, pleased to have resolved things with the American. She is getting better and better every year, she has wins to her name on ovals, and I think she is closer to winning on road and street circuits than she's willing to believe. I could well see her competing for championships in Indycar a few years down the line, and I hope it all goes well. I just hope that I can replicate that success in Formula One and performing with Ferrari would be the perfect first step.
Ferrari was getting all the headlines at the European Grand Prix, and for good reason. Not only was I making my return to Formula One in place for the injured Henrique de Matteo, but Ferrari did not let their injured driver slow down their development. Here at the first race following the few weeks F1 devoted to a summer break, Ferrari brought their final upgrade package for the 2009 season. The Ferrari F60 lengthened the wheelbase of the 2009 F60 ever so slightly, introduced a double diffuser design, retained the KERS unit that Ferrari had run all season long up until this point, and included a connected sharkfin engine cover in a similar vein to Red Bull, Toro Rosso, and some other teams. All of this was designed to incorporate elements Ferrari was testing for their 2010 challenger and to ensure a strong end to the season, one that hopefully included beating McLaren for third place in the constructors' championship.
Which reminds me, the 2009 drivers' championship standings currently read like this:
1: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 70 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 51.5 points.
3: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 47 points.
4: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 44 points.
5: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 25.5 points.
6: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 22.5 points.
7: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 22 points.
8: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 19 points.
9: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 18 points.
10: Fabian Schmidt - Germany - Toyota - 16 points.
11: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 12 points.
12: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 10 points.
13: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 9 points.
14: Maximilien Longpre - Luxembourg - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 3 points.
15: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 2 points.
16: Maximilien Lecroix - France - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 2 points.
17: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 0 points.
18: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Force India-Mercedes - 0 points.
19: Hideki Kitagawa - Japan - Williams-Toyota - 0 points.
20: Filipe Yannick - Brazil - Renault - 0 points.
21: Ximen Goikoetxea - Spain - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 0 points.
NC: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 0 points.
NC: Bernard Audinet - France - Renault - 0 points.
So, James Buxton holds onto his lead from the beginning of the season even as the Red Bull duo begins chipping away at the for-sale team. Then behind, it's a battle between Koskinen, the Toyota drivers, the Ferrari drivers, and the Toyotas. Hideki Kitagawa, my replacement mind you, has yet to score points. Hideki is going to struggle going forward, because Toyota and Williams are largely benefitting from the double diffusers they had at the beginning of the season, while Ferrari and McLaren have emerged as the faster teams in the rounds leading up to the summer break. That bodes well for me, but, as a replacement driver, I start at the very bottom. Anyway, the 2009 constructors' championship, meanwhile, read as follows:
1: Honda - Japan - Brackley, Great Britain - 114 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 98.5 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 40 points.
4: Toyota - Japan - Cologne, Germany - 38 points.
5: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 28 points.
6: Williams-Toyota - Great Britain - Grove, Great Britain - 25.5 points.
7: Renault - France - Enstone, Great Britain - 13 points.
8: BMW Sauber - Germany - Hinwil, Switzerland - 8 points.
9: Toro Rosso-Ferrari - Italy - Faenza, Italy - 5 points.
10: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 0 points.
That brings two other developments to mind. First of all, there is the fact that Ximen Goikoetxea replaced Maximilien Lecroix at Scuderia Toro Rosso from the Hungarian Grand Prix onwards, something I had mentioned before. Second of all, in a new development, it seems that Bernardo Fulvia finally pulled the trigger and dumped Filipe Yannick, replacing him with my former GP2 Asia teammate Bernard Audinet. Considering I outperformed Audinet back in 2006 and had Formula One experience, as well as the fact that Fulvia courted me for a drive before, it's certainly possible that I could've had a Formula One return at this race even if Henrique de Matteo hadn't been injured. That being said, my worries for the Brazilian driver aside, I'm certainly happier to be at Ferrari than Renault. In any case, the presence of Bernard Audinet in the paddock meant that he was part of the welcoming committee as I entered the marina paddock here at Valencia.
"She's back!" shouted a crowd consisting of Lorenzo Barbaro, Umberto Petronelli, Anthony Harrison, Tommy Koskinen, Maximilian Renner, Bernard Audinet, and Natasha Tsirinskaya, standing there in a white and red Honda polo. Speaking of polos, I was currently wearing a red Ferrari polo, with the joint Ferrari logo and Marlboro subliminal barcode on the left breast - and a slightly lonely Puma logo just below - while on the other side there was a Shell logo on white above another white rectangle marked with the Bridgestone logo. On either sleave was the red and white barcode badge and an AMD logo, while on my red cap was white text reading Mubadala Abu Dhabi, with the Marlboro bar codes on the side. I was officially a Scuderia Ferrari driver, and that meant I wore sponsorship for all of this companies, plus the likes of Etihad Airways, Telecom Italia's Alice sub brand, and Acer computers.
"I'm back!" I yelled back, coming over and giving Natasha a hug, followed by the rest of my friends from the paddock.
"Glad to have you back," Anthony smiled.
"For sure, it's nice." Tommy chimed in.
"It's been too long," said my other former teammate, Bernard Audinet.
"You've gone big time now!" Lorenzo pointed out, gesturing to the Ferrari shirt.
"Thank you, thank you everyone. I wasn't expecting a welcome like this." I admitted, blushing a bit at all the attention I was getting.
"You deserve it though!" Natasha interjected "You got dropped for stupid reasons and you managed to turn it around, now you're back with a better team!"
"Well hold on a minute..." Tommy responded, justified given he was currently best of the rest in the championship and single-handedly keeping Williams in contention.
"Eh she's with Ferrari, let her dream." Umberto pointed out. There is an alternate universe where, out of desperation to remain in F1, I would have taken that Force India offer and replaced Umberto Petronelli - which, ironically enough, could lead to our roles now being reversed, with me the backmarker and the Italian veteran getting a chance with Ferrari. On some level I think Petronelli is aware of that - obviously I'm not going to tell him that his own team was willing to drop him for me after the same thing almost happened at Renault a little while ago - so that's probably why he's so wistful about the whole Ferrari thing.
"What does your helmet look like?" Lorenzo asked, curious.
"Oh, let me show you." I pulled the duffle bag off my back and zipped it open, revealing my new helmet. It was the same basic design as my Indycar helmet but broken up with a white and red bar along the top for Marlboro - with the barcodes on either side, along with the prominent subliminal Marlboro badge on the forehead of the helmet. Then, along the visor, a cyan band with the Ferrari and barcode joint rectangle logo repeated three times, and Etihad Airways had their black and white rectangular logo on the chin of the helmet. Then on the bottom of my visor was a logo from Kaspersky Lab, who surprisingly agreed to carry over to F1 as my personal sponsor, as well as continuing their work in Indycar with Viktorija Urbonaviciute now confirmed to race in my place at Mid-Ohio and Laguna Seca. On the sides towards the back was another rectangle with the logo of Piaggio Aero, an Italian aerospace company, another partner of Ferrari. Finally, as a special touch to Henrique de Matteo, I had a little Brazilian flag on the top of my helmet towards the back, meaning that it would be the first thing that viewers see whenever F1 goes to an onboard shot with me. There was some level of guilt in the fact that my career comeback was coming at the expense of a driver who was currently recovering in Brazil, so I was trying to give back in the ways that I could, hence the shoutout to Brazil in my otherwise Kazakh themed racing helmet.
"Looks nice." Anthony noted "Have you spoken to Matti yet?"
"You're giving Matti a lot of credit to assume he made any effort to speak to me. I'll speak to him in the garage." I smirked, noted at the fact that my new teammate was famously antisocial and known for dodging interviews. That being said, Hamalainen was still a good guy by all accounts, so I imagine that things will go well once we do start speaking. I just don't see us going on any team bonding exercises any time soon. I don't mind that though, while I was friendly with Koskinen and especially Dani Pieri in the United States, I've also had plenty of strictly professional relationships in the paddock.
"Alright Tammy, you're through to Q3, through to Q3. Pull into the pits and we'll get you out again." Ronnie radioed in after a successful Q2, having broken through to the third qualifying session in my first appearance with Ferrari. Q2 has been the highlight of my weekend thus far since I finished the session just ahead of 2007 world champion and new teammate Matti Hamalainen, as the two of us rounded out the top ten and knocked out Piotr Kaminski. BMW Sauber's F1.09 is no match for their old F1.08 and Piotr Kaminski has particularly struggled to show the talent everyone knows he has, but he's still a great driver with the talent to compete for a title, so I'm very glad to have been able to beat him in qualifying. I've guaranteed a top ten start, now loaded up on race fuel and my starting tyres, it's time to decide where I'm going to start on the grid. As for Tammy, well, Ronnie is the same guy who famously told Henrique over the radio "Henrique baby, stay cool!" so that's just the type of guy he is. I don't exactly find Tammy an appealing name, but I know he means it in an endearing way, so I'm not going to fuss over it. In any case, I pulled into the pitlane, and the crew pulled my Ferrari F60B into the garage, then team getting both of our cars ready for the next season as the upgrade package was proving to work out for us.
"I want to get out there early. No tow." I reported in, speaking to my engineers, making it clear what I wanted. In somewhat ironic fashion, I was on the lead side of the garage, driving the #3 Ferrari as Henrique outperformed Matti Hamalainen yesterday, leading to the Finnish driver running the #4. Indycar has this team number system, but the way that Formula One works is that the numbers are decided by last year's constructors' championship, with the exception that the drivers' champion, no matter what, runs the #1 and his teammate runs the #2 - in this case, Anthony Harrison and Jyri Kaasalainen. Honda also happens to be numbered at the back since they registered late, meaning they're technically a new entry for this year, but that's an exception to the rule. As for getting a tow, the reason I didn't want to get one here is that there were more corners than straights here and not really any good places for a teammate to get out of my way - and in fact, in sector three, there are plenty of blind corners where a teammate could have an issue without me seeing anything - and I doubted Matti wanted that either. Come Monza it will be a different story, but Valencia was the type of track where you just wanted a clear track ahead of you and no distractions.
"Copy that, we'll be ready in just...one...minute. There. Do us proud good girl." Ronnie instructed as the car got lowered down and I was released. A Red Bull slotted into the queue behind me and Matti was behind him as we gathered at the red light at the pit exit, waiting for it to turn green to properly begin Q3. A few impatient seconds later, the green light came on and I completed my outlap, coming all the way around and then getting on the power coming out of turn twenty-five. I powered down the straight, crossing the line to start my lap, and then fired the car off to the right through turn one with a lift. I felt the air hitting the sharkfin engine cover like a sail, producing side force less for the sake of performance, and more for the sake of stability as I got back onto the throttle for the run down to turn two. On the brakes for the first time and shifting down the box, I threw the car to the right. A quick blast of throttle followed before lifting again, giving the brakes a tap, and throwing the car to the left through turn three. After a pair of corners with the concrete walls on either side, the track started to open up on the short straight that followed, culminating in there being generous runoff on either side as I arrived at the chicane on the northern end of the marina. First left and then snapping back to the right for turn five as I got back onto the throttle, heading flat-out through the kinks of turn six to the left and turn seven to the right.
Through these fast corners, I could really feel the double diffuser at the back biting into the ground, the underbody downforce pulling the car down with a vacuum created by the air accelerating out of the back of the diffuser. This meant that, in a somewhat paradoxical fashion, I actually felt myself losing rear grip as I hit the brakes going into turn eight. I suppose that's always the case in Formula One with the downforce requiring sufficient speed to activate properly, but the new double-diffuser juxtaposed with the cleaner aero profile in general exaggerated that effect, making for a weird sensation as I could literally feel the rear of the car lift under braking. Weird sensations aside, I came through the right-hand hairpin of turn eight and then flicked the car to the left through turn nine, bringing me onto the bridge that crossed the channel connecting the marina to the sea. As soon as the bridge ended, I was on the brakes for turn ten, slowing the car down and turning to the right to bring the car onto the back straight. On the throttle and on the KERS button as I accelerated out of the corner, I was flat all the way through the kink of turn eleven and down to the braking zone of turn twelve. KERS was a new feature in F1 for the 2009 season; functionally, it was like the Indycar push-to-pass system, but rather than extracting more power from the engine, KERS allowed drivers to use seven seconds of electrical power through the lap thanks to a new battery. Now this battery was optional, and it was heavy, so Ferrari and McLaren were the only teams running it by this point, but it did provide an extra 80hp in a time where engine development was frozen, so there was definitely some potential to this system...just not enough potential for BMW and Renault to keep running the system.
Anyway, I was on the brakes for turn twelve, flicking the car to the right and then to the left for turn thirteen, getting on the power just in time to brake again for turn fourteen, a ninety-degree corner to the right. On the power and on the KERS again coming out of the corner, I swept through turn fifteen and sixteen to the left before straightening out in time for the Valencian Community hairpin. Losing all the speed I built up on the straight, I turned the car around to the right and then got back on the power through the left, right, right series of corners that followed immediately afterwards. It was then flat-out coming out of turn twenty through the next series of kinks, keeping the car as straight and as fast as I could even as the walls seemed to jut out towards the circuit. I didn't lift until I was in turn twenty-four, throwing the car to the right just in time to get on the brakes for turn twenty-five. The final hairpin slowed me right down and turned me out to the left, bringing me back onto the start-finish straight to cross the line and finish the lap.
By the end of the session, I took eighth place, outqualifying Felipe Alvarez and Martin Weaver, while ahead of me, Tommy Koskinen was in seventh, Matti Hamalainen was in sixth, and championship leader James Buxton was in fifth. Challenger Maximilian Renner was in fourth, Rudolfo Goncalves was in third, and then it was an all-McLaren front row. Anthony Harrison won the Hungarian Grand Prix and now he's taken pole, with Jyri Kaasalainen finally seeming to get in the groove for McLaren by lining up in second place. Ferrari was on forty points and McLaren was on twenty-eight, ten points behind Toyota even, but I hope this illustrates why Ferrari and I consider McLaren the main threat to us getting third place in the constructors' championship. They've locked out the front row for tomorrow's race, so they're going to do some damage to our lead over them, it's up to Matti and I to limit that damage. With both of us starting in points paying positions, we have a chance, but we'll both be wanting to move forward. Funny how that works, even when I have a good qualifying session by my standards, it's still not enough. Oh well, I can't complain too much, because I'm back in Formula One and I'm in a position where I get to fight for the results that really matter. Onto the European Grand Prix tomorrow.
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva! You're back in Formula One, how does it feel?" Katherine Symmons asked me on the grid as I stood there in my Ferrari race suit, red cap, and gold-framed aviator sunglasses, looking every bit the Formula One driver and feeling great because of it.
"Oh, it feels amazing. I've been welcomed back to the grid in grand fashion, and I've been on an emotional high all weekend long. I qualified in a pretty good place, I'm close to my teammate, and now I want to go out there and impress. Not just for Ferrari but for Henrique de Matteo too, because the whole team wants to do well by him." I answered, keeping the smile on my face all the way - I really was happy to be back.
"You mentioned Henrique de Matteo, who obviously is recovering in Brazil after his crash at the Hungarian Grand Prix, have you spoken to him yet?" the redhead BBC reporter asked.
"Unfortunately, not. By the time I flew back from the United States and got to Maranello, they already moved him from Hungary to Brazil. He's at home and he's recovering right now, so I haven't had the chance to meet with him, but I have the Brazilian flag on my helmet this weekend so I'm sure he knows that he's in my thoughts and I'm trying to keep this car at the same level of performance that he's capable of." I answered, making it clear that I had nothing but respect for Henrique de Matteo and was wishing him a speedy recovery. I didn't know how I would feel if he managed to make a full recovery by the end of the season and thus knocked me out of the car, but nobody sees that as likely at the moment. The most likely outcome is I finish out the season with Ferrari and then hand the car back over to Henrique for 2010. All of that being said, as a driver, I never want to see another driver getting injured.
"Well, I'm sure he'll be watching and wishing you forward." Katherine nodded, closing out the interview.
"I hope so." I nodded, watched the BBC crew head elsewhere on the grid before returning to my car, seeing the Valencian model holding up the #3 board in front of my car, decorated in the colors of the Kazakh flag. I talked to Ronnie Sanders and the other engineers about some last-minute plans, I took my place during the singing of the anthem and the flyover to open the race, then I rushed to get into my car, well aware of the fact that the minutes down to the start of the race were ticking down and down. Soon enough, the engines were fired up. Soon enough, the cars were rolling for the formation lap. Soon enough, I slotted back into my grid slot, taking position in my grid slot, waiting for the green flag to come up at the back of the grid and the red lights to come on at the front of it. I held the clutch and raised the revs as all five lights came on and then released the clutch as the lights went out, rocketing off the grid.
The McLarens held onto their lead, Rudolfo Goncalves held on to third place, but Matti Hamalainen blasted off into fourth place to take two places by the time we got into the braking zone of turn two. A bit further back, I outdragged Tommy Koskinen to take seventh place and then was promoted to sixth place when James Buxton went off into the runoff at turn one and collapsed down into ninth place. Even further back, the typical first lap chaos kicked off and Bernard Audinet, Maximilien Longpre, and Fabian Schmidt all took damage early on, and all three of them would need to pit for repairs at the end of the lap. Fortunately, this didn't bring out a yellow flag or a safety car, so it didn't affect me, nor did some of the back-and-forth and the politicking going on between Buxton and Weaver some distance behind me. The Australian alleged that the Briton cut the track and blocked Martin to prevent an overtake, while Buxton insisted that he was just rejoining the track. Buxton would later slow and return the position to the Red Bull driver, so take that however you will.
I would make up another position in the first round of pitstops. I took my first pitstop on lap nineteen and it was a quiet, well-executed stop, but what really led to me gaining position was less something that we did, and more the misfortune that happened to someone else. By that I mean that Maximilian Renner had a nightmare of a race, first having a fuel rig problem on lap fifteen that led to him having to pit again the next lap to actually get his tank filled up, and then to add insult to injury, his engine would give out on lap twenty-four, sending the German out of the race. This meant that, almost my default, the battle for the lead began a battle between the McLaren of Anthony Harrison and the Honda of Rudolfo Goncalves, with James Buxton having dropped back at the beginning of the race and Jyri Kaasalainen just not having the pace to match the frontrunners today. The American started suffering issues with his brakes overheating, and that allowed Rudolfo to close up to the back of Anthony's car, leading to the Brazilian getting the jump on the reigning champion in the pitstops. I would take my own stop on lap forty-two, avoiding a bit of traffic the lap earlier when Buxton, Weaver, and Kaminski all came in at once, and that largely defined the end of the race for me.
Further up ahead, Anthony Harrison would try and try, charging up to the rear of Rudolfo Goncalves' car towards the end of the race, but ultimately it wasn't enough. Rudolfo Goncalves crossed the finish line to win his first race since the 2004 Chinese Grand Prix and give Brazil something to cheer about when Henrique de Matteo was recovering from a career-ending accident. Matti Hamalainen would finish up in third, giving Ferrari their second consecutive podium and their fourth of the season overall, showing off our forward momentum. As for the points-paying results of the 2009 European Grand Prix more broadly, they read as follows:
1: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 10 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 8 points.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 5 points.
5: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 4 points.
6: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 3 points.
7: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 2 points.
8: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 1 point.
So, McLaren locked out the front row but at the end of the race, both Ferraris finished directly behind both McLarens, so our damage limitation was more than successful. Furthermore, it was good to see Tommy Koskinen and Piotr Kaminski in the points, because even though they are my rivals now, both are some very fast drivers who deserve to be in better equipment than they are dealing with right now. Felipe Alvarez also managed to keep ahead of the likes of championship leader James Buxton and the sole remaining Red Bull of Martin Weaver. Speaking of Weaver, he fell from second to third in the drivers' championship after Rudolfo Goncalves' brilliant performance and an altogether terrible day for Red Bull.
A good day for both Ferrari and McLaren brings it up to 50 points vs. 41 points, respectively, with McLaren leapfrogging Toyota to take fourth in the championship. It took only one race for us to get into a straight fight, so my expectations were correct about McLaren being the main threat.
As for me, four points in my first race, a solid start to my Ferrari career and hopefully the beginning of many more to come.
Hideki Kitagawa, my replacement at Williams, still sits on zero points, having retired on lap fifty-four with a tyre issue.
Strange things happen at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps.
The weekend started out crazily enough, with a rain affected FP1 disrupting many of the teams' plans for the weekend, forcing us to condense our practice programs into the dry FP2 and FP3 sessions. Then came qualifying, which again was dry, but that didn't make it any more sensible. Tommy Koskinen was in tenth, sensible enough, then Martin Weaver was in ninth and Max Renner in eighth - a bit low for the Red Bulls but certainly within the realm of possibility, nothing all that weird yet. I was in seventh and Matti Hamalainen was in sixth, so a good performance for us, while Piotr Kaminski was fifth, Rudolfo Goncalves was fourth, and Victor Hartmann was third. Okay, a bit unusual to see such a strong performance by BMW Sauber this year but maybe their car is just better suited to Spa than other tracks, or perhaps BMW Sauber's slump this year so far was the unusual thing all along. James Buxton hasn't featured but Rudolfo Goncalves has been the better Honda for a few races now, with the Brit largely coasting off of the string of dominant victories he had to open the season. Then there was Ivan Tripoli in second, which is something that we haven't really seen since the beginning of the season, but I suppose Toyota is a competent team with a solid enough car. There was a bit of weirdness so far, but nothing radically weird...at least not until we get to the individual on pole. Umberto fucking Petronelli in the Force fucking India. Don't get me wrong, I like the guy and I appreciate the fact that he's given Natasha a drive in Superleague Formula, but...on pole? In a Force India? That is an absolute clown show.
"How the bloody hell has that happened?" I asked, incredulously, when I approached polesitter Umberto Petronelli and eleventh placed Lorenzo Barbaro. The Italian was lining up next to the Toyota of Ivan Tripoli and the Uruguayan was lining up next to the Toyota of Fabian Schmidt, just ten places behind, in a weird mirror that almost seems like too much of a coincidence to be true.
"Hey, when you don't have any aero, you get a lot of speed down the Kemmel straight." Lorenzo joked, the tall driver smirking as he was the closest to getting back into the points since the 2007 Japanese Grand Prix with Spyker.
"I don't question you driving for Ferrari, don't question me taking pole position." Petronelli joked, making light of the fact that both of us have had a bit of a career resurgence in the past few weeks for completely different reasons.
"It's the new livery, the white, green, and orange is faster than the white, red, and gold." Lorenzo piled on, smirk clear on his face.
"Maybe add some racing stripes for that extra bit of performance." I joined in, realizing I wasn't going to get a straight answer here.
"Wow...that's something to share with the engineers, isn't it Lorenzo?" Umberto turned to his teammate.
"You know what Umberto; I think we need to do that right now!" Lorenzo announced, giving me an exaggerated wave as the comedic duo marched off, both men on cloud nine - and so were their engineers - as Force India secured their best qualifying result ever. All that being said, as the old adage goes, you don't score any points on Saturday, so there is plenty of work left for the Indian-registered, Silverstone-based team.
"Lights out and away we go!" the British commentary team shouted as the race began. Umberto Petronelli kept his lead but Rudolfo Goncalves sputtered off the line, nearly stalling his engine as he tried to pull off the grid. This promoted me up to sixth straight away, meanwhile, Matti had to take to the extreme outside of the grid to go around the Honda, meaning he was all the way to the left going into the La Source hairpin while everyone else was constricted on the right side, including me. I hit the brakes and effectively waited in the queue taking the right-hand hairpin one after the other while Matti basically just went around both of us, just barely keeping a wheel within the white lines to technically be on track. All of this meant that, my the time we were on the run down to Eau Rouge, Matti was up to second. Keeping the throttle as pinned as the car would allow, the whole Formula One grid flicked to the left, swept to the right going up hill, and then snapped back to the left as we crested the top of the hill with Raidillon, arriving on the Kemmel straight with the long, long run down to the next braking zone. Everything was set for a drag race between the Finnish driver who competed for the 2005 championship with McLaren, and the Italian driver who helped his then Renault teammate Felipe Alvarez win the first of his two consecutive championships. The lead Ferrari locked itself into the slipstream of the Force India and -
"Safety car! Safety car! Four cars out in turn one...looks like Buxton, Audinet, Harrison, and Goiko...err, and Ximen." Ronnie reported. My first reaction was a sigh of frustration when Matti's run for the lead and my run on the BMW Saubers ahead were both interrupted by this safety car. My second reaction was a spot of worry as Sanders rattled off the list of four cars out in a single corner, painting the picture of a rather serious accident. My third reaction was nearly bursting out into laughter as my English race engineer nervously gave up on the attempt to pronounce the Basque driver's surname. It would turn out that those were separated incidents, effectively Buxton and Harrison both tried to back off and avoid the carnage at the start - likely due to cars trying to dodge the slow Goncalves at top speed - which caused the rookie drivers behind them to slam into the back of them. Regardless of the reason, four cars were out in a single corner. None of them were hurt, thankfully, but an incident like this brought out a long safety car, requiring the four cars to be removed.
The safety car came in on lap five and Umberto led us over the line to restart the race. Matti took a look into turn one but the Force India kept his position...at least for now. Coming out of the turn though, my teammate had a good run, and also got on the KERS button to chase down yesterday's unlikely polesitter. Meanwhile, Piotr Kaminski overtook his teammate going into La Source, leaving the German with a compromised exit. Coming out of turn one, I slotted behind the BMW Sauber, chasing Victor up Eau Rouge and then onto the Kemmel straight, pushing all the way uphill with a draft. Piotr tried to give his teammate a tow and help him out, but it wasn't enough, because on the run up to Les Combes, the Ferraris were practically synchronized. Matti dived out to the right and took the lead under braking into Les Combes, using the inside line to solidify his position through turns seven, eight, and nine. Further back, I took to the right-hand side of the track and pulled alongside Hartmann before we even got to the braking zone, taking fourth place for myself. Then it was on the brakes and to the right through turn seven, to the left through turn eight, and then back to the right through turn nine as we began the run downhill, myself slotted in between the two BMWs.
I didn't try an overtake into Bruxelles - the downhill braking zone to the right that followed the Les Combes sequences of corners - because Kaminski was a generational talent and a hard racing driver, one who I've already come together with in my career. The Pole would race hard and make me work for it if I was going to pass him, so I needed to be smart about it and take my opportunities well. Bruxelles wasn't a good enough overtaking zone to risk it. So, coming out of the corner we sped down to the no-name turn eleven, just barely wider than ninety degrees and to the left. I did use another brief blast of KERS going into Pouhon but still didn't trouble the Pole, instead I focused on lifting, taking a single downshift, and getting back on the throttle as soon as grip would allow through the long, fast, multi-apex turn twelve - Pouhon. Pouhon swept us to the left at high speed, leading into the Campus chicane. First braking and turning to the right, then getting on the throttle as the track swung back to the left through the second element, turn fourteen. After which, Kaminski led the three of us into Stavelot, the right-hander serving as the final corner of sector two. Now in the final section of the lap, Piotr and I swung through turn sixteen, putting a car length or two between us and Victor Hartmann as we ran through the flat-our turns seventeen and eighteen - Blanchimont - and down to the bus stop chicane. I did take a look into the chicane, mostly to intimidate the Polish driver, but stayed behind the 2008 Canadian Grand Prix winner through the tight right-left chicane that finished out the lap. Matti Hamalainen led from Umberto Petronelli and Piotr Kaminski was in third about a second behind them. The gap between Piotr and I was next to nothing though, while Victor Hartmann was already fading a bit behind us. This largely behind the first stint for us, with Matti and Umberto battling hard at the front, Piotr and I battling hard for third place, and Victor Hartmann in fifth falling back into the clutches of the Red Bulls.
"Box this lap, box this lap." Ronnie called me in on lap fifteen, pitting the lap after the leaders and Piotr Kaminski. I took to the pitlane, negotiating the somewhat cumbersome entry through the bus stop chicane. Some distance behind, Hartmann and Martin Weaver followed. I stopped on my marks and completed a well-executed stop, released onto the track with a new load of fuel and Bridgestone prime tyres. Behind me though, Red Bull did an unsafe release with Martin Weaver, almost leading to Hartmann crashing into him in pitlane. This would hold Hartmann up for a moment and lead to Weaver getting hit with an unsafe release penalty - a drive through - the very next lap. I, however, managed to get ahead of Kaminski thanks to clean air, an overcut, and clever use of KERS on my in-lap to erase the time I was losing thanks to worn tyres. All of this meant that, when the pit stops shook out, Matti led from Umberto, I was in third place, and Piotr Kaminski was in fourth. Maximilian Renner was in fifth, Victor Hartmann was in sixth, and Ivan Tripoli was holding on to seventh after a poor start, partially due to getting caught out by Hamalainen's audacious opening lap move. Even that wouldn't last much longer for the Toyota driver, as Tripoli would retire on lap twenty-two with an engine issue. Felipe Alvarez would follow a few laps later after a collision with Lorenzo Barbaro, but neither incident brought out the safety car.
"Fastest lap, that's the fastest lap of the race. Keep 'em coming Tammy." Ronnie cheered me on as I set the fastest lap of the race thus far in the middle of the second stint. I was breaking away from the BMW Saubers and the Red Bull of Max Renner behind and closing in on the lead pack. Specifically, I was closing in on Matti Hamalainen, since Umberto Petronelli was also making headway on my teammate. All of this meant that, when the second round of pitstops began on lap thirty-five, Umberto was within a second of Matti and I was just over a second behind Petronelli. Seeing this was Ferrari's best chance for a win this season, I did what I had to do while they were pitting. I once again charged around the track, using my KERS to make up for the deficiencies I was getting because of tyre wear, and pit at the end of the next lap, coming in with eight laps remaining. A splash and dash stop and a switch to option tyres later, the Ferrari crew had me back out in record time, sending me through the hairpin pit exit on the inside of La Source. Coming out of the pits I saw Matti pass me, regaining the lead, while I was drag racing Umberto Petronelli on the run down to Eau Rouge. The Force India ultimately took the position, but I slotted in just behind heading up the hill. Using the draft and the electrical boost, I overtook the Italian veteran and came up into second place. It was now a Ferrari one-two at the Belgian Grand Prix.
Petronelli was fast and, at times, Hamalainen was slow. Part of me wanted to just go ahead and focus on overtaking my teammate, but I knew that, best case scenario, that would result in Umberto passing my teammate, and worst-case scenario, it would result in me failing to make the pass and Umberto getting back ahead of us both. So no, the best thing to do for the team would be to hold onto second and hold off the reinvigorated Force India behind. Between the Mercedes engine and the clean aerodynamic profile of the Force India, he was probably the faster car down the straights, but we were fast enough, and we had that extra 80 horsepower from the Kinetic Energy Recovery System, and that combination was enough to keep us ahead. Finally, at the end of lap forty-four, Matti led us across the line, two Ferraris and a Force India separated by less than a second.
"Woo! Thank you guys, the car was wonderful today. I'm glad we made it happen with the win for Matti and the uhh...the one-two for the team. Thank you, thank you. I'm glad...yeah. Thanks." I cheered over the team radio, rambling into the microphone as I celebrated the win. It took twenty-five months - since the 2007 European Grand Prix - but I was back on the F1 podium and not only that, but it was my best result yet, finally taking that second place finish. Hopefully it won't take another twenty-five months to take that next step. Wow.
The points-paying results of the 2009 Belgian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 8 points.
3: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Force India - 6 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 5 points.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 4 points.
6: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 3 points.
7: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 2 points.
8: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 1 point.
The Finnish, Kazakh, and Italian anthems flew over the podium, but it was the Finnish anthem being played for winning driver Matti Hamalainen and the Italian anthem being played for winning team Scuderia Ferrari. I smiled as the team, who has had such a hard season up until this point, going from constructors' champions to midfielders, losing their lead driver in a horror wreck at the Hungaroring, and needing to draft in me as a last second replacement when seven-time world champion Wilhelm Ziegler was too injured to make the return. It's been such a hard season for a team with standards as high as Ferrari, but with a one-two finish at Spa-Francorchamps, one of the greatest tracks on the calendar, I think we've made it all worth it. The fact that this is the result we have going into Ferrari's home race at the Italian Grand Prix doesn't hurt either...and I'll be there too. I'll get to drive in front of the tifosi as a Ferrari driver...wow.
Elsewhere, McLaren fail to score while we took maximum points from the Belgian Grand Prix, taking the battle up to 68 points vs. 41. Just as it seemed that McLaren had the pace to push for third, we gave ourselves some breathing room. Force India's podium also enables them to jump ahead of Toro Rosso, relegating the other Italian team to rock bottom in the constructors' championship going into the race they famously won last year.
Eight points from this race brings my running tally up to twelve points. I took eighteen points for Williams in 2007 and twenty-five points for the same team in 2008, meaning that in just two races, I was already on course for my biggest points haul yet...wow.
Hideki Kitagawa, my replacement at Williams, has yet to score a point. finishing fourteenth today, the last car running on track. Just as a reminder, I was on the podium, finishing second, and maybe could have won the race if I needed to. Just saying.
"...on the replay after the race, Rudolfo was properly smoking. Then he was on fire in the pitlane, crazy." I discussed with Umberto as the three of us were ushered into the press conference room after the race. Matti took his seat in the middle, I was on his right, and Petronelli was on the left.
"Here we have our top three from the race. #4 Matias Hamalainen of Finland won the race driving for Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro. This is his fourth win at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps. The #3 of Tamara Shchegolyayeva of Kazakhstan finished in second, also for Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro. This is her first podium of the season filling in for the injured Henrique de Matteo. In third place we have the #21 of Umberto Petronelli of Italy, driving for Kingfisher Force India F1 Team." a British man in a somewhat dour voice announced from somewhere to my right, filling in the journalists on exactly who we were and who we drove for. Followed by this bit "Please state your name and your publication when you ask your questions."
"George Tarantano, Speed Channel. Question for Matti and Tamara, a perfect one-two finish for Ferrari, how do you respond to the speculation and the uncertainty over the 2010 Ferrari driver lineup? Matti is under contract, Henrique de Matteo is under contract but it's not clear if he'll be fit to race next year, Tamara has impressed in her two races since returning to F1, and there are rumors linking Felipe Alvarez to a Ferrari seat. What do you have to say?"
"Well...I don't make the decisions; I just drive the car. You'll have to ask Milan." Matti gave one of his standard gruff answers to the media, suppressing a smile as he spoke and getting a laugh out of me. Some people would say that Matti hated the media and didn't like answering questions, but I actually think it's the opposite: he loves the media and likes nothing more than to mess with them at every possible opportunity.
"A bit similar to Matti, I have to say that I don't really know. I am contracted with Ferrari through the end of 2009 and beyond that, I don't know what to say for 2010. I'd like to think that Ferrari liked my result, but this is still Henrique's car at the end of the day, I'm just a substitute." I answered, being honest about not knowing Ferrari's plans for the future and playing down my chances of staying with Ferrari. I have been a bit out of the loop thanks to my time in Indycar, but as far as I know, Matti Hamalainen and Henrique de Matteo was always going to be Ferrari's 2010 driver lineup. This is honestly the first I'm hearing of Felipe Alvarez being rumored with a move to Ferrari. Then again, knowing Felipe and his manager Bernardo, this could just as easily be a negotiating tactic for something else entirely. Where I do know there is a lot of speculation is about Jyri Kaasalainen, whose contract is up at the end of this season and hasn't been matching Anthony Harrison as of late. Valencia was a pretty good race for the Finn, all things considered, but he was anonymous again here in Belgium, so nothing is guaranteed there. Still, after how 2007 blew up, it would be hard to imagine Alvarez swallowing his pride and going back to McLaren, going back to having Anthony Harrison as a teammate.
"Ricciardo Torni, Sky Italia. Umberto, you were coming back at the Ferraris towards the end of the race. Did you have the pace to fight them?" an Italian journalist took the next question, turning attention to the Force India driver.
"Yes and no. The car and the upgrades worked great today, and we were very quick on the straights, but not so good in the corners. In the straights the Ferraris could defend with the KERS, and I could not fight back in the corners, so I had a very good car, a fast car, but I did not have the tools to fight the Ferraris today." Umberto answered, having largely come to the same conclusions as I did. The battery was heavy, sure, but it wasn't heavy enough to make a big difference against a team like less sophisticated car like the Force India, while the power boost we got while on the KERS button was enough to make up for the extra drag we had on the straights. Effectively, we were able to cancel out our weaknesses on the straights while Umberto had no way to make up for his car's weaknesses in the corners.
"...question for Matti, you were the slowest of the leaders during the final laps of the race. Maximilian Renner set the fastest lap in fourth while Umberto and Tamara finished within a second of you. Were you nursing a problem or just controlling the pace?" an English print journalist asked.
"Mmm...I was doing the pace I had to do and when Tamara got into the second place, I knew she would defend from Petronelli so I didn't need to push." Matti answered, his monotone doing little to hide the confidence. So, Hamalainen had pace to spare and was just confident that I would defend the one-two, meaning he took it easy at the end of the race and kept things rather anticlimactic from his end, despite how close and dramatic it may have seemed from the outside. So...maybe I wasn't quite as quick as my teammate yet and maybe I couldn't have just won the race if I wanted to, put the point remains that I put together a great performance to finish second. Maybe I could have beat Matti in a straight fight if given the chance, maybe not, all I know from today is that we secured the perfect result for the team, and both have something to be happy about.
Umberto also has something to be proud of, because for the team that was formerly Spyker who was formerly Midland who was formerly Jordan, he took their first pole position, their first points, and their first podium all in the same weekend. Petronelli enabled Force India to jump Scuderia Toro Rosso in the constructors' championship and gets to go into his home race with his head held high, because he fought us like a lion. Ferrari also gets to go into our home race with our held high, because for a season that, so far, seemed like it was going to get the team trashed by the vicious Italian press, we finally have a positive headline at the perfect time to change the narrative. Now, Ferrari is back at the front of the grid, and I'm back in Formula One. I don't know how my remaining seven races will go; I don't know if I'll be able to turn this into a full-time F1 return for 2010, but no matter what happens next, I'll be able to say I came back and I stood on the podium for the greatest F1 team there's ever been.
Notes:
So, I make no promises yet, but I am on winter break and just have a breathtaking amount of time now compared to this past semester, so I might have a chapter ready next week. If not, then it'll launch two weeks from now - on January 1st, 2023 - as per usual. Either way, I'm really happy with this story and what comes next. I enjoyed the brief attempts at writing Indycar and Le Mans, but nothing comes as easily to me as writing the F1 stuff.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 27: L'Italia s'è desta.
Notes:
Hello everyone! Last chapter was posted early because I wound up having a ton of free time to write, so let's see how this week goes! (Spoiler Alert, the week went well, after all, you're reading this).
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXVII.
L'Italia s'è desta.
On the drive to Monza for the Italian Grand Prix weekend, three things were making me feel really damn good...well four.
First of all came the obvious, I was back in F1, and I was driving for Scuderia freaking Ferrari, the best and most iconic team in the history of the sport. In the space of weeks, I've literally gone from completely outside of the sport to sitting in one of the most coveted seats in F1. Ferrari is currently having a downturn in form, sure, but Ferrari's worst ever results in the constructors' championship are still like sixth or so, which would be a miracle for some teams. Case in point, when I was with Williams in 2007 and 2008, we finished fourth and sixth in the constructors' championships, respectively, with myself tenth in the drivers' standings on both occasions.
Second of all, I came second at the Belgian Grand Prix, which did a number of things for both me and the team. For the team, it meant we came into our home race with a 1-2 finish, having scored the maximum number of points possible and, better yet, done it on a weekend where the otherwise resurgent McLaren team had faltered. Meanwhile for me, it instantly removed any doubts that I wouldn't be able to adjust to these new regulations or that I had gone rusty in my time away from the sport. I had been racing in Indycar and in endurance racing, which while far from the same thing as F1, wasn't sitting on the couch either. I was sharp, I was in shape, and I was getting closer to my teammate each weekend, so even if Matti really was holding back at Belgium like he said he was, I still had the pace to finish just a position behind him. From my first two races back, I had solid, consistent results, and while under the same circumstances, a driver of lesser caliber may well have failed to adjust to the car and embarrassed Ferrari by failing to bring home any points at all. In short, I can feel really damn good about my performance because I've given Ferrari zero reason to believe that they're doing worse than they were with Henrique de Matteo. Henrique was on a run of points finishes leading up to his Hungary crash - sixth, fourth, sixth, fourth, and third - and with a fifth and a second from Valencia and Belgium, I think I'm right where his momentum was building towards.
Third of all, I was driving a new company car. A rosso corsa Ferrari 612 Scaglietti with black rims, dark-tinted windows, and the Scuderia Ferrari shields proudly emblazoned on the sides. Yes, theoretically any customer could get those emblems on their car, but how many can say they've actually driven for the team that wears that particular variation of the Ferrari emblem? Similarly, inside, the black leather interior with red stitching included the red outline of the Cavallino Rampante - the prancing horse - on its headrest, and just beneath that, in the same red stitched outline style, were the initials T.S. Yes...they included a special touch just for me...the fringe benefits of working for the most famous supercar company on the planet I suppose. The best part is that this car is mine to keep - granted, a chunk was taken out of my salary for this year in exchange for the car, but...worth it - so a rather substantial upgrade over my little blue Alfa. I still love that thing, but nothing quite compares to a big 5.7L, 533 horsepower V12 in the back and those quad circular taillights in the back.
Fourth of all, being back in F1 meant there was inevitably going to be another controversy sooner rather than later, and this one mercifully does not involve me in the slightest...for the most part anyway. The reason this was a concern was twofold: firstly, there was the big, rather traumatizing controversy with me being outed and losing my sponsors. Secondly, there's the team I drive for, with Ferrari and BMW Sauber having made threats to leave the sport in response to a proposed budget cap for the 2010 season. The FIA claim this is about reducing costs in the face of the 2008 financial crisis and also making it viable for a number of new, small Cosworth-powered privateer teams to be competitive. Ferrari and BMW claim that this restricts their ability to develop and is in contrast to the ethos of the sport. There were pull-outs threatened, a rival series proposed, and a driver boycott threatened earlier in the season, but thankfully the situation has seemed to mostly cooldown in the time that I've been back in Formula One. So then, if it's not really about me and not about Ferrari, then what?
Well, the short answer is that Renault ordered Filipe Yannick to intentionally crash so that Felipe Alvarez could win the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix on strategy. The reason this is becoming relevant now is that Yannick was fired by Renault midseason and started talking about this during the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, eventually leading to an FIA hearing earlier this week, investigating what the media have dubbed crashgate. ING Group, Renault's principal sponsor, has pulled out, Bernardo Fulvia has a lifetime ban from the paddock which he is currently appealing, and the team has been put up for sale. On one hand, it is the justified reaction to endangering a driver for the purposes of rigging a race result - and coincidentally enough, it was pointless as Alvarez ended up winning the Japanese Grand Prix legitimately at the very next race - but on the other hand, we now have a concerning amount of teams up for sale. There's Honda obviously, which has been on sale all season long and really only made it onto this season because of the intervention of team principal Ross Brawn, but it also seems that BMW may be so unhappy with the FIA and their performance that year that they'll be pulling out of the sport too, and then you have Toyota spending more money than anyone else on F1 with next to nothing to show for it with the economic situation weighing down on the Japanese giant. Add Renault to the mix and you have three teams up for sale with Toyota on shaky ground as the board in Japan may finally see the economic crisis as a reason to pull the plug on this increasingly expensive failure. Those three teams coming in for 2010 might be a case of barely breaking even.
"Hey Natasha!" I greeted as I saw the dirty blonde development driver parking her Honda. I pulled up next to her, making a point to rev my Ferrari V12 as I did so, wearing a giddy smile as I did so. I parked and climbed out, putting my backpack and customary driver cap on before continuing "Seems the transportation is a bit better over at Maranello, doesn't it?"
"It's a nice car Tamara, but where is your team in the championship?" Natasha shot back with a smirk, noting that, despite everything, Honda was still the clear leader in both championships, with James Buxton playing the driver role. The situation with Honda really was a paradoxical one, because on one hand, Natasha Tsirinskaya was just one step away from the best seat in Formula One at this given moment, but on the other hand, nobody knows what that seat is going to look like in 2010. Honda has an operating budget obviously, but they haven't exactly been bringing a lot of upgrades to their car, and James Buxton hasn't won a race since the Turkish Grand Prix, while Rudolfo Goncalves' win at Europe was his only one so far this season. Honda is slipping down the field within the context of this season as Red Bull, McLaren, and indeed Ferrari out-develop them, and they might not even exist next season, so...what is going to happen to Natasha?
"Third for now, but you know, we scored a one-two finish last race." I took the dangling thread from Natasha's last comment and ran with it as we entered the paddock together. We stepped into the paddock proper, and I was instantly blindsided by fans cheering for me and asking for an autograph. I sheepishly looked over at my Kyrgyzstani counterpart and shrugged, heading over to greet some fans and sign some autographs for my third-place team while she was ignored at her championship-leading team. Yes, it was a bit different in that I was a race driver while she was a reserve, but this wasn't so much about who had an F1 start or not, it was more about the power of Ferrari and their absolutely devoted tifosi fanbase. I was now a Ferrari driver, so I had that fanbase on my side.
"Hey, he's wearing an AS Roma cap, I have fans too." Natasha teased, picking out a fan in the red and orange football team's jersey and waving to him, noting the fact that she was their Superleague Formula driver for a second season. Last year she finished runner up to Liverpool's Ezequiel Martinez last year and took wins at Zolder, Estoril, and Vallelunga, while so far this season, she has a win at Magny-Cours, one at Donington Park, and another Estoril to her name, holding off Maximilien Lecroix on the last occasion on route to victory. This time out she's a clear championship leader with two race weeks remaining at Monza and Jarama, in October and November, respectively. No one else in the series has more than one win to their name this season so no one has emerged as a consistent threat to her yet. My prediction is that, based off the pace he showed at Estoril, Maximilien Lecroix - recently dropped by Toro Rosso - he will emerge as the biggest threat in the second half of the season and probably outscore her in those last two rounds, however, two race weekends won't be enough to overturn Natasha's massive lead, so she'll walk away with her second championship of the 2009 season. GP2 Asia and Superleague Formula aren't exactly the most conventional feeder series in the world, but with support from Honda and two comprehensive championship wins at just eighteen years old, someone is going to have to consider her even if there is likely to be a lot of jostling of seats with teams pulling out and new teams coming in, along with drivers trying to return to F1.
"Renault is using KERS again the cheeky buggers. They must've seen what we were doing at Spa and wanted it for the straights here. Keep mind of that through the race weekend." Ronnie noted during one of the practice sessions after I returned to the garage following a race simulation. True to the Englishman's words, as I looked through the speed trap data, I saw that Alvarez and Audinet were performing above average, setting fast times down the straights and using that little extra bit of electrical horsepower to their advantage. Ironically enough, just after the teams' partners and owner leave in disgrace, the team might be on for their best result of the season. That complicates things for us, because, to put it frankly, we're not quite as quick here as we were in Belgium. We still have good pace, mind you, I just don't think we're going to be able to take control of this race and have both cars fighting for the lead like we did at Spa-Francorchamps. I, in particular, felt like I was on the backfoot.
"Where am I losing time to Matti?" I asked a few of my mechanics.
"You are using too much of the KERS in the first sector. Matti uses it more throughout the lap, try to balance it out more on the next run and maybe it'll help." Paolo di Rocco, an Italian man with an early case of male pattern baldness proposed.
"I'm using it out of the first chicane and the second chicane, those are the main acceleration zones." I noted. KERS really couldn't do much to boost your top speed or anything like that, where it really made a difference was in acceleration, and the fact of the matter is that most of the track here at Spa was made up of flat-out sections of track separated by, mostly, stop-start corners.
"That is good but save some out of Lesmo 2 and out of parabolica on the next run, see if it works." Paolo proposed, giving me something to work with.
"We should try not to because of the drag, but if you need more front downforce, tell us, we can give more." another engineer, this time a Thai man named Somchai Ngamnaimuang, proposed. The dream of working for Ferrari spread just as far as the dream of driving for Ferrari, so I had a rather diverse and international crew working on my car. Yes, most of them were Italian, but I also had two Frenchmen, an Albanian, a Thai, a Peruvian, a half-Spanish Scotsman, a Czech, and of course the man that was ultimately in charge of this car was from northern England. Speaking of Ronnie Sanders...
"So what are we doing Tammy?" Ronnie asked, wanting to get working and wanting to get the car back on track.
"Alright, I'll try with the KERS first and we'll go from there." I accepted, taking Paolo's suggestion as I prepared to get back into the car for my next run. I appreciated what Somchai was trying to do as well, but just like he admitted, it would just lead to more drag at what's supposed to be the fastest, most speed-centric track on the calendar. In any case, taking the advice of my engineers and just putting in more and more laps of the iconic Italian circuit, I got faster throughout the weekend and closer to where I wanted to be. On my initial runs in FP1 - and really into FP2 - I was 1.2 seconds off of Matti, by the end of FP2, I cut the deficit down to eight tenths, and the gap narrowed another two tenths by the end of the final practice session - FP3 - when adjusting for the comparative state of our tyres. At the end of all of this, on Saturday, I qualified in eighth place. I was half a second back from Matti Hamalainen who was up in third, sure, but I was outqualified Felipe Alvarez and both Red Bulls, I even got the satisfaction of knocking Martin Weaver out in Q2, advancing to the top ten shootout in the place of the experienced Australian. This was also my third consecutive Q3 appearance - having started eighth, seventh, and now eighth again in my Ferrari career thus far - so, given that qualifying wasn't my strong suit, I was doing well enough and starting up in the points-paying positions, placing me exactly where I need to be to start.
As the Italian Air Force flew over the track bellowing smoke colored to make the Italian tricolor, I looked over the starting grid. Anthony Harrison was on pole for McLaren once again, while Lorenzo Barbaro took an impressive second, once again taking advantage of the slippery, low drag setup on the Force India car. Two of my friends filled out the front row and my teammate, Matti Hamalainen, was in third, lining up alongside the second McLaren of Jyri Kaasalainen. This gave McLaren the advantage to start out with, but we didn't have a huge concern over that, given that we built up a huge buffer over the Belgian Grand Prix weekend. This might yet again be a situation like Valencia where our job is to limit the damage. In any case, the Hondas also benefitted from the low downforce requirements of the circuit, with Rudolfo Goncalves in fifth and James Buxton in sixth, filling out the third row of the grid. Umberto Petronelli followed up his Spa podium with seventh on the grid, I lined up next to him in eighth, and Felipe Alvarez was on the row behind for the now title sponsorless Renault. Maximilian Renner rounded out the top ten, having just advanced to Q3 while his teammate was down in eleventh, having just barely lost out.
So, the race started a few moments later, with Anthony Harrison blasting off the grid. Lorenzo Barbaro, unfortunately, couldn't quite match that start, so Matti jumped into second off the line, relegating the Force India to third. Further back, Jyri Kaasalainen lost fourth place off the line to Rudolfo Goncalves and was instantly being pressured by James Buxton as well through sector one. As for me, I got onto the brakes for the obnoxiously slow turn one, a ninety-degree right-hander to break up the straight. Turn two then flung us back to the left, leading to us accelerating down the road turns Curva Grande. At one time, in a time of less safety and more insanity, the long, nearly flat-out right-hander was the first turn here at Monza, but now it was the third and speeds were lower, paradoxically allowing for a greater degree of throttle through the famous curve. At this point, we were breaking away from the grandstands full of tifosi and into the forests that made up this Royal Park of Monza, running through the forests of northern Italia. The Curva Grande eventually straightened out just in time to brake for the Variante della Roggia: the cars ahead of me took it fine, I took the left-right chicane fine, but behind me, Piotr Kaminski had a run-in with Martin Weaver, leaving the Australian stranded in the gravel retiring and leaving the Pole with front wing damage. The BMW Sauber kept going for now as we arrived at the first Lesmo, hitting the brakes and downshifting but keeping as much speed through the right-hander at the top of the circuit, getting into the kerb but not the gravel trap further out. Lesmo 1 was, naturally, followed by Lesmo 2, this one slightly tighter and slower, but the right-hander also spit us out onto the infield straight.
Further up ahead, James Buxton also managed to get ahead of Kaasalainen, dumping the Finnish McLaren driver down to sixth, just one car between us now. That turned into zero as, dipping beneath the old oval, I overtook Petronelli and entered the top seven by the time we arrived to the Ascari chicane. Bleeding off a little bit of speed on entry before whipping the car to the left, getting back on the throttle as I threw the car to the right and then the left through turns nine and ten, riding out into the paved corner exit to keep the speed up. I pulled the car towards the left on the back straight, making sure that I put some space between myself and Umberto, and then turned my attention back to the front as I tapped the brakes and threw the car into Parabolica. Much as the name suggests, the right-hand corner forms a long, fast one-hundred eighty-degree corner, the flat out exit seamlessly blending into the start-finish straight as we powered over the line to begin lap two.
So, as the first stint of the race went on, Anthony Harrison was able to build a gap over the heavier fueled Hondas - who had managed to mass both Lorenzo Barbaro and Matti Hamalainen rather early on - but the American McLaren driver's speed started to fade along with his option tyres towards the end of his stint. This was bad news given that Harrison was fueled for a two-stop strategy whilst the Hondas were planning on just a single stop. Rudolfo Goncalves in second place and James Buxton in third place already started closing in on Harrison when he made his first stop, he had a big gap to overcome. Yes, theoretically, Harrison would be faster and, on less fuel, plus the Hondas still needed to make their stop, but Harrison needed to make a second stop as well, effectively meaning that the Vodafone McLaren-Mercedes driver was back on square one. Further behind, and speaking of McLaren-Mercedes, Jyri Kaasalainen and I took our first stops at the same time, given I've been chasing him all race long thus far, but this allowed the one-stopping Renault of Felipe Alvarez to leap ahead of us both, setting the stage for a three-car battle. Alvarez had track position, but he wasn't able to keep his pace as consistent as the Hondas ahead, so he was losing time, then my crew managed to get me ahead of Kaasalainen in the pitstop, while, based off of qualifying, the McLaren had the best raw speed out of all of us. All three cars had KERS, all three teams had managed to win a drivers' championship at minimum in the twenty-first century, and we had a classic track to work with.
Coming out of the first chicane and into the Curva Grande, Felipe Alvarez had just made his one and only stop of the race, now he was on cold tyres just a few car lengths ahead of us. I knew the Spaniard was a hard racer, I knew we had our little coming together in 2008 at the Canadian Grand Prix, but I also knew that this was a miserable season for the two-time World Champion, and he needed the points, so all of that came together to form a simple objective: overtake Alvarez into the Variante della Roggia. The Spaniard went to the left, covering the inside, forcing me onto the right, where I would struggle to pull off a move. Struggling turned into an impossibility as, instead of overtaking Alvarez, I had to take evasive action as Jyri slipped up the inside and locked up, carrying over the curve. I slowed right down and stayed on the outside, letting the Finn shoot past me and then pulling off the over and under, getting a better exit than the McLaren and charging back at him going into the Lesmo, while also making my feelings on the move clear over the radio.
"Jyri completed divebombed me! He went over the inside kerb, cut the track, and took the position." I was a Ferrari driver now, and that meant that politicking on the team radio was now part of the job description.
"Copy that Tammy, we're on it. In the meantime, get back at him." Ronnie encouraged, meaning that the team was working on getting Jyri a penalty, but that penalty might not be strictly necessary as, coming out of Lesmo 2, I had a run on the McLaren. Kaasalainen used the kinetic energy recovery system to get that extra eighty horsepower and that might have worked against a different car, but I had the KERS too. The combined effect of my Ferrari V8 engine, the electrical motors, and the hole the McLaren was punching in the air for me meant that I sailed past my McLaren counterpart, solidifying my grasp on seventh place under braking. Ironically enough, the hard braking into Ascari worked to recharge the KERS battery - hence the kinetic recovery aspect of the motor - so, while I still only had seven seconds to work with per lap, the regularity of braking and braking hard in this sport meant that I was always making sure I had seven seconds to play with. It was an impressive little system, even if most teams weren't using it, and it particularly proved useful at a place like Monza made up of these high speed, high acceleration zones, in contrast to the hard braking zones. Perhaps that is why Renault was running the electrical unit for the first time since the beginning of the season at this race, which, annoyingly enough, gave Felipe even more power to work with as he took advantage of Jyri and I's battle to build a gap. The damage only grew worse when it came time to take our pitstops.
Anthony Harrison won the 2008 World Drivers' Championship, meaning he was #1 for 2009 and his teammate, Jyri, was thus #2. Ferrari, meanwhile, won the World Constructors' Championship, meaning our cars were numbered just behind the McLarens, being #3 and #4. Henrique de Matteo finished second in the championship in 2008, having outperformed Matti Hamalainen and nearly won the title himself, now I was filling in for the injured Henrique...the end result of all that? Jyri Kaasalainen's pit box was directly in front of mine. I managed to get back ahead of the Finn at Ascari a few laps prior, so I boxed first, my team was already working on changing out the tyres and loading up the fuel tank, which meant Jyri had little space to work with. The Finn took a compromised entry into his box, ended up at an uncomfortable angle, and forced his front right tyre crew to back up as they got to work. In short, it was a complete disaster of a stop for Kaasalainen, which meant that, once I was able to squeeze past him out of my pit exit, I left the McLaren crew scrambling to change his tyres and release him. Even when his tyres were changed, Jyri was still at a weird angle, so he had to pull out of his pit box slowly and turn the car while he did it. Before the pitstop, Jyri was just behind me on track, after the pitstop? Kaasalainen fell behind Victor Hartmann, Umberto Petronelli, and Maximilian Renner, falling out of the points entirely. One problem down, now I just needed to charge all the way up to the back of Felipe Alvarez and overtake the Spaniard.
The Renault team has had an awful season so far, and that was before all the news came out about rigging the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix and losing their sponsors. To put into perspective how terrible their performance has been, Alvarez sits on thirteen points, just one more than I have, and I've only raced twice this season. Whoever finishes in sixth will be ahead in the championship following this race, and right now, Felipe had the position. That being said, I was on lighter fuel, I had fresher option tyres for this final stint, and I had a better car to boot, so I chased down the Spaniard up ahead, setting some downright electric pace as I did so - this is the best the car has felt all weekend long, I felt the front end of the car biting in enough in the corners without creating massive drag down the straights, I was tapping the KERS button coming onto the straights just to give me that little boost in the acceleration zones, and I was using backmarkers to my advantage, getting in their draft as I lapped them. The car was feeling great and I even had the fastest lap of the race at one point, but I didn't hold on to it as I was one of three cars on a mad dash towards the end of the race. Ahead of Felipe Alvarez, Lorenzo Barbaro in the Force India was the fastest car on the straights and trying to chase down Matti Hamalainen for fourth place, trying to match the amazing result that his teammate captured a race prior. Ahead of them, Anthony Harrison was driving like a rabid dog trying to take second place from James Buxton. Anthony started on pole position and lost out to the Hondas on strategy, now in the closing stages of the race, Anthony was desperate to get revenge...perhaps too desperate...
"Safety car! Safety car! Harrison stuffed it coming out of Lesmo 2, watch out for carbon." a defeated sounding Ronnie came over the radio just as I broke within two seconds of Felipe Alvarez ahead. I could see the white, yellow, and orange car ahead of me - and to add insult to injury, the safety car meant he slowed right down, and I closed up to his rear wing, forced to slot in behind him in the queue - but I couldn't do anything about it anymore. I was so close to Alvarez, with KERS and good timing I could probably get him in just a lap if given the chance, but we were perilously close to the end of the race...
"Are we going to restart?" I asked, hoping hard for just one lap of racing to finish the job, but when I saw the stricken McLaren with no crane in sight, I knew it was going to be a long safety car period. As long as the rest of the race. The racer in me always wanted to see a race end up green flag conditions, but...we're all also fueled for the existing race distance, if we were all of a sudden going to add laps to ensure a green flag finish, twenty cars would flood into the pitlane and all need the freshest tyres and new fuel, every second driver on track would have to double-stack, and Jyri Kaasalainen's botched stop earlier in the race already showed how insane things could get in a crowded pitlane. Add into a mad rush for fuel and all those cars waiting for their teammates to get serviced...it would be a disaster. And that's with 2009 regulations that allow for in-race refueling, that's supposed to be going away for 2010 for safety reasons, so how would adding green flag laps even work post-2010? I don't think it would. I suppose then the most logical answer would be to throw a red flag after a late accident to ensure a finish under green, but that can't happen as the regulations state a red flag can only be thrown in emergency situations. So, while I don't think that finishing under safety car is a particularly fair or interesting ending to a race, it seems to be the best possible outcome according to the way the regulations are written. In any case, I suppose it doesn't matter all that much, because no one can say for certain if I really would have overtaken Alvarez or if Barbaro would have had the pace to make up for Matti's KERS - either one of us could have ended up crashing just like Anthony did - the race was over and, as luck would have it, I did finish sixth after all. Anthony crashing out had the same effect as me passing Alvarez would have had.
The points-paying results of the 2009 Italian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 10 points.
2: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 8 points.
3: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 5 points.
5: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 4 points.
6: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 3 points.
7: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 2 points.
8: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 1 point.
So, prior to the safety car, Max Renner managed to overtake the McLaren of Jyri Kaasalainen, meaning that once again, we managed to turn damage limitation into a gain. A nine-point gain in this case. It was now 77 points to 41, meaning we had a massive buffer to work with for when McLaren finally started to have the more consistent, strong results that their qualifying pace suggests.
After today, 15 of those 77 points belonged to me. Another six points - which I honestly think I can expect from the next race in France given the kind of pace I've had from the last few races - will match my 2007 championship total. In four races I could legitimately match what I managed to do in my entire rookie season.
Hideki Kitagawa, my replacement at Williams, scored zero points. Smug running gag aside, this was actually the closest the Japanese driver has come to scoring points thus far, finishing eleventh, right behind the likes of Jyri Kaasalainen and Umberto Petronelli, and ahead of some rather respectable drivers such as Ivan Tripoli and Bernard Audinet. There's also the fact that Tommy Koskinen also failed to score points today and actually finished a lap behind Kitagawa, so I can't mock him too badly. In all honesty, my grievance has never been with him personally, just that I think I am a better driver than him and Williams should have kept me instead. That sounds arrogant, I know, but I think the results speak for themselves. I've scored fifteen points in three races after half a year out of the sport while Hideki Kitagawa hasn't scored any points as a rookie. I have a better car, sure, and I have experience in a different generation of Formula One, so it's not a complete like-to-like comparison, but Williams is the team that decided to drop me for a rookie just for financial reasons. Williams is the reason why I had to take half a season out of F1, so I get to be bitter about their decisions. If I want to keep a running tally of Hideki's points in the seat, I think should have been mine, then I'm going to do that.
In any case, three points from the Italian Grand Prix. It wasn't the absolute high of Belgium, and I do admit I probably should have done better than sixth when my teammate managed to finish on the podium, but I should be happy that I can consider this a bad result. In my two years at Williams, I finished in the points seventeen times and failed to score eighteen times, whereas so far with Ferrari, I have a one-hundred percent success rate. Yes, it's only been three races, but there were multiple times where I went three races without scoring a single point for Williams. In fact, I only scored three-consecutive points finishes once before in my career, at the beginning of the 2008 season when Williams and I were absolutely on fire and managed to score four-consecutive points finishes before getting taken out in turn one at the Turkish Grand Prix. Basically, I'm in the form of my life and have gone to strength to strength to strength, displaying my skills in multiple different series. Honestly, it reminds me somewhat of being a junior driver, where doing partial seasons was fairly common and it wasn't unheard of for a driver to come into a series, be the fastest driver for a weekend or so, but have no effect on the series at all since that was the only time they raced there.
This year, I went endurance racing and did well, most famously being part of the team to win the 2009 24 Hours of Le Mans for Peugeot, then I went over to Indycar and did well, managing to take a podium at Long Beach and then a win in Toronto, and now I've managed to come back to F1 and race for Ferrari. Three consecutive points finishes, including a second place as part of a one-two finish at the Belgian Grand Prix, and getting to race for the prancing horse at their home race. Sixth today wasn't exactly an amazing result, but I'm literally living out my dream, having moments I will remember for the rest of my life, and I'm in a position where I get to be disappointed with what, two years ago, would've been one of the best results of a season. I've won races in two different series this year and now I'm in a position to do amazing things with Ferrari - as crazy as it is to say, Matti Hamalainen has demonstrated that Ferrari has the pace to win with the F60B, so it's not unthinkable that I can win. I had to wait two years to go from finishing third to finishing second, but I don't think I'll need to wait as long to take the top spot.
I was being paid a lot more to fill-in at Ferrari than I got to race for Williams, Peugeot, or Andretti, and that meant that I could be generous. Thus, to celebrate a successful first three races and the team's home race, I treated my crew to a dinner in the town of Monza the evening after the race. All in all, it was about thirty people - Ronnie, his wife, Paolo, Somchai, Somchai's daughter, all my tyre guys, the strategists, everyone - and I'm sure the bill was going to be an absolutely terrifying number, but I also pulled up to the restaurant in my own Ferrari. I could afford it now. I drive the car, so ultimately our maximum speed is dependent on what I can physically do, but I'm able to do that because of these guys, because of the hundreds of hours of preparation that go into each and every race, because of the strategies making sure I could be competitive and catch up to Felipe Alvarez at the end of the Italian Grand Prix, and because of the pit crew getting me out of the box quickly and efficiently despite having Jyri Kaasalainen stuck in a weird angle in the box just ahead of us. Sure, the driver is the one who is responsible for whether all that hard work is good enough for fourteenth or seventh or first, but the driver is only able to do that because of the hard work that goes in. Formula One is a team sport and that goes a lot deeper than the fact that there is another car with the exact same paintjob. So, out of appreciation for all the people who have made my return to F1 possible, I turned my attention back to the goings on at the table, finding a few of my mechanics engaged in a conversation about motorcycle racing.
"...nah mate, it's mental. I'm telling you. Eh, Joakim, you did some time there, right?" asked Norbert, a Frenchman and one of my engineers, his accent a curious mix of French and English after spending much of his career in England - working for the likes of Arrows, Jordan, and Renault before getting the chance to live out his dream and work for Ferrari in 2006.
"Yup, I was with Ducati from 2003 to 2007," answered Joakim Moravec, who was able to transfer over suspension knowledge on two wheels to working on four wheels, a rather surprising change in my opinion, but not one entirely unheard of it seems. As Grand Prix Motorcycle Racing becomes more and more corporate and organized, it also becomes more and more similar to F1, having taken over the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course race from 2008 onwards on a modified layout, and also racing on other current and former F1 tracks such as Jerez, Catalunya, Donington Park, Estoril, and Sepang.
"How many drivers got injured and had to miss races back then?" Norbert pressed.
"A few, mostly a race or two here or there, but honestly we were remarkably injury free." Joakim answered with a shrug.
"Mate, are you honestly trying to shit on MotoGP drivers for getting injured when Henrique is literally hospitalized?" Lewis Martinez, the half-Spanish, half-Scottish tyre changer that Norbert had been arguing with all along pointed out.
"Whoa, whoa, you can't go there." Norbert countered "That was a freak accident, a spring shooting off another car is different than flipping over your own bike every other time you crash."
"Tamara, what do you think?" Lewis asked, noticing me looking over at the conversation.
"I think it's a fascinating display of rider and machine, they really deserve respect...but I wouldn't want to do it myself. I think Norbert is minimizing the sport too much, but he does have a point that some of those crashes are terrifying...so are the scars so see on some of the riders." I answered, somewhat hedging my bets, but ultimately bringing it back to what I would do in that situation. In fairness though, I wasn't really a motorcycle person. Some of the other drivers on the F1 grid have bikes and some are even really into riding - it's not exactly the same, but I know that Matti at least is into motocross, which is basically the offroad equivalent to MotoGP with the jumps and stuff - but that's never been me. I know this might sound a bit ridiculous coming from somebody who drives as fast as possible for a living with her helmet sticking out of the car, but motorcycle racing scares me. The whole leaning into the corners and throwing your knee as close to the ground as possible just seems like tempting an accident, and then, as discussed, when that accident does happen, it tends to be dramatic. No, I much prefer to be strapped into a car rather than sitting on top of a machine acting as much like an aerodynamic device as the one controlling it. And all of that isn't even mentioning the Isle of Mann TT, which is basically the only racing event left where people are expected to die. F1 hasn't seen a fatality since Senna and Ratzenberger in 1994, the Isle of Mann had eleven deaths in 2005 alone.
"Tamara, can I get you for a moment?" Somchai asked, having stood up and approached me on the right. I suppose the unfortunate aspect of paying for a massive dinner is that it means I'm the center of attention for its duration.
"Yes, of course," I politely answered the Thai engineer, remembering that he was one of the first to try to help me during a difficult first stage of the weekend.
"I'd like to introduce you to my daughter, Alexis. She's followed me to the team and now works in public relations...I think she could work with you too, eh?" Somchai proposed, trying to get his daughter a promotion, causing the brunette woman next to him to roll her eyes and offer her hand.
"Sorry about that, my dad's just trying to get me a promotion," she smiled apologetically. She was slightly lighter skinned than her father and actually stood just as tall, so, while I couldn't be exactly sure yet, I think she was mixed race. Perhaps Somchai moved over to Europe as a young engineer and found a European wife, or maybe I'm just completely ignorant about Thai people and there is a wide range of phenotypes, some lighter than others. I know in Kazakhstan for instances, Kazakhs can range from looking almost exactly the same as Russians to looking almost Mongolian to appearing Middle Eastern, all depending on which groups they mixed with in the nomadic times of Central Asia. I'm probably coming across as racially insensitive when I don't mean to, it's just I'm a racing driver, not an anthropologist, my vocabulary here isn't advanced enough to convey what I'm trying to convey. Moving swiftly beyond this particular rabbit hole...
"No, no, it's fine. They've had me working with Henrique's PR rep so far, but I think that was supposed to be an interim solution, what are you like?" I asked, seeing a satisfied Somchai return to his seat while Alexis pulled up a seat next to me, sitting down to talk. We got to know each other for a few minutes, learning that Alexis Ngamnaimuang seemed exceptionally qualified for the job. First of all, she spoke Thai, Mandarin Chinese, English, French, and Italian fluently, second of all, she's grown up around the team thanks to being the only child of a long-time Ferrari engineer, and third of all, she was actually mentored by the woman who served as Wilhelm Ziegler's long-term PR rep and personal assistant. Honestly, knowing all that, I found myself questioning why she wasn't working with a driver already.
"Henrique and Matti have both been here for a few years, and with this type of thing, once you have someone to work with, you rarely want to change." Alexis explained.
"I suppose I understand that. I worked with a woman called Mariana for two years at Williams and never even considered asking for somebody else, she just did her job and it worked for me." I shrugged, accepting that a PR person was someone important enough that a driver wanted to stick with one for as long as possible, but also not important enough for a driver to want to change if things went wrong. Racing drivers were a really superstitious sort and there are all kinds of stories of drivers needing to wear the same type of socks to perform well or having gained three tenths after changing from one undamaged chassis to another, things that don't make any logical sense but just represent the latest mental hang-up a driver has developed. In any case, I found it easy to talk to Alexis and Somchai clearly wanted me to give her the job, so why not change it? It's not like I've even had any notable interactions with Henrique's PR representative.
So, the dinner continued, everyone generally having a good time, talking about whatever came to mind and generally enjoying what we've been able to do together. I was proud to have hosted this thing, because after the season these guys have had, they needed it. In 2007 and especially 2008, these guys were used to winning races and competing at the very sharp end of the grid, now they've had a slower car all year long, and just when they were about to get a better car and pick up their performances, Henrique de Matto was injured in freak fashion. These guys spent all summer break not knowing who they were going to be working with come the European Grand Prix at Valencia, but despite that, they've been fantastic every step of the way, so they deserve to get something back for it. A moment to stop thinking about the high intensity racing and just enjoy some time together. That being said, me and some of the senior figures in the team did find a minute to talk.
"So, what do we think about the next few races?" I asked.
"We got two new tracks coming up. The Atlantic Grand Prix and the race in Russia. The Atlantic track is a permanent race track, to the west of Bordeaux, right on the coast of France. They've had some Formula 3 races and stuff like that over there but the F1 is going to be their first big event. From what I've been able to gleam so far, they describe it as a mix of Mugello and Zandvoort. I think we'll be alright there, but nobody fucking knows for sure yet." Ronnie explained, introducing me to the new venue. So, originally, there were going the be two French races on the 2009 calendar, one would be the French Grand Prix at Magny-Cours, the other a new event at this Bordeaux track. The European Grand Prix name was already taken by the race in Valencia, so they decided to call this one the Atlantic Grand Prix, both because the circuit marketed itself after the nearby ocean, and as somewhat of a mirror of the Pacific Grand Prix we had in the early 1990s. In the end, the Magny-Cours race was cancelled, however, they still had the rights to the French Grand Prix name through 2010, so, much like the European Grand Prix at the Nürburgring a few years back, we run into this awkward situation of only having one race in France, but it doesn't even get called the French Grand Prix. A bit of a shambolic affair, but whatever, the race is in France, and it's called the Atlantic Grand Prix, we'll see how the race goes.
"And Russia?" I asked.
"Fast street circuit on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg. The main feature is supposed to be this flat-out sweeping section along the embankment, another section goes around a big roundabout. Looks a bit ridiculous to me, but I think we'll be alright there. We had good pace at Spa and Monza so we should be good at another one of these high-speed circuits." Ronnie answered, filling me in on the event afterwards, the last European race of the season.
"They say they're going to build the tallest building in Europe right next to it." Paolo di Rocco added, ridiculing it a bit.
"Well, we'll just have to see what kind of circuit it is when we get there." I shrugged, not quite wanting to mock the circuit before I had a chance to experience it. Sure, it sounded a bit gimmicky compared to the natural terrain courses of old, and I did have my reservations about racing in Russia so soon after their invasion of Georgia last year - and the situation in Abkhazia and South Ossetia still hasn't been resolved, mind you - but it might be a fun circuit to race on. Besides, for better or worse, this is the closest I've ever come to a home race in F1, and maybe I can get some satisfaction out of delivering a performance for the common people of Russia. Yes, Medvedev and Putin are concerning figures to say the least, and I hate to see them profiting from the sport I love, but the same could be said about a lot of the countries we race in. Quite frankly, Russia has already been granted the hosting rights for the 2014 Winter Olympics and they're pushing to host the World Cup in the future, Formula One is far from the only sport in the world to ignore what happened in Georgia. In any case, regardless of morals or politics, the race was going ahead, and I had to try and perform there, as well as at the race after that "And then Singapore comes after that?"
"Right, we got some bad memories there after last year. I seem to remember you doing well though, so we'll see how it goes." Ronnie sighed, seemingly not wanting to talk about Singapore given that the 2008 race - and what Renault did there - led to a nightmare situation that ultimately killed Henrique's championship hopes. I managed to finish fourth in that race, so maybe now, with a better car and a crew wanting to avenge that loss last year, we could do a bit better and get back on the podium. So that's the challenge facing us now: two brand new tracks and one that's only a year old. Honestly, the penultimate race in Brazil is the only one I have any experience with, considering that after Singapore comes the Japanese Grand Prix, which is returning to Suzuka for the first time since 2006. The final race, however, is another new event, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, finishing off the season in the Middle East with a sundown showdown under the lights.
"Bonjour!" I waved to the French fans as I arrived at the interesting new venue. So, I instantly saw the Mugello comparison in the overall shape of the track map, and I also saw the Zandvoort comparison in a number of ways. First of all, there was the simple fact that it was a track right along the sea, partially built onto the sand banks, just like the historic Dutch circuit whose name literally translates to Sandfort. Second of all, despite the track otherwise being flat - something unlike either Zandvoort or Mugello - there is elevation up into the run up the sand bank. Now, the "sand bank" here is actually reinforced by dirt and concrete that just mirrors some of the sandbanks here in the area surrounding the Bassin d'Arcachon here to the southwest of Bordeaux, but it rises up and crests the hill, similar to sector one at Zandvoort - a place I last raced at during my time in Formula 3, racing many of the same names you see here in F1 today - and I was excited for the fast run down the hill that follows the sand dune. The Circuit de l'Atlantique was designed just a few years ago and this is the first top tier event that's been held here, but I would say that it has more in common with the old school circuits everybody loves than the more modern tracks. The fact that this place wasn't designed by Hermann Tilke also does help spice up the variety, as the German architect seems to be behind every new F1 track nowadays, including both the new Russian track and the Abu Dhabi circuit that we'll visit later this year.
"It's good to be home!" Bernard sighed, happily. The Frenchman still hadn't scored points, but he had been close from time to time, and I don't think that Renault is going to drop him. Quite frankly, dropping one driver is embarrassing enough, since then Renault has also been exposed for cheating, disgraced, lost their sponsors, and now appears to be for sale, so the last thing they need to do is dropping another driver. Also, while I have no proof of this and can only speculate, I wonder if Renault is throwing all their resources behind Felipe Alvarez and thus the second car has always been worse, meaning that Filipe Yannick and Bernard Audinet really can't match him. In any case, the Frenchman is still in the car, and he gets to celebrate his home race, something pretty neat given that, this time in 2008, there was every possibility that there wouldn't be a French Grand Prix at all. Yes, we went from no French Grand Prix to two French races to just one French race but it's not even called the French Grand Prix. It's been a ridiculous journey to get here, but I have a feeling the actual driving will make the whole situation better.
"How's Renault treating you?" I asked my former DAMS teammate.
"Eh...it's good and it's bad. I'm happy enough with how the team is treating me, but it's been a crazy past few weeks. Fulvia is gone, Felipe is angry with that, and everything seems very temporary, very...fluid. How about you?" Bernard explained, giving me an insight into the rather chaotic mood going on in that Renault team. Knowing that Filipe Yannick's crash was deliberate, giving Alvarez the perfect safety car to make his strategy work, was a massive stain on the team and on the sport. They put a driver in danger to benefit his own teammate, and even if you downplay the risk of crashing in that particular area, they still made their second driver ruin his own race just to benefit the first driver. At very best, Renault painted itself as the place that Fulvia and Alvarez do whatever they want with zero impunity, at very worse, Fulvia endangered one driver to benefit his star man. Of course, much like the spygate scandal that rocked McLaren in 2007, Felipe Alvarez has done a rather good job deflecting all of this from himself, claiming that his team principal and manager thought up the scheme on his own. I'm not trying to accuse Alvarez of anything, but I know that he and Fulvia are very close, so I don't know how believable it is that Fulvia was doing something to benefit Felipe without telling him.
"Honestly, it feels like I finally got some permanence. I know it's weird to say on just a half-year deal, but I feel more secure in F1 now than I ever did when I was a paydriver with Williams. I don't have anything figured out for 2010, but I'm driving well enough and have enough options that I'm confident of securing something." I answered, perhaps not being the most logical, but meaning that I felt. I was finally in F1 on merit and in these three races, I've had three solid points-finishes and I look forward to continuing that going into the Atlantic Grand Prix. I have a strong crew on my car and a great team behind me.
"Where do you think you'll want to go for 2010?" Bernard asked.
"Not sure. Honda is the best team this year but there's no way they're sticking around for 2010, so who knows what engine they'll have next year - assuming they find a buyer to begin with. Virgin sponsors them, Branson has said some things about wanting a team, so for all we know, next year it's going to be a Virgin team using those old Cosworth engines. I'm not sure if that would be a team I want to drive for. That leaves the old established teams. Ferrari, obviously, but with Matti and Henrique under contract, I don't think there's going to be an opening unless things turn for the worse for Henrique - and you know me well enough that I'm not the type of person to hope for something like that. Red Bull isn't an option either, they have Weaver and Renner, so that leaves a seat at McLaren, and maybe options at Toyota and BMW Sauber if they'll still be around." I listed off the options, going with some of the speculation that's been rampant in the paddock these past few years. Richard Branson and his Virgin companies are the most consistent sponsors on the Honda, and he's definitely got the money, so it all just depends on whether or not he has the interest to buy out the Honda team and pay the accumulated debts. If it isn't going to be Branson, it's not exactly clear who would buy out the Honda team, especially given that Super Aguri failed to attract a buyer last year and collapsed midseason. Honda is obviously a better team than Super Aguri was, but the point remains, it's not exactly a huge bidding race, especially with all these manufacturer teams seemingly looking to sell given the global economic outlook.
"You don't seem to have much faith in them sticking around." Bernard noted.
"Look I hope I'm wrong - I want to see BMW and Toyota on the grid. Hell, in my perfect world, Honda and Super Aguri would be on the grid too with Natasha having been in a Super Aguri seat all season long. It's just that, the way things are in the world right now, you have to question these manufacturer teams. BMW has been unhappy about the 2010 regulations all season long and is performing well below their expectations, everything points to them trying to pull out. As for Toyota, I admit this is more speculative on my part, but they're spending so much money with so little outcome. I don't see how their board is going to tolerate spending so much money to finish fifth in the constructors' championship when a half-bankrupt Honda team is on course to win both championships." I explained, going through the cold logic behind my suspicions. Spelling out exactly why I thought big changes were on the horizon for F1's teams.
"So McLaren is the best option then?" Audinet asked, getting to the heart of the issue.
"Jyri's seat definitely seems like the best one on the market, but I also think literally everyone is chasing that seat. The only one that might not be is Felipe, and if he's not, that's just because his pride is hurt." I shrugged. Felipe Alvarez going back to McLaren to partner Anthony Harrison after everything that happened in 2007 would be downright hilarious, but, on the other hand, I know Felipe wants to be in a competitive car above all else and I really don't see another option for him. Nobody knows what Renault is going to look like in 2010 - if it even survives - so Alvarez is obviously going to try and move, but then he has the same problem I have - where to go? As good as I feel about staying in F1, I do have to admit it does look like there are a lot of people looking to move and only so many good destinations. Yes, we're shaping up to have three new teams for 2010, but nobody expects those three teams to be in a position to compete right away, especially without the budget cap and with the FIA basically mandating that all these teams use the old Cosworth V8s that Williams ran in 2006. The engines weren't good enough for Williams then, I fail to see how they'll be good enough to make a competitive seat in 2010 when all the mechanisms to boost those three teams have been stripped away by the existing powers of the sport.
In any case, there's still plenty of action to be had in 2009 before I need to figure out where I'll be for 2010.
"Alright Tammy, this is gonna be your final lap. Make it count." Ronnie Sanders came over the radio as I came out of the final corner and accelerated onto the start-finish straight. The pitlane on my right, the main grandstand on the left, and the straight facing south, I rose through the gears and accelerated down the straight. My equipment? A seven speed semi-automatic paddle-shift gearbox, a 2.4L 90-degree V8 limited to 18,000 revs per minute, and four Bridgestone Potenza slick tyres - option compound. Along with an 80hp electric motor, with seven seconds of boost that I'd use over the course of the lap to my advantage. For now though, I was focusing on gaining energy rather than using it, hitting the brakes and slamming down the gears for the first corner, a tight hairpin to the right, followed by the smallest burst of acceleration before a flick to the left leading immediately into turn three. Rounder, softer, but still somewhat of a hairpin, turn three spit me out parallel to the start-finish straight, and here is where I used my first burst of KERS as I accelerated out of the first section of corners - those first three turns are really the part of this circuit that I'd consider mickey mouse-y, the rest I think stands out as surprisingly good for a modern circuit - then bleeding that speed off for another braking zone. Turn four was yet another hairpin-like corner, this time to the left, but it felt different given this is where the run up the "sand dune" began.
I used my circuit burst of KERS running uphill and accelerating out of the left-hander, and then flicked the car to the left and then back to the right for a fast chicane. I crossed the sector line to complete the first third of the lap before braking again as I turned to the right. The track was evening out below me here in turn seven as we crested up the hill, but then almost immediately dipped down again for a slower chicane. Accelerate for a moment out of seven, dip down to the right, then brake for turn eight, a ninety-degree corner to the left. A burst of throttle uphill brought me back up to turn nine to the right, getting back up to the top of the hill just in time for the plunge back down. Basically, the idea was similar to what they ran at Estoril in the final few years of the Portuguese Grand Prix - a chicane to slow down the cars before a fast, sweeping section that would be too dangerous if we just continued out through turn seven. In effect, it was another one of these things that made the Atlantic Grand Prix feel like a proper old school circuit, because it has the same kind of changes as an old school circuit would. In any case, coming out of turn nine the track swept downhill to the right and then popped back to the left through turn ten as the track reached ground level again. This led to another fast chicane, with turn eleven to the right and turn twelve straightening us up back to the left, leading to the section of track that resembled Mugello.
For the first time since turn eight I was back on the brakes for turn thirteen, but only for a moment before I accelerated again. This corner and the next one, both to the right that formed a wide-U at the northern end of the track, weren't quite banked, but there was just enough camber to them that made them really fast and really satisfying, especially turn thirteen which only required the slightest bit of a lift - much like Pouhon at Spa or, leading to the comparison, Arrabbiata at Mugello - spitting me out onto a short straight on the eastern extremity of the track. This was like an abridged version of the third sector at the famous Italian circuit - Mugello has never hosted Formula One before, but it hosts things like MotoGP and Formula 3, the latter meaning that many F1 drivers have experience with the track and hold it in high regard - as the Arrabbiata-like turn fourteen led to the Correntaio-like turn fifteen, braking and rounding out to the right and then accelerating down another short straight. This culminated in a final, round corner to the left, another circular corner that deposited me onto the start-finish straight. This is where I used my final burst of KERS, dumping all my remaining electrical energy to make a mad dash for the line, completing my final qualifying run.
"How did we do?" I asked, breathing heavily after a high-intensity lap as I made my way around at a slow pace to get back to the pits.
"Checking...alright. We're seventh. Harrison on pole, Kaasalainen in second, Buxton third, Goncalves fourth, Koskinen fifth, Matti is sixth, you're seventh, Alvarez is eighth, Renner is ninth, Weaver is tenth. Good work, we'll get back at them tomorrow." Ronnie ran down the results. So, outqualified by Matti Hamalainen for the fourth time in a row, but also making the top ten for the fourth time in a row, starting in a points-paying position. As much as I would like to be doing better and felt like that was a really good lap that should have been worth more, I still qualified in a good position and did my job. My teammate is the 2007 World Champion, I was a rookie in that year, and I just did half a year out of the sport; Matti is the lead driver for Ferrari, I'm a fill-in for Henrique de Matteo, it's not my job to outperform him. My job is to support him and get as many extra points for Ferrari as possible, hence my performance at the Belgian Grand Prix was perfect as far as the team was concerned, and hence Ronnie is satisfied with my performance despite the fact that McLaren locked out the front row. The fact that I was just behind Matti meant that, as far as the team could tell, this was the maximum that the car could do. At least in qualifying, we tended to be stronger in the race, but the same was also true of Red Bull, so we'll have to see what goes. Koskinen and the Williams could do well over one lap, but he tends to be weaker in the race, so that might be a position gained. Kaasalainen would also surprise a lot of people if he managed to stay up there given his recent performances, so that might be another gain. Anyway, qualifying done, we'll see how it goes in the race.
"It's open - come in!" I called when I heard a knock on the door of my trailer. Literally a trailer, considering that it was a lorry trailer with a personalized interior, including an exercise bike I just finished my morning rounds on. It was race day, I wanted to be fit and sharp. I was wiping the swear off my forehead when Alexis entered the trailer, holding a clipboard in one hand and a metal water bottle in the other. She offered me the water, but I politely shook my head, I had my own for now. The one she has might come in handy a few hours from now when we were on the grid waiting for the race to start. For now, I was still in the comfort of my own home...well, the temporary mobile home I was using for this race and the last few before it. Russia is in Europe but I'm pretty sure all the teams are treating it as a flyaway given the sheer distances involved from the southwest of Bordeaux to the northwest side of Saint Petersburg. After that, we have Singapore, Japan, Brazil, and Abu Dhabi, all of which means a lot of flying and a lot of hotels. Which brings to mind...what exactly are the accommodations for a Ferrari driver? I distinctly remember encountering Ferrari mechanics in the same hotel as I was back during the 2007 Malaysian Grand Prix, but where would the drivers stay? Furthermore, would I even get that treatment? At first, I would assume not given I'm just a circumstantial replacement, but I'm being paid more and treated like more than just a fill-in. Considering my level of performance, it feels like Ferrari is treating me like a full-on works driver for the rest of the season - taking second at Belgium likely cemented that fact. In any case, I'll find out what my travel plans are in a few weeks, for now, I have to worry about the lead up to the Atlantic Grand Prix.
"Okay, what do you need to do before I get to cart you out of here?" Alexis asked, poking fun at her own profession in the process.
"I need to shower and get dressed - give me half an hour and I'll meet you in the hospitality center." I answered.
"Okay good, we have an interview with American TV in two hours, get to me as fast as you can so I can prep you." the Thai-Singaporean-French woman replied. Talking to her in more detail, I found out that her mother is half-French, half Singapore Chinese, and she had been working for what was then the Chinese-language broadcaster of F1 races when she meant Somchai. One thing led to another and in record time they were married, and the soon-to-be mom was pregnant. I suppose that explains why they went with a name like Alexis, because in a household with so many ethnicities and languages, attached to a brand that is so heavily Italian, the background really was more cosmopolitan than Thai. Here I thought I was unique for representing a minority that makes up maybe 20% of Kazakhstan's population. In any case, I did as my press officer instructed and, a few hours later, I was sat in front of George Tarantano and a Speed Channel camera, being interviewed as part of their pre-race coverage.
"So, after all the adversity of losing your Williams seat and needing to adjust to life outside of F1, you, Tamara Shchegolyayeva, are back and driving for Ferrari, the best of the best, how does it feel?" George opened the interview.
"It feels like the jump between GP2 Asia and F1 all over again. When I came to Williams there were so many more eyes on me and so many more sponsors on my suit than there had been when I was racing in Asia, now I'm with Ferrari and it's like the same thing all over again. It's...it's the next level." I explained, just voicing how everything around me seems like more now - the salary, the car, the attention, the performance, the everything - it really does feel like I've taken a substantial step forward but I'm still in the same series. Maybe my perspective is a bit skewed thanks to my time in F1, but it really feels like something different.
"This also makes you the first woman to race for Ferrari, how do you feel about that?" George asked, reminding me of something that just didn't occur to me because I honestly don't even think that way.
"Look, to have raced for Williams is something very special and to now race for Ferrari is an absolute dream come true. I've driven for two of the greatest teams ever and I've done well with both of them, scored podiums with both of them. To be the first woman to do that is something very special and all I can hope for is that I won't be the last." I gave the answer that I thought Roksana would want to hear...but I wasn't going to dwell on that right now. My relationship status is what it is and it's given me the chance to refocus on my racing - after all, it's like she said, this is evidently what really matters to me.
"If given the chance, would you go back to Williams for 2010?" George asked, prompting me to glance at Alexis, remembering full well that she and I discussed specifically not talking about what comes after for Ferrari, keeping the conversation focused on the present.
"Well right now my plans are to perform as well as I can for Ferrari and help us beat McLaren in the fight for third. After that, we'll see what happens, but I do want to say I wish Henrique de Matteo a swift recovery and want to see him back in F1 as soon as possible." I tried to answer the question in a way that would take the focus off of 2010 while also not souring the interview, so I basically left a crumb stating that I won't be at Ferrari next year and my options are open. It wasn't anything Ferrari would be against because I was just wishing Henrique a quick recovery, which is what they wanted too, but for everyone else, it was also a statement that yes, this is still Henrique's seat and yes, I am still available for the future.
"Do you think any actions you take on track could influence what teams you might end up with for next year?" George pressed on, taking the mention of McLaren and running with it, implying that I might throw the fight with McLaren in hopes of getting a race seat with them.
"I am a clean driver and that's been true all my career so I don't think anything I do on track would hurt my reputation on the grid. And even then, I know what it is like to lose an F1 seat so I would not do anything that risks my chances of finishing out my chances with Ferrari. This team gave me a chance when they needed a replacement driver and I intend to pay them back every step of the way." I quashed that allegation fully and once again showed my appreciation for the team.
"Alright, those were some pretty tough questions, and you gave me an answer for each of them, so I'll stick to something a bit easier for the last one: how do you think you'll do this race?" Tarantano played it off well, but I think he realized he wasn't going to get any kind of scoop on my 2010 plans for this so transitioned to the more typical kind of questions, much I imagine - to the relief of Alexis Ngamnaimuang and Ferrari.
"It's a bit difficult to say - and I know that's probably the last thing you want to hear after that question - but I think we have a pretty good chance overall. The new spec performs well through the fast, sweeping stuff and we have a lot of that here, and the big acceleration zone out of the final corner should suit the cars running KERS - just us and McLaren again, I think - so we should make some forward progress. Besides, Ferrari always runs well in France, right?" I joked, referencing the fact that Ferrari has tended to be a dominant force at the French Grand Prix at Magny-Cours, this wasn't that, but it was the same country, so we'll have to see how it goes.
"Alright then, that was Tamara Shchegolyayeva of Kazakhstan, driving for Scuderia Ferrari. More coming from Formula One and the Circuit de l'Atlantique after these messages." George signed off, leading the broadcaster directly into a commercial break. Not for nothing, but between rewatching my performances in Indycar and trying to watch the F1 races while I was in the United States, the Americans really are obsessed with commercials. I know that's a somewhat ironic thing to say while wrapped in the logos of Ferrari, Marlboro, Shell, Alice, and all the rest, but it's true. Even on cable channels like Speed where the viewer is already paying a subscription just to watch the damn network there are constant ad breaks. I have to imagine it makes being a motorsports fan in America very annoying.
"Alright, good luck, do us proud." Milan Stefanovic wished me luck before the raced, watching over as I was strapped into the car. The Italian-born Montenegrin team principal took another look at my car lining up seventh on the grid and the #4 of Matti Hamalainen lining up in sixth place, just to the left in the row ahead of mine. It was a new race, a new track, and above all a level playing field. Nobody had more experience here than I did, nobody knew how to get two tenths a lap more than me around here yet, and nobody knew which overtaking opportunities were actually good and which were a waste. We would all be starting from the same level for the first of three times here in the 2009 season. So, a formation lap later, I watched those five red lights come up on the gantry and go out, unleashing the twenty best drivers in the world onto the Circuit de l'Atlantique for the first time. Anthony Harrison fired off the grid in first, but it was Rudolfo Goncalves from fourth on the grid who got the best start, rocketing from behind Jyri and taking to the pit exit for an audacious pass on the extreme inside. Two cars fighting on the even side of the grid meant that Matti was basically stuck as we arrived in turn one, while I was on the outside - which was actually the racing line. So, Anthony Harrison led from James Buxton, Rudolfo Goncalves, Tommy Koskinen, Tamara Shchegolyayeva, and Jyri Kaasalainen, with Matti slotting in behind through the twisty section.
It was single file through turn two and really the same through turn three, but the latter led onto the short straight heading back north. It wasn't quite long enough for me to get a run on the cars ahead, especially since the Hondas seemed to be pushing each other along quite nicely, and Tommy was riding their slipstream, while Harrison still had the track position ahead. In fact, I actually had to check my mirrors and go defensive into turn four, having Jyri Kaasalainen just behind me, the McLaren driver not at all happy at having gone from second to sixth in a single corner, and trying to recover that as quickly as possible. I held him off through the hairpin and through the run up the hill, through the chicane, and then in the high-speed plunge back down. The action didn't really pick up again until we arrived at turn thirteen. A tap of the brakes and two downshifts - I was heavy on fuel after all - before getting right back on the throttle, knowing this could be a monumental series of corners if I got the momentum right. I get it on track and used the camber to pull some speed together, getting into the draft from Koskinen's car as we came through turn fourteen, and this is where I got on the KERS button, speeding me up enough that I was able to pull alongside and overtake my former teammate into the penultimate corner. I'd use the rest of my KERS coming out of the final corner, which Jyri seemed to have saved his entire load for, as he was a menace under acceleration. Fortunately for me, I bad put a car between me and the unfortunate McLaren, and equally fortunately, Tommy made Jyri go on the outside heading down the straight and then outbraked the McLaren into turn one, meaning the Williams kept fifth place.
I took the opportunity to build a gap, turning the first stint into a bit of a quiet affair as I didn't have the pace to catch up with the top three while the cars behind me were battling hard and jockeying for position. Tommy was fighting hard to not lose too much track position despite not having the pace, Jyri Kaasalainen was fighting hard to get back towards the front of the field given all the speculation about who McLaren might sign instead of him - the media has linked the McLaren seat with everyone to James Buxton to Felipe Alvarez to, well, me - while behind the dueling Finns was a third Finn, Matti Hamalainen. My current teammate was hoping to pass his countrymen and do it quickly because, just behind the Ferrari, were the two Red Bulls. The last few races the Red Bulls have had some awful qualifying sessions, but they have this tendency in the race to behave like an unstoppable force, just charging into the points from absolutely nowhere. This is where I was starting to realize I was the lead Ferrari in the race, having put multiple cars between me and Matti at the start and now building a sizable gap thanks to the fact he was stuck behind the slower cars. All of that meant that, when it came time for the first stops, I was given priority.
"Box this lap, box this lap." Ronnie ordered at twenty-six laps into the race - it was a fast and relatively compact track, all things considered, so it was nearly seventy laps long - pitting at the same time as the leaders. Harrison and Buxton did their job in front of me, and Renner pitted behind, while Rudolfo, Jyri, Matti, and Weaver stayed out and got track position for now. This would work out rather well for Rudolfo and Matti, but not so much Jyri and Weaver, so, when the grid shook itself out again, it was Anthony still leading from James, but Rudolfo was much closer to his teammate now. I was in fourth, but Matti used the clear air advantage to overcut Jyri and Tommy, meaning he was up to fifth, the car directly behind me. Jyri was sixth, Renner was seventh, Weaver eighth, Koskinen ninth, and Felipe Alvarez was just ahead of the BMW Saubers, rounding out the top ten. So, what seemed like Ferrari was benefitting me at first turned out to be the opposite, as I was on the prime tyres compared to Matti, who was on his second set of option tyres, charging up towards me on tyres that were three laps fresher, adding insult to injury.
Matti was faster at this stage, and it seemed like he would be on my rear wing before the stint was over, however, two things worked to my advantage: first of all, there were no team orders in F1 anymore, so Ferrari couldn't just tell me to stand down and let Hamalainen past, and second of all: he was on the soft tyres, so they were going to burn up sooner rather than later. Then I'd be on the faster tyres for my final stint, given that Matti basically forced himself to take primes on the final stint by doubling up on the option tyres. The #4 Ferrari closed up to my rear on lap thirty-nine of sixty-eight and would twice attempt an overtake down the main straight, once into turn fifteen, again down the main straight and following that up with an attempt into turn four, but he was never quite close enough and could never quite overcome my defensive use of the electrical KERS power. Matti would eventually fade off my rear bumper and take his top of lap forty-three, finishing the race with twenty-five laps on the prime tyres with a relatively low fuel load - this would make the Flying Finn pretty fast, but not quite as fast as I'd be after my final stop on lap fifty, setting me up for nineteen laps on the soft tyres with an even lower load of fuel. I took off in pursuit of third place James Buxton with my teammate a safe few seconds behind me when, on lap fifty-eight, entering the final stages of the race we received an interruption.
"Safety car, safety car. Renner hit Kaasalainen in turn four, both cars are out. It's gonna be a fit of a wait." Ronnie reported in, revealing that the German tried to overtake the Finn into, what I'd say, was one of the worse overtaking spots on this circuit, and paid the price for it. Both cars were out and my charge towards the podium places was interrupted. The race would restart on lap sixty-two, and I'd pressure the Hondas again, but ultimately, I would have to settle for fourth place when the checkered flag flew at the end of lap sixty-eight.
The points-paying results of the 2009 Atlantic Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
2: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 8 points.
3: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 6 points.
4: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 5 points.
5: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 4 points.
6: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 3 points.
7: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 2 points.
8: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 1 point.
So, Anthony Harrison takes his second win of the season in a late resurgence that has tried to redeem what has otherwise been a nightmare season for the reigning championship. Nevertheless, nine points brings our points total up to 85 against McLaren's 51. We were safe in third place, in fact, we were now closer to Red Bull's total of 107.5 points than McLaren was to us. That being said, after what was otherwise a dip for Honda, the Japanese team has managed to fire back in the last few races, with two wins for Rudolfo Goncalves at Valencia and Monza, as well as having had both cars on the podium in the last two races.
As for me, while fourth was only my second-best result of the season thus far, it was the first time I outperformed Matti Hamalainen in the race. I've outraced a champion, even holding him back in the middle of the race when he was trying hard to take the position off of me, and because of that, I've raised my season total to 20 points. 20 points - in just four races I've eclipsed my 2007 championship total and now sit just five points off of my 2008 total. This is shaping up to be my greatest performance in F1 and I will have done it in just half a season. Yes, the Ferrari is a better car than the Williams was, even this year, but I sincerely feel like this is the best driving of my life.
Hideki Kitagawa, my replacement at Williams, still hasn't scored a point. He started thirteenth and finished fifteenth, losing two positions despite the fact that three cars - Renner, Kaasalainen, and Tripoli - retired in front of him.
Notes:
So, another bonus chapter thanks to me being on winter break and blessed with time, but I don't think I'll be able to do another one next week, so expect the next one in two weeks.
Also, if you're reading this the day it goes up - or on January 7th if you're Orthodox, I suppose - then Merry Christmas!
Chapter 28: Dov'è la Vittoria?
Notes:
Alright, so, I've decided to have F1 race in Russia during this time. I think I've made it pretty clear before and during this chapter that I don't support Russia's invasion of Ukraine and their infringement on a sovereign nation. That being said, keep in mind this takes place in 2009, so there isn't going to be a discussion of that in the text. If the section in Russia comes across as callous or untimely, that is why. Sorry I had to say this, I just don't want anyone taking this fictionalized period piece as a political statement.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXVIII.
Dov'è la Vittoria?
"...and he will visit the factory the week following the Japanese Grand Prix. We want you there along with everyone else when that happens, the whole team is going to welcome him, then we are going to make a video of him unveiling the 458 Italia." Milan Stefanovic, my team principal, explained. So, several months into his recovery, Henrique de Matteo was finally beginning to rebuild his stamina - he was getting back into the gym and planned on getting time in a go kart before leaving Brazil, and then he'll fly over to Maranello to visit the factory for the first time since his crash at the Hungarian Grand Prix. There will be this grand welcome from him at the factory - presumably with everyone lined up alongside either wall clapping for him as he walks down the hall, with Matti, Milan, and I at the end of the hall to welcome him - and Ferrari is going to tie that into the launch of their newest road car. Obviously, I'm glad for the Brazilian but it is bittersweet in a way, because it's yet another representation of the fact that this is also something temporary. Yes, I'm driving great, yes, I've rebuilt my stock in F1 and then some, and yes, I have a podium and this V12 sports car to show for my efforts, but I'm fundamentally just the replacement. I'm going to need to find something for 2010 and it's becoming abundantly clear that Ferrari isn't going to be that thing. That being said, Ferrari is giving me the best chance to impress another team, because there's a lot of seats opening up for the first time in awhile in 2010, but there's also a lot of drivers looking to move around, and a lot of seats are in flux.
Quite frankly, Felipe Alvarez wants to move back up to the front of the grid, Jyri Kaasalainen wants to hold onto the best possible seat, guys like Piotr Kaminski and Victor Hartmann have immense speed but don't think BMW Sauber is going to be around for the next season, and you have talented young drivers - including Natasha Tsirinskaya - trying to break their way into F1 after a few seasons of relatively quiet silly seasons. Combine this with the fact that Honda, BMW Sauber, Renault, and Toyota are all either confirmed to be in flux or highly likely to see some change, and there is a very small number of seats that seem to be both competitive and stable. All of that is to say I might potentially have to compete with the likes of James Buxton - who, barring disaster, will be the 2009 World Champion - and two-time World Champion Felipe Alvarez for any competitive seats that might emerge. I can't win a championship this year, that's just impossible, so the best thing that I can do for my chances of getting a great seat for 2010 is win a race. If I can win a race with the car I have, then maybe, just maybe, I can stick out from the crowd. It's not going to be easy, but Hamalainen at Spa proved that the car has the pace to win in the right circumstances and I've had strong performance as well - I was just behind him in Spa and I was gaining on the cars ahead of me at the end of the Italian Grand Prix, as well as outperforming Matti at the Atlantic Grand Prix - so I have to target that, because victory gives me the best chance possible to overcome my storied rivals and get into a seat that is at least as good as the Ferrari I've had this season. I'm back in F1, I'm driving for Ferrari with the reputation as a 24 Hours of Le Mans winner, and I have a win in Indycar too, I refuse to take another step backwards.
"Understood Milan, I'll be there." I responded for now, not wanting to keep my team principal waiting despite the fact that my mind was elsewhere.
"Good, I know you will." I heard him reply over the speaker phone before asking "They want you for a lot of interviews in Saint Petersburg."
"I figured as much, speaking the language and all. I'll talk with Alexis, and we'll make sure everything is planned out beforehand." I answered, making it clear that I would be taking the interviews - I'm the closest F1 has to a Russian driver right now, so for better or worse, I'm the woman in demand here - but everything would be nice and acceptable, meeting Ferrari's demands.
"Good, good. When are you flying out?" Milan asked.
"I'll pulling up to the airport now. I'm going to fly in with the Koskinens." I answered as I neared the Nice Airport. Much like we had in the Williams days, Tommy and I were flying together for the international races, each taking a spot on 1982 World Champion Johannes Koskinen's jet. Russia was in Europe - in fact, historically Saint Petersburg was Russia's gateway to the west, and things like this race indicate that Russia is once again positioning Piter as a major European city - but the northeastern corner of the Baltic Sea is a far distance away from the Mediterranean coast, so it was effectively being treated as a flyaway race by most of us. The fact that a visit to Russia means going out of the EU and through a hard border also makes teams want to do airfreight, given that we only have a week to go from the Atlantic coast of France to the opposite end of Europe, and border crossings would only slowdown that process even more. So yeah, a flyaway race before the proper flyaways.
"Okay, thank you. I'll speak to you in Russia." Milan responded.
"See you there," I finished the call, parking my car in a secure, executive lot before heading over to Johannes' hangar, ready for a flight to the Venice of the North.
"...so, the Lakhta Embankment circuit is complete and Grand Prix racing is returning to Saint Petersburg for the first time since 1914. There is a driver on the grid that speaks Russian, one is of Russian descent actually, and she is our guest tonight. Tamara Anatoliyevna Shchegolyayeva of Kazakhstan and Scuderia Ferrari!" a late-night TV host here in Russia's former capital and current second city introduced me. I stepped out in front of the studio audience dressed in black heels, a black dress, and a red sweater over my sleeves. I waved to the audience with one hand and held my special helmet for the race in the other. I walked up to the TV host - a relatively young man whose stage name was simply Antoni! with the exclamation mark included - we shook hands at the front and then walked over to the desk, where I set my helmet down on the table, in view of the cameras, just as we rehearsed. As the audience clapped, I took a glance to my left, just off-stage, and locked eyes with Alexis Ngamnaimuang, seeing that my press officer was right there for me.
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva," he began.
"Antoni!" I responded in jest, interrupting him. He took an exaggerated pause as if he wasn't expecting this and the audience laughed, just as he predicted - I suppose he did understand his audience, it was his job after all - before he continued on.
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva, you are the first Kazakhstani driver in Formula One and you are the closest thing to a Russian driver this season, how does it feel to be a part of the first World Championship race in this country?" Antoni asked, broadcasting from Saint Petersburg to the rest of the country. It wasn't quite as patriotic and chauvinistic as the Moscow based media from what I could tell, but they all still had to play up the country and the nationalism. I personally don't care much for the Russian government or what they do, but I'm also of the belief that the common people should not be punished for the actions of their government, at least not in this case. I acknowledge that I might feel different if I was Georgian or personally involved in last year's events in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but I am not, and from what I'm able to tell, the situation is now peaceful, albeit tense. I don't like what the Russian government is doing there but I also don't like what the Americans and the Brits are doing in Iraq so many years after the weapons of mass destruction were revealed to be a lie and Saddam Hussein was removed. Perhaps that's not the same because they aren't occupying the land with the intent to conquer it, but they're still forcing a western democratic model on a country as part of some kind of moving goalpost mission there. Anyway, getting back to the point, I'm trying to separate politics from the country here, and with its massive population and growing economy, Russia really should have a Grand Prix. Technically speaking, San Marino had a race, so the largest country in Europe really should have one too.
"I'm speaking the language again, I'm looking at these beautiful baroque palaces, and I've met some very knowledgeable fans. It feels good to be here and I'm excited to be a part of bringing motorsport to this country. Formula One has been expanding these past few decades with races in Malaysia, China, Bahrain, Turkey, and all that, so it's exciting to be bringing the sport I love to another market, a market I have some connection to as well." I answered, hinting at my time in the city so far and referencing the recent expansion of the F1 calendar. A few years ago, there was this big Vision60 plan for a massive show to celebrate 60 years of the World Championship in 2010, and that's been disrupted by the global economic situation, but they're still launching a lot of new races this year and in the next few years. This year we have the Atlantic Grand Prix, this race, and the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix as new races, along with a return to Suzuka - the plan currently is for the Japanese Grand Prix to alternate from Suzuka to Fuji much like the German Grand Prix alternates between Hockenheim on even years and Nürburgring on odd years - while next year, a whole new event in South Korea is on the docket, along with a plan to move the British Grand Prix to Donington Park, depending on some extensive circuit updates.
"Where is your family originally from?" Antoni asked.
"The Russian part is from the area around Bryansk, then some family members were also resettled from nearby parts of Ukraine and Belarus." I answered, noting the fact that my ancestors basically came from this triangle of Bryansk, Chernihiv, and Mogilev, before being resettled in Kazakhstan. This was mostly in the early Soviet period, but a handful did move even in the Tsarist era, and maybe a relative or two moved after World War II, but that's getting rather recent when it comes to ancestry when things were very set in stone.
"Well, someone seems to be from Bryansk." Antoni joked when someone in the studio, towards the back, seemed to cheer at the mention of the relatively small Russian city - perhaps 400,000 people level in Bryansk and that number is dropping, compared to nearly 5,000,000 here in Piter. That seemed to be all that we were going to get out of this topic, so the TV host quickly got things moving again "So, that brings us to the special helmet for this weekend, a tribute to Russia, wouldn't you say?"
"That's correct. It's a maroon and gold scheme, in tribute to the Russian national team - I actually was invited to meet the women's team at Petrovsky Stadium yesterday and they gave me a jersey - and just like the football team, on the back is the double-headed eagle. My usual helmet is very much the Kazakh flag design so I figured that, for the Russian Grand Prix, I should represent Russia as well." I announced. I was sure to mention the football team aspect because the double-headed eagle and such also tended to be symbols of the government, so I wanted to be clear what I was going for, even if I wasn't in an environment that allowed me to speak out against said government. So yeah, maroon red with gold details, most prominently the eagle in the back, but around the top of the helmet were five connected golden rings. These five rings were essentially a reference to the iconic gold Adidas stripes of the Russian football kit done in such a way that wouldn't get me sued...or anger Puma, who is a major clothing sponsor of the team. Of course, sponsorship stickers from Marlboro, Kaspersky, and the rest kind of interrupted the design, but that was an unavoidable problem, and part of the reason why the big eagle was on the back. I could fit a soaring Kazakh eagle on the sides of this design, but with the big, heraldic style eagle that represented Russia, I needed more room to work with. It was a bit of a compromise design then, but I think it worked for a one-off design.
"So, from what I can tell, Ferrari has been performing pretty well the last few races - what are the odds we could see this unique helmet on top of the podium?" Antoni asked, getting towards the end of the interview. I glanced at Alexis again before delivering a pretty typical media answer, one that was optimistic but didn't promise too much, basically something that couldn't be used to embarrass the team if things went against us.
"It's going to be a bit of a crazy weekend because nobody has any data yet, nobody knows who is going to be fast here, so it could be Ferrari, but it could also be someone else. That being said, it's Ferrari, the Formula One team of the decade, so there is nobody I trust more behind me to give me a strong car and a chance to show my maximum potential. My teammate, Matti Hamalainen and I will be doing everything we can to bring a strong result." I answered, ending on a hopeful promise.
"Very well then. Tamara Shchegolyayeva will be driving the #3 Scuderia Ferrari entry on Sunday's Russian Grand Prix here in Saint Petersburg." Antoni signed off, standing up as he ended the interview. I stood up as well, shaking hands with the TV host again before heading out to the left. I met Alexis as we left the studio, smiling at my press officer as we took on the most media commitments of anyone involved at this race. I knew this was the closest I had to a home race but doing things like mainstream television in a country like this are really out of my comfort zone. Fortunately, so far everyone has been fine with Alexis' list of what I can and can't talk about, and I've been able to deliver some rather automatic answers. I don't always like doing that - and I know fans probably hate it - but often enough I don't have a choice. Especially at Ferrari, there are so many sponsors and interests slaving over every word I say in public. That's the thing with Formula One or any type of fame really, the more successful you become, the more boxed in you get by that very success. Sponsorships, endorsements, deals, all things that can prove fragile if the wrong thing is said or the wrong quote turns out. Hell, I've already gone through losing a sponsor because of my sexuality, and even now when I'm back in F1, nothing talks about it - least of all me. All that controversy and pain has to be ignored because dredging it back up could make things worse.
The gilded chains of stardom aside, my fifth race for Scuderia Ferrari was rapidly approaching.
The Lakhta Embankment circuit was an urban street circuit; however, it was rather far removed from the canals and the Winter Palace that most associated with Saint Petersburg. Rather, it was to the northwest side of the city, on the closest tip of the Lakhta district, along the Gulf of Finland. Lake Lakhta itself was on the other side of the Primorskoye highway, which continued as the E18 all the way through Vyborg, across Finland, and ending at Turku on the west coast of Finland. All of this meant that it was somewhat of a home race for both Matti and I, since the Finns were out in force here as well - and Scandinavians as well, given this is the first time F1 has been this far north since the Swedish Grand Prix in the 1970s - so Ferrari was looking to impress here. To that end, I was setting laps early on in FP1, learning the circuit, and here goes one of those laps.
I came out of the final corner - a ninety-degree left-hander with the pitlane entry on the inside - and came onto the start-finish straight. I was now facing southwest into the bay with the future site of the Lakhta Center - a plan for the tallest building in Europe, originally meant to be built in the city center, but kicked out here due to the fact that the uniform Piter skyline was deemed to be part of the UNESCO heritage site -on my right. Future megaprojects aside, for now I merely powered down the start finish straight with the smallest burst of KERS before getting on the brakes for turn one. A ninety-degree bend to the left, a quick burst of acceleration, and then back on the brakes for turn two, once again ninety-degrees, but this time to the right. The series of boxy corners was broken up because an acceleration zone followed, and then turns three and four. I kept my foot on the floor as I threw the car to the right for three and then again for turn four - it was basically a chopped, faster version of a ninety-degree corner, but I appreciated the variety - especially because the next corner was a brief return to the right-angle business, with a short braking zone and a flick to the left before accelerating again just in time for the final corner of sector one - turn six. A fast kink to the right that got us in line with the hairpin that started sector two.
Hard on the brakes and 180 degrees to the left as we neared the waterfront. This part of the track is why the circuit is named Lakhta Embankment, as all the way until turn nine, we were flat-out on the road along the edge of the water. Coming out of the hairpin is where I used the majority of the KERS, speeding up my accelerating as I curved to the left along the coast in the endlessly long turn eight. There was a limit on the maximum length of a straight in Formula One, so even though it was all flat-out, this long curve of turn eight helped make this full throttle section legal. Now facing north, with the Primorskoye highway in the distance and Lake Lakhta on the other side of that, I ran down the rest of the long, long back straight before getting on the brakes for another sequence of ninety-degree corners. First was the hard braking zone into turn nine to the left, which slowed us down from the straight, then turn ten to the left formed a bit of a chicane before we finally reached turn eleven and flicked it to the left to get out of this section - interestingly enough, this seems to be something that Russia and the last race of the season at Abu Dhabi have in common, as turns eleven, twelve, and thirteen of the Middle Eastern circuit seem to do the same thing - however, at Abu Dhabi, it seems that sequence of corners is going to lead into another ninety-degree bend for the marina section, whereas here, turn eleven leads into something very different - perhaps the best section of the track. First though, coming out of turn eleven, we crossed the sector line to complete sector two.
Beginning sector three, I flicked the car to the right for turn twelve and entered the roundabout, circling around to the left in a wide loop that formed one of the most distinctive parts of this northern circuit. I kept it fast through turn thirteen, but as the loop continued, I had to lift slightly through turn fourteen before getting back on the throttle for fifteen. Turn fifteen, however, proved to be the first part of a chicane, with turn sixteen spitting us back out to the right, exiting the roundabout from the same entrance as we entered, albeit on the opposite side of a dividing wall. This fast sequence finally slowed down with a braking zone and a turn to the right with turn seventeen, spitting us onto another short straight. This culminated in turns eighteen and nineteen, a right-left chicane that brought us another a short shoot that was in line with the straight coming out of turn two. This was important, because with a final two ninety-degree corners - turn twenty to the right and twenty-one to the left, I was back on the start-finish straight, completing my lap of the Russian Grand Prix circuit.
"How was that?" I asked over the time radio as I slowed down and began an in-lap, circulating around track before sticking to the left coming out of turn twenty to enter the pitlane on the inside of the start-finish straight.
"Alright there girl, that was a good lap. Bring her in and we'll see where we go from here." Ronnie Sanders responded, explaining the plan for the session. I figured that he meant that, now that we were up to pace here, we were going to switch to some more tyre and fuel-based stuff, getting us tuned in for the race setup, but he wasn't going to say that out loud over the team radio. This stuff gets broadcast from time to time, and there's always other teams listening, trying to get an idea of everyone else's pace and what everyone else is doing in the session - as we are, to be fair - because Formula One is more than just a sport. Formula One is sports and politics, gladiatorial combat and corporate espionage, crash test piloting and skunk works all rolled into one. It is a brilliant display of human engineering and driver bravery - I think that's why we all fell in love with the sport as kids and decided, despite all sense, to become racing drivers - so few who attempt this make it, fewer still get to experience multiple seasons in F1, and only a couple have seen their career fall apart and manage to rebuild it. We are the most fortunate souls in the universe in that respect, because despite all the costs, competition, and adversity it took to get here, we managed to be the sole twenty that get to be F1 drivers for a living.
The fortunate twenty of us gathered as an orchestra on the grid finished up playing the Russian anthem. I stood in a prominent position next to Matti Hamalainen, not only because, as a Finn and a Russophone, we had rather extensive support from the fans, but also because we performed well in qualifying. Anthony Harrison took pole position from Rudolfo Goncalves in second and Maximilian Renner in third, Hamalainen was fourth, I was fifth, James Buxton was sixth, and Martin Weaver was in seventh. Tommy Koskinen was eighth, Jyri Kaasalainen was ninth, and Piotr Kaminski rounded out the top ten, those of us who made it to Q3. Besides the Ferraris and, to a lesser degree, the Hondas, the grid was rather jumbled up, and that could prove to be a tactical advantage. We had two cars to play with - meaning we could launch two different strategies and force our rivals into a difficult corner - against the one McLaren, the one Honda, and the single Red Bull ahead of us.
"Alright, good luck in the race." I told my teammate once the anthem ended, and we were released to head back to our cars and prepare for the race.
"Thanks, you too." Matti responded. It wasn't very many words, and I wasn't likely to get much more out of the Finn, but I took the sentiment as legitimate and hoped that we could both get a good result. Hamalainen was the 2007 World Champion, he was the star driver Ferrari signed to replace the great Wilhelm Ziegler - Matti got signed by Sauber after just two dozen car races because of his immense natural talent, and after a year of Sauber he was signed to McLaren where he was perhaps the fastest driver on the grid with the worst luck, narrowly losing out on the 2003 and 2005 championships - and he was signed through the end of 2010. Matti is the golden boy meant to lead the team in the post-Ziegler era, while Henrique de Matteo was supposed to be the young future of Ferrari, first mentored by Ziegler in 2006, now mentored by Matti in 2007 and 2008. That didn't quite go to plan, with Henrique emerging as Ferrari's best bet for the title in 2008 and nearly winning it too, but then less than a year later was injured and out for the rest of the season. That's where I come in, the replacement, the driver who lost her seat and came back in the unlikeliest way possible. All of that is to say we both have reasons to do well: Matti wants to reassert his position as the team leader at Ferrari and rebuild from a relatively disappointing 2008 and a very disappointing 2009, other than Spa. Then me? I want to get the best seat possible because Ferrari has Matti and Henrique signed for next year. Where I am now doesn't matter because it's temporary, just like my whole career has been thus far, so what I'm fighting for is a sense of permanence.
That permanence was perhaps in contrast to what was going on around me. The tension before the race was interrupted by the formation lap before ramping back up as we settled on the grid, facing out towards the Gulf of Finland, facing out towards Russia's once and future gateway to the west, before finally being released to begin the first ever Formula One Russian Grand Prix. Rudolfo and Anthony got into a drag race on the start - perhaps fittingly, because in my time back in F1, Rudolfo and Anthony have been perhaps the most impressive drivers, each with a pair of two wins - while Renner lurked just behind, with both of us Ferraris in turn behind him. This continued through the first sector, then, coming out of the turn seven hairpin, Anthony was able to solidify his lead, using the KERS to out drag the Honda out of the slow corner and maintaining that speed advantage all the way along the embankment. Likewise, this is where Matti was able to overtake Max Renner going into turn nine, and even I would've gotten a chance to put one on the Red Bull if not for the fact that, with my teammate and old F3 rookie rival going side by side, I didn't want to risk it and go three-wide on the very first lap. I was, however, able to fend off any attempt by Buxton to get ahead of me. Thus, once we made it around the roundabout, through the two little straights, and through the final pair of ninety-degree corners, the order at the end of the first lap was Anthony Harrison in the lead, followed by Rudolfo Goncalves, then Matti Hamalainen, Maximilian Renner, Tamara Shchegolyayeva, James Buxton, Martin Weaver, and Piotr Kaminski rounded out the top eight.
It is interesting because for the first part of the season, this year was defined by James Buxton winning seven races in dominant fashion, but after the Turkish Grand Prix, Buxton waned, and the Red Bulls of Maximilian Renner and Martin Weaver began fighting back at them. Renner took a win at China and another in Silverstone, whilst Weaver won the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring - with the GP Strecke hosting a race called the German Grand Prix for the first time since 1985, shockingly enough - for his very first Grand Prix win. Then the first half of the season ended with Anthony Harrison winning the Hungarian Grand Prix while Henrique de Matteo got hit by a spring and crashed out in dramatic fashion. This set up for the second half of the season: the first half of the season was defined by the ascendancy of the new kids on the block, with Honda and Red Bull winning all but one race, but since then? The powerhouses have returned. Even when Honda won two more races in Valencia and Monza, it came from Rudolfo Goncalves, a driver who - with Ferrari - was near the front of the grid since 2000 and already had nine wins to his name. Between those races, Matti Hamalainen won the Belgian Grand Prix for Ferrari, then immediately after Goncalves' Italian Grand Prix win, Anthony Harrison and McLaren won their second race of the year at the Atlantic Grand Prix in France. Now here in Russia, during the first stint of the race, Anthony has been building a lead, and both of us Ferraris have been trending forward. By lap ten Hamalainen was up to second place, having overtaken Rudolfo on the start-finish straight after nearly getting him down the back straight, while me and Max Renner ran into our own battle as we both caught up to the back of the Honda a few laps later.
"Alright, alright, you got a good run on him, get him now and we'll focus on Goncalves." Rudolfo encouraged as I had a run on Renner going down the start-finish straight. I used a burst of KERS and trended to the left, trying to take the inside of the Red Bull, but the German covered it off and made me take the outside. I went back to the right and tried to outbrake Renner but there wasn't much I could do from the outside heading into the left-hander, so I slotted in behind him through turn one and again through turn two. This, however, is where I decided to try something new, getting on the KERS button coming out of the ninety-degree corner and getting right on the rear diffuser of the Red Bull through the right-hand kinks of three and four, taking a look into turn five and making Renner go on the outside to avoid clipping my front wing. He stayed ahead but this is exactly what I wanted, because with a compromised entry I was able to take the better line through the kink of turn six and then outbrake him into turn seven on the inside. Speeding out of the corner with the last of my overtake load for the lap, I solidified my position ahead of the Red Bull, taking fourth place. The only thing between me and my teammate now was the white and red Honda of Goncalves "Beautiful work Tamara, we'll get Rudy next."
Suddenly Tammy didn't seem like the worst nickname one could get from Ronnie Sanders. Nevertheless, I made progress on the Brazilian through the rest of the first stint and finally overtook him on pit strategy, my team having executed our stop well and giving me the tools to set a fast outlap and overtake the driver whose replacement I'm currently replacing. Soon enough Goncalves would fall behind Maximilian Renner as well, so the order soon turned into Harrison, Hamalainen, Shchegolyayeva, Renner, Goncalves, and Buxton. The middle stint of the race would be quiet enough, but when Maximilian Renner's engine gave out and he ground to a halt in the roundabout section, a safety car came out which threw a massive wrench into the works. See, Hamalainen, Renner, and I - just barely, having pitted literally the lap before all of this went down - had just pitted, but Anthony had stayed out. So, with the safety car, all the track position was eliminated, we were right behind him, and the American McLaren driver was still on those same, worn-out tyres and low fuel load from the end of the second stint. Harrison could have pitted under the second safety car lap once the grid was bunched up and the pitlane was open, but he refused to do that, since he didn't want to drop all the way to the back of the grid. Thus, the McLaren would stay out as long as possible and try to build another gap, but eventually he'd have to bite the bullet and drop back. It was only a matter of how bad the damage was going to be. Since Valencia, Anthony has gone and set four pole positions, tying Buxton's record from earlier in the season, but he's only managed to get two wins from that impression run of qualifying positions. In Russia, it seems that Harrison will once again be let down in the race.
That seemed to be confirmed once the race got going again and Anthony, while still in first, wasn't able to break away from Hamalainen and I. I actually felt bad for Anthony to an extent, because he's someone I consider a friend, and I know him well enough to know he was trying to do everything he could in that car, only to see his chances of winning the race evaporate because of something he had nothing to do with. Harrison would hope and hope for something miraculous to happen and change the course of this race, but in the end, he had no choice but to box for me tyres and fuel, leaving Matti in the lead and myself in second. So, just like Belgium, a Ferrari one-two materializing in the late stages of the race, with my Finnish teammate controlling the gap and myself some distance behind in second. That being said, this was somewhat of a home race for me - for Matti too in a way, given the proximity to Finland, but we'll ignore that for now - and I felt that, at this point in my career, I needed a win more than Matti did. I was about to ask Ronnie what we could do to try and win this thing when he called me on his own accord, once again throwing a spanner in the works.
"Renner just set the fastest lap of the race, he's reeling you both in. Be careful." the British engineer informed, suddenly changing our perspective from the car ahead to the car behind. I didn't like it, but it was one thing to fight for a lead when it was just between my teammate and I, it was another thing to mess with a chance for a good win when there was a car reeling us in from behind. Ferrari won the constructors' championship from 1999 to 2004 and won five drivers' championships with Wilhelm Ziegler from 2000 to 2004 as well, then won the double in 2007 and another constructors' championship in 2008. For Ferrari, a season with one win is a loss, and, despite all the good so far this season, messing up the chance of a one-two would be a good way to end my Ferrari career prematurely. I wanted something permanent, but right now, Renner was coming back at us, and I needed to do everything in my power to preserve the one-two rather than fighting my teammate. So, I was going to fight for second, and if it became evident that I could only keep Renner behind for so long, then I'd hold him up for as long as possible and give Matti enough gap to make it to the end of the race before the young German could catch him.
Max reached my rear wing with eleven laps to go, starting out with an attempt to overtake me on the start-finish straight - I had already ran out of KERS for the last lap trying to maintain the gap, then by the time I crossed the line and had another seven seconds to play with, we were already at speed so it wouldn't help all that much - which meant that I needed to defend the good old fashioned way. I let him close up to the back of me in the draft before trending over to the left, ensuring that I'd have the inside for turn one and he wouldn't be able to actually overtake. The Red Bull driver did try, going deep on the brakes in turn one, but ultimately, there was a Ferrari in the way when he tried to turn in, so he needed to remain in third place for the time being. Likewise, I'd keep him behind in the hairpin and then finally could use the kinetic energy going out of turn seven to keep him at bay down the straight - this time I was sure to keep a little bit of KERS left for the final corner. Thus, for a few laps, I was able to counter the runs he'd get on me with careful use of KERS - effectively, I saved the seven seconds of extra power for the places you could actually overtake, letting him close up to the back of me through the twisty bits where he couldn't actually do anything to stop me. That being said, Renner was being relentless, trying over and over again - also being sure to take a look into every corner, making sure I had to check my mirrors - basically, he was doing everything he could to pressure me or make me shift my focus for just long enough to make the slightest mistake.
I hate to admit it, but it did eventually happen. Going into the hairpin with six laps to go, I had an inside front lockup and went wide in turn seven, just barely keeping it out of the wall and taking the long way around the corner. To add insult to injury, I still had a wheel on the exit kerb and had a tank slapper coming back onto throttle, further slowing me down. So, I still tried to do the KERS thing and help me out, but instead of giving me a speed advantage, it was mostly just making up for the poor exit I had from the corner, while Renner was able to pull the over-under through the corner, letting me go wide and coming out alongside me with a better line. I slotted in behind him through the sweeping turn eight and tried to get a run on him coming down the long, long back straight - and I did have more horsepower at this point - but the German positioned his car well, making me go on the outside and fail the overtake. Renner was up to second position and Ferrari's chances of a second one-two finish in four races were over and done. That being said, I managed to keep the German behind me for five laps; that gave Matti Hamalainen the chance to fuck off into the distance, building enough of a gap that the win was still secure. In fact, while both of us were going slower than our peak lap times by the end of the race, I was actually able to set better times than Renner on the final two laps of the race, reeling him in a little bit before we crossed the line and ended both of our attempts to gain another position. In the end, Matti had won, Renner had charged his way up to second, and I had managed to take a hard-earned podium at the Russian GP.
The points-paying results of the 2009 Russian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 8 points.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 5 points.
5: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 4 points.
6: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 3 points.
7: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 2 points.
8: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 1 point.
So, after getting unlucky with the safety car, Anthony Harrison charged his way back into the points, knocking both his teammate Jyri Kaasalainen and Tommy Koskinen out of the points in the process. Kaminski and Alvarez had impressive showings, good races for a pair of natural talents in underperforming teams, and Martin Weaver retired in a second half of the season which has largely been feast of famine for the Australian. As for Ferrari, after a miserable start to the season, we take our second win and once again take points away from McLaren. This years' McLaren is such a fast car in qualifying and Anthony Harrison has had so much speed lately, but he's also had some piss poor luck, losing out on a surefire win at the Italian Grand Prix thanks to an engine issue and losing out on a win here thanks to little more than bad timing. Anthony has won races in Hungary and Atlantic this season, but he's had the potential for so much more this season. Sure, it quickly became apparent that he wasn't going to be able to defend his title, but in the second half of the season, he's had the pace to suggest he might do that anyway, only to be let down over and over and over again.
As for me, another podium and another six points. This brings my season total up to 26 points, meaning that in five races with Ferrari I managed to do better than my best season with Williams in 2008. Yes, part of that is that Ferrari is a much better team than Williams right now, but I sincerely believe I'm driving better now than I was in either of my seasons with Williams. I'm older, more mature, physically stronger, and more confident than I was two years ago, and I think that shows in my results. Driving for a midfield team wasn't the only reason why I couldn't have won races in either of those seasons, I think I just plain wasn't ready, but now? Now I think I'm ready, and with a team and car combination that has now won two races, I think I can win a race this year.
As for Hideki Kitagawa, my replacement at Williams, he has once again failed to score points. Kitagawa just didn't have the speed this time as faster drivers in better cars like Anthony, Piotr, Jyri, Tommy, Victor, and a few others were fighting at the edge of the points. The fact that Weaver was well in contention as well before his retirement just serves to show that Hideki didn't have a chance this race.
"Beautiful work Tammy, love it. Bring the car into pitlane and celebrate, you've earned it." Ronnie congratulated me, happy with that performance and happy with the podium.
"Yes, yes, I agree. You fought like a lion today and defended our victory. Bravo Tamara, bravo. Congratulations on the podium." team principal Milan Stefanovic echoed, calling into my car as well and focusing on the fact that I held off Renner at the crucial time to let Matti build the gap and secure the win. It wasn't a 1-2 finish like we got at Belgium, but it was still a 1-3 finish and another 16 points for the team. Races like Belgium and Russia resemble the Ferrari of 2007 and 2008 a hell of a lot more than the Ferrari of the present day.
I smiled down at the team from the podium, seeing all the boys and girls in red start singing when the Finnish anthem ended, and the Italian began. Then I smiled again when, after spraying our team rep with the champagne, Matti quickly raised the bottle to his lips and started chugging down the champagne. Meanwhile, I took a smaller swig before heading over to the edge of the podium and dropping it down into the hands of Norbert, one of my engineers, so that he could take it over to the rest of my team. Then a smiled for a third time as the four of us - the top three drivers and a representative from the winning team - gathered in close for the official podium photos. Three smiles mere moments apart on the podium, but the biggest smile of the afternoon would come maybe half an hour later during the post-race press conference.
"Your second win of the season came today after what many would call a disappointing start to 2009 for both you and Ferrari. How do you feel about the upgraded car and the uptick in turn since the summer break?" a reported asked Matti.
"Mmm...well, I am very happy with the performance and the car that the team has given me. We have...uh, we have improved a lot this season and the car has performed well for me and for Tamara, Henrique before her, and now we finally are getting the results. Two wins in a season is a good result for my final season before I retire." Matti smirked to himself as, at the end of a rather typical media answer for him, he dropped the biggest bombshell of the season.
"You're retiring from Formula One?" a stunned reporter asked in the next question.
"I have become World Champion and raced for many years. Now I am still young, I am successful, I have all the money I need, and I want to explore other races and other opportunities." Matti announced, confirming that, despite everything, there was going to be a vacancy at Ferrari after all. I'm already filling in for the team, I'm performing well, and the team already knows how to work with me. This...this might be the greatest opportunity of the season.
"Does this confirm the speculation that Ferrari has been hunting Felipe Alvarez?" another reporter asked, dashing my hopes before they could truly begin.
"I don't know, I just drive the car. You'd have to ask the team." Matti answered, revealing nothing. So, in a race where Anthony Harrison dominated before getting hit with the worst luck possible when Martin Weaver's engine blew, the Finn managed to steal the win, and now he's stolen the headlines too. Maximilian Renner and I were both sitting on either side of the 2007 World Champion but, after that bombshell, we might as well have been invisible as far as the media was concerned.
Leaving my hotel, the next morning for breakfast before flying out around noon, the headlines were looking a bit better for me. After all the stuff about Matti retiring and Ferrari confirming that they did, indeed, agree for a mutual termination of his contract for 2010, they did get into the speculation about who would replace him. One F1 news website put it like this "while Felipe Alvarez remains the favorite to partner a returning Henrique de Matteo for 2010, Henrique's replacement, Tamara Shchegolyayeva, has demonstrated herself to be not only a very capable option as well, but likely a far cheaper one." While I did somewhat resent the idea of being thought of as the economy option to Felipe Alvarez, at least I was being thought of as an alternative. To their credit, Ferrari has stamped down on the speculation by saying that nothing has been confirmed yet, but that does little to stop the speculation train when something like this happens. There are so many question marks over Honda, Renault, BMW Sauber, Toyota, and the rest of these big teams, but there are two big names that are confirmed to be in F1 and always tend to be strong seats: Ferrari and McLaren. Both of those have vacancies for next season, and while some very high-level names have been linked to both seats, I've been fortunate enough to have my name in the mix for both. I haven't actually talked to McLaren or even my current team Ferrari about 2010 yet, but there is plenty of smoke suggesting that I'm at least up for consideration with both. And in Formula One, when there's smoke, there's often fire.
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva," I looked up to see a man with half a face standing next to a Mercedes-Benz S-class outside of my hotel room. Now, contrary to how provocative that may sound in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the man in question isn't some sort of sinister government agent or vicious gangster, rather it is three-time world champion Niki Lauda. The man who won the 1975 and 1977 championships for Ferrari and the 1984 championship for McLaren despite being involved in a life-threatening accident at the 1976 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. The accident left him with severe burns on his face, requiring a skin graft, and left him nearly dead in the hospital as the pumped his lungs clean. A horrible example of how dangerous racing was back then, the accident that brought an end to F1 racing at the Nordschleife, and an example of just how resilient this great man is. Lauda suffered this accident and was back in the car by that season's Italian Grand Prix and would go on to win a further two titles, one the very year after the accident. When a man like that says your name, you listen.
"Mr. Lauda, it's an honor to meet you." I greeted, meaning every word of it.
"I'm sure it is." Lauda responded with a small smirk, shaking my hand "You did well this weekend. Hell, you always do well, and you've attracted the attention of some very skilled and ambitious people."
"What do you mean?" I asked, wondering exactly who those people were.
"Come, I'll drive you to a cafe and tell you about a little project from Mercedes-Benz..." Lauda offered. A short drive later, I learned that Mercedes-Benz - the same giant manufacturer that has partnered with McLaren for so long and will continue to partner with them for the foreseeable future - is also intending to enter Formula One in their own name. The Mercedes F1 Team, a project aiming for success in the future while maintaining their success with McLaren as a stop-gap measure. That being said, too much of a stopgap may not be necessary, because the team Mercedes is looking to enter with is Honda - they'll buy out the Japanese manufacturer's team with its base in Brackley and run it under a German license. Sure, Honda hasn't been developing the car, but this late in the season, the car is still good enough for fourth and fifth in the Russian Grand Prix, and that's with a Honda engine that is still considered inferior to what Mercedes has with McLaren. It's an interesting proposal, and while McLaren and Ferrari still seem to be the options for guaranteed success in the short term, I won't forget the fact that the Mercedes program approached me. If nothing else, it is another option to consider, and to that end, while I learned all of that, Niki Lauda learned Ernesto Signorelli's phone number, getting the means to contact my agent and give me details. Furthermore, I was happy to see that, after winning GP2 Asia this year and being on course to win Superleague Formula as well, it seems Natasha's future is in great hands, as she'll go from being affiliated with Honda to being affiliated with - and maybe even driving for - Mercedes.
Excellent options, if not for me, then at least for my cousin looking to become the second woman in Formula One. As for me, it's an offer to consider as Ferrari and I continue on to Asia for the Singapore Grand Prix and the Japanese Grand Prix after that. Singapore, Japan, Brazil, and Abu Dhabi: just four races left in the 2009 season that has seen me disappear from F1 altogether, win the 24 Hours of Le Mans for Peugeot in June, win a race in Indycar with Andretti Green Racing in July, and then return to Formula One with the team of my dreams in August. This winter was soul-crushing for me, being outed, losing my sponsorship, and eventually losing my seat with Williams altogether, but now, I am in a much better place in my career because of it. I had a lot of potential with Williams, enough to be seen as a future prospect and desirable for other teams, but not desirable enough for anyone to break a contract or radically change plans. Now though, after just five races with Scuderia Ferrari, I have Mercedes-Benz sending Niki freaking Lauda of all people to present me an offer, I have media linking me with seats at McLaren or a more permanent extension with Ferrari now that Matti has announced his shock retirement. I am much happier about where I am today, and I haven't even eaten breakfast yet.
"You know, this is somewhat of a stereotype." Alexis pointed out as she rubbed my shoulders in the hotel room overlooking the track in Singapore. The Koskinens' jet was about as comfortable as they get, but there is only so long one can spend on a plane and be comfortable, so once we landed in the little wealthy island off the coast of Malaysia, I needed a bit of a massage. Turns out that Alexis Ngamnaimuang was more than capable of providing.
"Does that mean I shouldn't ask for a happy ending?" I joked, smirking.
"God no!" Alexis laughed before pausing for a moment "...that is just a joke, right?"
"Yes, it's just a joke, relax!" I responded, seeing that I made it weird and trying to squash that immediately.
"Sorry, sorry, it's just...I know you're gay." she responded.
"Yeah, pretty sure everyone in the paddock does." I shot back, meaning it sarcastically, though it came out more like a tired admission of my outing.
"What...what's it like?" Alexis asked "I mean, I know the team doesn't talk about it and the media pretty much decided it would make the sport look bad to talk about it too much, but what does it feel like to have everyone know and just ignore it?"
"I mean...I suppose on the most practical level, it's better for it to just be ignored than having to find out who hates me for it or what sponsors would refuse to work with me if I was open about it. Not to mention the fact that I have no idea what it would be like to fly into Bahrain or Abu Dhabi or even here if I was really open about it. That being said, it feels weird to know that everybody knows but then just have nobody acknowledge it. It's like this weird thing where everyone just acts as if I've never been outed but we both know the other knows. I know I'm probably not making the most sense but that's kind of the only way I can describe it." I answered, working through my own thoughts as I spoke. Take Umberto Petronelli for example - not accusing him of being homophobic or anything, just using him as an example - he's someone I consider a friend despite the generational gap, and we've talked a few times since I came back to F1, but never has my sexuality been brought up. Like I said, maybe it's better for it to be like this if the reaction is bad, but I just wish we could be frank about this. Right now it's like everybody is pretending not to know despite the fact that everyone has either read the tabloids for themselves or heard about the scandal. Even for the people who don't give the slightest shit about my personal life, they've heard about it because that's what led to me losing my sponsor and losing my sponsor led to me losing my drive with Williams.
"Would you want to be open about it?" Alexis asked, unfortunately having dropped any notion of rubbing my shoulders and now just engaging in a rather deep conversation while I just sat here, Ferrari polo thrown onto the bed, wearing the black tank top I had on underneath.
"Maybe? I don't know. When I was in a relationship, I was hiding it and was pretty happy with that, but in the past twelve months I've been outed, run that relationship into the ground, and had drunken sex with one of my best friends just to add insult to injury, so there's not much to be open about anyway right now." I answered, revealing how my romantic life has gone since it started in the summer of 2007. Right now, I'm left with no girlfriend and no particular desire to get a girlfriend considering how things ended with Roksana and that awkward mistake with Daniella. Maybe I wanted something with Dani Pieri on some level - like I said at the time, I wasn't exactly blackout drunk that night - but the alcohol and the emotional high definitely pushed me into doing something that I would have consciously talked myself out of. Even ignoring the Roksana situation, Pieri has made it clear that she's happy with her career in America and wanted me to be there with her. Meanwhile, the whole time I was in America, I was looking to get back to Europe and this Ferrari opportunity made that happen sooner than expected. Pieri's idea of our relationship would have me going Indycar full time, doing the ovals too, and abandoning any dream of a return to F1 anytime soon, which for me has just been impossible.
There were things I liked about America, sure, and there were things I liked about Indycar, but the sheer happiness I've experienced since returning to F1 shows me that this has been the dream all along. I won an Indycar race, hell I won the 24 Hours of Le Mans while I was out of F1, but still the highlight of my 2009 has been returning to F1 and now knowing that one way or another, I'll be on the grid in 2010. Even if Ferrari ends up picking Felipe Alvarez and even if McLaren chooses someone like Buxton over me, I will at least get to drive for Mercedes. Worst case scenario, I get to drive for the team that is on course to win both championships in 2009 joining forces with one of the giants of the European car industry. Not only that, but Natasha is the test driver for the Honda team that will become Mercedes next year, so maybe, just maybe, I could be racing alongside my cousin. Imagine if I could force that to happen - Mercedes clearly wants me if they had Lauda approach me, so maybe they'll want me enough to allow me to choose my teammate. Of course, it helps that Natasha knows the team quite well and is on course to win her second championship in a calendar year, as well as the fact that having an all-female lineup would definitely open up some marketing opportunities, but the point remains, if they would be willing to give me that, it would go a long way towards convincing me to sign. That way I could take a guaranteed seat in 2010 without doing anything to harm Natasha's chances of getting a seat - as that is one thing that is concerning me about signing for Mercedes, that it might block the most straightforward chance Nat has at an F1 seat.
"So, we're gonna stay focused on the racing then?" Alexis asked, accepting that I didn't really have a reason to push things about my sexuality even if Ferrari allowed it, because right now, there's nothing to push.
"Yeah, four races left this season, lets end on a high note." I smiled, grabbing my Ferrari shirt and throwing it back on. Maybe it would be Mercedes for 2010, or maybe it would be McLaren, or maybe I'll continue with Ferrari after all, I don't know, but I do know that my objective with Ferrari remains the same: perform to the best of my abilities, leave teams with no choice but to consider me, and maybe, just maybe take a win for a team I've always dreamed of driving for.
Speaking of the driving, it was somewhat of a mixed bag going into the Singapore Grand Prix for the team. For me, it was a positive, given that I finished fourth here last year in a Williams and now have a much better car to work with, but for Ferrari itself? That was another story. For Ferrari, F1's very first night race at the inaugural Singapore Grand Prix was a disaster of a race, with Henrique de Matteo losing out in a botched pitstop and Matti Hamalainen crashing out late in the race, after starting first and third, respectively. Henrique's rushed pitstop hurts even more now with the revelation that Renault rigged the race - they instructed Filipe Yannick to crash, which led to the leaders making a mad dash into the pits during the safety car, and allowed Felipe Alvarez, who stopped early, to take the lead. In the chaos in pitlane, Ferrari released Henrique prematurely, leading to the Brazilian driving out of the box with his fuel hose attached, tearing off the hose and leaving the rig stuck in the car, forcing the Ferrari to stop again at the end of pitlane, get wheeled back for service, and he lost a ton of track position in the process. So that's a lot of trauma for the team to work through a year later - compared to most tracks, which thanks to the dominant early 2000s period, Ferrari has a lot more positive memories than negative ones - and to add to that, we're now at a track that plays to our car's weaknesses.
The last few races, with long straights and a good collection of sweeping corners, have played more to our car's strengths, whereas here, the start-stop corners and constant acceleration zones, it's not quite as good. Sure, with a lot of these tracks, we've been able to use KERS to strengthen our exit and either cancel out a weakness or outright turn it into a strength, but here? There's just too many of those ninety-degree corners to do that - we'd need thirty seconds of KERS to make that work, whereas in reality, we only have seven to work with. All the negatives and the racing driver excuses out of the way, I do think our current car gives us a better chance than if we were still sticking with the standard specification F60 rather than the B-spec. We have a slightly longer wheelbase, which sounds like a negative at first, but the reason for that is that it gives us more room to make the double-diffuser work, which should give us some better rear aerodynamic grip on exit. Anyway, some positives, some negatives, we got to work, making our way through the sessions - including an unfortunate moment in FP1 where Bernard Audinet lost the rear and spun in the exact same spot where Filipe Yannick had his intentional wreck last year in the race, adding insult to injury to the disgraced Renault team - before, finally, making it to qualifying, specifically Q2. This was where we were on the fastest tyres of the weekend - since Q3 was set on the tyres and fuel with which we'll start the race - and it was make or break for Ferrari, as Matti and I were both marginal on whether or not we'd transfer to the top ten shootout. I've made Q3 every race for Ferrari thus far, and my teammate has been there with me, but now I need to work hard to keep that streak alive. Visor down, tyres heated up, and one lap to decide whether or not I advance.
Coming down the start-finish straight - probably the second longest straight on this track - I got on the brakes, clicked my way down the gears with my left hand, while raising the wheel with my right hand, turning to the left for turn one. As I got back on the power, I lowered my right hand to snap back to the right through turn two while clicking my way back up the gears. Immediately after turn two, was the hairpin like turn three, dropping all the speed I just gained and emerging onto another straight, albeit a shorter one. I hit the KERS for an acceleration boost coming out of the turn three but, as discussed, there was a lot of slow corners left, so I was off the button by the time I reached the left-hand kink of turn four, after which the straight continued until turn five. Just wide enough to be a bit faster than a typical ninety-degree corner, I still grazed the KERS button for just spurt of extra acceleration coming down the Raffles Boulevard straight. Matti liked to use a bit more here, considering it the most important acceleration zone, but unless he's doing something different than I, that just leaves me out of KERS by the end of the lap, making sector three slow and miserable. This was an important acceleration zone, but my method right now was to spread it across the lap to get more out of my seven seconds of extra power. Raffles Boulevard was the longest straight of the track, though about halfway down, there was a barely-there kink in the form of turn six, and between the kink and the next braking zone, I crossed the sector line to complete sector one.
Sector two opened with a nightmare for KERS management - a series of ninety-degree corners separated by straights just long enough to invite a boost of acceleration, but if I used it each time, I'd once again be running dry by the end of the lap. Thus, I saved the KERS through the left-hander of turn seven and the right-hander of turn eight - it was only coming out of the left-hander of turn nine did I used my next little burst of electrical power, using it to help me build speed down St. Andrews' Road. Now, at the end of St. Andrews' Road was an interesting proposition - turn ten, also known as the Singapore Sling. It's a major intersection when the track isn't in operation, so that makes it wide and gives a lot of room for a wide, fast line, however, for the race, two kerbs are put down, one on the left, one on the right, to make an artificial chicane. That was the idea anyway, however, in practice, what happens instead is that the drivers brake, downshift a bit, then as soon as the car is manageable, throw the car in and hope they're precise enough to keep it in between the white lines while keeping up as much speed as possible. That's exactly what I did, throwing the car to the left, getting a wheel on the kerb and then the opposite wheel on the other one, straightening up the car just in time for the fast chicane. Turn eleven to the right, then turn twelve to the left, bringing us onto the Anderson Bridge. The bridge led almost immediately to the left-hand hairpin of turn thirteen. I hit the brakes, downshifted for the umpteenth time, and then maneuvered the car to the left, aiming the nose down Esplanade Drive. Now, I haven't exactly measured the straights, so I can't say this for absolute certainty, but to me, this is the third longest straight on the track, longer than St. Andrews, and feeling just a bit shorter than the start-finish straight. So, with such a crucial part of the lap, I got onto the KERS button, getting that acceleration boost down the straight and completing sector two just before turn fourteen.
The final sector of the lap opened with turn fourteen, effectively the southern end of the same intersection as turn eight, hence it was another ninety-degree corner, albeit this time to the right. There was a kerb to ride out onto on exit, so that did make it a bit faster as I got onto the short shoot that followed, but then there was a rapid sequence of three corners. Turn fifteen was a kink to the left that led directly into a braking zone, bleeding off some speed and throwing the car to the right for turn sixteen, and then turn seventeen to the left spit us onto another short straight, the one that passed the floating football pitch. The Float aside, the straight was quickly followed by the underpass section, with me braking hard to avoid the concrete wall just off the corner. No, avoid the wall and go all the way to the left for a ninety-degree corner. That followed with another pair of right-angle corners, with turns nineteen and twenty to the right before finally getting out of this section with turn twenty-one to the right. This is where I dumped the last of my KERS, coming up to speed before taking a confidence lift as I threw the car through the final corners. Effectively a single, multi-apex sweeper to the left, the final corner spit me out onto the start-finish street with considerable speed. That speed, combined with the rapid appearance of the line, meant that KERS wasn't necessary here, so I just took the lap and got on the radio, hoping for a good result.
"How was that?" I asked, hoping for good news.
"Good work Tammy, you're through to Q3 by an arse hair. Beautiful work." Ronnie answered. Not sure if I ever heard the words "arse hair" and "beautiful" in such close proximity before, but Ronnie is how Ronnie is, and he helped me get through to the top ten shootout when my teammate didn't. Now, we were about at the limit of our pace, so I would only manage tenth in the final qualifying session, however, thanks to penalties for Rudolfo Goncalves and Victor Hartmann, I would get to start the race up in eighth, Piotr Kaminski ahead of me, Jyri Kaasalainen behind me. Anthony Harrison was on pole, but I would be starting the race ahead of one McLaren, maybe, just maybe, I could get ahead of another. It would take a strong start and a good strategy, but with a motivated team out for redemption at the track that stole their championship last year, the hunger is there for a good result. This wasn't the best weekend for Ferrari, but we'd give it everything we can.
The race was an interesting one up until this point. Some things were to be expected, like Tommy Koskinen dropping back - the Williams had tremendous qualifying pace in his hands, but the equipment just wasn't there to maintain a position as high as third, though I will also say the drop-off in this race was greater than usual, for reasons we'll get into shortly - though this also undid Maximilian Renner's race, since the Williams managed to get a better start than the Red Bull. So, the Williams took second place off the line and then trapped the German behind him as they both dropped back, severely harming Renner's pace and cancelling his chances of attacking Anthony Harrison who blasted off into the lead. Felipe Alvarez had also tried to overtake Renner but failed, going off track, as did Martin Weaver, who passed him out in the paved runoff outside the first two corners. So Renner was compromised by the slow Koskinen, and Alvarez and Weaver had taken their battle out of bounds, so who did that benefit? Well, surprisingly enough, it was Fabian Schmidt and I. The Toyota and I had managed to get ahead of the rejoining Alvarez but not ahead of Weaver, which made things awkward for the Australian once the stewards deemed his overtake illegal, meaning he had to return a place to Felipe Alvarez...who was behind me, and I was behind Fabian Schmidt. Thus, Martin Weaver lost three places in a single penalty.
Next up, I overtook Fabian Schmidt going into turn fourteen, now there were just three cars ahead of me: Renner in third, Koskinen just ahead of him in second, and then Anthony Harrison who, quite frankly, was disappearing into the sunset. I was able to get ahead of the both of them during the first round of pitstops thanks to being faster in clean air than the pair of them close together on track, and then to add insult to injury, Koskinen received a penalty for crossing the white line on pit exit, earning a drive-through penalty. Though before the Finn could serve the penalty, the safety car came out thanks to a crash between Lorenzo Barbaro and Victor Hartmann, which did two things: it ruined Koskinen's race since he wouldn't be able to serve his penalty until after the safety car, meaning the grid would be all bunched up and he'd lose even more positions than normal. Second of all, since the grid was bunched up, it erased Harrison's advantage: now I was right behind him, and Max Renner was right behind the both of us. So, on the race restart, the both of us would pressure the American, but after the final round of pitstops, Max Renner would run over a kerb hard and damage his floor, leading to the German dropping back. There would be no Renner coming at me late in the race this time: no position lost in the closing stages to my old European Formula 3 rookie of the year rival. Instead, it was a straight fight between Harrison and I.
The Hondas hadn't pit before the safety car came out, so they had to pit under SC and thus lost a whole bunch of positions compared to those of us who had already made their first stops, while penalties had taken care of the likes of Weaver, Koskinen, and Renner, while the likes of Fabian Schmidt, Felipe Alvarez, and Jyri Kaasalainen just didn't have the pace to compete with a McLaren and a Ferrari. This has been a year that has seen the ascendancy of Honda, dominating the first half of the season, and Red Bull, who emerged as their main challenger as the championship entered the European rounds, but since the summer break, the traditional powerhouse teams like Ferrari and McLaren have returned, with Anthony Harrison dominating in qualifying but not wanting more out of the race, while I've had some of the best qualifying performances of my career with a string of constant Q3 appearances. Despite that newfound success in qualifying - and a better car no doubt helps that streak - I've kept my tendency to gain places in the race alive, so from starting eighth on the grid, I'm now battling for the lead.
To that end, through the Singapore Sling and back onto the Anderson Bridge, I was right behind the McLaren. Both of us used KERS coming out of turn thirteen - the Ferrari and the McLaren being the only cars running kERS at this point of the season - so we were even on acceleration. Then down the Esplanade Drive straight, you could tell why Ferrari and McLaren battled it out for the last two championships, because the Ferrari and Mercedes engines were so close in terms of performance. The American managed to stay ahead through the twisty bit that followed and past the Float. I settled in behind through the underpass section, knowing it was too narrow for an overtake, but making sure I stayed right on the McLaren's gearbox, so that, accelerating out of this section, throwing the cars through the last two corners, and coming onto the start-finish straight, I was all over him. It wasn't the most optimal place to use the kinetic energy, but I was on the KERS button anyway down the straight, using the last of my load for this lap and the first bit of my seven seconds for the next lap as I dipped out of the slipstream and pulled to the left of the McLaren, taking the inside. The McLaren would try to close in on me, trying to get me to yield, but I stayed on course into the braking zone, making sure that he backed down instead. The McLaren blinked first, braking and taking the outside line for turn one, and as soon as I saw he gave in, I got on the brakes too, making the corner and keeping it between the white lines. I had track position with mere laps to go, now I just had to concentrate on keeping it.
"Brilliant work Tammy, you're leading the Grand Prix!" Ronnie cheered as I came out of turn three, congratulating me on the move once I was on a straight and could breathe, but I didn't want to, I just wanted to keep this position.
"Copy that, minimal radio please. I'm concentrating." I responded, knowing what I just did and not wanting any interruption. I had enough fuel, my tyres were fine, and there were just a couple of laps left, my objective couldn't have been clearer...but the same could be said about the silver and red car in my mirrors. I switched tactics at this point, using KERS on the major straights, no longer optimizing acceleration and instead just keeping it in reserve to counter any runs from Anthony Harrison. I was fighting the reigning world champion for the lead of the Singapore Grand Prix - I wasn't even in F1 for most of the season, I can scarcely believe I'm here. So I held him off down Raffles Boulevard, down Esplanade Driver, and down the start-finish straight. Three times I did this until, finally, on the last lap of the race, I neutralized the draft with KERS and kept my car planted on the inside line down Esplanade Drive. I turned right through turn fourteen, I kinked the wheel to the lift through turn fifteen, and I got on the brakes for turn sixteen, accelerating on exit and through turn seventeen to come onto the Float straight. Up a few gears before coming back down for the braking zone, I kept it out of the wall through turn eight and headed through the next few corners. I came out of turn twenty-three and accelerated down the straight, I threw the car through the final few corners and then swerved to the left, driving alongside the wall and the cheering boys in red to take the line and the chequered flag!
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva you are a Grand Prix winner!" Ronnie congratulated.
"WOO! Thank you guys, thank you, thank you, thank you. Woo! Woo...woo...woo..woo. Wow. I don't know what to say...thank you everybody, thank you Ferrari, thank you Henrique, I know you're watching, and I hope you're recovering well, we all do. Wow...thank you." I cheered and cheered and thanked the team as I began to process what just happened. It's one thing to win Le Mans for a French team, it's one thing to win the Toronto Grand Prix in an Andretti car on the track that MJ was best at, it's another thing to win a grand prix for Ferrari. You can never predict how this stuff will happen: Singapore wasn't even a race when I was a child daydreaming of what it might be like to win my first F1 race, and I wasn't even an F1 driver, let alone a Ferrari driver when this season began, so I could've hardly predicted winning my first grand prix like this. But it's happened, I've won a race, first woman to ever win a race, first Kazakh driver to ever win a race, first Asian - national, not ethnic in my case - to win a race for Ferrari. So many other firsts I imagine, but the only first that really mattered to me was that it was my first win.
The points-paying results of the 2009 Singapore Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 8 points.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 6 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 5 points.
5: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 4 points.
6: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 3 points.
7: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 2 points.
8: Fabian Schmidt - Germany - Toyota - 1 point.
"Woo!" I cheered again as I climbed out of the car in pitlane, having given the 1st place sign a slight bump on entry. I stood up and pumped booth fists in the air, cheering. I just barely took the time to reconnect the steering wheel - the regulations demand it - before climbing out of the cockpit and running over to the team, throwing myself at them and hugging my engineers as they patted me on the back. This #3 Ferrari team almost won the championship last year with Henrique de Matteo, then they had to see the Brazilian struggle through the first half of the season when Ferrari had an awful car, before losing him for the rest of the season in that awful crash at the Hungarian Grand Prix, but now I've given them something to celebrate, given us all something to celebrate. To that end, Milan Stefanovic, team principal, shook my hand before I headed over to a camera, shook it, and then leaned over to show it the little Brazilian flag I've run on the top of my helmet since the race at Valencia as a tribute to Henrique. Another reminder that this was all for him and devoted to him. I ran another special helmet this race, a paler blue, almost white, and with the gold details such as the Kazakh sun and the eagle down in a gold flake to pop under the lights, but I kept the Brazilian flag on it, because I'm filling in for him, and in a way, this should be his win. I'm not going to linger on that too much though, because I just won an F1 race.
"Hey, congratulations on that, we had a good fight there at the end." Anthony Harrison came over from the second place slot, congratulating me.
"Thank you, you really did make me work for it. From when I overtook you until I crossed the line I couldn't relax for a moment!" I told the American, happy to share the podium with him after such a strong race for us both. Speaking of sharing the podium, just as I was about to go and get weighed, Felipe Alvarez made it a point to come over and congratulate me. We've had our run-ins and our disagreements in the past, but time and time again he has demonstrated that he's not just an egotistical diva competing for the same seats as I am. It takes more than just speed to become a two-time world champion, it requires brains and respect too, and every once in awhile Felipe Alvarez sees fit to remind the world that he has plenty of both. I shook hands with the Spaniard - who, to be fair, knows what it's like to be the first driver to win for your country, and then finally got weighed. That particular regulatory event over with, I finally got to head up to the podium waiting room and take off my helmet and gloves.
"Jesus...I look like a mess." I laughed as I took off my helmet to reveal my hair was all dark and matted, stuck to the edges of my face. Singapore was a night race but it was still an island in southeast Asia, so drivers sweat, a lot, like to the point that it's measured in kilos, and I'm no exception to that rule.
"It was a hard race." Felipe echoed, collapsing into the chair as I wiped my face off with a rag and took a drink of water, not just for a refreshing sip, but literally to keep my fluids up after a race like that. Sure, we had a water bottle with a hose in the car, but I didn't take a drink during those last laps as I just focused everything on taking the win, so this was my first drink since I overtook Harrison.
"Crazy, crazy race. First stint was completely different from the rest of it." Anthony echoed. I'm sure on some level he was resentful on the fact that he had dominated the start of the race and just lost it after that, but he was doing a good job of hiding it and staying composed now. I think on some level it did help that it was a friend of his winning, so he did legitimately have something to be happy about. Speaking of being happy, one by one we got called onto the podium. First Felipe Alvarez in third place, then Anthony Harrison in second, and third Ronnie Sanders, representing Ferrari after he helped execute a winning strategy, and finally, me. I walked onto the podium, took the top step, and removed the Bridgestone first place cap as, for the very first time, Menin Qazaqstanim was played on an F1 podium. Two minutes of a rather strong and haunting Soviet melody followed by the fun and bouncy Italian anthem, reminding me of the fact that I just won a race for Scuderia Ferrari. Berger, Mansell, Prost, Alesi, Ziegler, Irvine, Goncalves, Matteo, Hamalainen, and now...Shchegolyayeva: the drivers to win for Ferrari during my lifetime. I've actually done it.
I got to race in Formula One, which was already a dream come true, but to do it with Williams? That was another dream. I got to race for one of the teams that defined the sport in my lifetime, but then I lost that. A1GP, Le Mans, Indycar...I had to scramble to find opportunities outside of F1 after I lost my sponsors, and to my credit, I made the most of those opportunities, winning a race in every one of those championships, and maybe that's why Ferrari was willing to take a chance on me. So they did, I got another dream drive, for a team that has not only defined F1 during my life, but for the entire existence of the championship. Ferrari won their first Grand Prix in 1951 and has kept winning all the way until the present moment when Ronnie Sanders is getting soaked with champagne on the podium with Singapore.
Ferrari is the cornerstone of F1 history, and now I've etched my name in that history.
Notes:
Woo! That was a big one! This was one of those key moments I've been waiting for since probably early last year when I really started plotting out the direction of this story. From what started as, quite frankly "wouldn't it be funny if there was an F1 driver from Kazakhstan?" has turned into the longest thing I've written so far and there's so much left to write. On that note, the next chapter will drop on January 22nd, 2023.
PS: This story turns one year old on the 16th which is freaking insane - time flies.
Chapter 29: Le Penne ha Perdute
Notes:
Hello everyone! I've received quite a few reviews on AO3 in the past weeks and, while I have tried to respond to each one, I just want to say again that I'm grateful and appreciate seeing your thoughts.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXIX.
Le Penne ha Perdute.
My very first F1 win, now my first race at Suzuka - a pair of very good races, if I do say so myself. Fuji Speedway is a good track don't get me wrong, and in a former configuration it was, indeed, the first home of the Japanese Grand Prix, hosting races in 1976 and 1977, but Suzuka is the venue with the great majority of the history. Prost and Senna's crashes in 1989 and 1990, Wilhelm Ziegler ending a twenty-one-year title drought by winning the world championship for Ferrari in 2000, and Matti Hamalainen winning from seventeenth on the grid in 2005 just to name a view, Suzuka just has so much history, and this year will be the first time I get to experience that. First things first though, some of the team's top brass called me in for a meeting before any of the weekend activities were due to begin. I tried to get an answer as to what this was about - even just a very general good news or bad news - but wasn't able to get even that. So, I was going into this meeting completely blind, and I can't say I particularly liked that. On the other hand, I haven't been with Ferrari for all that long, all things considered, so maybe this is the usual procedure. Hell, for all I know, they're about to give me a 2010 contract and are trying to keep it a surprise. Wishful thinking, probably, but with how quickly news gets to the media these days, stranger things have happened. Whatever it was, I was at least pretty confident that I would be in the car for this race worst case scenario - they've already applied the stickers with my name on them, after all, to both the car and the garage - but beyond that? I didn't know. I highly doubted Ferrari would fire me the week after I won a Grand Prix for them, but when nobody is telling me what to expect from this meeting, anything is possible.
"Good morning, Tamara," Pietro Ferrari greeted as I entered the office.
"Buongiorno," I greeted in turn.
"Hello Tamara," Milan Stefanovic offered me a tight smile.
"Buongiorno," Luca di Montezemolo echoed as I took a seat. It reminded me of the day I approached Ferrari, sitting opposite of Stefanovic with Ferrari and Montezemolo on either side of him, the presence of the Ferrari name and the current leadership both looming over the Italo-Montenegrin team principal. This is a man whose ancestral nationality has changed three times in my lifetime, but even that seems to shudder in the face of Ferrari's internal politics. I love this team and I'm grateful for the chance to drive for them - I hope that Matti's retirement allows me to continue driving for them - but I'll be the first to admit that Ferrari is an F1 team unlike any other. It is the oldest and most successful, and because of that, it is the one that comes with the most pressure, not just for the drivers, but also for the team principal, the mechanics, the aerodynamicists, everyone. Here, a mistake means you're failing to live up to the giants that have come before you, here a mistake means harming the reputation of the road car division as well as the F1 team, and here, failure is unacceptable.
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva," Milan began "While we are very pleased with your results - "
"Your podiums and your win." Pietro interjected, showing once again that he was on my side and showing that, if this conversation is going the way that the start of Milan's sentence implies, the heir to the team's namesake disagrees with it. Pietro clearly believes I'm performing well and wants me to remain, but I suspect that Luca di Montezemolo does not, and he was won the argument. Now it doesn't matter what Milan wants, as he just has to be the one to deliver the bad news or feel the wrath of one of the two men standing behind him. Stefanovic is the one nominally in charge of the team, but this setup makes it clear where the power really lies.
"Your highly impressive results, yes," Milan accepted to appease Pietro as Luca glared at his counterpart, who to his credit didn't seem all that bothered by it "We feel that we owe it to you to inform you that there will be no opening at Ferrari for 2010. We have Henrique de Matteo and Felipe Alvarez signed for the next two seasons, at least. We are going to announce Felipe's signing in the coming days so that, when Henrique makes his return to the factory, we'll have everything lined up for the future. We thought it was best to tell you this now and make it clear where we are."
"When?" I asked, drawing a few looks "When did you decide to sign Alvarez?"
"Tamara...he was signed in 2008, there was nothing you could have done." Pietro shared, sympathetic in his tone. I saw Luca di Montezemolo's hand tighten into a visit, as if Pietro was not supposed to reveal that. So Felipe wasn't pursuing an opening when Matti announced his retirement, Matti announced his retirement because Alvarez was already signed. Ferrari's pursuit of Hamalainen forced Wilhelm Ziegler into retirement after the 2006 season, and now just a few years later, it seems the same thing has happened to Hamalainen as Luca keeps pursuing the new hotness.
"However," Milan interrupted, getting the focus back on him "There is an alternative solution here, one that keeps you in the Ferrari family."
"What?" I asked, curious as to what this could be about.
"With BMW pulling out, Peter Sauber has offered to buy the team back, and we have negotiated a customer supply deal. We want to put you in a Sauber for two years, we will pay your current salary, and you may be able to rejoin Ferrari for 2012." Milan proposed.
"Henrique is under contract but nobody knows how he'll be after his injury, you could slot in perfectly if he's not the same Henrique he used to be, maybe even before that if things are really bad." Pietro added, emphasizing the Ferrari link and the fact that he'll be pushing for a return.
"Let's not say anything we cannot promise. Any potential return for Ferrari would not come until after the remainder of Henrique's contract." Luca di Montezemolo fired back, damning any notion that a move to Ferrari a few years down the line was guaranteed. So, BMW Sauber is slipping down the order and that's with a factory engine deal, now, with less resources, no factory support, and a customer engine, Ferrari wants me to spend the next two years with Sauber on the off chance that I might be able to move to Ferrari in 2012. The way I see it, why not take the Mercedes offer, sign for two years, and then maybe move to Ferrari in 2012 if there was an opening? This whole Sauber offer doesn't seem to be really doing much to boost my chances of getting into Ferrari if they don't extend Henrique's contract. So, this is a maybe, largely on the assumption that Henrique won't be as good as he used to be, but what if he is? There is no real promise here. All it really gives me is a salary - one which I'm sure Mercedes-Benz of all companies could match - and a Ferrari sticker on my engine. I'm afraid that's not going to be good enough when I have other offers on the table.
"I mean, I am grateful for the offer, but I don't have my agent with me and I have other teams interested as well, so I can't sign anything yet." however, when I responded, I was careful not to burn any bridges. I lost my seat with Williams, I know what it's like to not be in F1 despite being talented, despite having had teams like Renault try to sign me in the past, so now in 2009, having returned to F1, made podiums, and won a race, I never want to be in that situation again. Therefore, I'm pursuing contingencies, I'm keeping the Sauber offer alive, I'm keeping the Mercedes offer alive, and I'm not cancelling out anything just yet.
"Of course, this is just an initial offer, not contract negotiations." Pietro Ferrari took the liberty of responding again, for this time there wasn't any additional anger radiating off of the Ferrari CEO next to him, so I think that part is pretty true. I also don't think that Montezemolo has any problem with me in particular, I think it's more that he's angry at Pietro Ferrari's attempts at usurping his leadership. In reality, Montezemolo's power is such that, if he didn't approve of it, I wouldn't be getting this offer that keeps me affiliated with Ferrari, no matter how distantly. Montezemolo sees something in me, it's just he's already plotted out Ferrari's future and doesn't want external factors meddling in it. Henrique de Matteo's crash was a major upset in Montezemolo's plan for the future, and me coming in was a spanner in the works, now it seems that Henrique is recovering well and Felipe Alvarez's path towards a seat is clear, so he needs a place to put me. What he does not need is constant conflict over who is going to be Alvarez's teammate. It's an understandable position for the Ferrari boss, even if it has resulted in us being at odds.
"What matters right now is that we still have three races together, eh?" Milan changed the subject, trying to ease the tension in this little office.
"Right, I'll give it my best out there and hopefully we can see the season out on a high." I gave the team a polite smile as I rose out of my seat and out of the office, making my way out of the Ferrari hospitality center altogether. Once outside I took a deep breath...that was a stressful situation. Despite everything I've done I won't be a Ferrari driver for the 2010 season, but I do have options for the next season, two concrete, one that just might be soon...
"Everything alright?" Alexis asked, my assistant having seen me basically bolting out of the hospitality center and breathing heavily outside.
"Yes, yes, I'm fine. Just...I had to force a brave face in there and now I don't have to." I explained, having had to measure my reactions and stomach the tension through that whole thing.
"Do you want some water?" the Thai-Singaporean woman asked, still concerned for me.
"No, not right now." I said, pushing off the wall and walking a few steps through the paddock with the Asian brunette following me. After a few moments, I glanced at my destination and asked "Are any media people watching?"
"Hang on..." Alexis obliged and looked around, not seeing all that many people in the paddock at all right now, and certainly nobody paying too much attention to us "No, not really, how come?"
"Wait here a minute." I responded before heading over to the McLaren hospitality unit, getting a few looks from the staff as I entered the mostly black and gray building in my bright red shirt, but nobody stopped me as I made my way over to Michael Coronet's office. The Englishman, enjoying his first season as McLaren's team principal, saw me through the glass walls of his office before I entered, eyes lightening up as I came in.
"Hello Tamara, long time no see." he greeted, referring to our time shared in Williams, and how me being dropped effectively led to the both of us leaving the team. Myself being I lost my sponsorship, and Michael because he wasn't being given what he felt he needed from the Grove based team while Woking was giving him a better and better offer. Ron Dennis was retiring on top with his protege, Anthony Harrison winning the championship, and he wanted Coronet to be his successor. Now Michael has that job, and I just might have a job too. A long time ago, Michael said he'll do what he can to try and get me back in F1, at the time I think he was thinking of testing time and maybe a handful of FP1 appearances, but now? I think we can both help each other.
"I think it's time we talked." I answered, sitting down in his office.
"I think it is," Michael smiled, clearly seeing where this was going and receptive to going along with it. Anthony Harrison was Ron Dennis' modus operandi, a driver developed by McLaren since he was a child and shaped into one who won the world championship in only his second season, now, Michael Coronet can have his own project. A driver he worked with while developing his craft at Williams, and now that he was graduated to a full team principal at McLaren, Coronet can bring that driver with him, build on her winning form, and create perhaps the strongest lineup in the season. Jyri Kaasalainen may be fighting to keep his seat, and James Buxton may go into the off-season as both reigning champion and a free agent, but with Michael and I? There's a history, and I think that history can go a long way.
Talks between me and Michael Coronet went well, but a driver and the man in charge of the team agreeing on a lot would be far too simple for the demands of a modern F1 contract. Next Michael Coronet needs to convince the McLaren board - including Ron Dennis, who retains a quiet albeit powerful position on the board of directors since his retirement from the day-to-day running of the team - and then McLaren needs to make an offer. At which point, my agent Ernesto Signorelli and I need to look at the terms, the existing offer from Mercedes, and that expected Sauber offer backed up by Ferrari, and figure out what is the best option. Immediate performance is obviously a concern - and that is likely to favor McLaren, unless Mercedes can make it a seamless transition with Honda and also somehow make up for half a season of no development - but it's not the only factor. There's also future performance: where will Mercedes and McLaren stack up two years down the line? At that point McLaren should have maximized their package to the regulations, but Mercedes-Benz, with potentially even greater resources and a few years of experience by then, might be able to get Honda back to this level of performance, and then there's also the possibility of moving from Sauber to Ferrari in this time fame. All of that needs to be considered, so it's not as simple as who is most likely to get ahead in 2010, and that's before even getting into the non-performance concerns.
Money, endorsements, and contract length. The first two, for me personally, are nice but not essential - Mercedes, McLaren, and Ferrari are all more than capable of paying me enough to sustain my lifestyle, and I'm sure all of them will have plenty of sponsors and partners as well - but contract length? That will be a big one for me. Everything I've had in F1 so far has been temporary, I want something permanent, and I want job security for the foreseeable future. I never want to be out of F1 again, so if McLaren offers me a year and Mercedes is willing to offer me three, Mercedes will look like the better offer. The fact that I'm looking for a long contract also brings us back to the question of long-term performance: I'm willing to wait long enough for Mercedes to work themselves into a front running car, McLaren is already that, but Sauber is unlikely to ever become that. BMW Sauber has only ever managed to take a single F1 win - Canada 2008 - now Sauber is going to be without manufacturer support and left with a customer Ferrari engine. That's a lot less funding behind them and that's a lot less control over their engine development. The lack of a guaranteed return to Ferrari really makes Sauber seem like a poor option in comparison, and it sounds like this is just a two-year deal for Ferrari to keep me as an option for when Henrique de Matteo's contract expires. I'm effectively just the backup plan if Henrique's return doesn't work out, and even then, Ferrari might still pick someone else if they find a better option. So really, this is between the existing powerhouse of McLaren, and Mercedes, the manufacturer seeking to buy out Honda and create a new racing superpower. Bizarrely enough, both teams would be using the same engine, because even though Mercedes is entering its own factory team, they're retaining factory support for McLaren for the foreseeable future as well. Mercedes knows that the first few years of their own team might be a rough learning experience, so they're keeping a link with McLaren to keep the triple-pointed star at the sharp end of the grid regardless of what happens. This means that, regardless of which one I end up picking, it seems I will have some sort of connection to the German giant, either joining the likes of Mika Hakkinen, Daniel MacGowan, Matti Hamalainen, and Anthony Harrison as McLaren-Mercedes drivers, or forging my own path ahead as the young force propelling the Mercedes F1 team forward.
So, lots of options, lots of things to consider, and lots more to do before signing any final contract. All of that serves me rather well though, because right now, I need to turn my attention back to the present. Regardless of which of their rivals I will be joining next year, I still have a handful of races to finish out with Ferrari, and the first of those is the Japanese Grand Prix, now at Suzuka. Early on in FP1 the team let me out on a set of prime tyres to learn the track. I drove down the pitlane and sped up on the exit, joining onto the start-finish straight and then, shortly afterwards, throwing the car into turn one. Having just come up to speed after leaving the pitlane, I wasn't going fast enough to need to brake or even lift all that much going into turn one, instead saving that for turn two. Both corners were to the right, but turn two was much tighter, slowing us down just in time for the esses section. To that end, leaving turn two, I started to build up speed again before throwing the car into the next sequence of relentless, lovely corners: left, then right, onto the briefest straight before lifting, grazing the brakes, and downshifting before throwing the car to the left yet again for turn five, before snapping back to the right for the apex of turn six. Next up was turn seven, another left hander, but this one was uphill and wider, closing out the esses section with the Dunlop curve. Building up speed as I turned to the left and crested the hill, the road started to straighten out and descend as one of the best corners on the circuit loomed ahead of me.
I downshifted twice and lifted as I threw the car to the right, riding out onto the exit kerb to keep as much speed possible through the rapid Degner curve. By the time I straightened out it was time to get on the brakes and take the next corner, turn nine. There was a short straight between eight and nine, but with how fast these cars could take Degner - and the fact that every driver was trying to take it as fast as possible - it practically disappeared, with drivers just sorting out the exit from the previous corner as they arrived on the scene for turn nine. Nine was the closest this track had to a ninety-degree right-hander, and it led onto a short straight that passed beneath the bridge before a flat out kink uphill and to the right for turn ten. This was to set up for the hairpin, braking uphill as we turned to the left - the fact that it was uphill and gravity was against us made for a short braking zone for such a slow corner, and then as soon as I was facing the other direction for the exit, I blasted off into the next corner. That was the flat-out, endlessly sweeping turn twelve, basically just a straight that was gently making its way over to the right. This was in sharp contrast to the next two turns, the Spoon section, with the fast turn thirteen grinding down to the slow turn fourteen, as we carried on almost one-hundred and eighty degrees to the left through those turns. We entered the spoon section facing the west, we would exit it facing the east.
Speeding into the east on this far eastern circuit, I came out of the Spoon section accelerating, making more and more speed while I also climbed uphill, coming up onto the bridge that we passed underneath earlier in the lap. Yes, while Monza also features an underpass thanks to the old oval section, Suzuka is a modern-day figure-8 track, passing beneath and above itself in the course of a single lap. In any case, being here on the back straight meant that the lap was nearly over, however, some of the best and most iconic corners in motorsport history were still yet to come. First was 130R, named for its radius, as it was an as-close-to-flat-out as possible fling to the left, and while there is paved runoff beyond the track now, that was not always the case. There was a time not all that long ago that drivers were barreling into this corner at full speed with an armco barrier a mere foot from the edge of the track. Things are safer now, but that doesn't make the corner any less thrilling when you get it completely right, maximizing speed all the way through turn fifteen and to the final few corners. Then came the Casio triangle, where Prost and Senna had their first infamous collision in 1989, leading to the Frenchman winning the championship on that occasion. Here, I got on the brakes for the chicane like section, first right and then left before powering down the hill. I passed the pit entry on the inside as the flat-out turn eighteen to the right brought me back onto the start-finish straight. I crossed the line and continued on to turn one, where Prost and Senna had their second crash in 1990, leading to Senna winning his second world championship. The track was so much fun, and for the first time in my career, I would get to be a part of an F1 race here on this very weekend.
I mentioned how everyone would be trying to take Degner as fast as possible earlier in the weekend, well, as we got closer to the race, that trait continued, and the circuit started fighting back. Martin Weaver was the first victim, crashing out in FP3, giving his team a massive repair job, and preventing the Australian from taking part in qualifying, as the third and final practice session was mere hours ahead of qualifying. Things didn't stop there. The second Degner curve crash of the weekend went to another member of the Red Bull stable, with Ximen Goikoetxea of Toro Rosso crashing out in Q1. This was a disruption, but the worst came during the final laps of Q2, with Fabian Schmidt hitting the wall hard just as everyone was trying to set their fast laps at the end of the session to decide who will move onto the top ten shootout. The German needed to be airlifted to the hospital, and a lot of us got screwed on laptime, with myself among the many cars that couldn't finish a lap because of that crash. Of course, there were also plenty of drivers who carried on with their laps despite the crash, and that led to a slew of penalties after qualifying. Lorenzo Barbaro, Rudolfo Goncalves, James Buxton, Maximilien Longpre, and Felipe Alvarez all received penalties for failing to slow for yellow flags. Jyri Kaasalainen did make it to Q3 but then also crashed at Degner and wrecked his gearbox, earning a five-place grid penalty for his trouble. Anyway, the end result of all that is that I qualified twelfth but will start eighth, lining up just behind Tommy Koskinen and ahead of the penalized Barbaro. Matti qualified in eighth but will start fifth. So, thanks to a somewhat shambolic qualifying session, Ferrari has turned a very average performance into two fairly good starting positions. So now, with fast cars dotted all over the grid and just nineteen cars starting the race - Schmidt was ruled out due to his injuries - the scene is set for a chaotic race in the land of the rising sun.
To add another complication, with just this race, Brazil, and the finale at the new Abu Dhabi Grand Prix remaining, the championship battle was getting tight: the Hondas retained their lead from the early season, with James Buxton sitting on 92 points, however, thanks to better form as of late, Rudolfo Goncalves was keeping his championship hopes alive and sitting on 81 points. Next up are the Red Bulls, with Maximilian Renner a longshot by now, sitting on just 66 points after the Singapore Grand Prix; he'll be hoping for a strong result this race to keep in the hunt, and starting on pole position gives him the best chance of taking Red Bull's first win since the German Grand Prix months ago. The drought Red Bull has been experiencing ever since they closed the gap to Honda is best exemplified by Martin Weaver, with the Australian having scored just three points since my return to the sport. The side effect of all this is that my teammate, Matti Hamalainen, is just half a point behind the Red Bull, who starts the race from the very back of the field after his FP3 crash. Needless to say, Weaver has a long way to go if he intends to score points. Then just seven points behind Matti in the standings sits Anthony Harrison, with the American leading the charge for McLaren all year long, with Jyri continuing to fail to impress. Meanwhile, I've actually managed to work my way into seventh in the championship, ahead of the likes of Henrique de Matteo, Jyri Kaasalainen, and Tommy Koskinen, and I'm looking to end the season on a high note. For two reasons now, the first being that I want to do well and continue building up my reputation now that I'm a Grand Prix winner, but the second is that I really want to drill the point home that McLaren is fighting one-handed.
Henrique de Matteo is still ahead of Jyri Kaasalainen in the championship, despite the fact that the Brazilian has been injured for nearly as many races as he's been around for at this point, and the Finn has been particularly anonymous as of late. At this point, most have given up any notion that Kaasalainen will redeem himself in the eyes of McLaren, and it's just a question of who will replace him. James Buxton didn't have a chance of getting a top drive a few years ago, but this year he has demonstrated that he can dominate when given a good car, and he's preserved that lead even as his car's dominance has fallen away. Buxton's championship campaign - the fact that he just needs to preserve his lead over Rudolfo and Renner for a few more races to win it - and the romantic ideal of a reigning British champion at the British team has some value for McLaren, but he's also getting older, and he's only gotten a single win before he lucked into this dominant car. If you're being cruel, you can dismiss Buxton as the double-diffuser champion, which is reductive and doesn't account for the fact that he had to beat his teammate who has Ferrari pedigree, but the point remains, you can put somewhat of an asterisk on all of his results. Felipe Alvarez is going to be announced for Ferrari soon, so he's not an option any longer, and even if he wasn't, I've always maintained that the bridge is pretty damn burned after 2007. That leaves me, the third option.
Michael Coronet likes me and we worked together at Williams, and now I'm a Grand Prix winner with Ferrari, which can only help my results, but on the other hand, I'm young and unproven. McLaren's goal is always to fight for the world championship, and I've never done that - 10th, 10th, and currently 7th in the standings are pretty good numbers given the circumstances, but they aren't best in the world numbers - so who knows how I'll do in that environment? I've won a race, sure, but plenty of drivers have won a single race - even Jyri Kaasalainen has done that and he's the driver McLaren is trying to get rid of - so how will I do when I'm expected to win multiple races and support Anthony's championship bid, if not make one of my own? I think I'm good enough, I think I've demonstrated that, but McLaren needs to be convinced of that. I think Coronet believes in me, but like I said before, it's not nearly as simple as convincing him, a whole board of directors needs to be convinced. There's pluses and minuses to me, and there's pluses and minuses to Buxton, now that we seem to be the main two figures in the fight, McLaren needs to make a decision, and the only thing I can do to convince them is drive to the best of my abilities. So, as the five red lights went out, I took off from the grid, slotting in behind Koskinen as we reached the esses section, retaining position through the first sector of the race.
It was a quiet first few laps for most of the grid to be honest, with the exception of Martin Weaver whose weekend went from bad to worse when his headrest came loose - he had to pit to get it put back into place, since it's for safety more than it is for comfort, as a padded headrest feels a lot better in a crash than a bare carbon tub - followed by a puncture of all things just to really rub salt in the wound. Then there was also the case of James Buxton, who lost a few places on the grid thanks to Maximilien Longpre stalling ahead of him, so my rival for the McLaren seat spent the opening stages of the race regaining ground rather than charging his way up the field, which suited me just fine. Though luck would turn back to the Brit's side when Lorenzo Barbaro and Jyri Kaasalainen were inspired to do a Prost and Senna 1989 tribute act and clatter into each other in the Casio Triangle. I was left having to hope that Buxton passing the damaged McLaren wouldn't be too symbolic of the future. Anthony Harrison had also overtaken Ivan Tripoli off the line to take second place, but Tripoli got him back during the first pitstop. A KERS issue for the American would prevent Harrison from taking back the position, and the Toyota would disappear into the distance.
My race was comparatively uneventful at this stage, because Koskinen was flying in his car and that Williams was making its double diffuser design work better than it has since the beginning of the year. The Ferrari F60B also had a double diffuser now, plus I have KERS, and with all of that I'm still fighting to keep the gap steady at around two seconds behind my former teammate: I can only imagine how bad it would be without those two gimmicks helping me out. This continued even through the pitstops, with me gaining a bit of time back at the last round of pitstops but only because Tommy extended his stint to have fresh option tyres at the end of the race, meaning he practically guaranteed he'd be faster than me when it mattered most, and he still managed to come out of the box ahead of me, under a second ahead of me at the time, but quickly getting that gap back up towards the two second mark it had been earlier on. Suzuka is a really fun place to drive, however, it is not as strong of a race for Ferrari as some of the others, and that's really showing in this final stint of the race. I did get handed a bit of a lifeline at the end of the race when Ximen Goikoetxea crashed yet again, this time losing it in 130R and clattering into the wall, but there were five laps left and Koskinen's fresher, faster tyres were again able to keep him out of my grasp. I was able to retain sixth place though, so another solid points finish. Not bad considering that, in qualifying, I only really had the pace for twelfth on the grid and it took the misfortune of others to elevate me up to eighth.
So, the points-paying results of the 2009 Japanese Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 10 points.
2: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 8 points.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 6 points.
4: Matti Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 5 points.
5: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 4 points.
6: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 3 points.
7: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 2 points.
8: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 1 point.
So, while the Hondas were struggling at the edge of the points, Max Renner dominated the race from pole position, led every lap, and was only denied fastest lap by his teammate, lapping in the same car at the back of the field. This means that Maximilian Renner has kept himself in championship contention, if only just, as he is seventeen points off of James Buxton with twenty points still up for grabs in the final two races.
As for the Ferrari-McLaren battle, it's more or less over now. Jyri Kaasalainen just hasn't been there so it's been Anthony Harrison fighting the two of us. Anthony is very capable, as shown with the fact that he's finished ahead of the both of us, but fundamentally, McLaren is only bringing in six points while Ferrari has managed to take eight points. Formula One is a team sport and Anthony Harrison taking more pole positions than anyone else, winning two races, and fighting us both hard doesn't matter when both of us can consistently finish right in the same area as he is. Sometimes Anthony scores more points than either of us, sometimes he splits us, other times we both beat him, and race after race that adds up to a lot more points for Ferrari. Case in point, I've managed to score 39 points this season, almost twice as many as Jyri Kaasalainen has scored, and you have to add Henrique de Matteo's twenty-two points to that team tally as well. Anthony and Matti are neck and neck in the battle for best of the rest behind the Hondas and Red Bulls, but it doesn't matter if Anthony Harrison wins that fight. Quite frankly, for the teams, you're either driver's champion or you're not, and if you're not, the team's constructors' championship position is what matters because that's what decides to prize money. McLaren needs it with that $100 million fine from spygate a few years back, and they're not getting it because, with Henrique's results cancelling out Jyri's, it's a one car team.
As for Hideki Kitagawa, my replacement at Williams, he did not score points at his home race. The Williams car was good today, as Tommy Koskinen demonstrated, and Hideki just wasn't, finishing as the last car on the lead lap, ahead of only Bernard Audinet, who was a lap down, and Martin Weaver, who was two laps down thanks to his absolutely miserable start to the race. McLaren isn't the only one car operation in F1 at this point, and Williams is even worse off since Kitagawa has scored literally no points. Surely at some point, the discount on the Toyota engine is outweighed by the loss in prize money, right? Oh well, Williams made their choice, and I'm off to bigger and better things. Yes, the Williams was just as fast as the Ferraris, if not faster at this race, but this is the exception rather than the rule. I won the last race after all, so I can hardly complain that I finished just two places behind my teammate in the race that brought me back down to Earth. So, satisfied with the race despite the fact that it was somewhat of a downgrade compared to recent performances, I tended to my media duties after the race.
"So Tamara, we saw a lot of crashes throughout the weekend, how do you feel about F1's return to Suzuka?" a somewhat critical English reporter asked, referring to the slew of crashes in qualifying and another one in what was otherwise, a bit of a boring race. I would argue it's most been good races since I've returned to the sport, but yeah, this one was pretty dull...though I don't think that's all that much of a bad thing. Suzuka is a driver's track, not necessarily one that's good for racing: quite frankly, the best thing racing wise is a wide, repetitive track with simple corners like an American oval track, which is why those tend to have so much more passing. That's not what's most satisfying and challenging to drive though, and every once in awhile, I think it's good to test the drivers rather than just produce the most entertaining product. Obviously, we live off of it being an entertaining product that gets our sponsors recognition and prestige, plus a lot of races manage to be both entertaining and challenging, but there's just something cool about a track that makes the drivers work for it.
"Well, first of all, I wish Fabian Schmidt well and hope he can recover. Nobody ever likes to see a driver injured and out of the race - and I know that's a bit ironic considering why I'm in this seat, but I'll be the first one to tell you this isn't how I would've wanted to get here. Anyway, I don't think that the track is especially dangerous or anything, what we've seen here can happen at any circuit. What I think might have contributed to all the crashes we saw at Degner is just it being a faster corner and everyone trying to push hard on a track we haven't raced at in a few years - I haven't raced here at all before - so it's been a learning experience. I think next time we come here drivers will treat the track with more respect and hopefully we'll get less crashes and no injuries." I answered, trying to be fair.
"Did you feel safe through Degner and 130R?" he continued.
"Personally, I felt fine through both corners. I can see how incidents happened at Degner, but I was fortunate enough to avoid any troubles through the weekend. As for 130R, I think Ximen just got really unlucky and put a wheel onto the astroturf or something. It's something that could've happened at any track with the artificial grass, it just looked more dramatic because it's a very fast corner I think." I responded.
"Okay, thank you for your time." the Englishman finished the interview. I waited until he was gone before sighing with relief - that was my last one for today. I asked Alexis for a water bottle and took a sip before heading off for the hospitality unit. It was the land of the rising sun but now the race was over, and it was getting close to sunset here at Suzuka. Matti and I both hated the media stuff, perhaps for different reasons, but while Matti just took a trollish delight from messing with them, I tried to give the best answer I could, and I think that just led to me getting more and more exhausted with these things. I understand that, for the fans, this might be the only interview with me they get to see so I wanted to give a nice and informative answer, but what the fans don't see is outside of that particular TV shot, I'm getting asked another dozen plus questions across seven or eight different reporters from multiple countries all while I just want to lay down and take a shower after a long race. It's a privileged problem to have, I know, but the media circus is my least favorite part of F1. I love the driving, the competition, the circuits, and traveling to all these different countries, but I don't care much for answering whether or not the option tyres will be good at Interlagos.
"Check it out Tamara, the press likes you." Norbert announced as we gathered in Maranello a few days after the Japanese Grand Prix, ready for Henrique de Matteo's triumphant return to the Ferrari factory. Also, this week, Felipe Alvarez has been announced as Ferrari's driver on a long five-year contract with options for years beyond that even, closing out that seat for many years to come. If I was going to go back to Ferrari any time soon, my only chance is with Henrique's seat. That being said, when I looked at the magazine Norbert presented to me, I saw the cover was from my win in Singapore. The Italian press were celebrating my win with Ferrari, and not only that, but they gave me a new nickname as well - l'aquila, the eagle, fitting given the presence of the soaring Kazakh eagle on my usual helmet and the double-headed Russian eagle on that special one-off helmet I brought to Saint Petersburg - and that...that was just a special kind of love. To get a nickname from the Italian press so quickly was a term of endearment. I wasn't a paydriver to them, I wasn't the token female gimmick, and I wasn't even seen as the mere replacement for a better driver - this was genuine adoration, and it was adoration I had earned by a series of positive results. The beginning of the year was so miserable and just as Ferrari hit rock bottom with Henrique's crash, Matti and I were there to lead the team back to the front of the grid.
Which brings us to the second topic: the doors of Maranello. The town and Ferrari's factory in particular has a flag for every win Scuderia Ferrari has ever won, and above the doors to the main building, there were the flags for the current season. The Italian flag above the window was a constant, but on the left side, there were two red flags defaced with the yellow shield containing the black Cavallino Rampante - the prancing horse - also known as the Ferrari shield. On the right there was a third of these Scuderia Ferrari flags, the one most recently hung, and that represented my win at the 2009 Singapore Grand Prix. This is what I mean about Ferrari being a team unlike any other - winning with any other team isn't enough to instantly make you a media darling in that country, winning for any other team doesn't get you a flag hung up in your honor alongside the flags flown for Ascari, Fangio, Lauda, Mansell, Prost, Ziegler, and all the rest of the greats. Williams was great, McLaren could be great, being the first Mercedes driver since, again, Fangio could also be great, but nothing quite compares to Ferrari. I've been fortunate enough to have a stint with the great Italian team, a stint that has saved my career no less, but also a stint that is now coming to its end.
"Welcome back Henrique!" Milan Stefanovic shouted as soon as Henrique entered the front doors and walked into the factory, with the rest of us following in cheers and clapping for the Brazilian as he made his way over to us. Milan was in the middle, Matti was on his left, and I was on his right, and all the way down the wall to the doors and reception desk were team members. An army of red and white shirts, some mechanics, engineers, press people, aero people, marketing people, Bridgestone consultants, anyone and everyone involved in the team was here to welcome back the Brazilian, and he was clearly touched and overwhelmed by it all. I continued to clap as Henrique made his way over to Stefanovic and wrapped his arms around the Italian-born Montenegrin team principal, crying tears of joy: after everything, Henrique was back, and he was so damn happy to be back and see the whole team out in force for him.
"Welcome back," Matti greeted, the Finn showing a rare genuine smile.
"Welcome back Henrique, I kept the seat warm for you." I echoed, glad to see him back after his injuries. That was a scary day, and in a earlier, more dangerous era of F1, getting hit in the head by a spring, knocked unconscious, and set flying into a barrier would be a death sentence.
"You did, you did, congratulations on the win, it was so good to see!" Henrique congratulated me too, not showing the slightest hint of jealousy or bitterness over me winning in his car, instead he was happy to be happy for me. There are few nice guys in Formula One, and even fewer that manage to be both a nice guy off the track and a fast, championship contending driver on it, but in all my time with the Brazilian, Henrique de Matteo has shown himself to be nothing less than a true gentleman. There are more drivers that should be like him, and I've been honored to have been able to stand-in for him for these races and for the next two.
"Thank you, I hope you know I dedicated it to you." I added.
"I know you did, thank you, but that was your win. You don't have to share it." Henrique insisted on being more courteous than me, throwing the praise right back at me and saying there's no need to treat the win as if it was supposed to be his. As far as he was concerned, it was my win and the fact that it happened in the car he was supposed to drive in that race doesn't matter to him.
"It's nice to see you getting along, but we have a lot to show you Henrique. First the 458 Italia, and then we'll do a seat fitting, get you back in an F1 car for the first time since the accident." Milan set out the agenda. So, soon enough, Ferrari was videoing Henrique seeing the new mid-engine V8 Ferrari - the replacement for the F430 - for the first time, then taking some pictures of the three of us with the car. It was a beautiful car with some of the best lines I've seen on a car since the 1960s, and I got to drive for the team that built that. Ferrari is such an honor both in racing and on the road car side of things, and since this seems to be coming to an end, I'm going to savor these memories as long as I can, cherish them forever. To illustrate the impermanence of the situation, by the end of that very evening, Henrique was doing laps of Fiorano in an F2007 as the first steps towards getting reacclimated to the team and to F1 machinery in time for the 2010 season. He's been recovering in Brazil, he's raced go-karts, but nothing quite compares to an F1 car, and even an old car built under the old regulations can tell you an awful lot more about the forces this sport puts on you than any other alternative. There's nothing quite like F1 in that aspect, and unfortunately for me, there's nothing quite like Ferrari.
In brighter news, there's nothing quite like Brazil either...not that you'd know it considering this weekend's weather.
Three things to talk about this weekend: first of all, Fabian Schmidt was obviously unable to race after his horror crash at the Japanese Grand Prix, thus Toyota drafted in a replacement - Yoshikazu Higashiyama, Natasha Tsirinskaya's 2008 GP2 Asia Series rival and considered the best driver to come out of Japan in decades. I'm actually excited to see how Yoshi does in his first two F1 races, though I am also concerned if he might be hitching his career to a sinking ship with their being more and more evidence that Toyota won't make the 2010 grid. Sure, Toyota hasn't announced anything yet, but come on, no drivers signed for 2010, no investment on their car, and the global financial crisis bearing down on the Japanese giant. Second of all, with more rumors about my move to McLaren coming out - nothing stays private in F1, does it? - and with Ferrari's plans for next season formally announced, I've been frozen out of the technical briefings and all that. The team is increasingly shifting the focus of those conversations to the 2010 car, and they don't want to be leaking trade secrets to a driver who seems to already have one foot in the door of their biggest rival. It's annoying and abrupt, but I understand why it's like that, and I can tell it's nothing personal. Third of all, a tropical storm decided to hit the track right in the middle of qualifying, throwing a wrench into the works. Both McLarens, the Red Bull of Maximilian Renner, and the Honda of champion-elect James Buxton are down towards the back of the field while Rudolfo Goncalves is on pole, giving the Brazilian the best opening he has to take the title fight to the final race in the United Arab Emirates. As for us here at Ferrari, Matti Hamalainen lines up fifth and I line up ninth, us being the only team to get two cars into the top ten shootout.
"Dry race today, Tamara, how do you think it's going to go?" American reporter George Tarantano asked while in the midst of a televised grid walk, grabbing quick questions with drivers, team personnel, and the occasional celebrity whilst establishing the starting order for the race. The Speed Channel reporter was one of the media people I knew better so I didn't mind answering a quick question every now and then.
"I think the conditions should suit us better but there's also a lot of fast cars behind us. The McLarens are going to want points, Max Renner is going to want to keep his championship alive, and James Buxton is going to be trying to settle it as early as possible. We're going to try to move forward but so are a lot of other people, and there's only eight slots, so we'll have to see how it goes." I answered.
"Beautifully said Tamara, thank you and good luck." George continued, elaborating to the American viewers about the championship implications as I continued my preparations for the race. Tying my hair back into a bun, putting my radio headphones in, and sliding on the fireproof balaclava, next came the HANS device, keeping my neck from snapping in the event of an accident and anchoring itself to my helmet, which came next. Just the standard cyan and gold affair for this race, but I still had a little Brazilian flag towards the back rim of its top - maybe I could give the Brazilian Ferrari fans something to cheer for even if their driver is a guest of honor rather than a driver for this event. In any case, a few moments later, Twenty F1 cars in scrambled order made their way up the hill and slotted into place, waiting for the start of the penultimate round of the 2009 World Championship.
"Go, go, go!" Ronnie shouted encouragingly into my ear as I ripped off the grid as the five lights went out, jumping Piotr Kaminski on the line and seeing the rear end of Tommy Koskinen's car once again. I wasn't going to spend the whole race stuck behind him this time though, so going into turn one, I made my way over to the left-hand side of the track and got on the brakes as late as possible to take the inside line and the position going into the Senna S. Plunging downhill to the left and then snapping back to the right at the bottom of the hill, I made it through the first two corners just as there was contact behind me - with Max Renner forcing Jyri Kaasalainen off track and nearly causing the Finn to drive into the Force India of Umberto Petronelli. Kaasalainen and possibly his former teammate Petronelli picked up some damage during all of that, but all three cars continued so a yellow was avoided. As for me, I had already made my way through the flat-out sweeping corner to the left that was the Curva do Sol and made my way onto the Reta Oposta. Here I was out dragging the Toro Rosso of Maximilien Longpre to gain yet another position. This put me right behind my teammate and gave me a front row seat for the carnage coming up.
We hit the brakes and turned left into turn four with Barbaro and Tripoli squabbling hard, and as turn four opened up into the faster turn five, the Uruguayan and the Italian made contact, both cars careening off track. Matti and I had to swerve to avoid the debris coming off those cars while, a few places behind us, Felipe Alvarez was coming in blind thanks to all the cars ahead of him, and he ended up getting taken out as well when the Force India slid back onto the track, taking out a third car in just one car.
"Jesus - damage, do we have damage?" I asked frantically into the radio after that big one.
"Negative, safety car is out though," Ronnie answered, easing my nerves a little bit "Matti has some front wing damage, we're going to pit him, you stay out. That was a mighty first lap and we'll have good track position for the restart."
"Copy." I answered. It turned out to be very fortunate that I didn't pit, as McLaren boxed Jyri Kaasalainen as well, and in their rush to gain a position, he left the box with his fuel hose still partially attached, spraying fuel all over the pits. Fuel which Matti would ignite while burning out his tyres to heat them up on exit, engulfing the car in flames. The crews would put the fires out nearly instantly with their extinguishers, and both cars were able to continue, but they lost a lot of time and scared a lot of people. I suspect this will only justify the FIA's decision to get rid of in-race refueling for the 2010 season.
True to his word, we did have good track position on the restart, sitting in third behind polesitter Rudolfo Goncalves and the Red Bull of Martin Weaver. A Honda and a Red Bull battling for the lead just like they would have early in the season, but much like the second half of the season, a manufacturer team - a Ferrari - is lurking just behind and is the lead car with KERS. Ready to take advantage, I waited and waited for the Brazilian to start the race, but he knew the run up the hill here in Interlagos was brutal for the lead car, so the veteran was buying himself some time. It wasn't until we were evening out at the top of the hill did Rudolfo launch, and even then, it was sudden, meant to catch us out and build a gap. To an extent, it worked, but Weaver and I were pushing hard regardless. We made our way through the first sector yet again but, coming out of turn five, we were entering new territory for the first time under green flag conditions. First came Ferradura and Laranjinha, two corners to the right, tightening and taking us ever so slightly uphill as we wound through the infield, the reinforced hillside looming above us and providing space for the many billboards advertising at this event. The real braking zone didn't come until turn eight though, an uphill braking zone into a tight corner before plunging down into Pinheirinho.
Braking downhill, turning to the left, and emerging uphill, Pinheirinho began the run up to Bico do Pato. Unleashed from the slow Pinheirinho, we built speed uphill, kinked to the right, and then hit to brakes for turn ten, the tight Bico do Pato hairpin, grinding down our speed and grinding us down to the right before depositing us for a fast downhill run. Goncalves, then Weaver, then Shchegolyayeva - Honda, then Red Bull, then Ferrari - as we plunged down the hill and threw our cars to the left with reckless abandon for the lightning fast Mergulho, the ground not evening up under us until well after the corner. We crossed the sector two line just in time for the braking zone for Juncao - a somewhat abrupt ninety-degree left-hander, Juncao prepared us for the run up the hill. I unleashed my KERS as the three of us ran up the hill, taking three flat-out kinks to the left and we made our way up and up and up the mountain before only just cresting it in time for the start-finish line, and then the track almost immediately began descending once more for the braking zone for the Senna S. There's no real interruption with Interlagos, it just flows and flows and flows, each lap into the next one in a beautiful way that few tracks are able to accomplish. I'd love a win here to cap off my Ferrari career, but the same could be said about both of the cars ahead of me: Rudolfo Goncalves wants to keep the championship fight alive and there would be no better way to do that than winning his home race. The fact is that James Buxton hasn't won a race in half a year, Rudolfo's been the one to take Honda's most recent two wins, and after all the misfortune he experienced as second fiddle at Ferrari, perhaps he deserves a champion more than the contenders. As for Martin Weaver, the Australian has been with Red Bull since 2007, he's been in F1 for nearly a decade all things considered, and he doesn't much like the fact that his young hotshot teammate is running circles around him and competing for the championship. A win here could be a way of recementing his reputation as team leader after coming back from a broken arm in the offseason.
Well, Rudolfo Goncalves would be the first to fall away, the Brazilian's team kept him out on decaying tyres even as Weaver, and then I the following lap, both pit to undercut him. This meant that Rudolfo was doing half a dozen laps on nearly dead tyres as Weaver and I started reeling him back in on fresh tyres - and at least in my case, I was on the faster option tyres for this middle stint of the race - so once he did finally switch tyres, he fell behind the both of us. So at this point Martin Weaver was leading the race and I was in second, but Anthony Harrison was on a charge, making his way up the field, allegedly on a one-stop tragedy no less. The American was by far the fastest car on track and needed to only make one pitstop - while the rest of us also needed to make a second step and we were currently on tyres that should have been faster - and he was carving his way through the field. First up he slid past the Red Bull of Maximilian Renner on the Reta Oposta, passing the German championship contender with frightening ease, then he set the fastest lap...and then he did it again, and a third time while charging up to the rear diffuser of Rudolfo Goncalves. Goncalves started this race from pole position and had a solid two second gap over us at one point in the race, but now he's about to get knocked out of the podium positions.
It proved to be worse than that even, with Harrison and Goncalves slamming into each other in turn one, leaving the McLaren with negligible damage but slashing open the Honda's tyres, meaning Rudolfo needed to make an unscheduled pitstop. This puncture basically killed Rudolfo's championship hopes and with Renner having inherited fourth place from that incident, he wasn't much better off. James Buxton was on course to seal the 2009 Formula One World Championship today, but I couldn't focus on that right now, because I was the next one that Anthony Harrison had in his sights. The soon-to-be eclipsed champion is sick and tired of being let down by McLaren, he's sick and tired of taking a commanding pole position only to lose out on the win through no fault of his own, so Harrison is doing everything he can to win this race, and that means going through me and going through Weaver. I wasn't going to go down without a fight though, because while McLaren may well be my team next year, I'm still a Ferrari driver, and I'm going to be loyal until the very end. It's not personal McLaren, just the way the sport works.
Holding back Anthony Harrison was easier said than done though, because he was too close to my rear diffuser with seven laps left in the race. Seven laps may not sound like a lot, especially at a relatively short circuit like Interlagos, but Interlagos is also a circuit with a good amount of overtaking zones, so those seven laps turn into a mind-numbing number of opportunities for the American driver, and I don't know if I'll be able to stop them all. I was able to stop the first one though, because heading down the straight to the Reta Oposta, I kept my car planted in the middle of the track, not giving Anthony quite enough room to comfortably make it on the inside or the outside, and while the American was still trying to decide which way might be safer, we had already reached the braking zone for turn four. Coming out of the following turn five, Anthony surprisingly got on the KERS through the fast corner and had a bit of a run on me, but mercifully, turns six and seven weren't quite one of the obvious overtaking opportunities. Turn eight could be, but thanks to taking the inside through turn eight and then following the racing line towards the left, before braking back to the right for the corner itself, I had Anthony covered off. I would use my own KERS coming out of Pinheirinho, hoping to use the twisty bit here in the middle of the track to build up a bit of a buffer in time for the hill. It was a hopeless endeavor though, because the McLaren stayed right there no matter what I tried to do, and by the time I got to the final real corner and started the run up to the line, the American was ready to pounce.
I again tried to position my car in such a way to make it as awkward as possible for Anthony, starting on the inside for turns thirteen and fourteen, but then gently swinging out to the outside as I headed up through turn fifteen - if asked, I would just say I was following the racing line through the corners, rather than making a defensive move - and then I snapped back towards the left, and thus the inside line, in time for turn one, taking that as my defensive move. There was more or less a gentleman's agreement in F1 that you would get one main move to defend from an attacking car, and to do more than that was considered extreme, unsportsmanlike, and even dangerous. All that being said, it didn't matter if I tried one defensive move or a dozen, because Harrison had me figured out, and he simply braked later than me on the outside, managed to keep it on the inside, and turned that into the inside for turn two. Admittedly, the extreme inside here for turn one did make for a tighter and somewhat more awkward line through the Senna S, but a lesser driver wouldn't have been able to pull off that move. It took talent and bravery to do something like that, and I will begrudgingly admit that Anthony got the better of me today. Nevertheless, Martin Weaver took this battle to just properly fuck off into the distance, so I suppose it didn't much matter anyway, since the Australian finished first, the American was left with second, and I clung onto a podium with third.
The points-paying results of the 2009 Brazilian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 10 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 8 points.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 5 points.
5: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 4 points.
6: Matti Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 3 points.
7: Maximilien Longpre - Luxembourg - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 2 points.
8: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 1 point.
So, as Henrique de Matteo waved the checkered flag at his home race to the delight of the Brazilian fans eager to see him working his way back to Formula One, the 2009 World Championship was settled. There was nothing left to play for in Abu Dhabi because, with a maximum of ten drivers' points remaining, James Buxton sat on 97 points, Rudolfo Goncalves was on 84, and Maximilian Renner was in third place with 81. A win brings Martin Weaver up to 64.5 points and not a moment too soon, as Matti Hamalainen with 62 points and Anthony Harrison, now with 61 points, had closed right up to the back of the Australian. It has been a miserable second half of the season overall for Martin, but here, he has found his footing again and taken his second win, resetting his confidence in time for the 2010 season where Red Bull is expected to improve on an already impressive car.
As for me, thanks to another podium and another six points, I was now on 45 points. I've scored more points - 45 to 43 - in half a season than I did in two years with Williams. That just shows the power of Ferrari and the improvement I've had as a driver. Not only that, thanks in no small part to my performances, Ferrari has sealed their hold on third place in the constructors' championship. McLaren is no longer a threat to us, Jyri has simply failed to deliver. Perhaps the fight would've been closer if Jyri got his act together or if Ferrari hired a lesser driver to replace Matteo, but the fact is, with me, this is the result. Ferrari is the best of the rest behind Honda and Red Bull after a start to the season that was absolutely miserable for the Italian team.
Then there's Hideki Kitagawa, my replacement at Williams. Hideki tangled together with countryman Yoshikazu Higashiyama, picked up some front wing damage, and crashed out, bringing out a local yellow. This time I will say it's not necessarily Hideki's fault that he didn't score points - and to his credit, neither did Tommy Koskinen this time - but he was also clearly holding up Yoshikazu at this point and the rookie was trying hard to get past. In fact, Higashiyama would eventually finish in ninth, just one place outside of the points and ahead of some solid drivers like Piotr Kaminski, Umberto Petronelli, and the McLaren of Jyri Kaasalainen. I don't mean to be harsh, but with all the speculation about Toyota pulling out of the sport, I don't think Hideki Kitagawa will be able to find a lifeline somewhere else. Yoshikazu Higashiyama though, after just one F1 race filling in for the injured Fabian Schmidt, I think, has a future.
"So, here it is." Ernesto Signorelli presented the contract to me as I entered his Monaco office. We've been talking back and forth for a few days now as he negotiated with McLaren, but a number of things quickly became apparent: first of all, Michael Coronet pitched me to the McLaren board as just as talented as James Buxton without the price of paying a world champion, thus, I couldn't ask for anything astronomic. Second of all, when you're signing for McLaren, what they consider a bargain is what most other people in F1 would consider astronomical anyway. I suppose I should have seen this coming after seeing what Ferrari was willing to pay me just as the replacement driver for Henrique de Matteo, but there really are mouthwatering sums of money on the line here. Despite spygate, despite the abysmal 2009 season, and despite my relative lack of experience or reputation, McLaren is offering me unthinkable amounts of money.
In raw terms, it was $20 million over four years. So that boils down to $5 million a year for 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. Now, in the context of Formula One - and I know this is going to sound spoiled no matter how I put it - that isn't all that crazy of a number, however, that's just the base salary. I could be just as bad as Jyri Kaasalainen, if not worse, and still be making nearly five times as much as I've made with Ferrari, which in itself was an order of magnitude higher than what I was making with Andretti and Peugeot combined at the beginning of the year. I've come a long way, and that's just the base salary. Signorelli has also managed to secure me the following things: either McLaren or their engine partners Mercedes-Benz will provide me a car for the year, which I will own; the team will provide me access to a private jet for the duration of the contract, which I will not own, but will have discretion to be flown wherever I wish when not going to a race weekend. Finally, there is language for separate deals, endorsements, and other potential contracts with McLaren's sponsors - the likes of Vodafone, Emirates, Hugo Boss and such - but those will be negotiated in detail on a separate date. The point is that Ernesto has won me what I would consider very generous terms, secured a plane for me, and has gotten me a line of luxury supercars from two of the most prolific companies in the field. Not only that, but the Italo-Argentine agent has left room for endorsements, commercials, and other such sponsor arrangements that could greatly expand that $5 million a year into some truly ludicrous numbers. Reading over this contract, two things instantly came to mind: first of all, that I was the luckiest person in the world, and second of all: what in the hell was James Buxton asking for that this seemed like the economy option in comparison? I know that Coronet would be willing to spend money on me, but my thinking is that Buxton must have been making some outrageous demands - which, fair enough, it's his prerogative as the new champion - for this to pass chairman Ron Dennis' desk intact.
So it was more than enough money wise, but there was also the length aspect. I was on a two-year deal with Williams but it was so heavily weighted towards the team that, in practice, it was a single year deal with an option for a second year exclusively on the team's side, and all of that was dependent on my sponsorship, as I quickly found out at the end of the 2008 season. Then there's this year, where I'm a temporary replacement for an injured driver. I'm driving at the best in my career as far as I'm concerned, but nothing was going to get me a 2010 seat with Ferrari because, between Felipe Alvarez, Henrique de Matteo, and Matti Hamalainen, I was the fourth driver in the mix for a pair of seats. Now though, it's a four-year contract...I won't have to worry about whether or not I'll be in Formula One ever again. Of course, I think there is somewhat of a tactical aspect to this as well, because nothing stays secret in the F1 paddock for long, so I'm sure someone in the McLaren organization was able to figure out that Henrique's contract expires before the 2012 season, and Ferrari still has some small concerns over his recovery. They might even know that Ferrari gave me that Sauber offer as I way of keeping me in the organization, so what does McLaren do? They make sure that's right in the middle of my contract. I've proven I can win races with Ferrari, I've proven I can help Ferrari beat McLaren, so not only has McLaren gone and signed me, but they've signed me in such a way that I won't have the opportunity to return to Ferrari. It's a shrewd move that is almost more concerned with undercutting their rival than benefitting themselves. I wonder if this is a microcosm of the kind of Ferrari vs. McLaren culture that, left unchecked, results in something like Spygate. Regardless of that rapidly negative line of thinking, the point is that McLaren wants me and they were finally willing to give me the one thing no one has given me in F1 thus far: a stable contract.
"Alright," I said, signing my name to the contract. It was done...I was a McLaren driver for the 2010 season.
"Okay, so McLaren will announce things publicly in the days leading up to the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the media will probably ask you many questions, but the team said they wanted this wrapped up before the end of the season so they could focus properly on the offseason. McLaren wants to build the best car they can and make sure you and Anthony are fighting at the front next year." Ernesto explained. So, more media duties at Abu Dhabi, but it was a price I was willing to pay, because all the contract drama was over with, the Ferrari experience was over with, but I would have a seat just as good, if not better, for the next season. I will always be grateful for Ferrari for giving me the chance to restart my F1 career, to fight for podiums, and to take my first win, but they've also chosen their drivers for the next season well in advance, so there was nothing I could do there. The Sauber offer was an attempt, and I do recognize that, but fundamentally it was just too little compared to the other offers I was getting, which brings us to the Mercedes question. They're going to buy Honda, the championship winning team, and maybe they'll shock everyone and manage to be just as good in 2010 despite all the development disruptions and the new engine, but that's not what most people expect. Mercedes is expected to struggle and build up, and maybe they'll even find that being in it alone is harder than they fought and give up just like all the other manufacturers seem to be doing these days. Maybe they'll tough it out though, and they might develop into something, but right now, if I'm going to drive for a Daimler-backed team, Vodafone McLaren-Mercedes is the better one.
So, with that, I wrapped up in Ernesto's office and made my way over to my apartment where Natasha Tsirinskaya was waiting for me, my little cousin eagerly awaiting the news of my contract. We'll need to figure out something for her as well, because, despite a late season charge from Maximilien Lecroix - the Frenchman joining the Sevilla FC Superleague Formula team after getting kicked out of Toro Rosso since the machinery was so similar to the one he used to dominant effect in Champ Car - which saw him take five consecutive podiums, including a win, no one was consistent enough to challenge Natasha over the course of a season. Four wins - one each at Magny Cours, Donington Park, Estoril, and Jarama - were enough for her to seal the 2009 Superleague Formula title and combining that with her 2009 GP2 Asia title earlier in the season, and Nat has had a perfect season. Neither of those championships are the traditional route to F1, but she deserves respect for winning them both and for beating past and present F1 talent in the process, and she has impressed in all of her duties with the Honda team. All of that, to me, makes her a sure fit for the 2010 F1 grid, but it's all a matter of finding her a place in her rookie season, something complicated by Honda's exit...
"How did it go?" the Kyrgyzstani teenager asked as I entered the apartment.
"Good, the contract is signed, I'll be a McLaren driver for the next four years." I answered, smiling as I said it out loud for the first time, making everything feel all that much more real.
"Congratulations!" she cheered.
"Thank you, now...what are we going to do with you?" I asked, keeping my smile but seeing Natasha smile and take a bit of a frown...not a good sign.
"I don't think being born in obscure Asian countries nobody knows how to sell are exactly an asset for the two of us." she pointed out.
"How so?" i asked.
"Well, nothing is official yet with the Mercedes thing, so everyone is keeping it rather hushed for now, but from what I'm able to tell, Mercedes wants two things from their driver lineup. First things first, they want a highly rated German driver for the marketing aspect of it all. The German team being led by the German driver, it makes sense, right? Well, I can't exactly fill that role, and the other thing they want is a proven factor. From what I can tell, they wanted you, but now that you're gone, and they're thinking about maybe going for James Buxton, but I think he's about to announce he's leaving. Beyond that, I've heard names like Koskinen, Kaminski, and even Hamalainen thrown around, all of which suggests they want someone with at least a little bit of experience. They haven't officially told me anything yet, but it's becoming clear that they don't want a rookie if it can be avoided, and I don't know what that means I should do." Natasha explained. Now for her, a Mercedes program could be perfect in terms of giving her time to showcase her abilities while building their way up towards the front of the grid, but like she says, that makes it a difficult fit for her. My guess is that they either picked up Victor Hartmann as their German or lured someone back from retirement, because there aren't any highly rated German rookies that I could think of. If it was a German rookie, maybe even a Mercedes driver from something like DTM that they want to mold into an F1 driver, I could kind of get the demand for experience in the second seat, but it sounds like they have an established name as their German driver and want another established driver - albeit a young prospect based on who Natasha has suggested - which suggests they expect some level of performance.
"Well, if they're looking at names like that, that will at least open up a seat somewhere else, right?" I brought up, pointing out that most of the names she's suggested would require someone to move teams.
"I mean, in theory yes, but you know as well as I do that about half the grid is a massive question mark for next year. Sure, there might be an opening at Toyota or whatever, but how do I trust that Toyota is even going to be a thing next year?" Natasha shot back, raising a valid concern...one I've had as well.
"In that case, I'd suggest looking at Williams, Force India, or one of the new teams. There's a lot of movement going on for 2010 and these are the types of teams that are going to be receptive towards a rookie, and I can tell you from experience that it's a lot better to have a foot in F1 than not when it comes to negotiating a future contract." I advised, well aware of the fact that I was being somewhat of a hypocrite considering I turned down Force India in 2008, but to their credit, they're now a team that has scored a second place and a fourth place in consecutive races. Sure, they're hardly a consistent team, but they've shown actual pace at times, and with Umberto Petronelli retiring to become Ferrari's reserve driver - as well as a factory GT driver for them - there should be an opening there as well. As for Williams, well, if Toyota is pulling out of the sport, then that's Hideki Kitagawa's career over with, and it seems Koskinen is in contention for a lot of the open seats as well, so there should be at least one opening at Williams as well. Then there's the three new teams - named something along the lines of Manor, Caterham, and Campos as of the most recent news reports - coming in with the Cosworth engines. Sure, these teams are expected to be minnows considering they were promised a budget cap that the manufacturer teams promptly used their political power to destroy, but a seat is a seat and for a rookie, that isn't terrible.
"I mean, yeah but...I guess I thought after winning two championships and being a guest of Honda at about half the races, I thought I was going to get something a little bit better than a back of the grid team." Nat sighed.
"Believe me, I can sympathize, but I've done infinitely more to fix my career as a replacement driver than I did outside of F1. I won the freaking 24 Hours of Le Mans and it did nothing for my F1 career, but I do a couple of races for Ferrari after Henrique gets into a freak accident and all of a sudden, I have teams tripping over themselves to sign me. I hate to say it but if I've learned anything this year, it's that F1 teams don't give a shit about endurance racing, they don't give a shit about Indycar, all they care about is what you can do in F1. We're dealing with very shortsighted and elitist people here, and as much as I want to believe they're smart enough to be aware of these other things, experience has demonstrated you're a lot better off with something dangling right in front of them." I advised, effectively admitting that Roksana was right about this stuff. I wanted to believe that F1 bosses would track my progress in Indycar and Le Mans, but I swear through all these contract negotiations, they cared an awful lot more about the last half season with Ferrari than anything else I've done this year. It's as if I was sitting on the couch for half a year until I stumbled into a Ferrari seat as far as they're concerned, so I can't be asking Natasha to make the same mistakes I did. Take the F1 seat, even if it is at a Force India, because if you care about F1 more than you care about motorsport as a whole, you'll find that most of the F1 paddock feels the same way. I thought I was doing something in A1GP, Le Mans, and Indycar, but I've been a lot happier and a lot more in the spotlight since returning to F1, and, while I'm not sure that's a good thing, it's the reality we have to live with.
"Shchegolyayeva to McLaren!"
"Jyri out - Tamara in!"
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva signs for McLaren!"
The headlines were flying in as I opened my laptop in the Abu Dhabi hotel room, and it was mostly being treated with excitement. I was a highly rated young prospect, and I won a race this season, now I was going to McLaren, and everyone was wondering how I would stack up next to Anthony Harrison. Some people were trying to stifle the hype by pointing out that Jyri Kaasalainen was also a highly rated prospect before he was subjected to being Anthony's teammate, others were shooting back with the fact that I already survived being Matti Hamalainen's teammate. A few of the dissenting voices would then acknowledge that my half-season with Ferrari was strong but then question if I could keep up this level of performance over a whole season, and that one win wasn't all that much when McLaren was looking to fight for world championships. So yeah, there were a few arguments and questions being levied at me, but overall, I would say it was positive.
I did, however, find one argument that really did illustrate the pain of leaving Ferrari though. What was the headline there? Well, simply "Le Penne ha Perdute" the most literal translation being something along the lines of "the plumes are lost," however, it's an allusion to the Italian anthem. The line in the anthem reads "gia l'Aquila d'Austria le penne ha perdute" meaning that the Austrian eagle has already lost its plumes. Thus, the nickname I just earned was already turned against me, because rather than being associated with the Kazakh eagle that I had on my helmet, the offended Italian press was now associating me with the Austrian eagle that proved to be the enemy of the rising Italian nation in the 19th century. Of course, I didn't exactly have much choice when it came to leaving Ferrari, though the Italian press does not appreciate the fac that I've gone to their biggest rival. It's uglier than it needs to be, but I made the move I needed to for my career. If I can't be a Ferrari driver, then being a McLaren driver is the next best thing.
Notes:
One more chapter for 2009. That one is just going to be one race and some offseason stuff so hopefully I'll be able to show restraint for once and it won't be yet another 15,000-word behemoth. Though if you do like the long chapters, have no fear, because there are going to be some super busy ones in 2010 as well. Anyway, yeah, we're a year into this story and it's already turned into the longest thing I've ever written, while there's still half of act two and a whole third act to go. It's interesting how writing works, I spend a few months plotting out a sequel to my Star Wars fanfic and I burn out on it after five chapters and have to go on hiatus, but from a half-formed idea about writing F1, I can't shut up about it. I guess the message is don't try to force it, if it's something you want to write, you'll write it, whereas if it's not, there isn't much preparation can do. Well, there you go, this week you get a chapter and some incoherent musings about writing.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 30: Evviva l'Italia
Notes:
Hello everyone! Here's chapter thirty, the last one of the 2009 season.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXX.
Evviva l'Italia.
"...so yeah, I am grateful for what Renault has given me but I am ready for a new challenge with Ferrari." Felipe concluded his answer at the press conference. The big regulation change came in at the end of 2008, but in some ways, this last race of 2009 feels like the end of an era. It's basically an open secret that Mercedes will announce their takeover of Honda shortly after the end of the season, likewise BMW is pulling out and Sauber will return to a privateer team using customer Ferrari engines, and it seems that Toyota may just disappear entirely. There are better cars out there for the few people looking to buy into F1 during a recession, and the car that is there is built around a Toyota engine which won't be a factor next year, and on top of all that, Toyota is isolated amongst F1 teams by being based in Cologne. On the surface, that sounds like something that would be very attractive for the likes of Mercedes-Benz, however, it's a long way from any motorsport hotbeds. There's motorsport valley in the UK - where Williams, McLaren, Red Bull, Force India, Honda, and Renault are all based - and then there's the heart of the Italian motor industry in Emilia-Romagna, where Ferrari and Toro Rosso are based. Toyota in Cologne and Sauber in Hinwil, Switzerland are outliers, and that hurts when trying to attract the best talent in the industry. Sure, there would be a romantic factor to Mercedes-Benz basing their new F1 team out of Germany, but they would probably be better off taking over Honda's base in Brackley. The fact that Mercedes' High Performance Engines division is already based in Brixworth in motorsport valley - due to having formerly been the British half of Ilmor - is just the icing on the cake. All of that is not even to mention the fact that Mercedes can be based in England and still run under a German license.
"Thank you, Felipe, next question for Tamara. You are obviously leaving Ferrari after half a season, and now you are going to McLaren, tell us about that please." an English reporter asked as a follow-up question to the one Felipe Alvarez just answered.
"First things first, I just want to say that I am incredibly grateful for Ferrari. I lost my seat in F1 a year ago and was fighting tooth and nail to get back here, and Ferrari is the team that gave me that chance. I wish that it happened under happier circumstances, but I got to realize two of my biggest dreams with this team: I got to drive for Ferrari, and I got to win my first race. These are memories that I will treasure for the rest of my life, and I will be doing everything I can in this race to finish this short stint with them on a high note. Secondly however, I know what it's like to be out of F1 and I never want to experience that again, so I needed to look at all my options. McLaren was the best option. They're the team that won both championships the year I was born, they have so much history and success that it would be an honor to drive for them too, and they're obviously very fast and competitive. I got to race for Williams, I got to race for Ferrari, now I get to race for McLaren. These are the three most successful teams of my lifetime, and I am honored to have gotten these opportunities, especially as someone of my background." I answered, trying to make it clear that I meant no disrespect to the Italian press who has seemingly turned against me after this move was announced, but also not backing down on what I've done. Tons of drivers have raced for both teams and tons more will after me.
"And how will both of you react in a few months' time in Bahrain when Henrique de Matteo makes his return to F1?" a follow-up question came from somewhere in the crowd, obscured from us thanks to all the lights and the cameras focused on us.
"I'll be very happy to see Henrique come back after a scary crash like that. I was very happy to work with his crew and keep that Ferrari at the front of the grid in his stead." I answered, meaning every word. I was also trying to think of something I could do as a way of sort of passing the torch back to him. I wasn't going to give him the trophy from my Singapore Grand Prix win because, while I think that would be a good way of showing appreciation, it's also my first win and I intent for that trophy - well, the copy I'll have made of the trophy anyway, since Ferrari has the real one - to become the centerpiece of my collection. I've always tried to preserve my racing history and my accomplishments because I never know when all of this is going to end, and a Formula One win, after the year that I've had, is going to be there no matter what. So yeah, I want to give back to Henrique after doing so much good in a car that should have been his, but I also hunted down Anthony Harrison to win that race, so it's just as much part of my history as it is the car.
"Yeah, I think everything will be fine. Henrique has worked with drivers like Ziegler and Hamalainen without a problem, so I don't see why there should be a problem with him and me." Felipe answered. It seemed like a relatively innocuous answer from the Spaniard at first, but then I realized that, with Wilhelm Ziegler in 2006 and Matti Hamalainen in 2007, Henrique de Matteo was the number two driver playing support to a title contender. They're not even teammates yet and Felipe Alvarez is making it clear what he expects from the Brazilian, and it's none too flattering for the man who was very nearly the 2008 champion. Look, Felipe Alvarez is a two-time world champion and has moments where he's been good to me, so I do have to respect him, but...he's all about himself. I wouldn't want to be teammates with Felipe Alvarez because I think I'm good enough that it would go just as poorly as when Felipe and Anthony were teammates in 2007. Then again, I am going to be teammates with Anthony Harrison next year, so I guess I better hope it really is a Felipe Alvarez problem, otherwise the next four years are going to get ugly.
"Alright Tammy, one last track to learn this season. Make me proud." Ronnie Sanders gave me a smile before the team lowered the car down, took off the tyre blankets, and released me for my first lap of the Yas Marina track here in Abu Dhabi. I left the garage, turned right, and headed down the pitlane before literally descending, turning left, putting beneath the track, then climbing back up before kinking to the left and leaving the pits at speed already in turn three of the circuit. The pit entry here is completely normal, but this pit exit not only features a tunnel underneath the track but also bypasses the first two corners, making for a strange experience all around. We'll just have to hope no one hits the wall and gets stuck in the tunnel or else this race might take a weird direction. In any case, I made my way around the track, heating up my tyres along the way, before turning onto the start-finish straight and beginning my first lap at speed. I blasted KERS out of the final corner, accelerating up to the line, and then got off the button as soon as I crossed to ensure I wasn't using up my supply for the hotlap as I made my way over to turn one. A ninety-degree left-hander on paper but, in practice, thanks to a relatively wide entry and a generous kerb on the exit, it was a pretty fast corner, and that speed set the norm for the following sector. Turn two was a flat-out kink to the left before kinking back to the right for turn three, where the pit exit meets the track. The ground then gives way beneath us descending towards the upcoming hairpin, but first featuring the kink of turn four that straightened us up to the left. Just before the braking zone for the next corner, I crossed the sector one line.
Sector two opened up with a chicane, first left and then right in an awkward pair of corners that proceeded turn seven, the aforementioned hairpin. I hit the gas just a little bit coming out of the right-hand element of the chicane before getting on the brakes for the hairpin, turning the steering wheel all the way to the left, and accelerating out of it, coming onto the endlessly long back straight. There was a slight climb to the beginning of it - making up for the drop in sector one - before cresting the hill and beginning to descend again shortly afterwards, though the track did level out only a few feet lower than that. I did think we rose just a tiny bit for the chicane, which opened with turn eight, a hard braking zone and a tight, almost acute-angled corner to the left, followed by a touch of the throttle to get up to turn nine. Nine is the one that slapped us back to the right and onto the second of the two back straights, and it was pretty fast thanks to the agonizingly slow corner just before it. Nevertheless, I didn't feel like I had enough rear grip to take it flat out, so I made the slightest bit of a lift through the corner before getting onto the straight that wasn't all that straight. I saw this because, while it is all flat-out, there is turn ten in the middle of this straight that accounts for the gentle sweep to the left. I crossed the line to complete sector three just before reaching an awkward series of corners.
First of all, there was the next hard braking zone, which was turn eleven, a ninety-degree corner to the left, but then turns twelve to the right and thirteen to the left continued the trend as I reached the bottom of the track. These corners reminded me a little bit of the section between the embankment straight and the roundabout in Russia, except the arrangement here felt clumsier and more claustrophobic despite the swathes of paved runoff surrounding the corner. Nevertheless, the shortest of straights followed turn thirteen before reaching another right-degree left-hander, this one taking me onto a longer flat-out section, one that actually reminded me of another part of the Russian circuit, that being sector one. Much like turns three and four in Saint Petersburg, turns fifteen and sixteen here in Abu Dhabi formed fast, flat-out kinks. It was almost like someone cut a triangular edge off of a square corner to make something better. The difference between sector one in Russia and this marina section in Abu Dhabi was that, rather than snapping out at the end, here the section closed with a hard braking zone for the right-hander of turn seventeen, winding in on itself. Now we were on the north side of the marina, alongside the hotel. This wasn't an ordinary hotel though, because after a short straight coming out of turn seventeen, we turned to the left, between the two halves of the hotel and underneath the bridge linking them together. This is the United Arab Emirates, the country with the tallest building on the world, artificial islands shaped like palm trees, and now apparently a hotel bisected by a Formula One track.
Strange uses of money aside, the short hotel straight quickly gave way to turn nineteen, another ninety-degree left-hander, but one followed by a fairly long acceleration zone on the other side of the hotel. Of course, it didn't amount to much, because I was tapping the brakes for the next corner, slowing down just enough to throw the car to the right and ride out the exit kerb before coming upon the final corner, braking again, downshifting again, and throwing the car to the right...again. In a case of deja vu, I again dumped the rest of my KERS for the lap as I accelerated up to the line, crossing it to set my first fast lap of the Middle Eastern circuit. On first impressions, in terms of race tracks in morally dubious oil states, I think I prefer the Sakhir circuit in Bahrain to this, but I suppose Sakhir doesn't have the same flash. Towering grandstands, painted runoff, a hotel covered in LED lights, and a dusk-into-night race - which will apparently include an impressive pyrotechnics display once the winner crosses the line - makes for more of a spectacle finale than a somewhat dusty bowl in the desert.
"So, what do you think?" I asked my teammate, Matti, once we were both back in the garage after our initial runs.
"It's shit." was the eloquent response from the Finn.
"That bad, huh?" I asked, not feeling quite as harsh as Hamalainen did, but seeing where he was coming from.
"Too many corners and none of them are good." he answered before taking a sip from his water bottle, softening up only the slightest bit afterwards "Maybe sector one is okay but the rest of the lap? Eh, it's nothing. The straights are too long, and the corners are all the same."
"Eh, I agree it's pretty bland but there was nothing that made me upset." I shrugged. It was far from the best F1 circuit, and it seemed to be leaning rather heavily on the gimmicks - the day to night race aspect, the aforementioned fireworks, the hotel, and I suppose that as a Ferrari driver, I should mention that there's a massive Ferrari themed amusement park being built right next door - rather than the racing itself, but there's nothing that's frustrating me. There are parts that I would call boring, maybe, but not frustrating, at least not for me.
"Well, you would say that." Matti shrugged in response.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You won at Singapore, you have more of a stomach for these new, long tracks than I do. I prefer the old stuff, the natural stuff." Matti explained, which rather instantly made sense considering he's the most successful driver on Spa-Francorchamps of the current grid. Add in wins at places like Canada, Suzuka, Silverstone, and Interlagos, and he definitely has a thing for the classic circuits. That being said, I like the classic circuits too, and while yes, my first win came at Singapore, Matti's latest win came at Russia, which, like I said, definitely has some things in common with this circuit.
Not enough in common as it turns out, because we struggled in qualifying. I can't exactly put a reason behind it, because looking at those two long straights, and the fact that we performed well at places like Spa-Francorchamps, Monza, and Russia that are fast circuits, this should have suited our car better. If I had to guess as to a reason, qualifying was held in the afternoon going into night, just like the race will be, and that meant that, in the later sessions especially, cars spent the whole session on track trying to put some heat into the tyres to get them into the operating table. Maybe it's as simple as we couldn't get the tyres working quite in the right way in the cool desert night, I'm not too sure, the point is that I qualified in eleventh and Matti qualified in thirteenth. So, I'm left dealing with the juxtaposition of a poor performance for the team with the fact that, for one of the first times, I managed to outqualify my world champion teammate, while elsewhere on the grid, my future team is dealing with a qualifying of two extremes. On the bright side of things, Anthony Harrison continued his impressive run of late season qualifying results, scoring yet another pole position, but on the other end, Jyri Kaasalainen was all the way down in eighteenth, sitting with the likes of Hideki Kitagawa and the Force Indias. Jyri Kaasalainen had a chance to fight for his McLaren seat, he failed at that, and now he may be failing at his chances of ending up anywhere on the F1 grid.
On some level, I had some level of sympathy for the Finn, and I knew I was taking advantage of his misery by taking over his seat for 2010, but on the other hand, Kaasalainen was going to get replaced anyway. He had two years to prove he belonged with McLaren and failed to live up to it. In 2008 McLaren was fighting for the title but Jyri only managed one win, in fluke circumstances no less, leading to McLaren losing the constructors' championship despite the fact that Anthony Harrison managed to bring the drivers' championship back to Woking. This year, while he did have a decent run of form midseason, Jyri was nowhere in the beginning of the season and he's been nowhere in the latter half of the season, so when a team wants to get back to the front of the grid as soon as possible, he's dead weight. As I watched the Emirati flyover spraying smoke in the Pan-Arab colors of black, white, and green - which, along with a red band, form the flag of the UAE - the realization really set in that I was about to have my last race with Ferrari. Just one more race, something that could be over as soon as the first corner if I'm not careful, and then I'm done with this chapter of my life. The bitterness of my Ferrari stint ending was only offset by the sweetness that I was going to McLaren next, because like I said, Jyri Kaasalainen failed to live up to expectations, and that has cleared the way for me to jump from top team to top team. In the last race of the 2008 season, my career was over despite the fact that I was improving, despite the fact that I was closing the gap to my teammate in qualifying, and beating him in the races, but now, a year later? My career is better than it has ever been. Just like I said in the interview at the start of this weekend: I am so very grateful to Ferrari and in this last race, I don't care that I'm all the way back in eleventh place, I'm going to give it my all and try to give back to the legendary team that believed in me.
To that end, Matti was in thirteenth, I was in eleventh, and Yoshikazu Higashiyama was the car lining up between us in twelfth. Maximilien Longpre was the car ahead of me in tenth, lining up alongside the Williams of Tommy Koskinen. Victor Hartmann was in eighth and Piotr Kaminski in seventh, both for BMW Sauber in what is likely to be Sauber's last race as a factory team. Ivan Tripoli for Toyota is in sixth, world champion James Buxton is in fifth with nothing left to play for, and his teammate Rudolfo Goncalves is in fourth, still fighting for second place in the drivers' championship. Having already won both championships, there could be no better send-off for the Japanese manufacturer than for the Brazilian veteran to finish second to his teammate in the standings, completely a perfect season for the team before it's sold off to Mercedes-Benz. The Red Bulls aren't just going to take that lying down though, because Brazilian Grand Prix winner Martin Weaver lines up in third while Maximilian Renner is in second, hoping to deny Honda their monopoly on success. Finally, there is Anthony Harrison, the symbol of how McLaren has spent all season fighting with a hand tied behind its back. Anthony Harrison is there weekend after weekend, pulling McLaren on his bare back, while Jyri Kaasalainen is nowhere to be seen. McLaren expects to bounce back next year, once they're adjusted to the new regulations and have, what they hope, will be two world class drivers, young and hungry for success, but before that can happen, there's just one last race in the 2009 season. One last race in this decade that has been defined by four teams: Ferrari, Renault, McLaren, and now, surprisingly enough, Honda. Ferrari and McLaren will try to bounce back next decade, Mercedes-Benz will try to carry the torch that Honda lit, and Red Bull will try to make the 2010s a decade of their own to build off of the success they have found this year. There is plenty to look forward to in the future, but first, we have to close out this era.
Five red lights came out to begin the inaugural Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Anthony Harrison led from the Red Bulls in turn one but the energy drinks company kept their cars on the heels of the British supercar manufacturer. Further back though, I blasted off the line and disposed of Longpre instantly, finding myself on the tail end of a battle between the BMW Saubers and Tommy Koskinen as we arrived in sector one. Victor Hartmann got the better start so he was the car ahead, but Piotr Kaminski still seemed to be the faster car at this stage, so the Pole went side-by-side with the German going into the chicane before the hairpin. Victor kept his teammate behind through the two turns and into the hairpin, maintaining the position, but this squeezed the four of us together as the cars ahead were able to pull a few car lengths ahead of us. This was slowing me down at a point in the race where I didn't need it, so I worked on trying to pass them as soon as possible: to that end, I got into the tow of my former teammate and drafted past him going turn eight, taking the inside and gaining the position. Coming out of turn nine, we reached the second back straight and I pulled up to the back of the quarreling BMWs, attempting a move on Kaminski into the braking zone but backing out when it became apparent that the Pole was going to make this difficult. Piotr Kaminski is not the type to purposefully crash into anyone, he's a fair driver, but the firm but fair kind, so while he won't purposefully crash into me, he will absolutely cause a scenario where there is a high risk of us coming together if I try anything. I learned that the hard way in Australia 2008 and have learned to treat the Pole with respect, he's a race winner for a reason and could be a championship contender again, if given the opportunity.
I would finally get past the Pole on lap three with a little bit of help from KERS coming out of the hairpin, and then I would pull ahead of Victor Hartmann at the end of the very next lap, out dragging him as we crossed the start-finish line to begin lap four and conclusively pulling ahead in the braking zone for turn one. I did lose quite a bit of time stuck behind the BMW Saubers though, so while I was now up to seventh, there was a big gap to the cars ahead. I would try eating into that gap throughout the first stint, but when I made my first stop on lap eighteen, I was only up to sixth. Even that gain wasn't down to closing the gap to the cars ahead, but rather it was because on the same lap as my pitstop, Anthony pulled into the pits with a right rear brake failure, Mclaren reliability taking him out from the lead of the race...hopefully they'll have that sorted in time for the 2010 season. My concerns over my future ride aside, I made some good progress from the start of the race until now, having gone from eleventh on the grid to now be running in a stable, points-paying position. That being said, while I was in aggregate sixth, there were some potential complications, mainly the fact that both Victor Hartmann and Yoshikazu Higashiyama had yet to stop. I had good race pace so far - in fact, I was starting to reel in Ivan Tripoli, now just over a second behind the Toyota - but based on the qualifying performance, we weren't all that much better off than the BMWs and Toyotas today, so I'd have to watch out. I've proven I can overtake Hartmann in this race already, now I just need to do it again.
"Tripoli is losing grip, go get him girl." Ronnie reported in as the Toyota really started struggling just a few laps later, burning up the option tyres he had for this middle stint of the race. I was on the longer-lasting, harder prime tyres so I still had good condition on my tyres - it was difficult to manage temperature though, as we were going into the night part of the race, so with dropping temperatures and the smooth, newly made surface of the track, our tyres were liable to slide across the surface rather than gripping into it - Tripoli was the one suffering from it now though, so when he locked up in the chicane between the straights, I was able to sail on through and gain the position, rising up into a potential aggregate fifth...something which should become clearer as the two of them should finally make their stops any minute now. Higashiyama would bite first, the Japanese rookie slotting in behind me and again of his teammate Tripoli who was still struggling to get his tyres into the operating window. Hartmann pitted soon after as well, and I was ahead of him...though the gap wasn't as comfortable as I'd like, and my tyres were now beginning to wear as well. The end result of which was that, once I took my second stop and came out under the tunnel on fresh tyres, I slotted in between Hartmann and Higashiyama, able to clear the Japanese driver on fresh tyres but struggling to catch up to the BMW Sauber ahead in the laps remaining. I didn't realize the significance at the time, but with the change to the 2010 regulation on full-race fuel tanks on safety grounds, this would be the last refueling stop I ever took in Formula One.
Fortunately - or unfortunately, depending on how you view things - I wasn't the only one struggling. Martin Weaver's tyres were practically dead at the end of the race, and James Buxton was really reeling him in, hoping to cap his season with the best possible result, maybe even passing both Red Bulls to help his teammate take second place. Both cars would go off track at one point or another as the Englishman and the Australian pushed each other hard, but at the end of the night, as the fireworks blasted over the start-finish straight to conclude the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Maximilian Renner crossed the line to finish out the season with a win. Martin Weaver took second place after a hard battle, and James Buxton settled for the final podium season. The British veteran dominated the early part of the season and was able to coast off of that all season long, even being linked with McLaren at one point, but the Woking team chose me instead, leaving the Englishman in a strange position. He will pilot the #1 car next season, but much like Damon Hill after the 1996 season, no one quite knows where the championship winning number will end up. Perhaps he'll be able to convince Mercedes that he can play the - relatively, in his case - young gun to their German driver and remain with the Brackley-based F1 team, perhaps he'll finally live up to all of those court cases and make that dream move back to Williams, who gave him his first chance in F1 in 2000.
Regardless of what comes next for the champion, the points-paying results of the 2009 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 10 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 8 points.
3: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 6 points.
4: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 5 points.
5: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 4 points.
6: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 3 points.
7: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Toyota - 2 points.
8: Maximilien Longpre - Luxembourg - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 1 point.
So, in the past year, I was publicly outed by a British tabloid, lost my sponsorship from Kazakhoil, and that in turn led to me losing my seat with Williams. Out of F1 and desperate to break my way back into the sport, I went anywhere and everywhere I could, racing hard in an attempt to stay on F1's radar and break back into the series that I've been trying to get into all my life. First things first, Ernesto Signorelli was able to get me a drive with A1 Team Monaco just weeks after the end of the 2008 F1 season, putting me in a high-level open wheeler for the Asian rounds, and I managed to win a race there in Malaysia, then with Peugeot I competed at the 12 Hours of Sebring, the 1000km of Spa, and finally won the 24 Hours of Le Mans, becoming part of a historic French victory at the great French race. Finally, in Indycar, on a track full of Andretti history, I gave Andretti Green Racing yet another win at the Toronto Exhibition Place street circuit. All of this, proving my success all over the world, destroying my relationship in the process, and did that get me back into F1? Not really. What really got me back into F1 was Henrique de Matteo getting injured in a freak accident and Wilhelm Ziegler not being fit enough to fill in for him. Ferrari's options were someone who was out of F1 for a few months or a test driver who hadn't raced competitively since the 1990s, so Ferrari chose me and it had next to nothing to do with my time in Indycar, A1GP, and endurance racing.
That being said, once I was back in F1, I was flying. I scored points in every single race with Ferrari, I took podiums in Belgium, Russia, and Brazil, and I took my maiden Grand Prix win at the Singapore Grand Prix. I went from outside of the sport to so in demand that I received offers from Mercedes-Benz, Sauber, and McLaren, the team I would eventually choose. I lost everything at the end of 2008, and now at the end of 2009, I'm about to have a multi-million-dollar four-year contract with one of the greatest teams in F1 history. I've gone from not flying to any of the F1 races at all to being able to fly to each race in a private plane provided by McLaren and its partners. There was a time when I felt lucky just to be given a Williams seat, but now I'm a proper frontrunner, and I've gone from honor to honor, moving from Ferrari to McLaren. Ferrari to McLaren...these are the things that dreams are made out of, legends of the sport. Every kid on the F1 video games wanted to drive one of these cars, including Natasha and I when we were playing the old games on the Playstation...and now I've made it. I've gone from driving Ferraris in the video game to helping Ferrari seal third place in the constructors' championship, scoring 48 points in the process and more than doubling my career total in just half a season.
As for Hideki Kitagawa, my replacement at Williams, today he scored a dubious honor. By finishing down in thirteenth place, he became the only driver to race in every single event of the 2009 season and fail to score a single point. There are question marks over Toyota remaining in the sport and therefore connections over Toyota's partnership with Williams, so Kitagawa's career might just be over. Even if Hideki's Japanese benefactor does remain in the sport, Yoshikazu Higashiyama has shown demonstrably more talent and speed in two races filling in for the injured Fabian Schmidt than Kitagawa did all season, so Hideki has been properly shown up. Hell, if I was in Sir Frank Williams' shoes, I'd go ahead and tell Toyota that Williams is glad to continue running a Japanese driver for them...provided that driver is Higashiyama. Natasha's old championship rival has demonstrated that he's the real deal, and I can't wait to see how his career looks looking forward.
Speaking of results, that brings us to the championship table: the 2009 World Drivers' Championship results read as follows:
1: James Buxton - Great Britain - Honda - 103 points.
2: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 91 points.
3: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Honda - 89 points.
4: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 72.5 points.
5: Matias Hamalainen - Finland - Scuderia Ferrari - 62 points.
6: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 61 points.
7: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - Scuderia Ferrari - 48 points.
8: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Williams-Toyota - 33.5 points.
9: Ivan Tripoli - Italy - Toyota - 30.5 points.
10: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Renault - 28 points.
11: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 22 points.
12: Victor Hartmann - Germany - BMW Sauber - 19 points.
13: Fabian Schmidt - Germany - Toyota - 17 points.
14: Jyri Kaasalainen - Finland - McLaren-Mercedes - 14 points.
15: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - BMW Sauber - 11 points.
16: Umberto Petronelli - Italy - Force India-Mercedes - 6 points.
17: Maximilien Longpre - Luxembourg - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 6 points.
18: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 5 points.
19: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Toyota - 2 points.
20: Maximilien Lecroix - France - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 2 points.
21: Hideki Kitagawa - Japan - Williams-Toyota - 0 points.
22: Filipe Yannick - Brazil - Renault - 0 points.
23: Bernard Audinet - France - Renault - 0 points.
24: Ximen Goikoetxea - Spain - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 0 points.
So, after a 2008 season that saw no driver movement - with the exception of Haruki Tanaka and Louis Sanderson losing their seats when Super Aguri collapsed - the 2009 season instead saw plenty of in-season movement. Part of that is down to Henrique de Matteo and Fabian Schmidt both having rather serious crashes, leading to me and Yoshikazu, respectively, getting our seats for the latter part of the season, but some of that is down to performance as well. Toro Rosso dropped Maximilien Lecroix for Ximen Goikoetxea and Renault dropped Filipe Yannick for Bernard Audinet, which means that, maybe even if Ferrari had said no, I could have found a way onto the F1 grid. That being said - and no offense intended to Henrique - I'm very glad with how things turned out, because, for all its faults, the 2009 was a substantially better car than the Toro Rosso, the Renault, or even the Williams. Sitting here, a Grand Prix winner with a secure, long-term contract with a top team, maybe now I can say that everything happened for a reason and things are better this way. I certainly wouldn't have won the Singapore Grand Prix in a Williams, and I wouldn't be a Le Mans winner either. Peel away the agony of losing my seat and losing my girlfriend, and 2009 was a monumental year for me. This is the year where I've gone and proven that women can do it all over the world, any discipline, any type of race. Whether those be timed sprint races in A1GP, full length F1 and Indycar races, or the twenty-four marathon of Le Mans.
All that being said, the 2009 World Constructors' Championship results read as follows:
1: Honda - Japan - Brackley, Great Britain - 192 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 163.5 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 132 points.
4: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 75 points.
5: Toyota - Japan - Cologne, Germany - 49.5 points.
6: Williams-Toyota - Great Britain - Grove, Great Britain - 33.5 points.
7: BMW Sauber - Germany - Hinwil, Switzerland - 30 points.
8: Renault - France - Enstone, Great Britain - 28 points.
9: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 11 points.
10: Toro Rosso-Ferrari - Italy - Faenza, Italy - 8 points.
If you're wondering what all the half-points are about, the Malaysian Grand Prix at the beginning of the season was stopped halfway through because of torrential rains and they ended up awarding half-points for the event.
The position of McLaren and especially Williams and Renault in the final standings are a testament to the caliber of three drivers: Anthony Harrison, Tommy Koskinen, and Felipe Alvarez. Two of these drivers, Harrison and Alvarez, are expected to be in top rides for 2010, at McLaren and Ferrari, respectively, but it still isn't clear where Koskinen will end up, though it is suspected that he will leave Williams. As a former teammate of his, I cannot stress how good of a driver Koskinen is, especially in qualifying, because we pushed each other hard, we made each other better drivers, and now he's single-handedly secured sixth place in the constructors' championship for Williams. I think in retrospect, people will look back at that 2007 and 2008 Williams driver lineup and see two of the young drivers who would go on to do great things in F1. Yes, I include myself in that, because next year I am going to McLaren, driving side by side with the 2008 World Champion...and I'm not afraid. Because this year, I've proven I can run with champions, take podiums consistently, and even win a race on my day. To that end, let's take a look at how things broke down between me and Matti Hamalainen in our time together at Ferrari:
Our time together started in Valencia, where Matti qualified sixth and I qualified eighth, we would go on to finish third and sixth, respectively. A race later in Belgium, he qualified sixth and I seventh, which we turned into a one-two finish that day, so while he was still ahead of me in the second race, the gap had already narrowed to just a position in each session. I would then struggle in qualifying at Monza, leading to Matti qualifying third while I was down in eighth, however, come the end of the race, he was still in third while I moved forward into sixth place, so while he scored more points that day, I showed more forward progress. Next, in the Atlantic Grand Prix, Matti again outqualified me by a slim margin, lining up sixth compared to my seventh, however, I would beat him in the race, finishing fourth to his fifth, outperforming my world champion teammate for the first time. In Russia we again started alongside each other, with Matti lining up fourth and myself fifth, but that would turn into first and third, as Hamalainen took his second win of the season while I fell to third in trying to keep Maximilian Renner behind late in the race, protecting our win. Singapore was a poor qualifying performance for the team, with Matti in thirteenth and myself in tenth, but we would both be promoted further up the grid, and at the end of that race, Matti would finish outside of the points in tenth while I took my first win, first place.
In Japan, Hamalainen would qualify eighth and I qualified twelfth, but both of us would get promoted several places thanks to all the grid penalties for ignoring yellow flags following Schmidt's horror crash. In the actual race, Matti Hamalainen would finish in fourth while I finished in sixth, securing a good points load for the team, but one that again showed me making more relative progress than my teammate. In the penultimate race in Brazil, Matti lined up fifth and I lined up ninth, however, by the end of the race Matti could only manage sixth while I was in contention for the win and managed to finish third. Now finally we get to the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Matti qualified thirteenth and I qualified eleventh, and at the end of the race, Matti finished outside of the points in twelfth whilst I was able to score points yet again by finishing in sixth place. So, at the end of all this, Matti outqualified me 7 to 2, however in the race, the ratio was 5 to 4, ending up nearly in an eleven split despite the fact that Matti was, one: the 2007 World Champion, and two: he's been in the car all season long, where I've only been here for the final nine races. Finally, the real kicker is that, in our time as teammate, Matti scored 44 points compared to by 48. I scored more points than my teammate in our time together. Now, granted the main reason for that is that when Matti took his wins, I was on the podium with him, whereas when I took my win, Matti wasn't even in the points. That being said, neither of us had any retirements in the final nine races of the season, so when I scored four more points than him in our time together, there really isn't an excuse to take that away from me. So yeah, head-to-head, Hamalainen had the edge, points-wise I have the edge, and all in all, I'll settle and call it matching my teammate. Considering I'm in only my third year in F1 and spent the first half of the season elsewhere, I can be pretty damn happy with that.
"So, your last race with Ferrari is over and done." Alexis noted, with a rather clear sadness in the Thai-Singaporean woman's voice.
"It is...I get to keep the car though, so that's nice." I grinned, referring to the red 612 Scaglietti road car I was given as a company car. It's a 5.7L, 533 horsepower V12 so it's not exactly a slouch performance wise, but what I actually like out of it is that it's a big, comfortable grand tourer. I know that some drivers will disagree, and they'll drive their super tuned, super stiff supercars when away from the track, but I get enough high-performance driving from my day job. I don't need a track day car as my daily driver, I want something that's a little bit sporty, sure, but also something that's actually pleasant to sit inside of and, dare I say, just a bit practical to use. As for styling, while there are some that would call it a bit of an ugly duckling in terms of Ferrari design, I actually like it, and not for nothing, it's also a Ferrari with quad taillights, which is a long-running design trend that the Italian manufacturer seems to be moving away from now with the 458 Italia, 599 GTB, and the California. Of course, I wouldn't mind getting one of those cars either - a 458 in particular seems like a very elegant car - but I doubt Ferrari is going to be keen on giving me another car as a parting gift. Oh well, if I really want a mid-engine V8 supercar, McLaren recently unveiled their own...
"Well, I'm glad I got to work with you. You did basically get me a promotion, after all." Alexis awkwardly thanked me, looking away and blushing a bit from embarrassment.
"Don't worry about it - I should be thanking you, I had a lot more fun with you than with Henrique's press officer." I shrugged it off. Even if I was only with Ferrari for a little bit, it did feel nice to get the little things - the sticker with my name on it, the little Kazakh flag on the cockpit surround for me, and, indeed, having my own press officer - it's like, no matter what happens next in my career, there is real, tangible evidence that I raced for Scuderia Ferrari in 2009, that I even went and won a race with them. So even if I crash and burn at McLaren and it turns out my pace was a fluke and I'm really not cut out to be a frontrunner, I will have still done the thing that every racing driver dreams about and so few ever get to accomplish. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: every driver wants to win a race in F1, every driver wants to race for Ferrari, and I got to do both in the same season.
"Seriously though, I was a minor, minor figure in the team before this, and because of you, I got to be one of the primary press officers for the team, even if it only was for half a year. I think even the people who can't wait for Henrique to get back are gonna miss you in their own way." Alexis continued, explaining just how much of an impact I've had in this team. I suppose I was here for long enough and performed well enough that I became a new normal, the team got used to me being around, and it sort of just turned into this thing where Henrique de Matteo was going to come back which meant I had to leave. My destination would end up being McLaren and that just made things weird, because the team got used to me, and now I was going to be a rival.
"Well, it's not like I'm leaving the paddock. I'll be in the next garage over. Just because I'll be wearing a different color shirt doesn't mean we won't see each other." I pointed out, noting the fact that there wasn't exactly a no fraternizing rule going on here.
"I guess...but it won't be the same." she sighed.
"I mean...yeah, it won't be, but it doesn't have to be all that different either. I'll still be me; you'll still be you." I responded.
"Yeah, yeah...I guess we'll see in Bahrain, huh?" Alexis shrugged, still seeming a bit sad about the whole thing. I probably didn't have the authority to do this, but I has half-tempted to offer that she come over to McLaren with me, but then I remembered that between her dad being a mechanic at Ferrari and her living in Italy as a result, it wasn't as simple for her to switch teams as it is for me as a driver.
"Yes, I'll see you there." I nodded, meaning it. We went our separate ways at that point, her heading to the team hospitality unit while I started heading out of the track and towards the airport. We would meet again though, because after a few months of rest, car development, and testing, F1 would be back, just a short boat trip away in Bahrain to start the 2010 Formula One season at the Sakhir circuit with a special 60th year of F1 event. As the whole point of this conversation went, we would be on opposing teams come that race, since she'd still be involved with Ferrari while I'd be driving for McLaren...and on that note, I spotted my future teammate. Anthony Harrison was leaving the McLaren hospitality center, dressed in casual clothes with a jacket on and a suitcase in his hand, clearly heading straight for the airport after a disappointing retirement in the end of the season. Part of me felt he probably wanted to be left alone right now, but he was also my friend, and he was going to me dealing with me on a regular basis come next year, so I approached anyway "Hey!"
"Tamara! What's up?" the American greeted rather warmly all things considered, losing some of his frown in the process.
"Just heading to the airport for the flight home." I answered.
"Same, same. How are you flying back?" he asked.
"With the Koskinens this time, they're also heading out tonight, so I figured I'd join them." I answered.
"Yeah, makes sense." he nodded before the frown slowly made its way back onto his face, along with a bit of a tense silence before he finally asked "So, you're going to be my teammate next year?"
"Yes...is that a problem?" I asked, now wondering if I was part of the reason he was in a bad mood.
"No, no. It's not you, it's just...look, I understand why the team made the change, but personally? I had a good thing going with Jyri. I became the number one driver for the team, I won the championship, and I didn't have to look over my shoulder in my own garage. Now...I don't want it to be another 2007 situation, alright? I've been teammates with Felipe Alvarez, I know what it's like to be at each other's throats, and we lost a championship because of it. I don't want that to happen again." Anthony explained. He didn't quite say this part out loud, but I got the impression that if it was only up to Anthony, he would've kept Kaasalainen as his teammate. It's not because Anthony can't take on a challenge - he proved he could by matching Alvarez as a rookie - it's just that he prefers to work in a less stressful environment, so he just wants the team to give him the equipment he needs to work with and to let him work. In those situations, where Anthony is comfortable and the team is with him, he can be virtually unbeatable, but when things are rocky, well...he's seen the 2007 title slip from McLaren's hands and into Matti Hamalainen's.
"Hey - I promise you there's not going to be a problem with me. You can ask Tommy, you can ask Matti, hell you can ask my teammates from Le Mans or Indycar, I don't cause problems within the team. I don't want that stress any more than you do." I promised. I'm not looking to go into McLaren and cause problems, I'm not even necessarily looking to beat my teammate right away, I just want to get into a top team, be able to match my teammate on my day, and maybe pick up a win or two along the way. I'm not expecting to instantly be champion or instantly be as good as Anthony is. Based on how I did against Matti, I think it would be reasonable to expect that Anthony dominates me in qualifying - it felt like he was on pole every other race in the second half of this season, so who knows where he'll be if the 2010 car is a big improvement - while in the races, I think a 60-40 split Anthony's way would be pretty reasonable for me. Now retirements or luck could skew that in either direction, but I would be fine if he outperforms me three out of every five times, because outperforming a champion forty percent of the time is better than I ever expected to be anyway. I'm just happy to be in a top team and I'll take any good performance as a blessing after the time I've spent outside of F1.
"Well, I think you're more of a threat than you give yourself credit for - but still, I really do appreciate the fact that you're not going to consciously cause any problems. Let's hope for a good year, eh?" Anthony responded, beginning on a bit of a sour note that he'll still probably see me as a threat in spite of what I said, but quickly moving on to a more positive note in wishing for a good 2010.
"Here's hoping!" I responded, shaking hands with the American. Anthony might think I'll be a problem in spite of my words, but if anything, I think that shows he has an appreciation for my talent and a deep respect for me - something I clearly have for him, as well - so I actually think we're in a good place. We both consider the other more than worthy of being in this position, we both want the team to take a big step forward, and I think we both want to see the other win races. Now, we both obviously have different ideas as to how many races the other should win and what percentage we should then win in turn, but the point is we can be happy for each other's success. All of that, to me, suggests that the foundation is there for a good working relationship between a pair of friends. We're good drivers, we're young drivers, and we want to bring this team back to the greatness it experienced when we were kids in the 1980s and 1990s.
"So...it's like a loan move?" I asked, still not entirely understanding this arrangement.
"Basically yes. I'm signed to Mercedes as their reserve driver for the next two years, but Wilhelm and Tommy are going to be their main drivers. So instead, Mercedes has made a deal with Marussia to put me in their car, at least for the 2010 season, but it's probably going to be 2011 as well. Two years there, and then maybe I'll get to move up to the Mercedes team, especially if Wilhelm wants to retire." Natasha explained, filling in the rather complex details of her F1 debut. The 2010 Formula One grid has begun taking shape, with Ferrari, McLaren, Red Bull, Toro Rosso, Williams, and Force India remaining the same, BMW Sauber reverting to just Sauber, Renault selling their team to Lotus Cars to bring the Lotus name back to F1 after decades of absence, and Honda becoming the Mercedes GP Petronas F1 team. This is the organization that Natasha Tsirinskaya is formally contracted to; however, she'll be driving for one of the three new teams entering F1 for 2010: that being the Marussia F1 team, a British based team licensed after a boutique Russian supercar company. The other new teams would be Caterham, named for a Malaysian-owned British track toy company, and HRT, standing for Hispania Racing Team, and organization trying to cash in on the popularity F1 is experiencing in Spain in the wake of Felipe Alvarez's career. These aren't exactly the most reputable names in motorsport, but it's gotten Natasha onto the 2010 grid, and it seems to just be a stopgap until she can get a seat with Mercedes-Benz.
Speaking of, when they couldn't get me, Mercedes-Benz decided to get my former teammate, Tommy Koskinen. I am a bit frustrated that it came at the expense of Nat, but like I said before, Tommy is one of the best young guns on the grid and he single-handedly carried Williams to sixth in the constructors' championship this year, so I get why Mercedes chose him as their young gun to propel this project forward. As for their German, Mercedes is pulling all the stops on this one, as they brought Wilhelm Ziegler back into the sport for the first time since 2006. The German must have gotten that hunger for racing again in his attempts to fill in for Henrique de Matteo, so he's signed for the German brand, and this time, Wilhelm isn't going to let some motorcycling injury get in the way of his F1 return. So, with Tommy gone and Hideki on the way out, this has left two vacancies at Williams, ones the team quickly filled with James Buxton and Rudolfo Goncalves. That's right, Williams managed to pick up the 2009 constructors' championship winning lineup wholesale. From what I understand, it wasn't necessarily intentional either, they actually signed Rudolfo Goncalves first and then Buxton sort of neatly fell into their lap once it became clear that he wasn't going to get a seat at either McLaren or Mercedes. This rather neatly means that the Williams and Mercedes lineups solve each other, which probably makes things easier for all the media people writing about this stuff.
"So...how do you think it's going to be?" I asked my little cousin as we sat together on the couch of my apartment, just having a casual conversation about how our careers were going now that we were both on the same level.
"Look...these teams were created under the expectation of a budget cap that never came, so I know that things are going to be rough. On the other hand, there are some good signs too. You know the Manor Motorsport team in the junior series? Well, we have a technical partnership with them, and a lot of their employees are coming over, so there are some good, experienced people on this team. Second of all, the Cosworth engines we'll be running were good enough for Williams in 2006 and good enough for them in 2010, so they'll have to be good enough for us too." Natasha gave a measured, but overall optimistic answer. I know from experience that Williams wasn't all that happy with the Cosworth engines in 2006 and that engine is coming back in 2010 primarily because the FIA pushed it as a low-cost option for HRT, Caterham, and Marussia, while Williams has taken those engines as well due to being left high and dry by Toyota pulling out of the sport. As for the budget cap, that was a whole big crisis that the teams and the FIA argued about early in the 2009 season before I came back, and in the end, the teams gutted the cost cap and pretty much kept all their power. It wasn't good enough for BMW though, because they pulled out regardless.
"Well...good luck," I said what I could at that point, because none of us would know exactly how things would shake out until we got to Bahrain for the first race.
Notes:
We'll get a bit more offseason next chapter then start 2010 off with a bang. I really like this part of the story so I hope you will too.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 31: The Dawn of a New Era
Notes:
Hello everyone! Today we start 2010 and the second half of act two. I'm really excited for this part of the story, and I hope y'all will enjoy it too.
Also, just for the sake of simplicity, I've simplified some of the team name changes that happen here. Renault becomes Lotus from 2010 rather than keeping the Renault name for 2010 then becoming Lotus-sponsored Renault for 2011 and Lotus proper for 2012. Thusly, Lotus Racing is now Caterham from the get-go rather than messing around with the Lotus name for two years before Enstone got it. Likewise, the Virgin team from 2010 and 2011 is Marussia from the beginning. Brawn in real life/Honda here is still going to become Mercedes, BMW Sauber just becomes Sauber rather than the confusing BMW Sauber-Ferrari debacle we had. Look, the alternative is having two teams called Lotus in 2011 so I think this just makes it easier for everyone.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXXI.
The Dawn of a New Era.
"Alright..." I took a deep breath as I put down the final box before turning to my two impromptu helpers "Thank you,"
"Come on, it was nothing." shrugged Ysabella Villarreal.
"Hey, if it gets you in the US, you'll move another two dozen boxes for you." Daniella Pieri responded, revealing that, even after all the awkward end to our relationship, my return to F1, and my new contract keeping me there for the foreseeable future, she still likes me and wants me to experience her country.
"Is that a standing offer? Because I could use some manual labor." I teased in turn, meaning it as a joke, but there really was plenty of work left to be done.
"Look I'll help you settle up this whole place, but you gotta let me try to turn you into an American - next time, we're gonna have you shooting guns, eating hot dogs, and driving an old Dodge Charger, and so help me God you're gonna love it." Pieri puffed her chest out in exaggerated patriotism, getting both a smile and an eyeroll out of me as I sat own on the solitary couch I had set up in what was going to be the living room. So what was going on here? Well, at some point around December, around the time I caught up on the TV shows and video games I missed during the season, I started feeling lonely in my apartment. Roksana and I had lived together for over a year by the time we broke up, and I was used to her habitating my space. I was used to her presence, her smell, her stuff...and now that was all gone. During the season, I was preoccupied with Ferrari and the contract drama - not to mention the fact that travel kept me away from home to begin with - so I didn't notice it then, but a month and a half into the offseason? It was all I could notice.
Now, there were band-aid solutions. Natasha visited a lot and that helped while she was here, but that wasn't sustainable. I could distract myself in things like new shows of playing through Grand Theft Auto IV again, but that wasn't a real solution either. I suppose I could have changed apartments, but I liked the place where I lived, and then my new apartment would just remind me of the place I went to in order to escape my lingering feelings for my ex-girlfriend. Thus, something more radical was in order...so I bought a house in Miami. I first stumbled on this place when I was in Indycar and looking at potential places to live, but with my stay in the US proving short and fighting Roksana over the duration of that stay the whole time, things didn't really go anywhere. Now though, outside of the season, and without Roksana to consider, I had the time to check the place out for myself, make an offer, and now I'm moving in. Now, when I first looked at this place, it was to be my primary residence during the Indycar season, but obviously that's no longer relevant, so really, this is more of a vacation home now. It's a place I have when I feel the need to escape the spotlight and media scrutiny of Formula One and instead enjoy the anonymity of a country that doesn't really know who I am or what my sport is.
My McLaren contract - and the money I earned in my brief stint at Ferrari to be fair - meant that I could afford this place, a suburban Miami home with high fences, its own pole, and a stylishly timeless white exterior. It was a two-story building with a detached garage and a grand entrance framed by a pair of white, square columns. Out back was a lavish patio area including the swimming pool; one that was both aesthetic and large enough to put some actually beneficial laps in when I need training, all surrounded by the comfort of that tall courtesy fence which, thankfully, is in the style of the neighborhood. All that being said, I was one person, so a place like this was a bit much for me, hence I needed a little bit of help moving. Dani Pieri was my main contact in the US, and she was enthusiastic about getting involved, and she even brought along Ysabella Villarreal. Villarreal was one of Dani's teammates in an all-female effort at the 24 Hours of Daytona - one I was actually asked to be a part of but had to refuse due to my F1 testing commitments and the potential risk of injury. So I couldn't race with the two of them, but I was at least able to spend some time with them while getting situated in my new American residence. Obviously, during the season I'll be centered in my Monaco apartment and spending about as much time in hotel rooms near the race track as I will in any place at home, but during the offseason and the summer break? I'll be able to stay here.
"So, did she make you eat guns and shoot hot dogs too?" I joked to Ysabella once Dani left for the kitchen, which thankfully, is one of the more operational rooms in this place. I'm excited to live here and I think it will offer me more variety and sanity in my life, even when removing the whole ex-girlfriend factor from my place in Monaco. I haven't exactly made progress with this considering that the two people helping me move in are racing drivers, but I honestly don't know all that many people who aren't related to me or involved in my racing life. Roksana provided that for a little bit but, again, that relationship broke down, so if I want to talk to someone other than fellow racing drivers or my trainer, I need to get out of Monaco. I am exaggerating a little bit, obviously there is more to Monaco than just racing drivers or people involved in the sport, but it's also small enough that everyone is likely within six degrees of separation of a racing driver. Hell, Daniel MacGowan once told me that his hairdresser's son is racing go karts in the south of France.
"I think she just misses you - she was really excited when she asked me to help you move in." the Venezuelan girl shrugged "and I figured why not? It's not every day that you meet an F1 race winner."
"Sure, but I think the standards are a bit different when you're Grand Am teammates with an Indycar race winner." I pointed out, noting that Villarreal had little reason to be starstruck when, one: she was a racing driver in her own race, two: she was racing against plenty of race winning NASCAR and Indycar drivers in the Grand Am series. Hell, the #02 Chip Ganassi car alone at the Rolex 24 will be driven by Charles Armstrong, Marino Franzese, and Juan Pablo Montoya, so you get plenty of Indycar and NASCAR success with those three, and Montoya comes with Formula One success as well.
"Yeah, yeah, I know my situation is pretty good. Look I was born in Venezuela and with a little bit of luck and some oil sponsorship, I managed to get out and start racing karts in the United States. I thought that if I could prove I was good enough, I could maybe go to Europe and maybe get to F1 someday, but I wasn't good enough for that and we couldn't go to Europe. So then my goal was to stay in the US and maybe be good enough for Champ Car or the IRL or something, wasn't good enough for that and Marina went instead, now I'm doing what I can in sports car and making a living in America, but...you're a top F1 driver. You don't have to act humble or downplay it, it's pretty amazing...if I want to be a little starstruck, let me." she countered, not quite making eye contact during that whole rant. My situation was a bit different of course, but with being born in Kazakhstan and getting fast tracked to F1 thanks to Kazakhoil sponsorship...I get it. I now think I have the talent where I could've gotten to the top tier of motorsport somehow, someway without Kazakhoil, but they're the reason I went from F3 to GP2 Asia in a single year, and they're why I was able to turn that winning 2006 GP2 Asia campaign into a 2007 Williams seat. Left to my own devices, I think I definitely would've still been in the Formula 3 Euro series in 2006, maybe I would've been able to challenge the likes of Richard DiPaolo and Max Renner that year for the title, maybe not. For 2007 onwards, it's hard to say where things would have been money wise, but my father was able to start growing Goliath as a company at this point, so maybe he would've been able to provide enough funding for GP2 or GP2 Asia, or maybe someone would've noticed my talent and taken me on at that point. I don't know, but I think I could've made the F1 grid around 2009, 2010 if I didn't have Kazakhoil sponsorship, and maybe I would've been a more rounded driver when I got there than I had been back in 2007, but I also could've run out of money and fallen out of contention for an F1 seat like Villarreal did. As confident as I am in my own abilities, every driver will tell you there's a certain amount of luck involved in making it to F1.
"Hey, hey, I didn't mean it like that. Sorry...I just get uncomfortable with the praise. I also don't think you're being fair to yourself. Dani's a great driver, especially on ovals but she's better on the road courses than she admits...and if she's taken to you enough to be friends off the track, I think that shows she believes in you. When we were in Indycar together she was so excited about me and wanted nothing more than for me to show off my talent in this series. I think she wants the same thing to happen to you, so as far as I'm concerned, that means you're more than good enough." I explained, making it absolutely clear that I meant no offense, and also sharing the fact that I've developed a deep respect for Daniella Pieri. The American seems to have taken Villarreal under her wing, so if she sees something in Ysabella, I don't think she's just a washout that's only good for the occasional sports car appearance, I think there's something here, and that deserves respect.
"Hear that Villarreal? Looks like I'm a good road course driver!" I laughed as Dani boasted behind me, having returned from the kitchen carrying a few bottles of coke, handing them out to the both of us and keeping one for herself.
"I mean it though, Dani picks them well, so if she's picked you, then you don't have to fawn over me, we're equals as far as I'm concerned." I added before taking a drink, trying to cover some of the blush creeping onto my face.
"You would think I pick 'em well, huh?" Dani saw what I was doing and made it worse by wiggling her eyebrows, causing me to nearly spit my drink out.
"Oh...you two...?" Ysabella asked, gesturing back and forth.
"Whoa, whoa, not anymore." Dani rushed to make it clear we weren't together.
"No, no...it was a one-time thing. I won in Toronto, we were celebrating, and we got carried away." I explained.
"Way to make it awkward..." Dani blushed too, apparently having revealed a bit too much of our shared sexual history to the Venezuelan. For a second, I wondered if Dani might have a bit of a crush on Ysabella, but no, that doesn't fit what I've seen of their dynamic so far. No, I think it's more of a little sister type of deal. Dani is a few years older than me and I think Ysabella is a year or two younger than me - she's definitely an adult, nineteen or twenty I'd wager - so she probably sees Villarreal as too young for her. I'm not all that much older but I think my comparative success in motorsport probably leads to Pieri seeing me as older than I actually am. Americans are weird about this stuff; I've only been able to drink in this country since last May after all.
"It's a good thing there wasn't a second date, otherwise I'd be bringing Dani's stuff in here too." Ysabella got a laugh out of both of us by getting us out of the awkwardness with a lesbian joke. Though if she knows the U-Haul lesbian joke, what else does she know?
American dreams aside, this offseason in particular proved to be short, because it was still January when I found myself in Vodafone's UK headquarters in Newbury, dressed in McLaren gear for the first time. White and red overalls, a red Vodafone cap, and the logos of McLaren, Mercedes, Vodafone, Mobil 1, Hugo Boss, Johnnie Walker, Santander, Emirates, and Bridgestone. It was real, and that made me smile...which was perfect for the cameramen taking pictures of Anthony and I posed in front of the sponsor backdrops marked with the same sponsors. Michael Coronet made an appearance as well, the young Brit dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and a tasteful red lapel pin shaped like the McLaren swoosh. The same swoosh that was on my racesuit, nicking the corner of the black McLaren logo, and on the hip of that same racesuit was a Kazakh flag followed by T. Shchegolyayeva in black text. I suppose it wasn't all that shocking given that I came from Ferrari, but spending time with Dani and Ysabella reminded me of the fact that, this time last year, I wasn't involved in the car launches, my name was nowhere to be seen in F1, and there wasn't even much of a hint that there would be an opening for me.
"Tamara!" a reported greeted "How do you feel about the coming season?"
"I'm excited! This is a brilliant team with so much success and I can't wait to be a part of the next era of that." I responded, managing to keep my smile through that whole question.
"How are you and Anthony matched up in terms of first driver, second driver?" the same reporter asked as a follow-up.
"Look, contractually there is nothing about first or second drivers. As far as McLaren is concerned, they have two young, talented drivers that will lead the team to glory. In practice, I have a lot of respect for Anthony, and I think it would be hard for anyone to match him, but I don't think we can judge anything until the season starts and we see how we match up. That being said, it's important to the team that we don't trip each other up and stay focused on being the best team we can be. This is a team that deserves to be at the very front of the grid and, as drivers, it's our responsibility to deliver that. That means being fast but that also means we can't throw away good results, so ultimately, instead of having a fixed first driver, second driver model, I think what we have is two drivers who respect each other and want the team to succeed. We've both proven we can win races, Anthony's proven he can win a championship, now we just need to prove we can deliver a 2010 to be proud of." I answered, dismissing any notion that I would be a second driver but also making it clear that I wasn't here to cause problems either. Like I promised Anthony, I'm not here to tear McLaren away from him, I want to be part of the best team possible, and, to me, that means both drivers need to be successful. My target this season is to prove I can win races for McLaren too; Anthony's target is probably to win the championship if at all possible. Both of those things can happen.
"Okay!" Michael Coronet announced "We're ready to move into the display room. Everyone, take your seats, Tamara, Anthony, follow me." Michael announced, bringing this first part of the launch event to a close and bringing everyone into the next room. The media people took their seats while the three of us headed up onto a stage, this one centered on a car covered in a white tarp, with a white backdrop reading "Vodafone McLaren Mercedes" behind it, with Vodafone in red, the latter two words in black. For now, Michael had me stand in front of the rear wing while Anthony sat in front of the front axle, while he went up to a podium "Ladies and gentlemen, I know you've been waiting a long time for this so I'm not going to make you wait any longer. In the 2010 Formula One World Championship, the #7 McLaren MP4/25 will be driven by 2008 World Champion Anthony Harrison of the United States and the #8 will be driven by 2009 24 Hours of Le Mans winner Tamara Shchegolyayeva of Kazakhstan. Our 2010 season begins now!"
On cue, I walked up to the front of the car while the taller Anthony went around to the back and we began pulling the tarp off of the car, exposing first a silver and red front wing, then two Bridgestone front tyres on a pushrod, double-wishbone front suspension, next came the Vodafone logo running along the nose of the car, followed by the cockpit, with the mirrors on the cockpit sides - Ferrari, along with some other teams, had been running them outboard last season for better aerodynamics, something I was open to continuing, but Anthony maintained that the visibility was better with conventional mirrors, which is true, but personally, I'm fine losing a bit of practicality in the mirrors if it comes with a small advantage - then those dayglo red painted sidepods marked with the Vodafone logo, along with the full length sharkfin engine cover. The silver surface, marked with Mobil 1 sponsorship, connected to the rear wing, splitting the Vodafone text on the front of it, though preserving the Fly Emirates text on the back of it. The sharkfin made for a silhouette quite unlike anything else and paired with the long nose and the long front wing, it looked like the car was constantly in motion, like the whole mass of the car was thrown towards the back by its sheer acceleration. Now, obviously that would make for crappy weight distribution in reality, but it made for a powerful looking visual. So, our car was set, and we had just over a month to get it working before the season starts in Bahrain in March.
McLaren was at the first preseason test in Valencia - at the MotoGP circuit at Ricardo Tormo, not the F1 street circuit around the marina - but proceedings were dominated by Ferrari on that occasion, with Henrique de Matteo topping the time sheets both days he was present, and Felipe Alvarez continuing the trend when it was his turn in the car on day three. Next up were two consecutive weekends of testing at Valencia, with Marussia making their debut in the first test and Caterham appearing for the first time on the second occasion. Both weekends were interrupted with rain but, when it did dry out, we were able to show some pace. On the Saturday of the first test, Anthony Harrison was able to top proceedings, while a week later, also in a brief dry respite, I was able to top the timesheets myself. The reason for the newfound success in Jerez? Well, we brought a sneaky new device, one that the media cleverly labeled the F-duct...because there's a duct next to the letter F in Vodafone. Pulitzer Prize winning journalism aside, the duct is ostensibly there for cockpit cooling - that is its legal purpose after all - however, should we roll our left leg over to the hole in the side of the cockpit, the air won't be able to escape and will instead continue down a tube, up the side of the car, along the length of the sharkfin, and then shoot out of the back of the car, creating a zone of negative air pressure that stalls the rear wing, reducing drag down the straights. At the end of the straight, all we need to do is roll our leg off of the gap, the rear wing will provide downforce as normal again, and we'll then left-foot brake into the corner, as typical of modern F1. Performance wise, it wasn't quite the same silver bullet as the double diffuser last year, but it was an advantage down the straights in an era where the engines are close in performance and frozen in development. Not only that, but it was a comparatively cheap, novel solution on our end, and thanks to the fact that it's built into a homologated chassis, our rivals have their work cut out for them if they want to adapt this F-duct for themselves.
Things were difficult for Marussia in these early tests, with reliability issues keeping their running minimal throughout both Jerez tests, and then as we moved onto Barcelona, things went from bad to worse when Nat's teammate, Brazilian Lukas Casemiro, crashed the car. This left Natasha on the sidelines the next day as the team didn't have replacement parts on hand and had to ship them in from England. This was doubly problematic for the Kyrgyz driver as, unlike most junior drivers, she actually hasn't raced at Barcelona before. Out of all the tracks we've tested at so far this offseason, this is the first one we actually race on, and Natasha is losing out on valuable time to learn the track - catching her up with everyone else - before we come back here in May for the actual race. Anthony Harrison set the fastest time at Barcelona before we all packed up and flew into the Middle East. The weekend before the opening round we had one final preseason test, on the same Bahrain endurance layout as the race will be this year, and Martin Weaver was the one to top testing this time out, bringing Red Bull into a conversation that had, so far, been dominated by Ferrari and McLaren. Mercedes GP Petronas, the heir to last years' championship winner Honda, was still a good team but somewhat behind the front pack as they struggle to overcome last year's lack of car development. Also at the sharp end of the midfield is Lotus, with the Malaysian parent company - Proton - of Lotus Cars having bought the team off of Renault who was ending its factory team involvement following the crashgate scandal. The team will still be using Renault engines, however. Force India, Williams, Toro Rosso, and Sauber were also in midfield contention, while Caterham and Marussia were at the back. HRT presumably was as well, but in spite of the fact that they showed up for this final test in Bahrain, neither Brazilian Ayrton Senna II nor Pakistani Shandar Khan did any running for the Spanish team.
Testing could give a general idea of where things were, but fundamentally, the real answers come when the five red lights go out and the first race of the season begins. That's what comes next, because after months of rest, recovery, training, and preparation, the 2010 season is upon us, and the teams and cars have been set up on the grid for their introduction.
First, there was Williams, the landing destination for both James Buxton and Rudolfo Goncalves after the sale of Honda. James Buxton, as champion, gets the #1 regardless of what team he goes to, and with Rudolfo going to Williams as the #2, it actually fits quite well. The constructors' championship winning lineup of 2009 may be at a different team for 2010, but it is still preserved. That being said, Williams was a midfield team last year and they're unlikely to improve with Cosworth engines this year, so they have to be lowering their expectations compared to last season. Nobody expects a title defense from Buxton this year.
Next up, in a normal year, would be the constructors' championship winning team, but with Mercedes having positioned themselves as the legal successor to the 1950s Mercedes team rather than Honda itself, they're considered a new entry. Therefore, #3 and #4 go to the second placed team, Red Bull, with Maximilian Renner first and Martin Weaver second. The Australian will be looking to change that and reassert his dominance over the team, while Maximilian Renner will be hoping to turn his race-winning form from the final race of 2009 into a title campaign for 2010. Red Bull are a young team but last year they proved that they must be considered among the contenders, they'll be looking to move one step further next year.
Behind Red Bull was my former team, Scuderia Ferrari. The returning Henrique de Matteo will drive the #5 Ferrari whilst Felipe Alvarez will be in the #6 car for his first season with the Italian giant. Henrique will want to prove he has what it takes, while after a series of disappointing years with Renault, Alvarez would expect nothing less than to be competing for the title. I know they have a good team from last year and I can see that the F10 has taken what worked on the F60B and improved it even further, turning it into the car that was the strongest on average throughout winter testing.
Next up was us. Vodafone McLaren Mercedes, with Anthony in the #7 and myself in the #8. Two race winning drivers, one of whom is a champion, a car that was strong throughout winter testing as well, and a clever new F-duct to give us a little bit of an edge down the straights as well. I don't need to say much more, we have the ability to fight for the title, now Anthony and I just need to make sure we live up to that potential.
With Toyota gone and Williams having gotten the champion numbers, Sauber comes next. Victor Hartmann remained with the team as the driver of the #9 and they picked up Yoshikazu Higashiyama to drive the #10 car. I think that, with Hartmann's unflinching consistency and the raw speed that Higashiyama demonstrated in his two appearances at the end of last year, this is actually a really strong driver pairing. That being said, their numbers are this high up because they were the BMW factory team, it's going to be hard to stay at this same level as a Ferrari customer team running what is mostly a blank white livery with black trim.
Lotus came next as the heirs of Renault, and they picked up Piotr Kaminski to drive the #11 car while Russian rookie Vladimir Alexandrov debuts in the #12. I suppose that it's nice to see the first all-Slavic lineup in Formula One, and I definitely like the iconic, John Player Special-inspired black and gold colors returning to the F1 grid, I just don't know what to expect from this team. I have to imagine they'll take a dip because they're losing the resources of Renault, but Renault wasn't doing much with all those resources anyway, and perhaps the Malaysian Proton Corporation that now serves as the parent company of Lotus Cars will bring an ambitious spending program to this reborn British team.
Skipping thirteen for the sake of superstition, Force India comes next, with Lorenzo Barbaro in the #14 and Italian driver Giuseppino Leone returning to F1 in the #15, replacing the retiring Umberto Petronelli. This team showed impressive pace last year at Spa and Monza, so if they can reach some consistency, I think they have the under looked talent to be a competitive midfield team. Lorenzo is a friend of mine, so I'd like to see the Uruguayan do well.
There aren't many surviving teams from 2009 left, so Toro Rosso comes next, with Maximilien Longpre still in the #16 and Ximen Goikoetxea still in the #17. Red Bull sees something in this lineup, but Toro Rosso is going to need to perform better this year than in 2009 when they finished as the bottom team on the grid.
The first of the new teams is Caterham Racing, the British racing green and yellow painted car having provided a lifeline to Ivan Tripoli in the #18 car and Jyri Kaasalainen in the #19. I imagine that for both of them, the goal is just to remain in Formula One with the hopes of performing just well enough to find something else, because nobody expects Caterham -or any of the new teams really - to be able to accomplish much this year.
Part of the reason why these teams are expected to struggle is one: they were promised a cost cap that the existing teams shot down, and two: the FIA practically limited them to Cosworth engines to keep any of these teams from falling into the pocket of an existing manufacturer. Cosworth's 2006 V8 wasn't particularly good, but it was a neutral party during the disputes of early 2009. All of this paints a grim picture for the new teams, and the picture is perhaps grimmest with HRT, the Spanish team that failed to accomplish any testing prior to the Bahrain Grand Prix. They will field the #20 car for Shandar Khan and the #21 for Ayrton Senna II, both old rivals of Natasha, coincidentally enough.
The new teams for 2010 seem to be sorted alphabetically, as Marussia comes next. Natasha Tsirinskaya will drive the #22 car while Lukas Casemiro will be in the #23. Nat doesn't expect much from this year, but she did crack a smile when I told her that the last two champions were #22 the year they won, so perhaps there is hope for her yet. Finally, going from the team Natasha drives for to the one she is contracted to...
Mercedes GP Petronas takes the final two numbers for 2010, but nobody expects them to stay down here. Part of that is down to the fact that, development or not, their car was good enough to win the championship last year so it should still be competitive this year, but another part of that is because Mercedes has come with a powerful driver lineup. In the #24 comes Wilhelm Ziegler, the 1994, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 Formula One World Champion making his return to the sport after a three-year absence, having developed the hunger for racing after Henrique's accident, only to be cruelly denied a return thanks to injuries sustained in a motorcycling accident. That won't be stopping him this year. The #25, meanwhile, will be driven by my former teammate, Tommy Koskinen, having impressed Mercedes enough that they chose him over champion James Buxton to drive for them.
So, twenty-four drivers across twelve teams to contest a twenty-two-race calendar that brings us all across the world. The Global Recession disrupted plans for the grand Vision60 season that Formula One Management had dreamed up along with the FIA, but we will still see the longest calendar in the history of the sport, including a return to the United States - in Anthony's home market, no less - but also racing in Korea for the first time, along with returns to Canada and Hockenheim. There will be new layouts, not just here in Bahrain but also in Silverstone, which has fended off an attempt by Donington Park to steal the British Grand Prix out from under them. Not to mention that every race from 2009 will return as well. So many tracks, so many opportunities for different drivers to win, and a new points system - going down to tenth rather than eighth - to make it that much more competitive, should all make for a 2010 season for the ages. I'm with McLaren, I get to go into this season as a top driver in a top team, I get to be in discussion for the race win every single weekend...and I can't wait to see how it turns out.
I held an exact replica of my McLaren helmet in my hands - the same Kazakh-flag inspired cyan and gold design, with the sun design on top and the outline of a soaring eagle on the sides, but a few things were new given I was at Vodafone McLaren Mercedes. Most prominently was the thick white band around the top of the helmet, trimmed in red, with a red Vodafone logo on the front and red Vodafone text on the sides. Just above that, I had a black Mercedes star - the silver wouldn't show clearly enough for Merc's taste - leading to the sun design being smaller on this helmet than it had been before - and on top of the visor, I had a black and gold strip reading "Johnnie Walker" with a silver and red McLaren swoosh on either side of it. An Emirates logo below the visor with a black box reading "BOSS" on the chin of the helmet, for Hugo Boss of course. This was flanked by a Mobil 1 logo on either side of it. As one final unique touch, to make up for the smaller sun on top of my helmet, mirroring the Mercedes star logo on its forehead, there was a little golden crown design on the back, just before the Vodafone band wrapped around. It represented my win at the 2009 24 Hours of Le Mans, one leg of the prestigious motorsport triple crown of old. The triple crown required one to win the Indianapolis 500, the Monaco Grand Prix, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. I've done one of those, I see no reason why I can't aim for winning Monaco eventually, and as for the Indy 500? Well, who knows? I admit that ovals do scare me but I do have a win on an Indycar road race, so maybe someday it will be a possibility. Now, perhaps I've doomed my chances of ever winning the triple crown by manifesting it here - not that the chances are particularly high to begin with, as only Graham Hill has ever done it and that was back in the 1960s - but hey, even if it never happens, even if I never win Monaco, let alone Indy, at least I have a tasteful little shoutout to my Le Mans success with Peugeot.
The reason for this replica is that, on the Sunday morning before the race, as part of the pre-race coverage, Henrique de Matteo and I swapped helmets on television. It was a sort of way of me welcoming him back to the grid and he thanking me for keeping his seat warm for him, so he got a signed Tamara Shchegolyayeva McLaren helmet, and I got a signed Henrique de Matteo Ferrari helmet. Of course, these were replicas and we'd have to wear our regular helmets during the races - sponsors wouldn't exactly take kindly to me wearing Ferrari colors, nor him representing McLaren - but it was inspired by the jersey swaps you sometimes see in football, for instance. It's just a way of showing respect and acknowledging you've raced against some pretty cool people. I'll definitely be putting this somewhere in my collection, and I'm sure that he'll do something nice with mine as well. In any case, after that wholesome TV shot, we both had to pack up the helmets and put them away, because things were counting down for the race, one where Henrique de Matteo set up for a triumphant return by qualifying on the front row.
Indeed, Maximilian Renner took pole position for Red Bull while Henrique de Matteo took second, outqualifying new teammate Felipe Alvarez who was down in third, lining up next to my teammate, Anthony Harrison. Tommy Koskinen was fifth for Mercedes on his debut with the team, sharing the third row with the second Red Bull of Martin Weaver, whilst on the fourth row was the returning Wilhelm Ziegler in seventh for Mercedes and myself in eighth for McLaren. Piotr Kaminski was ninth for Lotus while Lorenzo Barbaro rounded out the top ten for Force India. This is a bigger deal than it has been before, because, as mentioned before, this year will award points down to tenth for the first time, meaning that everyone who makes it to Q3 will start in a points-paying position. Towards the back of the grid, Natasha had the distinction of being the first of the backmarkers, qualifying nineteenth, ahead of the Caterhams of Tripoli and Kaasalainen, her teammate Lukas Casemiro down in twenty-second, and the HRTs rounding out the final row of the grid. Marussia was a small team, the Cosworth engine was one of the weaker ones - though Williams is making it work better than the backmarkers, admittedly - and they're miles off of the Mercedes team that Nat perhaps feels she should have been in, but so far, she's doing the best she can with the machinery she's been given. Not for nothing, she did better relative job in qualifying than I did.
"Good luck out there, do what you can and see what happens. I believe in you." I encouraged my little cousin before her first Formula One race, feeling proud for her. I know it has to be hard on her on some level, the fact that she was in contention for a Mercedes seat - meaning she probably would've outqualified me, based on the pace of Tommy and Wilhelm - but had to settle for a seat at the very back of the grid while a guy like Vladimir Alexandrov - who she beat in GP2 Asia - gets to drive for Lotus. That being said, so far, she's doing great considering the level she's at, and for all the car advantage Alexandrov has in the Lotus, he's only managed to qualify down in seventeenth, his grid slot directly ahead of Natasha's.
"Alright, alright. Thanks - you too by the way, show those Mercs who's boss." Nat smirked before heading back to her red, black, and white backmarker car, while I took the long trek back up the grid towards the Red Bulls, the Ferraris, the Mercedes, and the McLarens.
It wasn't more than ten minutes later when we were lined up on the grid waiting for those five red lights to come on and then come off, but it felt like a completely different world. The mechanics and team personnel cleared the grid, the jovial back-to-school mood of the grid was replaced with the cold seriousness of high-level competition, and those of us at the front of the grid just stared down that dusty front straight with the desert sun baking down on us. One red light. I took a deep breath. Two lights, three. My eyes darted to either side of Martin Weaver, wondering how I was going to attack the Red Bull directly ahead of me. Four red lights, the right I decide, taking things to the extreme inside because I knew the track would open up once we got to the pit exit. Five red lights, the tensest moment of a Grand Prix weekend I think, that final moment just before the start where everything is asking to be unleashed. And then...it goes out. Twenty-four cars roll off the grid to begin the 2010 Formula One World Championship and, for the first time, there's two women on the same grid.
I cut to the right and eventually took to the pitlane exit to pull alongside the Red Bull in the run down to turn one - the Ziegler hairpin, which Wilhelm Ziegler would be taking today for the first time since 2006 - and got ahead of him in the braking zone for the hairpin to the right. Accelerating out of it 180 degrees later, I was grateful to have gotten ahead of the Red Bull, because smoke then blasted out of the back of his car...directly into the eyes of Piotr Kaminski behind. I couldn't blame Kaminski and Barbaro for spinning out after that, but I couldn't dwell on that much either, since Weaver kept going and so did I. Turn two was a fast corner to the left and then turn three was a flat-out kink to the left, bringing us onto a long straight. Further ahead, I saw Anthony Harrison going side by side with Henrique de Matteo for fourth, but the Brazilian held his nerve and took turn four as usual, causing Anthony to go off and not only concede third, but also lose fourth place to Koskinen. So, as we arrived at turn four - the point where this endurance layout of the circuit diverges from the usual Bahrain layout that I actually enjoy - it was Renner ahead of Alvarez, Matteo, Koskinen, Harrison, Ziegler, Shchegolyayeva, and Ziegler - all of us taking the hard braking zone of turn four but rather than it winding down into a hairpin, it then snapped outward with turn five, taking us onto the outer perimeter of the Sakhir circuit.
It was a fast, somewhat uphill run to the right with the sweeping turn six- during which I held off an attack by Weaver - before plunging into a relatively fast chicane with turns seven and eight, first left then back right, leading us directly into the braking zone for turn nine. A hairpin to the right, turn nine is where this layout started winding in on itself. Accelerating out of the hairpin, turn ten was a kink to the left whilst turn eleven was a braking zone for a nearly ninety-degree corner to the right, taking us to a fast, windy bit with turn twelve to the left and then turn thirteen to the right kinking us back into a straight line. The wide hairpin left of turn fourteen rejoined the original track, plunging downhill through the quick turn fifteen to the right and then swinging back left through turn sixteen before the hairpin right of turn seventeen - for context, on the usual layout of Bahrain, all these corners are still in the single digits - anyway, out of turn seventeen we climbed the hill ever so slightly in a straight line before bottoming out as we grinded to the left with what is now turns eighteen and nineteen, but I believe are turns nine and ten on the usual layout. Differences between layouts aside, the end result was still the same, bringing us onto an infield straight where I tucked into the slipstream of Ziegler, neutralizing the slipstream that Weaver had from me. Then at the end of the straight, a tap of the brakes and a few downshifts before throwing the car to the left and uphill for the run up the hill. Powering up to the left then snapping back to the right through turn twenty-one just before cresting the hill and getting on the brakes for turn twenty-two.
Braking and turning right, then riding out onto the exit kerb just a bit, turn twenty-two got me onto the back straight, heading overall downhill but picking up a little bit down the middle of the straight before again bottoming up just before the final two corners. I was on the brakes hard for turn twenty-three and then turning right through it and the final kink of turn twenty-four that got us aligned with the straight, but here I got a good run on the Mercedes of Ziegler. It was Mercedes power against Mercedes power, silver car versus silver car as I pulled up to the back of the seven-time world champion, took to the inside, and then outbraked him into the corner that bears his name to open lap two of this forty-nine lap race. German Maximilian Renner led the race in his Red Bull, then came the two Ferraris, with Spaniard Felipe Alvarez ahead of Brazilian Henrique de Matteo, Finn Tommy Koskinen was up to fourth for Mercedes while the McLarens ran fifth and sixth. American Anthony Harrison ahead of Kazakh Tamara Shchegolyayeva, with German Wilhelm Ziegler in seventh for Mercedes, just ahead of Australian Martin Weaver in the second Red Bull.
This was how the front group of cars looked during the first stint, while further down the grid attrition began eating away at the twenty-four-car field, though thankfully nothing that required the safety car coming out and disrupting the race. First Shandar Khan retired in the unexperienced HRT team after hitting a bump hard enough to break his own front wing, joined soon after by the Marussia of Lukas Casemiro displaying the same concerning reliability the British-based, Russian-licensed team has experienced in winter testing. Higashiyama retired with an engine issue on lap eleven and, two laps later, Vladimir Alexandrov would join him with after running over a kerb too hard and damaging both his floor and his suspension. Natasha would, unfortunately, be the next casualty of the race and of Marussia's reliability, while a lap later, Ayrton Senna II would grind to a halt as well, making sure that, at very least, HRT wouldn't capitalize on Marussia's misery. So, by the time we reached the first round of pitstops, six cars had already retired, meaning a fourth of the grid was out before they could even get a pitstop done. Now granted, the last time I was in a first race of the season - the 2008 Australian Grand Prix - the finishing rate was also woeful, leading to me scoring a sixth place despite the fact that I crashed out of podium contention, but this seems really bad to me, especially considering that two teams are completely out of the race after, what, seventeen laps? It doesn't bode well for HRT and Marussia, especially given that, while they certainly aren't quick, both Caterhams are still running.
In any case, during the pits, the McLaren crew proved their worth, leading to Anthony Harrison leaping ahead of Tommy Koskinen whilst I was able to close up to the back of my former teammate, and build a bit of a gap over the likes of Ziegler and Weaver. I would get ahead of the Finn two laps later when I caught up to him coming down the main straight. I got into his slipstream and closed up to the back of him, but Tommy was going to make me work for it, covering off the inside and forcing me to go the long way around. Challenge accepted, I gritted my teeth and pulled to the left, coming alongside him and trying to comprehensively outbrake him into the hairpin, but he was having none of it, getting on the brakes so late that he locked up. Thus, I changed strategy, braking a bit earlier and trying he over-under on him, trying to pull inside of him while the lockup took him on an even wider line than I was. The truth was though, due to his lockup and my positioning, we both took rather wide, clumsy lines through turn one so by the time we got through turns two and three and onto the straight, neither of us had come out on top. The straight did give me a second chance though, so in the slipstream again, I pulled alongside Tommy and this time assertively took the inside, forcing him to give way and let me overtake him into turn four, taking me up to fifth place. This is how I settled in for most of the second half of the race and into the closing stages, it appeared that the race was going to finish, rather uneventfully, with Renner ahead of the two Ferraris ahead of the two McLarens, until...
"Renner has a problem! He's going slow!" my race engineer at McLaren, Nicky Morrison reported in. True to his word, over the final few laps of the race, Max Renner would lose the lead to Felipe Alvarez, second place to Henrique de Matteo, and even third place to Anthony Harrison as he struggled with what was later revealed to be a sparkplug issue. I arrived on the scene on the final lap, throwing everything I had at him in an attempt to take fourth place. During each of the straights I rolled my leg onto the air gap to complete the F-duct and stall the rear wing, combining that with a draft from Renner to get as much of an advantage down the straights as I could, but it still wasn't enough. I was braking as late as I could on these worn Bridgestone prime tyres as I could, but it wasn't enough either. I didn't have KERS this season because, on cost grounds, the teams agreed not to use it for the 2010 season, so I didn't have that, but I doubted that would be enough either. As we crossed the line to complete the first race of the 2010 season, Renner was three tenths ahead of me. One more lap and I would've gotten him, but as it is, the result is what it is.
Speaking of, the points-paying results of the 2010 Bahrain Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 25 points.
2: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 18 points.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 15 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 12 points.
5: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
6: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 8 points.
7: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 6 points.
8: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 4 points.
9: Giuseppino Leone - Italy - Force India-Mercedes - 2 points.
10: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 1 point.
So, thanks to Weaver's smoke bomb, Kaminski and Barbaro narrowly lose out on the points, though at least in the case of Force India, his misfortune allowed for Leone to slip in and take ninth place. Rudolfo Goncalves also manages to score points for Williams, while James Buxton was down in fourteenth, a lap down after an off-track excursion nearly led to him crashing out of the race. Jyri Kaasalainen would champion the cause for the new teams, sitting down in fifteenth, two laps down, after his teammate Ivan Tripoli retired with three laps to go. Maximilien Longpre for Toro Rosso also ground to a halt on lap forty-six, so combining those two, Victor Hartmann who suffered a hydraulics issue just over half-distance, and the six cars that retired before we even got to the first round of pitstops, and we had nine cars fail to finish the race. That is a high rate of attrition, and if this continues, it might have serious affects for the championship.
Speaking of, given this is my first full season as a frontrunner, I've decided to start tracking the championship standings race to race - the top six anyway, which ought to be accounting for the Red Bulls, the Ferraris, and the McLarens. However, with just one race in the books, the standings read exactly as you'd expect, so instead of that, I'll just account for the constructors' championship, once again just the top six for the sake of symmetry.
1: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 43 points.
2: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 25 points.
3: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 16 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 14 points.
5: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 2 points.
6: Williams-Cosworth - Great Britain - Grove, Great Britain - 1 point.
Not the perfect race for us, but we did finish third and fifth, which was good enough for second in the championship. Nevertheless, Ferrari took maximum points from this race - the lineup may be completely different, but the form is just as good as it was when Matti and I were firing on all cylinders for Ferrari at the 2009 Belgian Grand Prix - while Red Bull lost out on the win due to a reliability issue on Renner's car. Given that Martin Weaver also belched out some smoke on the first lap despite the fact that he finished the race without any other clear issue, I'd wager there's a certain fragility to the Red Bull that may help us out here. In any case, it is just one race, so it's hardly a complete set of information. We'll have to see how things develop down under for the next race in Melbourne.
"Alright then," I sighed once we were up in the air, releasing the seat belt and stretching out in the chair. Nat and I were in the main cabin of my jet, which, when climbing up the boarding ramp into the plane itself, there was the closed-off cockpit to the left and the cabin to the right. The first thing in the cabin was a living room type area with a a TV on a stand on one side and a little couch wrapped around a table on the other. Behind that were the four main passenger seats - giant, stuffed comfortable things meant for luxury travel - followed by a little corridor. The corridor had a bathroom on one side and a closet on the other, then down the corridor was a small bedroom area. Yes, they gave me an actual bed in the sky...and I had half a mind to plop down in it right now. That being said, I think there's still something I ought to do in here, because Natasha is over there sat wrapped up in herself staring out the window at the Persian Gulf below, probably not even aware of the fact that I said anything. Something is going on in that head of hers, and I think I should probably go ahead and help her through it "Are you alright?"
"What?" she snapped out of it for a moment, the blonde looking a bit stunned as she turned back to me. She was dressed in sweatpants, socks, and a reddish zip-up hoodie, sat crisscrossed in her chair, dressed for comfort. A beat later she sighed and opened up a bit "Sorry, it's just...I didn't want the race to go like that."
"Nat...you were setting pace for your team in qualifying and again in the race before your chance at finishing was taken away from you. None of what happened was your fault, everything that was in your control you handled wonderfully considering it was your first race." I tried to reassure her, knowing that it was a tough situation to finally get to F1 only for the race to end before you could even experience a pitstop, let alone get anywhere near the checkered flag.
"But that's the problem! I spend years of my life trying to get here and now, what, I'm supposed to be happy driving for the worst team? I'm supposed to smile when my car breaks not even twenty laps into the first race? I've spent my entire life building up towards this and I might as well be in a GP2 car." she bemoaned, spelling out the misery of having such a bad car...and I had no answer for her. Maybe it would be different if she had struggled really bad in the junior series and then Marussia gave her an offer, because then it would seem like, when F1 was just about to disappear as an option, she got a lifeline, and it didn't matter if it was with one of the worst teams on the grid. Instead, though, Natasha knew that she was in contention for a Mercedes seat, certainly not the favorite, but she knew she had a chance, especially once I disappeared as an option and Mercedes was down to their second choices. That didn't materialize for her though, and after her first race with Marussia, it really seems like Mercedes passed over her with nothing but a pity offer in compensation.
"Everyone knows the team is crap though, so nobody can judge you on that. The only thing you can really be judged on is your teammate and maybe HRT I guess, because it seems to me like Caterham has a leg up on you guys and then everyone else has a leg up on them." I tried to calm her down, thinking that maybe if I could give her a smaller context and some achievable goals for the next few races, she'd be able to adapt, feel better, and find enough of a rhythm to give Mercedes no choice but to put her in a better seat. I mean, I doubt any of this is in the contract, but Force India has used Mercedes engines these past few seasons, so maybe Natasha can work her way into a Force India seat instead for 2011, partnering up with Lorenzo Barbaro. I mean no disrespect to Giuseppino Leone, but he was a Toro Rosso driver from years ago brought in because Force India couldn't find anyone else to replace Umberto Petronelli once the elder Italian retired from F1 and moved on to GT racing with Ferrari. He's essentially a seat filler, and if Nat can impress at the back, maybe she can replace him and at least move up to the midfield.
"Tamara...we don't even have a big enough fuel tank. The car is fucked, the team is fucked, whatever goddamn computer program they used to design this stupid thing is fucked...how can I impress anyone in this thing?" she pleaded, spelling out the dire state of the situation. For the computer program thing, one thing that Marussia has been vocal about in the past few months is their lack of a wind tunnel - not even a scale version - so instead they've designed their car using entirely computational fluid dynamics - CFD - and some members of the team have even gone so far as to say this is how all F1 cars will be designed in the near future. There might actually be some truth to this and CFD is used by virtually all the teams in some capacity, but...I think Marussia's debut also shows what happens when you rely solely on the digital rather than what can actually be observed in the real world. And even then, there are plenty of things that seem fine in the wind tunnel but then behave completely differently on the actual track. These things, the CFD, the wind tunnel, they're band-aids on the restrictions on testing in F1, not real answers...at least not yet.
"Look, I'm not going to pretend it's easy, but look at my example. I was out of F1 for half a year and in that time I managed to do some pretty amazing things...that did basically nothing for my career. F1 teams care about F1 first and foremost, so be the best driver you can be in the context you're given and make it impossible for any of these teams to overlook you as an option." I pointed to my own difficulties and the fact that, essentially, I have this McLaren contract off the back of half a season with Ferrari and a single Grand Prix win. I continued with "And hey, there are some pretty smart people at your team, right?"
"Yeah..." she shrugged, accepting it.
"Then they'll figure out the issues and give you whatever car they can considering the resources and knowledge they have. It won't be perfect, but those are the tools at your disposal, and it's up to you to use them." I finished off, sitting down on the arm rest of her seat and tapping my hand on her knee to show support.
"Thanks...it feels good to have said that...and thanks for believing in me too." Nat accepted, calming herself down with a shaky breath.
"Of course, everyone is entitled to vent every once in awhile - and yeah, I'll always believe in you." I smiled. What happened in Bahrain happened, now we have the rest of the season to work through it - Nat has the edge over her teammate so far, so her job is to keep that as the team hopefully begins to find its feet in F1, while I have a strong car and a strong team behind me, now I just need to work on reducing the deficit to my teammate - we can both get started on those things once we get to the second race of the season in Australia.
Well, the good news was that I outqualified Anthony in Australia, putting the car up in fourth on the grid, the bad news is that it's only because Anthony has been having a terrible time all weekend. First things first, he was caught speeding in Mercedes SL he was given for the weekend, so he had to apologize publicly before going to the track while getting dragged through the mud by media in multiple countries - Australia and the UK in particular, but TMZ covered the story in the US as well, hitting at Anthony from his home country - and I couldn't blame him for that taking a toll on his performance. Now, obviously, I'm not condoning him speeding - he could've hurt someone and he should know better - but the thing is, he knows that. Getting caught by the police and arrested, however briefly, is embarrassing enough, he doesn't need the media piling on when he's trying to get back to doing his job. In any case, this effectively leaves me at the front of the grid alone, with the Red Bulls having locked out the front row, me splitting the Ferraris - Felipe in third, Henrique in fifth - and the Mercs sixth and seventh.
So, with conditions set to dry out after an earlier passing shower here in Melbourne, there was nothing else to do as we took off on the formation lap. Down the straight, to the right for turn one, and then snapping back to the left for turn two, coming onto the Brabham straight...a straight I haven't been on since 2008, mind you. Everyone here has more recent experience than I do, everyone else here has a teammate to help them out, and based on what happened in Bahrain, everyone is probably just going to stop once and be done with it. There's no refueling for 2010 anymore - much to Marussia's chagrin, I'd imagine - and if the tyres are sturdy enough to have only required one stop in the desert heat of Bahrain, then surely a set of primes will do the job in cooler conditions here in Australia...when the time is right, of course, otherwise you'll just be flopping around a too-wet track like a muppet. Case in point, the braking zone for turn three was still too wet for dry tyres, as braking hard and then turning right could leave you aquaplaning off track once we're up to speed. This nearly ninety-degree right-hander was followed by turn four to the left, a nice fast one followed by turn five to the right, also fast, though with perilously little exit kerb before a strip of grass and then a concrete wall. Renner and Kaminski had a bad coming together in this part of the track last year, and it might prove even worse in the rain. In any case, the straight that followed the corner ended sector one.
Sector two began with a hard braking zone to the right before speeding up through turn seven, a flick to the left before pulling it back to the right through the fast one that is turn eight. Now at the top of the Lake at the center of Albert Park, the Clark chicane - hard on the brakes, first right, then left - brought us onto the lakefront straight, speeding just along the northern edge of the park attraction, and gently sweeping to the left the whole distance. The sweep to the left sharpened into a dab on the brakes and then throwing the car to the left as fast as you dare for turn eleven, then snapping it back to the right for turn twelve, onto the back straight, now properly in sector three of the Australian track. Hard on the brakes for the ninety-degree right-hander of turn thirteen - Ascari - before coming onto a narrow straight that led to a faster right-hander named for another champion, this time Stewart. Riding off the kerb and back onto the track just in time for the penultimate corner, Prost, I got on the brakes and turned to the left before pulling it back to the right for turn sixteen, the final corner, bringing me back onto the start-finish straight. I gave my intermediate tyres one last good burnout, tapped my brakes one last time to ensure they were in their working temperature range, and then took my spot fourth on the grid. That formation lap was as much of a refresher as I was going to get for this track before getting thrown off the deep end and into the race.
Five lights went out and I made a good start to the race, but it didn't matter anyway since Henrique de Matteo blitzed us all with a rocket of a start, overtaking me, Alvarez, and Weaver to launch himself into second by the time we got to turn one. Then in turn one, I was unlucky enough to be at the center of the the inevitable first corner collision here in Australia, finding Alvarez slowing to a crawl in front of me for no discernible reason, leading to me bumping him off the track and into a spin on the wet grass. I came out of turn two trying to figure out what condition my front wing was in while Piotr Kaminski - who also got a rocket start it seems - powered past me in his black, gold, and red Lotus. Alvarez and Ziegler made contact as the Spaniard rejoined, and Higashiyama also lost his front wing at some point or another, so finally, by the time the lead pack was entering sector two, the race director brought out the safety car.
"Safety car!" Nicky yelled over the radio "The front wing looks fine from our end, how are you feeling?"
"It feels fine but, ugh, why was Alvarez so slow? I had nowhere to go!" I complained. I had no zero to believe I was in the wrong or that the stewards were already investigating this, but I just wanted to go ahead and make it clear that this wasn't my fault over the radio just in case.
"I don't know Tamara, I think he might have been surprised by Henrique, doesn't make sense to us either." Nicky echoed. The race would restart on lap four, with Renner leading from Matteo, Weaver, Kaminski, myself, Koskinen, and Harrison, Anthony having taken advantage of the chaos behind to gain places. Harrison would attempt to attack Koskinen for position and Kaminski would make at least one attempt on Weaver during those first racing laps, but the race would begin to settle down like this, all of us just waiting for the water to clear up a little bit more so that we could switch to slicks. No one was quite brave enough to be the first one to do it though, because like I said, nobody wanted to be the idiot on the wrong tyres that couldn't control that car. No, it would take a smooth driver with experience at this circuit - a win, preferably - to switch onto the dries and prove it can be done for those of us with something to lose at the sharp end of the grid to follow suit. Fortunately for me, the next thing out of Nicky's mouth suited us just fine "Williams just pit - Buxton is out on the dry tyres."
"Is he doing well?" I asked, waiting for a reason to pull into the pits this lap and hopefully be the first of the leaders to pit.
"He's quick but he just went off at turn three...but he's back on track and going quick again...hold on...hold on...close to purple in the first sector if you account for the pitstop and the off, he's got pace. The choice is yours, but I think we can do it." Nicky reported, basically giving me what I was expecting: it's still risky, but the pace is there if we can keep it on track.
"Roger, pit this lap." I decided, pitting that very lap while the rest of the lead pack - including my teammate - continued on. Good thing I stopped when I did, because I was just able to get out ahead of the Williams of James Buxton, meaning I was the lead car on the dry tyres just as the track was really coming into the dry. It was still dangerous, as I nearly lost the place to Buxton through the Clark chicane when I hit a damp patch of track and almost straight-lined it into the grass before getting control of the car again and defending my position from the white and blue car. I started to get into my groove though, and as we shaped out a dry line, two things started to happen: one, the superiority of the McLaren over the Williams meant I was building a gap, and two: everyone else was starting to notice. Renner would pit from the lead at the end of lap nine, Weaver would pit a lap later, and Lorenzo Barbaro would take up the lead before pitting on lap thirteen, leaving the running order looking like this: Renner, myself, Kaminski, Harrison, Matteo, Weaver, Koskinen, and Alvarez. The Spaniard having worked his way back into the race thanks to the safety car and the pitstops a few laps after that, meaning he didn't have to fight his way through the field like one usually would have in this type of scenario.
So, Renner had built up just enough of a lead to remain ahead of me despite my undercut, and he was starting to pull away now too. The Red Bull was a strong package and that was allowing it to hold true as this wet-to-dry race settled firmly into the dry stage. That being said, the McLaren was a strong car too, so I was only really letting him gain a few tenths on me here and there, remaining in striking distance, keeping him in sight, and just waiting for my chance to slip through. Maybe the German would be too preoccupied looking in his mirrors and lockup, maybe he'd run on a kerb a little too hard and discover it was still wet, or maybe he'd get caught behind a backmarker for long enough for me to close back up. It wouldn't be Natasha running interference for me though, because she was actually running rather well at the head of the group of backmarkers, so if her car could just hold out and the fuel would just last long enough...maybe she could do something.
My focus was purely on the front of the grid though. Renner was a second and a half in front of me, Kaminski was a further two seconds behind me, and further back in the field, Harrison and Matteo were battling hard, trading positions over and over again as they battled for fourth place. That fight would become a lot more significant - as would my position on track - when, for the second race in a row, disaster would strike for Red Bull. I was powering after the Red Bull through the lakefront section when he threw the car through the chicane and disappeared from view, and when I followed him a moment later and regained line of sight, I saw the Red Bull going slowly and sparks pouring from the back of the car. I pulled far to the inside to give the German as much room as possible, overtaking him in the process, and when we reached the braking zone for turn thirteen, I turned into the corner whilst Renner spun backwards into the gravel trap. The predominantly blue car coming to a halt in the gravel trap - last time out in Bahrain, Red Bull reliability cost Renner a win and relegated him to fourth, but today, it cost him everything. Renner in his stricken car was just able to hold me off at the end of the race in the desert, but this time, I passed him before he was even entirely out of the race. The same could be said for Piotr Kaminski, who moved up into second, and Henrique de Matteo, who had taken third place for the moment. Anthony had dropped a few car lengths behind the Ferrari, but that was okay, since we were running first and fourth as a team right now - this could be really good for us after a relatively disappointing day in Sakhir.
"Weaver has pit for option tyres, he's the fastest car in the first sector. Expect him to set the fastest lap." Morrison reported. So, Weaver was struggling in his home race and Renner had just fallen out of the lead, so Red Bull felt they had nothing to lose, hence they gambled and brought Weaver in again for new tyres. The Australian lost track position, naturally, but he was now on fresh tyres and taking chunks of time from the rest of us, who pitted right at the beginning of the race when the track was drying out. I probably didn't have to worry - I was going fast enough and had enough of a gap that Weaver would run out of laps before he'd reach me - but further back? It was a lot more of a question, as Anthony Harrison found out when he and Weaver went side by side through turn thirteen, making contact and spinning out. For the second time in the race, a Red Bull was sitting in the gravel trap on the outside of the corner, though this time there was a McLaren with him. Fortunately, Harrison was able to get going and continue the race, whilst Weaver followed a few moments later...though without an intact front wing. The Australian would have to take his third pitstop of the race, this time for a front wing change, and he would fall out of contention for the win. Thus, the final threat to my win fell away, and I coasted through the final fifteen laps of the race comfortably, taking the win by twelve seconds.
Natasha unfortunately, was told to pit on lap forty-one of fifty-eight, with the team retiring the car. Marussia still hadn't finished a race, but they came infinitely closer in this event than they had in the first race of the season. Not only that, but, at least with her car, Natasha was able to show better pace than even the Caterhams - it was still some distance behind the established grid, but it was progress. Hopefully Tsirinskaya and Marussia could continue moving their way forward.
In any case, the points-paying results of the 2010 Australian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 25 points.
2: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 18 points.
3: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 15 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 12 points.
5: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 10 points.
6: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 8 points.
7: Giuseppino Leone - Italy - Force India-Mercedes - 6 points.
8: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 4 points.
9: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 2 points.
10: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 1 point.
For the second race in a row, Maximilian Renner took pole position and dominated the early part of the race only to be cruelly denied victory, however, I'm not exactly going to complain, because this led to my second career win, my first with McLaren. Piotr Kaminski has validated his move to Lotus with a podium in just his second race of the season, a return to form after a largely miserable 2009 season with a half-hearted BMW Sauber team. Behind that, Henrique de Matteo and Felipe Alvarez once again finish back to front, though this time the Brazilian had the edge, hinting that, despite the accident, the Brazilian still has it and Ferrari may still have a competitive lineup despite everything that's happened the last few years. Mercedes again has a consistent performance, but Tommy Koskinen has comprehensively outperformed Wilhelm Ziegler this weekend. Now, I'm sure some people will call Ziegler washed up and ruining his own legacy, but in contrast, I would argue that Koskinen is demonstrating the immense talent he has. I am a good driver - I just won the race after all - and I was beat by Koskinen in qualifying two years in a row, as well as it being a close fight in the races, with Koskinen beating me narrowly in 2007 and me emerging in 2008.
Speaking of stats, the top six in the drivers' championship read as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 37 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 35 points.
3: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 33 points.
4: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 23 points.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 18 points.
6: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 16 points.
Considering that Red Bull took the pole position in Bahrain and then locked out the front row here in Australia, they have not been able to convert that into the race. After the first two races of the season, Maximilian Renner has twelve points - all from Bahrain - while Martin Weaver sits on just six points. They aren't the only ones struggling to perform to the performance of their car though, because Wilhelm Ziegler's triumphant return to Formula One has, thus far, amounted to nine points. In more successful news, a surprise win in the second race of the season means I'm just two points off the championship lead, and twelve points ahead of my world champion teammate. Of course, there was plenty of luck involved in me winning the race here, and plenty of bad luck on Anthony's part really skewed things in my advantage, but it was a good place to be - better than I expected to be two races into the season - and we'll have to see how this situation develops.
The top six in the constructors' championship, meanwhile, read this way:
1: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 70 points.
2: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 58 points.
3: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 25 points.
4: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 18 points.
5: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 18 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 8 points.
Red Bull's struggles in the races are such that they are not even the highest ranked team using Renault engines. Likewise, Force India holds onto sixth place thanks to Giuseppino Leone's eight points outweighing Rudolfo Goncalves' five points, with teammates Lorenzo Barbaro and reigning champion James Buxton having yet to score. Behind that Sauber, Scuderia Toro Rosso, Caterham, Marussia, and HRT have all yet to score. As for McLaren, while we were still behind Ferrari thanks to their strong start to the 2010 season, I think the whole team would argue that Anthony and I are a stronger lineup than Anthony and Jyri Kaasalainen. I could be wrong but I don't believe that Jyri was ever ahead of Anthony in the standings, not even for a brief moment, while I've already managed to accomplish that. That's no excuse to rest on my laurels, but we're just twelve points behind Ferrari with a new points system that is an awful lot more generous than the old one. If Anthony and I pull off a one-two finish - so 25 and 18 points - while Ferrari finish third and fourth - so 15 and 12 points, that's already sixteen more points. Of course, Red Bull and Mercedes will try to upset this battle as much as they can, whilst Ferrari won't take anything lying down, but the point is that the current points system is generous so, once we get both cars firing properly, we'll be able to eat into Ferrari's lead quite easily. Of course, the same can be said for Red Bull leading into the advantage both of us have built over them, so nothing can be taken for granted. So, much like the end of 2009, it's the battle between Ferrari, McLaren, and Red Bull, with quiet consistency from the team that was Honda and is now Mercedes ensuring they have a chance too.
2010 is shaping up to be an excellent season of Formula One and we're only two races into it so far.
"Congratulations!" Natasha cheered and hugged me once I was finally released from the media room - having just completed the post-race podium press conference with statements both praising the team by giving me tools to win and downplaying the notion that we were thinking about the championship already - and I couldn't help but give a content sigh as I hugged back. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the media stuff is my least favorite part of the job. I know that sounds awful and spoiled of me to say, but it is honestly so difficult to have to juggle all these sponsors, all the things that the team would rather keep secret, and maintaining my own reputation while also giving the media an answer which is both truthful and something they want to hear. So many drivers are accused of being boring or lacking in personality these days, but the truth is it's hard to give an answer that meets all these criteria. Mobil 1 would rather I not share trade secrets when it comes to getting the best performance out of our motor oil, Vodafone would rather not have me come across as arrogant, and then you have the logos for Johnnie Walker sitting next to Emirates, the flag carrier airline of a dry country...it's a whole thing. And unfortunately for me, the prize for winning is yet more media attention.
"Thank you...I'm happy. That was nice." I smiled as we walked through the paddock together, seeing it packing up on a Sunday afternoon, with only a handful of hardcore fans still lingering around the circuit.
"So, what's it like to be a two-time Grand Prix winner? Is it just the good the second time or has it faded?" Nat asked. I imagined that the blonde was trying to live vicariously through me given that, with her own team, she's failed to finish either race she's competed in. Australia was an improvement, yes, but the team still called her in maybe two-thirds into the race. It was a positive development but, quite frankly, Marussia still hasn't proven that they can complete a race distance, let alone beat the likes of HRT and Caterham - not to mention the fact that, realistically, these teams should target competing with the established teams, regardless of the clear pace and experience disadvantage they have in the moment. Natasha needs this team to prove it's not just a complacent backmarker meeting an FIA quota while promoting a Russian supercar nobody has ever heard of, she needs them to prove they have the talent and ambition to try and move forward in spite of the odds. The best way to start that - hell, the only step they can take at this point - is to make sure that their car can finish the race.
"It's...weird. I don't know how to describe it really. I definitely think this was a more boring way to win my first race than Singapore was, winning by twelve seconds thanks to Renner's car failing on him and all, but it's also nice to win my first race at McLaren. The fact that this is a win at a track I didn't race at is also a sigh of relief for me, because this is the part of the season, I figured I was going to struggle in, so getting that weight off my back right away is going to help me, I think. The fact that I won a race this season before - " I was going on when we passed another driver.
"Good job Tamara, that was a nice race!" Victor Hartmann of Sauber gave me a thumbs up and then a pat on the back while passing me heading the other way.
"Oh, thank you." I smiled. Piotr Kaminski and Henrique de Matteo both congratulated me when we pulled into the podium slots, Anthony, Tommy, and even Wilhelm Ziegler congratulated me pretty early on as well, and now Natasha and Victor Hartmann as well. I think it's fair to say that I don't have all that many enemies in F1 - even Felipe Alvarez has seemed to mellow towards me since we had that brief little flare-up in mid-2008 - and it's seen as a smart win with good timing to switch to the right tyres, capitalizing on Renner's failure, and then winning over Kaminski with a generous margin, so I guess it's a fairly popular win. There is, I suppose, also the fact that, based on Singapore last year, the sport tends to get more media attention when I do well. I'm sure some drivers resent the fact that I get some extra attention just because I am a woman, but I think most are happy to see more eyes on the sport. If nothing else, their egos motivate them to try and be the one to steal all the headlines off of the girl that the media looks to talk about. Anyway, "So like I was saying, I never expected to win for McLaren before Anthony did, so that's another bonus. I think I have to say Singapore was better - my first win and winning for Ferrari and all that - but this feels great too."
"Tamara! Woo!" and, as if on cue, some of the aforementioned hardcore fans still lingering in the park caught a glimpse of us walking and shouted out towards me. I replied with a chuckle as I waved over to them. I will say, winning in front of the Australian crowd gets a more passionate result than the Singaporean one.
Notes:
So, I'm going to mention this next chapter, but with how long this story is getting, what do you guys think about me splitting this story after act two? Like the first forty chapters, covering 2007-2010 will be LatSoF1 Part I, and then 2011-2013 will be LatSoF1 Part II? Everything would continue as normal with the updates and all that, I'm just wondering if you guys think the length is getting unwieldy and would appreciate a split. Let me know what you think.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 32: The Peak and the Valley
Notes:
Hello everyone!
So, this story is now the longest thing I've written at over 400,000 words and I think I have 70 chapters in mind for this story. That is going to be a truly unwieldy amount of words, and I'm not sure what to do about that. I don't want to reduce the amount of content you guys have been getting at this point - maybe it would've been fine if I started with shorter chapters, but at this point, you guys have every right to expect 10-15K word chapters because that's what I've been producing - so, here's the question I have for you guys: should I split the story? Chapter forty is going to be the end of act two and that's as natural of an ending as we're going to get, so what do you guys think about me capping this story off at chapter forty, then continuing with what would've been chapter forty-one of this story as chapter one of LatSoF1 Part II? The content would be the same either way and I imagine I would continue writing straight away, I'm just wondering if you guys think it might be a good idea to split this story before it truly becomes ridiculously long. So, let me know what you think, and, for now, enjoy chapter thirty-two!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXXII.
The Peak and the Valley.
"So, what are you doing?" Ysabella asked over the phone.
"Laying jetlagged in a Malaysian hotel room. How about you?" I sighed into the phone from my position on the coach. We were a fair distance from the track - Sepang is from that era of F1 circuits where we designed them out in the middle of nowhere by the airport, so my hotel room is about forty-five minutes from the circuit, given I decided to stay at a bit of a nicer place this time around - and it was currently Wednesday evening, so I had basically nothing to do here. Natasha, for her part, got dragged to a sponsor event for Petronas. In her words, she doesn't even get to drive the Mercedes but still has to do the sponsor events for the team, so it is quite literally the worst of both worlds. In any case, Natasha's duties as a driver affiliated for two separate F1 teams leaves me even more alone, hence I'm calling the Venezuelan racer in America.
"Eating breakfast on your couch, actually." she said, with the smirk practically audible on Villarreal's face.
"Did you sleep in my house?" I asked, sitting up.
"Hey, I'm helping furnish this place while you get to race all over the world, and my apartment sucks, so yeah, I'm gonna crash in your big, fancy American mansion, what are you gonna do about it?" she retorted. I suppose she does have a point there, even banter aside - because, after all, I'm not really mad that she's staying at my house, more weirded out by the idea of someone sleeping in my bed while I'm not even there - she has been a major help in me setting up my place in Miami while I've been away traveling with the F1 circus, going from car launches to preseason tests to Bahrain, Australia, and now Malaysia, with a handful of trips back to Monaco during all that as well. Needless to say, between Miami, Monaco, and these places, I've crisscrossed the globe in the past few months while Villarreal, whose schedule consists of a few Grand Am events - she and Daniella finished seventh in the Rolex 24 at Daytona by the way - and whatever handful of other sports car races she can get a ride in during the next few months, so she's been a lot less busy than I have. A lot less busy than Daniella has as well to be fair, because with Indycar starting up and Pieri being the media darling of that series, she's been moving from place to place as well.
Daniella wasn't the first female driver in Indycar, and she won't be the last. Hell, she's arguably not even the fastest woman in Indycar anymore, with Tatiana Vynnychenko of Ukraine having impressed for Team Penske in her part-time 2009 campaign, and now going full-time for 2010. That being said, Daniella has a number of things going for her: first off, she's all American, with a clean midwestern accent that anyone can understand, making her an inoffensive marketing option anywhere in the United States. Second of all, she's had a number of lucky breaks that have really put her in the American spotlight, the first being that she started with Rahal-Letterman Racing, leading to her getting invited onto the Late Show with David Letterman early on in her career, and the second of those two breaks being that, thanks to her being a great oval driver, some of her best results have come at Indycar's biggest stage, the Indianapolis 500. Even casual American viewers will watch the Indy 500, and as a rookie, she started towards the front of the grid, lead laps, and ultimately finished fourth, getting all the headlines even as Callum Walters won the race. Third of all, and maybe this is a bit unfortunate, but Dani leans into the sex appeal aspect of it in a way that the rest of us really haven't. I would say that Tatiana and I are attractive - I'd include Evie Carpentier and a few other women from Indycar in that category as well - but we don't lean into it the way. she does. I might wear shorts in the paddock and ostensibly be showing a lot of leg, but I'm not doing anything to make it a sexualized situation. Meanwhile, Dani can be dressed in a race suit and still walk with a confident sway or throw a kiss to fans that makes her the girl even out of a group of girls. I've said plenty of times that I'm sure there are people who are fans of me purely because I'm the rare female driver, but I'm also a bit of a clunky interview and from a country nobody has ever heard of, so I'm not marketable in the kind of what that Dani Pieri is in the United States.
"Fair enough," I accepted with a shrug...one she couldn't exactly see, but I decided I was just going to privately blush and not acknowledge that "Still though, I think you're talented enough to make money racing, you just need to keep performing until you find the right people and a stroke of good luck. At the end of the day, that's what got us all where we've gotten." In my case, it was probably three strokes of luck - first being finding Kazakhoil, second being finding Ernesto Signorelli as my agent, keeping me involved in motorsport when my career collapsed, and then getting that opportunity with Ferrari that ultimately revived my F1 career, bringing it back stronger than ever. If I didn't have Kazakhoil, my journey to F1 would be very different, if I ever got there at all. If I didn't find Ernesto Signorelli, I'd be stuck with whatever my dad could find for me while working my way back to the good side of the F1 grid, because the thing is, even if my time outside of F1 didn't lead to my return to it, it did keep me race fit and, in the news enough for my talent to give me that extra bit of a push to prove myself. Had I been sitting on the sidelines for months before trying to make my F1 comeback, who knows if I would have performed at all when given the Ferrari test? Then finally, with Ferrari, I not only demonstrated the pace to compete at the front and win a race, but also earned my current seat at McLaren. Now having won for McLaren in just my second race with the team, my position in F1 couldn't be more secure, so I suppose all the good and the bad was there for a reason.
"I mean...I don't know. I need to do something because I'm just not big enough of a name to live off of sports car racing forever, but I've burned out of the Indycar ranks, and other than that, all the money here goes towards stock car racing." Ysabella sighed, pointing out the very real issue that, in the United States where she's now based and wants to operate out of, the world of NASCAR dwarves these categories like Indycar, Grand Am, ALMS, and all the rest.
"I'm not entirely convinced that you're out of Indycar forever. I mean, Viktorija Urbonaviciute was in a position not all that different from yours a year ago and now she's driving for Andretti." I countered, remembering how I helped the Lithuanian woman, effectively naming her my handpicked successor when I left Andretti Green Racing. Well, MJ tested her out for the last two road courses that I was supposed to do, and also gave her an oval test that she took enthusiastically, now Viktorija is going to join Dani, Tatiana, Evie, and the rest in doing a full Indycar season for 2010.
"Well, it's a luxurious position to say that from a penthouse in the Petronas Towers." I could hear Ysabella roll her eyes.
"I'm not staying there...and I'd hardly call this place a penthouse." I defended myself, blushing again as I had to deal with a power imbalance that I didn't really like here. I suppose it's been all over this conversation though, I mean, Villarreal is staying in my Miami home because it's empty with me flying from race to race during the season, and largely operating out of my Monaco apartment during the free time I do have.
"Ask for a better room then - you drive for McLaren, you should get like a pool and a helipad, with a private helicopter to fly you directly to the track. Roll a golden carpet out for you to float across as you ignore those filthy pleb fans and walk directly to your grand chariot." the Venezuelan ramped up the teasing, treating McLaren as if it were endlessly rich and limitless...and I suppose they did give me a private jet, so maybe she has a point.
"Well, maybe I should have you negotiate my room deals then." I quipped back.
"House sitting and negotiations? You're not paying me enough Shchegolyayeva." she fired back.
"Hey, I just asked you to keep an eye on the place, the house sitting was your idea." I smiled as we went back-and-forth.
"Isn't that literally what house si - you know what, nevermind. Who do you rate in this race?" Villarreal asked, changing the subject to the upcoming Malaysian Grand Prix, trying to steer this ship back on course, but you know what? I don't think I'm quite done being silly.
"Why, are you looking to bet my money on it too?" I teased, going full circle and connecting it with the fact that she's sitting on my couch right now.
"Is that an offer? Because I'd gladly gamble your money - I might even bet on you too." she raised her voice in a joking challenge.
"First you go to the states and now you're talking about gambling - not sure if Chavez would approve." I pretended to chastise her, barely holding a straight face in the process.
"Says the one literally born in the Soviet Union." she shot back, never quite one to let me have the last word, is she?
"In all seriousness, I don't know what to say yet. I feel like Ferrari has been super consistent both races, finishing back-to-back both times, but I also feel like Red Bull's bad luck has to break at some point, so who knows?" I shrugged again, really unable to make a decision as to who is the favorite. I couldn't exactly work off of last year's race either, because not only was I not there, but it was plagued with torrential rain and eventually called off early, leading to half point being awarded. This is the exact reason why the final 2009 points standings came out as ugly as they did, because a fair few drivers were sitting on half points.
"Not rating McLaren highly then?" she asked.
"With Red Bull's qualifying speed and Ferrari's race pace, I think it's gonna take a few things for it to go our way. All I know for sure is that I'm hoping for changeable conditions to hit again after what happened in Australia." I decided, placing us third in terms of cars right now, but at the same time, I'd argue that we have one of, if not the best driver lineup on the grid right now, so in the right circumstances, we can turn the tide in our favor. What the circumstances will look like come race day at the Sepang International Circuit, time will only tell.
"Spoken like someone with media training." Villarreal teased.
"Well...yeah," I accepted with a laugh, turning my head a moment later when the door to my hotel room unlocked and a tired-looking Natasha walked in "Hey, I gotta go, I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay? And again, thank you for watching over my place...even if I think you sleeping in my bed is a bit weird."
"Weird or not, it's too comfy to stop now. Anyway, that's fine, just mind the time difference." Ysabella accepted, hanging up the phone. Likewise, I put my phone away and turned to see Nat standing over me wearing a shit-eating grin despite her otherwise drained state. My cheeks flushed slightly red in embarrassment which, to be honest, did little to help my case. Funny how that works, the reaction to embarrassment just confirms my embarrassment.
"What?" I asked, trying to play it off as innocent, with little success.
"Oh nothing, just you chatting up your girlfriend like a schoolgirl." she teased.
"She's not my girlfriend." I responded with a roll of my eyes.
"When has anyone ever said that and had it turn out to be true?" my little cousin struck back.
"What would you know about relationships? You're such a virgin they even sponsor you." I fired up, gesturing to the Virgin Airlines logo on her shirt, given that they were a major sponsor of Marussia, appearing on their sidepods and their rear wing, and thus the team shirts as well.
"I...uh...hmmph." Natasha replied, eloquently. The smirk she was wearing mere moments ago replaced with a frown and a furrowed brow.
"What?" I asked, wondering if I struck some kind of nerve. I definitely changed the mood of the conversation with that joke, with this going from some mutual teasing into something a lot more awkward.
"Nothing...I just wish I had a comeback to that." Natasha answered, clearly not telling the whole story, but also making it pretty clear that, whatever this was really, she didn't want to talk about it right now. To that end, after another awkward beat, she brought the subject back to my awkwardness "Seriously though, you seem to like her and from what I've seen, she's a pretty woman. Why not date her?"
"It's more complicated than that - I don't even know if she likes me in that way." I answered in such a way that didn't have me confront my own feelings, not really anyway.
"Considering that she's sleeping in your bed, I think she's willing to cross some boundaries with you." Natasha observed, having been snooping in on the end of that phone call.
"There's a difference between sleeping in my bed and sleeping with me." I pointed out.
"Sure, but it's a lot smaller of a difference than normal. Besides, didn't you say Dani introduced you two? Maybe she's trying to play matchmaker." Nat shrugged, quickly shooting down my reasons for not trying this.
"Look...she's in America, and I'm in a better seat than ever, I really need to focus on what I'm doing this season. That means spending a lot of time in Europe and not all that much time in Miami...I just...I can see all the same mistakes that happened with Roksana happening again and I don't want that." I gave in, sharing some of my insecurities about why I didn't want to push this issue.
"But she's a racing driver too, she understands what you're doing better than Roksana did." Nat pushed.
"She's a racing driver at a whole different level though, she doesn't travel like I do, doesn't compete at the level I do. I can already sense some bitterness from her about how her career worked out, and I can only imagine it would get worse if my career starts interfering with a relationship. Hell, right now, I'm calling her from a hotel room thirteen hours away." I explained.
"You still managed to make time to call her though." Nat pointed out, gentler this time, beginning to sympathize with me.
"That never mattered with Roksana..." I sighed.
"I'm sorry that worked out that way." Nat sighed too, not really having an explanation for that business.
"Me too..." I trailed off. I took one last big sigh before getting up from the couch, stretching for a moment, and then turning back to my little cousin, a completely different subject in mind and a smirk growing on my face "So...how does it feel to go to a sponsor event for a brand that doesn't even sponsor you?"
"Ugh...don't even get me started. I thought the car was the worst part about this Mercedes arrangement but having double the sponsor commitments? That is just hellish." Natasha complained. Now, I was sure this wouldn't be the case everywhere we go, but Malaysia was the home of Petronas, the title sponsor of the Mercedes team, and someone who has been in F1 for a long time. Petronas was with Sauber from the late 1990s through the BMW years and now has gone to Mercedes as a title sponsor, adding some teal to the otherwise silver and black car. All of that is to say that Petronas is a big deal during the Malaysian Grand Prix weekend, so Ross Brawn is going to present all his drivers to the sponsor, even the one that doesn't actually drive for Mercedes right now. That being said, maybe it all will be worth it in the end, because for better or worse, while I was here goofing off in a hotel room, Natasha was ingratiating herself with a frontrunning Formula One team. And yes, I know Mercedes isn't quite on the same level as Red Bull, Ferrari, or us here at McLaren, but they've been strong this year so far, and I'd say they're easily the fourth strongest team at the moment. We'll just have to see if Mercedes can continue their positive momentum here at their title sponsor's home race.
"Why are we still in the garage?" I asked my crew as Anthony and I both sat in our cars, waiting and waiting to be released onto the track for our Q1 laps as ominous clouds clung over the Sepang International Circuit.
"Patience Tamara, patience, there was rain after FP3 that washed all the rubber off. We're waiting for the track to rubber in so that we can set our laps at the optimal time, because we might only get one shot at this." Nicky Morrison explained, but I didn't exactly agree with the explanation, given that we could at least set a banker lap in these conditions just to play it safe. Nevertheless, these were my mechanics, they clearly wanted the best for the team and they had better data than I did. The clouds might just be left over from the earlier showers and conditions are going to improve...but then there's the thing about only getting one shot? Look I didn't know, but Anthony wasn't being let out either, and there's no chance that a team like Vodafone McLaren-Mercedes is going to throw away both of its cars getting into Q2, let alone Q3. This is a top team, they've proven that they can give me the machinery to win with, so I owe it to them to trust their process. So I sat there, repressing the impatient urges of a restless racing driver, and waited until Nicky spoke again "Alright...alright. We're going now."
Thus, the crew lowered my car to the ground, dropped the tyre blankets, waited for Anthony to leave the garage, and then let me out, the second McLaren in the line. The plus side of that meant that I was going to get a tow from my teammate down those two long straights here at Sepang, the downside was that, should Anthony make a mistake - or even just be slower than me in a particular section - I'm suddenly stuck behind the car that's supposed to be helping me. In either case, it wasn't Monza, so a tow wasn't essential either, and my priority right now was just to get a lap in, as those clouds looked even more ominous now. I understood what the team was trying to do - perfectly time our laps so that we get the driest possible surface to work with and do it just before the next wave of rain moves in to prevent our rivals from topping us - but I'm just concerned that we're overthinking this. No time to complain now though, because my out-lap had come to an end, and I was coming out of turn fifteen to begin my first lap in qualifying. All I needed to do was set a time good enough to advance into the next season so that the timing could reset itself, rain or no rain.
I dropped into the slipstream of Anthony Harrison coming down the straight, letting the American punch a hole in the air for me, reducing the forces acting against my car and increasing my top speed. That being said, we were both pushing hard so Anthony remained ahead into the braking zone, both of us braking late and throwing the car to the right for the first turn in perfect harmony. The two silver and red cars in perfect sync continued as turn one folded in on itself to create a hairpin before snapping to the left to begin the flat-out run to turn four. Turn three was in between the two corners, but with it being an easy sweeper to the right as we climbed up a gentle hill, it didn't even register as a corner for our simulator. Coming across the timing line to end sector one and begin braking for the ninety-degree right-hander turn four, I noticed the first drops of rain appearing on my helmet: we had waited too long, and the rain was here.
We accelerated out of turn four okay but by the time we arrived on turn five there was already a noticeable difference in grip, thus the flowing left-hander of turn five was now a serious corner, involving braking and a lift off the throttle to avoid understeering off the circuit. This was so typical of the Malaysian circuit that it was practically considered a feature: when the rain comes, it comes fast and all at once. This isn't even particularly bad in comparison as last year, while I was still out of the sport, the Malaysian Grand Prix itself had to be called off due to excessive rain, and the top cars were awarded half-points for their efforts...efforts that consisted of little more than pure survival. This wasn't quite that bad, but it certainly didn't feel good as the S that turn five started was completed by the rightward turn six, bringing us onto a short straight. I avoided taking the exit kerb as the difference in material makes for a slicker kerb in comparison to the tarmac, which in slick dry tyres was a quick way to throw yourself into a spin. Speaking of, Anthony nearly did that on his own accord when he experienced a tank-slapper coming out of turn six and onto the straight, likely from getting on the throttle a tad early, but to his credit, the American held it and continued one.
I did gain on Anthony a little bit thanks to that tank slapper but whatever I gained I lost as I understeered in the next braking zone, for the twin right-handers of seven and eight - this was the part where the track started to form a circle - leading onto a slightly longer straight. This, however, was followed by the hard braking zone of turn nine, the hairpin, where Harrison and I were both just happy to avoid sliding off the track. We gathered our cars up, turned left and uphill, and continued on this lap despite the fact that both of us knew we weren't going to get anything out of this endeavor. Literally everyone who managed to set a lap before we did is going to be ahead of us. Sepang has good enough drainage to avoid any lingering water from the previous shower, but it can't exactly shed the water that is currently falling onto it. In any case, coming out of turn nine Anthony and I crossed the sector line to complete sector two. Just the final third of track left to go.
Turn ten was a faster sweeper to the right uphill. Then tightening into the nearly ninety-degree corner of turn ten, bringing us onto a short straight as we lost some of the elevation we had built up in the last few corners. Under dry conditions, turns twelve and thirteen can actually have some decent speed and flow to them, but in this rain, Anthony and I had to brake for turn twelve, throw the cars to the left, and then nearly get out of the throttle entirely to throw the car back to the right for turn thirteen to avoid a tank slapper. A burst of throttle later, we were back on the brakes for turn fourteen, the penultimate corner, bringing the cars to the right through the hairpin and onto the long back straights. Finally, the conditions didn't really matter, so I positioned my car directly behind Harrison, rolled my leg onto the F-duct outlet to stall the rear wing, and get as much advantage down here as possible. Then, once we reached the hairpin, braking hard, throwing the cars to the left almost one-hundred eighty degrees in the final corner that is turn fifteen, I did it again, chasing down my teammate's car all the way to the line. It was a scruffy lap on the wrong tyres at the wrong time in the session, but McLaren was a strong car and we worked together well at the end there. Considering that all we needed to do was get into Q2 to forget all about this mistake and move on with the weekend, I was actually quietly hopeful that the lap may have been enough.
"Well...the good news is that we outqualified Alvarez, Harrison, and de Matteo." Nicky Morrison began. So, two things there, one: Ferrari made the same mistake we did so there's a little bit of hope to be had there. Two: the tow did indeed make me faster than Anthony. So, if anyone out of us four made it out of this session, it was going to be me. That being said, I wasn't an idiot, so I knew that when Morrison started with the good news, that the other shoe was about to drop too.
"And what's the bad news?" I asked.
"We're starting eighteenth. We're behind Tsirinskaya and both Caterhams." That was two pieces of bad news, I'd argue, but whatever, it is what it is. There are no flashbacks or restarts in real life, this is the situation we forced ourselves into and now we have no choice but to live with it. We misjudged the conditions and tried to optimize a session that absolutely did not need to be optimized, now we have to start the Malaysian Grand Prix from the back of the grid while the Red Bull drivers would go on to lock out the front row of the grid. There are two good things I can see though: the first being that Ferrari is just as screwed as we are and Red Bull has a lot of points they need to make up, so if this is going to happen, this is the least damaging way for it to happen. The second is that Sepang has the widest front straight on the calendar, so we have plenty of room to start limiting the damage from the very start.
"I can't believe that I actually outqualified you." Natasha said with a smirk as we gathered on the grid the next day for the race. Today it was dry but with overcast conditions, this could quickly go the same way as Q1 did, that being said, the radar actually didn't look all that bad. I wasn't trying to attack the team - I was driving for McLaren for God's sake, this is still a dream come true - but I did make it a point to check the weather forecast myself for this race. I knew what to expect now, and I was going to try and make it through almost the entire grid today, working my way up front. Unfortunately, that meant that Natasha was doing to be one of the first cars on my list, given that she split the Caterhams and would be lining up directly in front of me on the grid. I wanted to dispose of them right away because - and I know this was an ironic thing to say given that they did, factually, go faster than me yesterday, albeit in difficult conditions - they were a tier below everyone else. I would lose time stuck behind a Toro Rosso or a Sauber too, but these backmarker teams have finished the first couple of races multiple laps down, so if I get stuck behind them for any significant amount of time, I may never make it back to the front of the grid. A taste of what Natasha has to experience every racing weekend, I suppose.
"Well...that's what happens when you get a clean lap in. Do me a favor and try and give Alvarez a hard time, yeah?" I asked with a smirk, hoping my cousin could hold up the Ferrari for a little while and maybe, with a bit of luck, I might just walk away with the championship lead. I was just two points behind Alvarez, and we were both starting well in the back, so even with the great cars we have, I would anticipate us finishing in the lower half of the top ten. Of course, I would also anticipate Red Bull winning, but the thing with that is that Renner is sitting on twelve points and Weaver is only on six after a disastrous first two races for the team which, all things considered, seems to have the fastest raw pace of the whole field. Say Max wins and takes the full twenty-five points from this race, that still only puts him on forty-seven, while if Weaver wins and Renner has to settle for second place and eighteen points, that'll just be forty-points. And lucky for me, Weaver is the one on pole while Tommy Koskinen of all people managed to split the Red Bulls, so if I take a seventh place and six points, with Alvarez in ninth - two points - or lower, then I take the championship lead. Forty-one points to Renner's forty to Alvarez's thirty-nine. I know this is a rather circuitous possibility but, to be honest, I already completed my objective for the season. I won a race with McLaren, I proved that I could do it, now I'm left wondering what else is possible. Could I lead the championship, even if just for one race? Why not try it? Because leading the championship once may be the only chance I ever get to do it.
"Trying to start that feud again?" Nat smirked, referring to that period after the 2008 Canadian Grand Prix where things nearly got ugly between Felipe Alvarez and I. Ironically enough, we've kind of gone and replaced each other now, with Alvarez taking over the seat I was filling in for Ferrari, while I suppose I could be considered the true heir to Alvarez at McLaren after Kaasalainen turned out to be a bit of a dud in a top car. I suppose I can't insult him too much though, given that he's quite literally three positions ahead of me on the grid today, with his teammate Tripoli and Tsirinskaya in between us.
"No, not quite. Just a bit of gamesmanship, besides...when else are you going to get the chance to race against a Ferrari this season?" I shrugged, then offered her the chance to live out a bucket list item she probably never expected to face this season.
"Point taken...I'll see how it goes. You know how bad my car is though, so we'll have to see how it goes." Natasha accepted, albeit with making any promises, because, quite frankly, how could see? Nat could be trying her hardest to keep Alvarez behind but fail simply because the performance level is that great. Still though, I had someone who I could trust to at least try and help me, so that was a nice feeling to have. With that, I met with my engineers one last time, stood for the Malaysian anthem, got in my car, and rolled off the formation lap on prime tyres - the idea was to go long and make up spots as other people pit, then use clear air to try and minimize the damage for when we have to make our own pitstops later in the race, then finish strong on the faster, softer option tyres - all while the ominous clouds still clung over the Malaysian Grand Prix circuit. The forecast said just clouds, little to no actual rain, but after seeing how we misjudged qualifying and the monsoon conditions of the 2009 race that I missed, anything was possible on these fifteen turns south of Kuala Lumpur.
Coming out of said fifteenth turn, I did one last burn out to heat up my tyres and took my slot on the grid. Sardonically, I figured that starting this far back at least means I'll have marginally more heat left in my tyres than the frontrunners sitting there waiting for the grid to form up. And form up it did, twenty-four cars from twelve different teams lined up for the third race of the 2010 Formula One World Championship! The five red lights went out to begin the race and I instantly shot off like a rocket, the starts of my car - and to be fair, Anthony and the Ferraris behind - were so much stronger than the backmarker cars here. Pulling out to the right - partially into the pitlane even - and rolling my leg onto the F-duct, I was able to instantly shoot ahead of both Natasha and the Caterhams going into turn one. Alvarez tried to follow me behind but didn't quite have the same launch of as good positioning, so when he came across the backmarkers in turn two, his move to overtake them left Tripoli and Tsirinskaya squeezing each other at the very edge of the track. The two cars made contact behind me, and I don't know if it was that hard of a hit or if these backmarker cars were just made fragile, but both cars seemed to crumble from what seemed to be a relatively low speed blow. Regardless of why the crash was so bad, the point remains, Alvarez continued on as the Marussia and the Caterham were left stricken at the side of the road.
"Safety car, safety car." Nicky Morrison called out, thus the cars ground to a halt with Renner leading from Weaver and Koskinen after a strong start, while I was up to fifteenth, the two Toro Rossos ahead of me, and Jyri Kaasalainen behind, the sole remaining Caterham splitting me and Felipe Alvarez. Thanks to the owner of Caterham Cars - and sponsor Air Asia for that matter - being Malaysian, the team was licensed here, and this was considered their joint home race along with Silverstone, so losing a car in turn two was hardly ideal for the minnow team. The same could be said for Marussia, because while this is just another race for them, it was Tsirinskaya's strongest qualifying position all season, and she didn't even get the chance to do anything with it for an accident that wasn't even her fault. As much as I felt bad for my cousin, I was soon confronted with another problem: it started to drizzle.
"Do we pit for intermediates?" I asked Nicky over the radio as the grid formed up behind the safety car and everyone probably asked themselves the same question.
"This is as bad as we think it's going to get, do whatever you feel is best. Either way we think the SC is going to take a few laps and we're still pretty deep in the pack anyway." Morrison left the decision up to me. There was rain in the air, that much was true, but it wasn't all that bad, and even the slick tyres could displace a small amount of water if need be. It wasn't perfect, not by any means, but it also wasn't as bad as the end of the qualifying lap, where I was able to keep the car on track despite the difficulties...but do I really want to put all my faith in McLaren's radar after that? I did see it myself before the race though. so, I know what Morrison is saying is true...decisions, decisions. Ultimately though, I had the security of multiple laps behind the safety car, so when we reached the pits at the end of lap one, I stayed out, while almost everyone else pitted. The Red Bulls opted to double stack, as did the Ferraris, and Anthony Harrison decided to split strategies by pitting while I stayed out. In fact, the only cars left out were Koskinen, Kaminski, Alexandrov, and myself. A Mercedes, two Lotus cars, and a McLaren, now the unlikely top four of the race after everyone else pitted for the intermediate tyres.
That being said, come lap two of the race...conditions were just about the same, with a few rain drops on the cameras but the track remaining just about the same. I even glanced to the grandstands and saw the locals weren't bothering to put on jackets or take out umbrellas. I mean, sure, it was a covered grandstand, but if they expected the typical kind of Malaysian Grand Prix rain dump, it would be blowing into their faces anyway. The locals weren't expecting conditions to get any worse, so, the four of us continued to stay out, with the rest of the grid having formed up behind us on the intermediate tyres likely starting to doubt themselves. In fact, at the end of lap four, as the safety car pulled into the pits, so did a number of cars, pitting to switch back to the dry tyres as the track went green to begin lap five. Those that stayed out found that the rain failed to materialize. There were droplets, sure, but even those would fade a few laps later, and by lap twenty of the race, the sun would even come out, peaking through the clouds as the conditions remained dry throughout the race.
So, as everyone else pit to get rid of the intermediate tyres, it was just the four of us in contention. Sure, we would need to pit at some point to make the race distance, but that applied to everyone else too, as they couldn't do another fifty laps on these dry tyres, especially because some of them went straight back to the scrubbed set of tyres they had started the race on. They would try to claw their way back to the front and, I'm sure, some would have the speed to take positions from us, but from where I was sitting, after starting eighteenth on the grid, by the end of lap five, I was in fourth place, a pitstop between me and everyone behind, and in a faster car than all the ones ahead of me. Vladimir Alexandrov, the rookie Russian in the Lotus and a former GP2 Asia rival of Natasha, would be my first victim, getting overtaken going into turn fifteen at the end of lap six. It was a simple move really, getting into his draft down the back straight, using the F-duct to give myself even more of a speed advantage, and then diving into the inside of the hairpin to take the position. That part was easily done, but the two cars ahead wouldn't be taken so easily. In second place was Piotr Kaminski, the Pole driving for Lotus-Renault fresh off a second-place finish at the Australian Grand Prix, wanting to turn Malaysia into a repeat performance, if not do one better. 2009 was a bleak year for the Polish driver, but now in 2010 in the black and gold car, he was back to doing the same type of heroics as he was known for in the white and blue car in 2008. Considering I was in a Lotus sandwich right now, Mercedes is the fourth best car, but Lotus may be a closer fifth than we've realized. Kaminski in particular may be poised to play as much of a spoiler role in this Red Bull-Ferrari-McLaren battle as the Mercedes of Ziegler and Koskinen. Speaking of Koskinen, he was going to be hard to beat, as my former teammate was getting a taste of a win by leading the race, and considering this track was plastered with Petronas logos just like his car, he had double the reason to not let this one go easily. I worked my way into third on lap seven after starting eighteenth, so a win was definitely on the cards, but the Pole and the Finn ahead of me aren't going to make it quite as easy as the Russian did.
The problem with that is, while the rest of the field is a pitstop behind me, the likes of Renner, Harrison, Alvarez, and Weaver are going to be pounding out fastest laps of the race in clean air while I'm stuck battling these guys at midfield pace. I have the opportunity to take a shock second win in a row, but I need to get into clean air before those guys get too close to me, or else this sudden advantage I've built up over them will be gone almost as quickly as it materialized. So I knew that getting past Kaminski and my former teammate was going to be tough, but I also knew it was exactly what I needed to do if I wanted to snatch an unlikely Grand Prix victory here. So, come the end of lap nine, I had a good run on the Lotus coming out of turn eleven. On the short straight my silver and red car chased after the slipstream coming from the black and gold car with its red Total Energies sponsorship on both the front and rear wing endplates. Piotr threw the car into turn twelve with reckless abandon and I tried my best to follow as closely as I could, throwing the car there and then snapping it back right for turn thirteen, then finally regaining some of the time I lost to the Pole by outbraking him in the final corner. In theory, this should've prioritized my corner entry over the exit, leading to Kaminski just gaining that time back down the straights, but thanks to the grunt of my Mercedes engine and the clever duct in my McLaren chassis, my Vodafone sponsored car used the slipstream to remain close.
All the way down the back straight then, my car gained on the Lotus ahead, Mercedes power against Renault power. I thought I could manage a repeat performance of what happened to Alexandrov into the final corner, but Kaminski was too wiry for that, so he took to the inside line and braked late, effectively trying to goad me into outbraking myself and shooting into the gravel trap - which, given the rainy conditions all weekend prior to the race itself, might spell doom - but it didn't quite work out for him. I did brake late, pushing the boundaries of the corner, but I kept it in between the white lines and took a wide line, letting the camber of the corner slingshot me back into Kaminski's draft for a second attempt at the pass down the main straight. Obviously, the corner was nowhere near as banked as this, but it was sort of like the idea of taking the high line on an oval track and keeping the momentum up, even as cars took the more aggressive, shorter route at the bottom, at the expense of some stability. This was far from the twenty-degree banking of some of the American superspeedways, but the same idea applied, and I had another good run on Kaminski going into turn one as we began lap ten of the race.
I was assertive in taking the inside this time, throwing a dummy to the outside and then diving two car widths to the right, giving the BMW Sauber-turned-Lotus driver no choice but to concede the inside. That being said, Kaminski was more than fine with playing a game of chicken, so he outbraked me into turn one, going wide in the process but keeping it on track and swinging back to attack me as we turned to the left. We were side by side on the exit of turn two, as the outside of turn one turned into the inside of turn two, giving Kaminski the advantage on that particular corner. The outside of turn two, however, becomes the inside for the sweeping turn three, and the braking zone of turn four beyond that. Piotr was challenging though, nearly pushing me onto the kerb as he refused to give an inch, refused to make this easy on me, making it just as hard for me as he would any male competitor - as it should be, as far as I'm concerned - and thus, the battle continued as we crossed the line to complete sector two. We'd been battling almost all the way back to sector two on the previous lap, but with the inside and some assertively late braking for turn four, I finally got the move done and moved into second. I'd imagine we just got a minute straight of uninterrupted TV coverage for our battle, and I wasn't even up to the lead yet. After all of that, corner after corner after corner of fighting, I still needed to hunt down and pass my former teammate.
My current teammate was no slouch either, because by this point in the race, he's gotten ahead of Maximilian Renner to be the first of the cars that pitted for intermediates. Anthony started the race on the right tyres, switched to the wrong ones under safety car, and then had to switch back to the correct ones as we came to power under green, but he was coming back now, charging at us in clean air and setting several consecutive fastest laps of the race in the process. As significant as the margin we built by not stopping was, Anthony is eating into that advantage, and he has forty-five more laps to catch up to us...I need to get ahead of Koskinen, otherwise, sooner rather than later, I'm going to be fodder for the American charging back into the race with a vengeance. Anthony was the clear later at McLaren for two years - as far as he's concerned, he sent Felipe Alvarez running scared back to Renault and then earned himself a clear number two in the form of Jyri Kaasalainen - but now, I've gone and won McLaren's first race of the season in just my second race with the team. Add into this fact that Anthony had a nightmare weekend in Australia, qualifying down in eleventh and then having to work his way up to sixth place, and now he started all the way down in twentieth. A twentieth-place start and then almost immediately ruining his own race with a pair of botched pitstops while I miraculously put myself into a fight for the lead? Yeah, he's not going to like that. I'll be doing everything I can to get past my former teammate, but my current teammate will be doing everything he can to overtake us both and reassert his dominance over the team.
So, coming up to lap twenty and the aforementioned sun coming out, I was closing up on the Mercedes of Tommy Koskinen. Alexandrov had dropped off completely, Kaminski was sticking with us to the best of his ability, but the Lotus just didn't quite have the same pace as the two of us, though at the same time, neither of us could match the speed of Harrison either. I needed clear air and I needed to hope that Anthony's pace slowed way down once he got up to the rear wing of Alexandrov and the rest of the cars that stayed out at the beginning of the race. So, the hunt for Koskinen began, first with me taking a look into turn four at the beginning of lap twenty-one, but that was really about spooking the Mercedes driver and getting into his head. It was mind games really, making sure that Tommy was looking in his mirrors rather than looking forward, and slipped up, making a mistake in the process. F1's latest flying Finn was too cool a customer to fall for that, so he stayed ahead through all the twisty bits before we finally got to my favorite overtaking sports on this track: the twin straights. Now, Koskinen tried to defend, once again, this time weaving to break the tow, but with the same engine in my car and our F-duct trickery, I had the speed advantage, and I was able to pull alongside Koskinen going into the final turn.
I was making the move on the inside by I had a slight lock-up on my front left Bridgestone tyre, going wide as Tommy pulled the over-under through the corner, crossing the line to begin lap twenty-two in the lead, but I recovered and took off after him down the second straight. Once again slipstreaming hard and going down the inside, this time I managed to make the move, taking the lead of the Malaysian Grand Prix. Of course, the Mercedes had a little bit of momentum back through turns two and three, and I did have to check my mirrors - placed all the way out for the aerodynamic benefit, as was my preference - in turn four, but I had dealt with Tommy. The Petronas sponsored car lead laps at the Petronas event, but it wasn't to be, McLaren was still the top Mercedes-powered team, and I left Koskinen behind as I built a lead through the twist section, truly guaranteeing my lead down the straights where I retained my speed advantage in clear air.
"Beautiful work Tamara, you're up to the lead." Morrison praised, and that summed up the first stint of the race. The McLaren was a league above the Mercedes and the Lotuses, so I was able to build about a ten second gap by the time we made our pitstops, roughly two-thirds into the race, both of us switching onto the option tyres. This meant I was even faster and in clear air for the final stint of the race, so I just disappeared into the distance at this point. Meanwhile, Anthony was on a different strategy, having pitted earlier and emerged on fresh prime tyres, ones he used to take second place from Koskinen and begin clearing the gap to me, once again setting the fastest lap in the process, on harder tyres than me no less. I will begrudgingly admit that my way up to the win involved considerably more luck than Anthony's charge up to second, and he's got better speed than me despite the fact that my tyres are both newer and better. Felipe Alvarez was also flying, having overtaken the Lotus of Piotr Kaminski, dropping the Pole down to fifth. Fifth would be as bad as it got for Kaminski though, because he would hold off a charge from Maximilian Renner to take a top five finish here in the Malaysian Grand Prix. I wasn't much focused on Kaminski's race, because after overtaking him early on, and overtaking Koskinen not long after that, I was firmly in control of this race. Not the most exciting victory, but the team and I made the critical decision when it counted, and we were able to turn that into a win from eighteenth on the grid. The way it played out obviously helped me, but it still took plenty of speed to pull this off and battle the likes of both Lotuses and Tommy Koskinen to take the win after starting out fourth in the line.
"Woo! Thank you guys, thank you. I didn't expect this after what happened Saturday, but you guys never gave up and we pulled it off. Thank you, thank you, thank you." I thanked the team profusely as, once again, I was taking an unexpected victory lap after taking advantage of a mixed conditions race.
"Good job Tamara, that's two in a row!" Nicky Morrison cheered.
"At the beginning of the season, i didn't think winning two races in a row was possible, thank you guys...I appreciate it so much. God...I'm grateful. Wow. Wow, wow, wow wow wow." I sighed contently as I began pulling off-line to wave to the fans, knowing that they came out not knowing whether to expect clear or dry conditions, and having to face an event where a lot of the top guys - including both McLarens and both Ferraris - seemed out for the count, yet in the end, we finished ahead of two Red Bulls as they double-stacked in their disastrous tyre switch and got overtaken by Harrison early on.
"Great work Tamara, we're proud of you. That's one for the board." Michael Coronet came over the radio as well, the young English McLaren boss now feeling fully vindicated in his decision to sign me over the likes of James Buxton last year. I'm sure once we fly back to Europe, Michael will be able to take these two wins to the board - consisting of Ron Dennis in a now distant chairman role, the French-Saudi businessmen behind the TAG group, Bahraini investors, McLaren cars which has taken over a significant share of the F1 team directly as part of a corporate restructuring, and Mercedes-Benz, who downsized their stake in the McLaren F1 team after creating their own, but they remain a minority partner, albeit with zero shares in the road car business - and dispell any remaining doubts about me. Like I said at the beginning of all of this, my goal for the season was just to win a race for McLaren, and three races into the season, I've already done that twice. I'm performing well above my own expectations and, quite frankly, I'm leaving Anthony in the dust right now.
Speaking of, the points-paying results of the 2010 Malaysian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 25 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - Unted States - McLaren-Mercedes - 18 points.
3: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 15 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 12 points.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 10 points.
6: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 8 points.
7: Vladimir Alexandrov - Russia - Lotus-Renault - 6 points.
8: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 4 points.
9: Henrique de Matteo - Scuderia Ferrari - 2 points.
10: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 1 point.
So, the guys that had to double-stack behind their teammates when switching onto the intermediates and back again - mainly Weaver and Matteo - really lost out on track position and that shows in their results at the end of the day. Wilhelm Ziegler didn't have to double-stack given that Koskinen didn't pit, but he also didn't have as good a car as Martin and Henrique did, while not being on the right strategy like Tommy was, so as harsh as a fourteen-point difference seems, I don't think this was a disastrous race for the seven-time world champion. Quite frankly, the team on Ziegler's car made a mistake and the Mercedes didn't have the pace of the McLarens, Ferraris, or Red Bulls to push out of it. Lotus, meanwhile, earns some points back on Merc thanks to having both cars on the right strategy, with Piotr in particular following up his Australian podium with a Malaysian top five.
So, the top six in the drivers' championship now read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 60 points.
2: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 49 points.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 41 points.
4: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 35 points.
5: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 31 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 28 points.
Three races into the season, the Red Bulls don't feature into the top ten - Renner sits on 20 and Weaver sits on 10 here in the year of 2010, which fits aesthetically but doesn't really satisfy the Austrian team's championship hopes. In their places in the top six, Tommy Koskinen and Piotr Kaminski live up to their performances in the last few races, marking themselves out as top drivers and the class of the midfield. While it may be difficult to work a race win in with Red Bull inevitably bouncing back and McLaren and Ferrari jockeying for wins with them, I don't think I would be shocked to see either of them win a race sometime soon. If not Koskinen and Kaminski this year, then in some form I think we can expect to see a Mercedes or a Lotus win, I know I'm being repetitive here, but those are the drivers that are standing out to me right now. Perhaps it's down to what happened to me at the end of the 2008 season, but it's important to me to note when drivers are performing well in inferior equipment. This is going to sound harsh, but to a point, the Red Bulls, Ferraris, and McLarens of the world are expected to win - that's fundamentally why I'm here and Kaasalainen isn't - so I find myself appreciating the people who can be in that conversation without the same advantages.
Anyway, having talked about the teams so much, the top six in the constructors' championship look like this:
1: McLaren Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 101 points.
2: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 84 points.
3: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 41 points.
4: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 34 points.
5: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 30 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 8 points.
It's rather hard to believe that the sixth based team is only on eight points, but I suppose it would be exactly the same as after Australia, given that the top five teams all got both cars in the points today and there's only ten points paying positions. It's two more than last year though, so Force India doesn't really have an excuse there, and I don't think they need one right now, because they're quite content to fly high in sixth after having been a true backmarker for the past two years...Spa and Monza 2009 notwithstanding. Seriously though, they've come a long way, and if this Force India was the one my father offered me a seat with at the end of 2008, I probably would've taken him up on the offer, as Force India is a sideways step from Williams at the moment. Now, I don't think the 2010 WIlliams is as good as the 2008 one - James Buxton and Rudolfo Goncalves demonstrated last year that they're championship caliber drivers, too good to be finishing in 15th and 12th, respectively - but the point remains, Force India has improved leaps and bounds. Oh well, as difficult as 2008 and 2009 were for me, that chain of events has led to me leaving the Sepang circuit a three-time Grand Prix winner, having taken the 2009 Singapore Grand Prix for Ferrari and now two consecutive races for McLaren.
"Finally," I collapsed into the couch on my plane as Nat and I boarded for the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Shanghai for the Chinese Grand Prix. Given that there was still a lot the crew needed to do before this thing got airborne, Natasha turned on the TV, it showing an ad for...energy drinks and motorcycles? I couldn't speak Malay, so the words on screen weren't helping me, other than the ones saying Monster Energy, causing me to ask "What is this?"
"A commercial," Nat answered with a smirk.
"Thanks asshole, but is that a woman on a racing bike?" I asked, gesturing to the TV.
"Yeah...motorcycle racing is popular here, I guess Monster Energy is using that in their ads now." Natasha shrugged "And that's Hayley Richards, she's been racing there for a little while.
"Huh...how come I didn't know that?" I asked as the TV already moved onto something else.
"Because you don't know the slightest thing about motorcycles?" Nat mocked.
"And you do?" I shot back.
"More than you." she smirked, having won this round "Monster is a partner of Mercedes, I've heard her mentioned from time to time. She's effectively their go-to girl when it comes to motorcycle racing, has been for a few years now."
"Wow, I had a conversation about MotoGP last year and they didn't even mention her." I complained, harkening back to when the topic came up in my post-Italian Grand Prix dinner with my then crew.
"Well, as far as I understand it, last year she was at a satellite team - you know how Toro Rosso used to basically run a year-old Red Bull? It's the same deal, she was riding on an old Ducati after Kawasaki pulled out, now she's got a good ride again with Suzuki, so she's better off." Natasha explained, explaining the situation in a way that my motorcycle-blind brain could understand.
"Good for her then. I like to see women doing well in motorsport." I decided.
"I thought that was more of a Roksana thing?" Nat asked, noting the fact that I don't really push the identity issue.
"I mean, yeah, probably, but I still like to see it. Me and you in F1, probably five or so competitive women in Indycar by now, Hayley in MotoGP, and hey, speaking of America, I heard there's a woman driver in NASCAR now. I'm not exactly going to be an activist about it, but if really does feel like we're making a difference here." I explained. So yeah, some of that probably was done to Roksana Yurasova rubbing off on me a little bit while we were together, but at the same time, it really does feel like motorsport is in a different space now compared to when Nat and I were the only girls in sight at the karting tracks in southern France.
"Some more than others," Natasha chuckled humorlessly at her own situation.
"Ah come on, we've been over this. All the struggles now are working towards something later." I noted, trying to cheer up Natasha given that, this time, she didn't even last long enough for a car issue to take her out of the race, as her Marussia fell victim to an incident which wasn't even her fault mere corners into the race. Thus, the Kyrgyz driver was left sitting in the paddock watching me win the race...now I have to try and cheer her up.
"It's not even that, it's just like...by the time I succeed, I'm just going to be the second woman on the podium, the second woman to win a race, the second woman to race for Ferrari or whatever. I can't help but feel like I'm about to be the Roland Ziegler to your Wilhelm." Nat explained, harkeing back to the days of the Ziegler brothers racing each other in the 2000s.
"Hey...I still maintain that Roland was a solid driver on his day, he won, what, six races for Williams? That's not bad." I defended the German.
"Whatever," Nat shrugged that off.
"You can still be the first woman to win the championship." I noted.
"Please, the way you're driving, you'll cover that off sooner rather than later." Natasha responded, which...I actually took as significant praise.
"Well now you've jinxed it, my Chinese Grand Prix is gonna suck now." I joked.
"God I hope not, I'd feel bad if that happens." Nat laughed, meaning that, in the end, I did get her into a good place.
"Alright Tamara, you won from eighteenth on the grid last time out, what can you do from eighth today?" George Tarantano from Speed Channel asked me as we gathered on the grid for the Chinese Grand Prix. This time out, it was a completely dry qualifying, with Anthony and I lining up seventh and eighth, respectively, after the Red Bulls locked up the front row of the grid, Renner ahead of Weaver. Felipe Alvarez was third, Tommy Koskinen split the Ferraris in fourth, which left Henrique de Matteo fifth, and Piotr Kaminski lined up sixth for Lotus, continuing a strong string of early season performances. I expected that we were going to be stronger in the race, but at the same time, we have yet another mixed conditions race, and I honestly don't know how it's going to go. Sure, the past two races suggest it's going well for us, but as I see it, we have two cars on a dry race setup, a dry, albeit cloudy race start, and the implication being that we're going to get rain in the middle of the race before drying out at the very end. This means that, to win today, you need a car that can be well on prime tyres, intermediate tyres, perhaps wet tyres even, and then option tyres at the end of the race. It's a lot of the same stuff that I've succeeded with in the last two races, sure, but it's a different track and the conditions are going to come at us in a different way, so I really don't know what to expect here. The fact that my Malaysian Grand Prix win largely came from ignoring the wet conditions isn't helping matters.
"Honestly I don't know, we'll have to see how things go with the weather, what other teams do, but I believe in my team and believe in myself." I gave an admittedly rather bland, corporate response because I really didn't have anything better for the media today.
"You still feel that way after the Malaysian Grand Prix qualifying disaster?" George pressed, trying to get something juicy out of an interview that's started out rather dry.
"Sure. Look, what happened in qualifying last time out happened, we can't go back and change that. What happened after is that the team and I worked together, we looked closely at the weather forecast, and made the call that won the race. I'm not going to take the team to task for a small mistake when they immediately showed me that they could turn it around into a race win." I defended my team vigorously in response, knowing that George was just fishing for something to spice up the American TV broadcast, but not willing to go after my own team for the sake of some artificial drama.
"Alright then, McLaren bouncing back well after qualifying at the back last race, we'll see what they can do from the middle of the grid this time." George finished off before continuing down the grid, in the shadow of the massive bridge structure connecting the grandstand to the pitlane. I've made no secret of my opinion that the Shanghai International Circuit is a world class venue...that happens to sit in the middle of nowhere in a rather grim corner outside of Shanghai. The track was usually cast in smog, making for a rather gray day, but here under the clouds, it was even worse off.
"The Ferraris are set up for rain, get ahead of them early if you can, we expect they'll be impossible to catch if we're still behind them when the weather changes." Casey, one of my engineers, advised as I climbed into my car, having just taken a look at the rear wing setup on Henrique de Matteo's car lined up a few places ahead of us on the grid. So, with that objective in mind, I took off for the formation lap, eighth car in the parade circling around the Chinese circuit one last time before it really matters. First a right turn into the snail section, one that kept tightening through turn two before snapping back at the bottom of the hill to the left for turn three. Turns four and five were kinks to the left and right, respectively, as we accelerated out of the snail section and down to the next hard braking zone in the form of turn six, a hairpin to the right that shot us out into the infield section. Turn seven was a long, long, endless sweeper to the left before heading back to the right with turn eight to complete the bottom of the S section. Then turn nine brought us back onto the brakes and turned to the left, then a dose of acceleration just long enough to lift and throw the car to the left onto the infield straight. This is where we built speed, crossed the sector line to complete the middle section of the track, and then got onto the brakes for the second of the two snail sections.
Turn eleven was a hard braking zone into a ninety-degree corner to the left, moving ever so slightly uphill before winding downhill around through turn thirteen to the right. The camber and the slight elevation in the corner made for a fast, flat-out corner that was almost banked in its design, propelling us onto the longest straight in Formula One at an impressive speed. Speed, speed, speed was the aim of the game down the back straight that crossed the entire width of the venue, and this part of the track is the one place where I think we might hold an advantage today. As mentioned, the Ferraris are running a high downforce setup because of the threat of rain, and the Red Bulls tend to be higher downforce to begin with, because the way that Adrian Newey has built that car means that Red Bull gains a lot of downforce in a rather efficient way. All of that means that, with our dry weather setup and thus lower downforce, when combined with the traits of our car that produce good speed to begin with, we should be a threat to the cars ahead down this back straight...provided we can stay in touch through the rest of the circuit.
The long, long back straight came to an end with the hairpin, turn fourteen, bringing us around 180 degrees to the right to go down a short, parallel straight. For whatever reason, perhaps a party mandate, this part of the track is listed as turn fifteen, but it so impossible to notice as a corner - it is just barely a kink to the right straightening us up after the hairpin, I suppose - that I cannot think of any rational reason for it to exist. The entire snail section is written off as two corners to the right despite being nearly an entire circle before turn three snaps us back to the left, so I cannot possibly imagine what turn fifteen has done to warrant a corner number. It's stupid, I don't know why it's like this, but it is also completely and utterly irrelevant, the kind of thing you can only really think of during a formation lap like this, so with that, the grid turned to the left through the final corner and took our slots beneath the UBS bridge, lining up to begin the 2010 Chinese Grand Prix.
Five lights came on and were extinguished, a dull red was probably still left in the bulbs as Felipe Alvarez took off with a mighty start, the Ferrari instantly shooting ahead of the Red Bulls to take the lead, not very good news for us, especially not when Anthony and I were forced to tuck in behind the back, still stuck in seventh and eighth as the field went single file through the snail section. This would largely define the first stint of the race, us slowly trying to work through the midfield cars while the Red Bulls disappeared into the distance. As for Felipe Alvarez, well...
"Alvarez has a drive-through penalty, he jumped the start." Nicky Morrison informed. Well, a little more than some red lingering in the bulbs then, Alvarez took off before the lights were even entirely off, earning himself a drive-through penalty that dropped him to the middle of the pack, elevating Anthony and I another position. I was now up to sixth, while Anthony was up in fourth, Piotr Kaminski splitting us at the moment, and the Pole in the Lotus making it no easier to pass him for fifth than he did to pass him for second last time out in Malaysia. So, for the time being, I was stuck, waiting for something to change - whether it be the rain, tyres, or something else entirely - because at the moment, I was stuck behind a midfielder, I was losing time to my teammate, and the Red Bulls were disappearing into the distance. All the while, Felipe Alvarez was carving through the midfield cars like it was nothing, showing that no midpack car could keep the 2010 Ferrari behind for long, and he was gaining on us all. I won two races in a row, but the chances of a threepeat seems further away than ever.
The rain came and went, the primes were replaced with intermediates which were in turn replaced by prime tyres to close out the race, and Maximilien Longpre somehow managed to lose both his tyres in the braking zone for the hairpin. Not only that, but Lorenzo Barbaro of all people gambled on the strategy perfectly, taking the wets at the perfect time and coming off of them at the perfect time, combined with great pit work from the Force India crew, to propel him into the top five. As for me, I was running in eighth yet again, ten seconds off of Henrique de Matteo - little prospect of moving forward in the closing laps then - but every prospect of moving backwards, because Felipe Alvarez was right behind me, threatening to send me down into ninth and make today even worse. Now, eighth, ninth, those seem like petty points in comparison to the wins we've fought for earlier in the season, but we're still fighting each other for the championship lead, and a couple of points here might make all the difference come the end of the year. It was a different points system, sure, but need I remind you that Anthony Harrison and Felipe Alvarez both finished a point off of Matti Hamalainen at the end of the 2007 World Championship? These things matter.
Thus, the Spaniard was giving me no quarter. Coming out of turn three with two laps to go, Alvarez was right behind me, trying to take the position, and I was doing everything I could to give me a buffer. I used the F-duct to give myself a little bit more grunt down the straight, stuck to the right to keep the inside, and forced Alvarez to try it on the outside if he wanted to try to overtake me in the hairpin. Try, Alvarez did, braking late and trying to loop it around me, but I stood firm and kept the position, cutting across the Ferrari in a firm, assertive mood as we got into the S section. I didn't think that it was going to be possible to overtake in this twisty bit, but Felipe evidently disagreed, as he tried to go side my side with me through turn eight. It didn't work out for him, and probably hurt his momentum a little bit, but Alvarez gained it back under braking in the next few corners. He knew he wasn't going to get the move done in turn eight, he was just doing that thing all of us do sometimes, playing mind games and trying to make me slip up so that he could slip through and take the position. I was trying to make him slip up too, stubbornly using the F-duct down the midfield straight to pull away from the Ferrari, practically mocking him, as if to say that, whatever he does, he still won't have as much speed down the straights as I do.
In the end though, it wouldn't be me slipping up, and it wouldn't be Felipe Alvarez slipping up either, instead, it would be the Ferrari engine that gave out and ended our battle. Coming down the back straight and into the hairpin, a plume of white smoke shot out the back of the Ferrari, forcing it out of the Chinese Grand Prix with a choked-out whimper. Now, having driven for Ferrari, I can say that reliability issues for the team is pretty rare, at least in the current era, so I think that there might actually be a driver factor to all this. I mentioned that I was mocking Alvarez with the superior straight-line speed. Well, I also know that, with the reliability rules only getting stricter, Alvarez was no doubt running the same engine as he had in Bahrain, Australia, and Malaysia. So, here's what I think may have happened: Alvarez sees me pulling away on the straights and knows the biggest straight is about to come, so, to make up for the wet weather aero setup, Alvarez runs the engine hard, trying to extract every ounce of juice from his Ferrari V8 engine. Run an engine hard after having it do almost four whole race distances? It gives out eventually, so, after having led the Grand Prix at one point, Felipe Alvarez walks away from the Chinese Grand Prix with a broken car and no points.
Speaking of points, the top ten results of the 2010 Chinese Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 25 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 18 points.
3: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 15 points.
4: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 12 points.
5: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 10 points.
6: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 8 points.
7: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
8: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 4 points.
9: Ximen Goikoetxea - Spain - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 2 points.
10: James Buxton - Great Britain - Willians-Cosworth - 1 point.
Red Bull finally get the monkey off their back for 2010, with a one-two finish no less. Not only that, but Maximilian Renner returns to the top spot of the podium in the same race where he scored his first win for Red Bull a year ago...after having already won the Italian Grand Prix in a Toro Rosso. Speaking of Toro Rosso, F1's other Italian team also scored their first points of the season. One car out with a freak suspension failure, the other scoring valuable points for the team...must be an odd clash of emotions in the Toro Rosso garage. Speaking of a clash of emotions, from the highs of back-to-back wins in Australia and Malaysia - the latter completely unexpected after the team butchered our qualifying performances - now to the low of eighth place. Four points from the Chinese Grand Prix is all I have to show for fifty-six laps of effort, going from dry to wet to dry again, and fending off an attack by a Felipe Alvarez who quite likely pushed his engine to the breaking point.
With me scoring just a handful of points and Felipe Alvarez scoring none, there's relatively little change in the top six of the drivers' championship, which reads as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 64 points.
2: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 49 points.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 49 points.
4: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 46 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 45 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 41 points.
After four races in the season and three different winners from three different teams, the top six is finally starting to settle into the six contenders across the six different teams. The exceptions being Martin Weaver, sitting on twenty-eight points after a miserable start to the season, and Tommy Koskinen, whose consistency has put him in fourth place at the expense of Weaver. Weaver isn't even the closest challenger to the top six, as Piotr Kaminski sits just outside with forty points to his name. The Lotus driver has been just as good as Tommy Koskinen so far this season, and to illustrate his dominance within the black and gold team, teammate Vladimir Alexandrov has only scored six points. Granted, Alexandrov is a rookie, and he showed some good racecraft when I was up against him in the Malaysian Grand Prix, but a driver still deserves praise when he scores forty out of the team's forty-six points.
On the subject of team points, the top six in the constructors' championship read as follows:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 113 points.
2: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 90 points.
3: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 73 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 56 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 46 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 18 points.
Just like the drivers' championship was settling into the usual suspects, so was the constructors' championship, with McLaren, Ferrari, and Red Bull now running top three. McLaren has the edge now - in both championships, given I've retained my lead as well - but this is a long, long season and anything can change. I know I said my goal was just to win a race and I've achieved that twice over already, but that actually makes it harder, I think. I know I have a car good enough to win two of the first four races in my hands, but I've gone and finished eighth with it, having been outperformed by my teammate as well. Sure, Anthony is a world champion, and he should be outperforming me, but that didn't stop me from doing better in Australia or Malaysia, did it? Expectations are the curse of success, because my worst result of the season after a pair of wins has me feeling like crap despite the fact that me and my team are leading both championships, already doing better than expected. There was one thing I could be unequivocally happy for though, and that was my friends.
"Did you ever think that, in 2007, that just a few years later, we'd be first and fourth in the world championship?" I asked Tommy after the race, smile on my face as I congratulated the Finn on his second consecutive podium finish.
"We've come a long way, haven't we?" Tommy smiled back, feeling like he was on top of the world. With good reason too, I'd argue, as he's thrown himself at the front in these races while, for one reason or another, Wilhelm Ziegler has been rather anonymous. I can be proud enough of myself for outperforming my one-time world champion teammate, but Koskinen is outperforming a seven-time world champion right now.
"We have...and the way you're driving, you'll be a race winner soon enough too." I voiced my prediction.
"You think so?" Tommy asked, some surprise in his voice.
"Mercedes is a good team with a strong foundation to build off, and a great driver leading the program, why not?" I shrugged.
"Because I don't think you guys at the front of the grid are gonna leave any scraps for the rest of us. There are six top cars and all of you are super talented, any one of you could be world champion this year, and if one of you slips up, someone else is there to take it. Take Malaysia for instance, even if you hadn't been on the same strategy as me, Anthony got me by the end of the race anyway, so I wouldn't have won then, and today it would have taken two Red Bulls failing for me to have won the race. For the likes of us in the midfield, it's all about being the best of the rest, because I can't even imagine a weekend where all of you, with the talent you have and the cars you drive, slipping up." Tommy explained, sharing an insight that I, quite frankly, have to agree with. Felipe Alvarez, Henrique de Matteo, Maximilian Renner, Martin Weaver, Anthony Harrison, and Tamara Shchegolyayeva...all of us, with Ferraris and Red Bulls and McLarens at our disposal...everyone else doesn't stand a chance and it would take a minor miracle for all six of us to have a bad day at once. It's not impossible - nothing if in Formula One - but I see where Tommy is coming from. Guys like Tommy and Piotr need to grab whatever results they can because, once all the reliability issues and the mistakes of the early season get ironed out, it'll take some extenuating circumstances for the top six cars to not be set in stone. Sure, the exact order may differ, but unless something or someone takes one of us six out, then the best anyone else is going to be able to hope for is seventh place.
To add insult to injury, the next race is Spain, the traditional event where everyone brings their first real upgrades - thanks to the proximity to the European bases - and everyone has testing data from the preseason. Barcelona is the track where the running order typically reveals itself, and that's the very next race on the calendar, followed shortly by the jewel in the crown, the Monaco Grand Prix.
Notes:
Alright guys, like I said, do let me know what you think I should do with this length wise.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 33: The Spanish and Monegasque Rounds
Notes:
Hello everyone! I'm leaning towards cutting this story off at chapter forty, the end of act two, then turning act three into LatSoF1 part two, picking up where this one finished with the 2011-2013 seasons. Let me know if you have a strong opinion about this either way though.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXXIII.
The Spanish and the Monegasque Rounds.
"So, at least we should be able to finish the race now." Natasha sighed as we entered the meeting room at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, having just explained the upgrade package that the British-based, Russian-licensed Marussia team brought to the Spanish Grand Prix. The most obvious part, visually, is the fact that Marussia is now running a fully connected sharkfin, much like most of the frontrunners - except for Mercedes, though they're now running their own unique engine cover, with a split air intake turning some heads this weekend - but the most significant part, in both Nat's mind and mine, is that Marussia finally sorted out their fuel tank, meaning they really should be able to finish the race now. We cut the conversation though, because while Natasha and I trusted each other not to share anything told to the other in confidence - and even if we didn't, Marussia doesn't have anything that McLaren needs, and Marussia can't afford anything that McLaren has, quite frankly - but having just entered a room full of the entire F1 grid, the same thing wasn't true. So, Nat and I took our seats in the front row, with Anthony on my left, and Koskinen and Lorenzo Barbaro in the row behind us, filling out the usual bunch of us young drivers.
"Alright then," Rudolfo Goncalves began, the Brazilian stepping up to a makeshift podium at the front of the room after a brief conversation with Felipe Alvarez and Victor Hartmann, the three of them serving as the directors of the Grand Prix Drivers' Association, effectively the union of F1 drivers. The GDPA served F1 drivers through the horror years of the 1960s and 1970s, with Jackie Stewart having served as the chairman during his famous crusade for safety, and then the modern GDPA was born almost exactly sixteen years ago, after the deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. In terms of representing the interests of the drivers, particularly in regard to safety, the GDPA is a crucial organization for us F1 drivers. Thus, we all listened as Rudolfo, one of the three directors and the current chairman, spoke up "First things first, Felipe Alvarez has announced his intention to resign as GDPA director and has appointed Henrique de Matteo to fill his seat. Any objections?"
Various shakes of the heads and muttered "no's" followed as nobody had any reason to complain about Henrique's appointment. Quite frankly, I think most of us would argue that Henrique would be an improvement over Felipe Alvarez. That's not to say that Felipe is a dirty driver - he's not, he's a firm racer, certainly, but he's not the type to wreck a driver intentionally or anything like that - but he is abrasive and opinionated. Henrique de Matteo is significantly more popular and just about universally liked, plus the accident he survived last season, I think, makes him uniquely qualified to serve in such a safety-minded role.
"No? Good. Welcome to the board Henrique. Now then, this weekend the FIA, in accordance with our suggestion, has mandated cockpit mounted mirrors, taking them off of the sidepods. Does anyone have anything to comment?" Rudolfo asked. I shook my head. I was running the outboard mounted mirrors, yes, but I will freely acknowledge that I was doing that for performance reasons, and it really isn't all that good as a mirror. I mean, for us, mirrors are supposed to be something to glance at quickly while diving into a corner, dropping a hundred miles per hour or more in the process. Turning my head all the way to the edge of the sidepod is harder, but it came with an aerodynamic benefit, something that I wasn't going to give up unless the Ferraris, Red Bulls, and all my other rivals gave it up first. Realistically, the only way to accomplish that was for the FIA to mandate that the teams drop it and go back to traditional mirrors. Granted, Anthony had opted to run the usual mirrors anyway, seeing the aero benefit as negligible and preferring to have the use of his mirrors, so it was a tiny advantage to give up to begin with. That being said, it's not the 1970s anymore, we don't really see those radical innovations of old, so these tiny, percentage of a percentage of a second advantages are what our engineers live for. The miracle gimmicks of the last two years - namely the double diffuser and the F-duct - are the exceptions to the rule.
"It's the right move, we need to be able to glance quickly and see what we need to see." Anthony echoed my thoughts, the African American driver evidently having a rather passionate position about this, perhaps that is why my teammate never really wanted to run the outboard mounted mirrors.
"Thank you, Anthony," Rudolfo nodded at American before checking his notes once again "Alright, well, that should solve all the dodgy blocks, right?"
"Har har," was the sarcastic, mocking response to Goncalves' joke.
"That's all I have, now Hartmann has something to say." Rudolfo finished up - there wasn't much to talk about really, Barcelona was one of the go-to tracks for testing, including this season, so we all knew what we were about to get into, and the wing mirrors were really the only regulation change going into this race - I'm sure some drivers had opinions on the F-duct that were reignited by several teams bringing their take on the design to Spain for the beginning of the European season, and there are various rumblings about the option and prime tyre compounds being too similar, but those types of things are usually saved for the drivers' meeting with the FIA, rather than a GPDA meeting like this. So, no one was really surprised to see Rudolfo wrap up quickly and hand the podium over to the German driver.
"So...I have to admit, I didn't know about Felipe's announcement, but that doesn't change what I have to say. My wife is giving birth soon - " Victor began.
"Congratulations!" an interrupting shout broke out from the back row.
"Thank you - anyway, as I was saying, I have a little boy on the way. I'm thrilled, I'm happy, and I want to take care of my son, so that's going to take a lot of my time and attention. I don't have it in me to split my focus between driving, a newborn, and being a director, and something like this, something like all of you, deserve better than that anyway. So, I have to resign from my post. I don't have a successor in mind but a lot of you are smart, a lot of you care about your fellow drivers, and all of you want to make sure this funny little sport of ours continues for as long as it can, so I'll believe in any one of you. Thank you for letting me serve as your director for the past two years, and I'll be around awhile yet as an ordinary member." Victor gave his speech, showing just how much this position - and the trust from the other drivers that came with it - meant to him.
"A moment of applause for Victor Hartmann." Rudolfo Goncalves reentered the picture and, as a show of respect to both men, the whole grid gave a round of applause to the elder statesman of F1 and the long running German driver. A moment after things quieted down, Rudolfo continued "So, to close out the meeting, how about this: whoever is interested in a director's position make your pitch, and we'll have a vote...say, before the British GP? Good? Okay. So, raise your hands if you want the job."
I looked around the room to see Maximilian Renner raise his hand first, but then closer to home, I was genuinely surprised to see Natasha's hand go up, and a lot of other people seemed surprised too. I don't want to offend Nat, but quite frankly, she's a Marussia driver, so most of the time, the rest of the grid doesn't think of her unless they're currently lapping her. Besides the on-track stuff, most of the drivers still saw Natasha as little more than my little cousin, effectively a sidekick, and based on her comments in the past couple of weeks, this was a reputation that Nat was desperate to break out of. Perhaps this is the beginning of that. In any case, Rudolfo pointed at Max to deliver his pitch first.
"I may be young, but I've raced with many of you when I was younger, in karts or Formula Renault or in F3, whatever, the point is I know a lot of you. I know the engine guys, all my mechanics, and even the Bridgestone guys. I try to be as aware of all the pieces in my car as possible, and that is a culture of awareness - and therefore safety - that I would like to bring to the sport at large. I want firm, fair racing that is safe, I want crashes to be aware, and I want every driver to know everything that goes into their car. This is what I would want to accomplish as a GPDA director." Max Renner explained, giving out his pitch and mission. A few nods and whispers came from the crowd before Rudolfo, with a nod, turned over to Natasha, the only other one to express interest.
"Hi everyone, I'm Natasha Tsirinskaya, I drive for Marussia, I'm at the back of the field...look, you know all of that, and that's why I want to be the director. The cars we have at the front of the grid aren't like the Mercedes or the Red Bull or the McLaren, we on a whole different level of performance. We use different materials in our car, design in different ways, and thus have a different benchmark in safety. In this economy, that situation isn't going to change anytime soon, and I think that it's important to have a back of the grid perspective in the GPDA." Natasha made her speech, showing that this was an actual, thought-out passion she had, not just some whim idea to seize on an opportunity. This was something she was passionate about and she was going to push for it. So, as the cutthroat battles break out on track, the friendly, democratic side of the drivers will be playing out too. The campaign pitches have been made, and soon enough, the grid will need to vote for the next driver to join a long line of drivers, champions, and legends to represent our collective interests.
"Good morning," I greeted Anthony as we left our individual trailers and headed into the garage to begin the day on Saturday. The political backdrop taking the backseat for the moment as practice sessions and on track action entered the picture. FP1 and FP2 took place yesterday, now today, we have one final practice session - one last opportunity for the various teams to figure out their upgrade packages and their balance at this unique Catalan circuit - before we drop into the deep end with qualifying. At that point, we will have an hour of on track action separated into three roughly equal blocks: Q1, Q2, and Q3. The first of those three sessions decides the final seven positions on the grid, Q2 decides the next seven and leaves us with just the top ten cars left in contention, finally, in Q3, the top ten determine who exactly will start where when it comes time for the Grand Prix on Sunday. The fastest driver in Q3 starts on pole position, the most forward and optimal starting position, sometimes based on giving you the inside line for the first corner, but more often based on putting you on the racing line. In contrast, the even half of the grid has to start among all the discarded rubber and rubble that accumulates just off the racing line.
"Morning Tamara," Anthony yawned "I see Ferrari's finally dropped those ugly ass barcodes."
"Yeah, I saw that too," I responded, referring to the now somewhat blank Ferrari engine cover given that the Marlboro barcode style Marlboro logos, which Ferrari have run in some form since 2005 and as their primary livery since 2007 in place of stricter and stricter tobacco regulations making it impossible for Philip Morris to sponsor their tobacco products. So the barcode, a mixture of red lines on a white background, are meant to look like the Marlboro chevron at speed, blurring in such a way to provide subliminal advertising. I won't pretend it's pretty, and I am somewhat glad to see it gone, but...it does seem like Philip Morris International is still affiliated with Ferrari and I can't help but think this is the end of the story "What do you think about the whole tobacco sponsorship thing, anyway?"
"Well, I last ran a tobacco car when I was with ART, and back then I think it was still kind of normal, you know? I feel like 2007 is when things really changed. Renault dropped Mild Seven, Ferrari pretty much stopped openly running Marlboro, BAT left Honda, McLaren had already dropped West after 2005, it was the end of an era, I think. Then right as we made it to F1, it was basically all gone. The fact that Ferrari is still running it while nobody else is the weird thing." Anthony explained, and I could see his logic here. In 2005 the EU regulations changed, tightening the tobacco rules, and that's really what put the screws on the tobacco companies, with West leaving first, followed by British American and Mild Seven a year later, and that just leaves Marlboro. It's like the old historical saying where South Africa needed Rhodesia because it was a lot easier being one of two white-dominated countries in Africa than being the only Apartheid state. The fact that tobacco advertising is now generally frowned upon and the fact that Ferrari is the only one doing it, is what makes it seem so much worse. There's only one target to focus on in terms of this issue.
"You know, the funny thing is I think 2009 was the first and only time I ran a tobacco car." I laughed, referring to my brief Ferrari stint last year "You know, when I was in Indycar, one of my teammates, Rio Andretti, drove a 7/11 car that was apparently funded by Kool cigarettes in a sort of secret deal. The idea was basically to tell people to go to the convenience store to buy their cigarettes there. These bastards are crafty."
"Doesn't the Penske team over there run a straight-up Marlboro car?" Anthony asked.
"Yeah, they did last year anyway. The Marlboro livery, Hugo Boss, Mobil 1...it's like old school McLaren." I laughed, referring to the weird similarities between McLaren and Team Penske considering the organizations are - and always have been, as far as I know - completely unrelated. Hell, in the mid to late 1990s, Team Penske even ran Mercedes-Benz engines, just like McLaren has since 1996. Penske now runs Honda engines, much like the rest of the Indycar grid, but their particular engines are tuned up by Ilmor, which in turn is the American, CART and Indycar focused branch of the original Ilmor, which has since been acquired by Mercedes to form Mercedes-Benz High Performances Engines, the organization in Brixworth that builds the engines in the back of our cars. Hugo Boss and Mobil 1 then are still partners for McLaren as well, whereas Penske right now seems to be in transition, with the rumor being that, when Indycar launches its new chassis and engine formula in 2012, they're going to run Chevrolet engines with Shell fuel. Anyway, the point is the organizations seem to have oddly similar sponsorship arrangements, and while that does appear to be coming to an end, it did last just about two decades.
"That's wild." Anthony spoke as we entered the garage "Alright, good luck here."
"Thanks, you too." I patted Anthony on the shoulder before we each went to our respective side of the garage and prepared for the final practice session, one last bit of preparation at the track where we all already tested so much before, before we had to go out and execute this silly numerical exercise to see where the performance envelope is. Qualifying was a predictable affair then, with the two HRTs dead last on the grid, followed by the two Marussias with Natasha just ahead of her teammate Lukas Casemiro, and the two Lotuses ahead of them, with a struggling Rudolfo Goncalves the final car to be knocked out in Q1. The cars knocked out in Q2 were bookended by the Force Indias, with Giuseppino Leone in seventeenth and Lorenzo Barbaro in eleventh, and between them were: the Toro Rossos of Ximen Goikoetxea and Maximilien Longpre, in sixteenth and fifteenth, respectively, then the Lotus of Vladimir Alexandrov in fourteenth. James Buxton was down in thirteenth at the track where he won at last year, and then Victor Hartmann in the Sauber slotted in between the Briton and the aforementioned Uruguayan. Finally, the top ten were decided in Q3, with Yoshikazu Higashiyama tenth for Sauber, Henrique de Matteo ninth for Ferrari, Tommy Koskinen was only eighth, surprisingly enough, while Piotr Kaminski in the lead Lotus split the Mercedes, meaning that Wilhelm Ziegler was up in sixth.
At the sharp end of the grid, I was in fifth, my primary title rival at the moment, Felipe Alvarez, was in fourth, and my teammate Anthony Harrison qualified in third, lining up just ahead of me on the grid. Then it was an all Red Bull front row, with Martin Weaver edging out Maximilian Renner for pole position. This was nothing new though, Red Bull have been pole merchants all year long, but thus far, the Chinese Grand Prix is all they have to show for it. It's little surprise then, that at a track that is considered a good indicator of overall car performance, they took pole, now we just need to see if they can last the race or if they will once again be toppled. We know they have speed, we know they have good race pace too, but we also know that they are vulnerable. Yes, strategy calls did play our way in Australia and Malaysia, leading to my wins, but we also saw Renner fall from a certain victory in Bahrain and retire in Australia, while Martin Weaver picked up pitiful points from the first three races due to a number of issues. There is no guarantee that Red Bull will win, and even if they do, they still have a long way to go to dig themselves out of their championship deficits. Some say the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya tends to bring out a boring race, but I think there are plenty of storylines to watch out for this weekend.
"Go, go, go-go-go!" Nicky Morrison cried over the radio as the five lights went out to begin the Spanish Grand Prix. Twenty-four cars fired off the grid, ran up hill, and then ran back down as part of the long, long run down from the starting line to the first corner here on the Catalan circuit. Weaver and Renner led but the width of the track an the long run down to turn one meant that Anthony and Felipe had good runs too, meaning the top four fanned out across the track - making me, as the one in fifth, briefly wish for a good old big crash in turn one just for the hell of it - but alas, when it came down to turn one, the top six returned to single file order, with Weaver leading from Renner, Harrison, Alvarez, Shchegolyayeva, and Ziegler. There were, however, incidents behind us as we turned right through the right-degree turn one before snapping back to the left for turn two, beginning a brief run up hill: the first bit of contact was between Kaminski and Higashiyama, leading to both of them losing a few places, as well as Koskinen, who went off track in an attempt to avoid them. Contact breeds contact though, so another incident followed with Longpre hitting Hartmann, sending the Luxembourger to the back of the grid and leaving the German with a puncture...and with him dragging a flat rear left all the way across the circuit, he would retire at the end of the first lap with severe floor damage. The other retirement was the HRT of Ayrton Senna II, who rather clumsily hit the wall while trying to avoid the Toro Rosso and the Sauber ahead, ending his day earlier. This left a number of damaged cars throughout the pack, but only one car actually retired on the spot.
The end result of all of this was that the marshals were going to try and deal with the incident and the stricken HRT under a local yellow, leaving the rest of us free to continue the rest of the lap without interruption. Therefore, I found myself arriving in turn three at a rapid rate, turning right with the slightest bit of a lift - it is the first lap after all - before the 180-degree corner spit me out at the top of the hill for a brief straight leading into turn four. I glanced in my mirrors - inboard mounted, as was now mandated - just to make sure that I was safe from any attack from the Mercedes of Wilhelm Ziegler, before hitting the brakes and turning right for Repsol corner. It was another 180-corner, but slower and tighter than turn three, and it put me onto a very brief infield straight before getting on the brakes almost immediately for the hairpin of turn five, braking, turning to the left, and then plunging downhill. At the base of the hill, turn six was a kink to the left before the track straightened out into a braking zone for turn seven. For the briefest moment the track turned into a ninety-degree corner to the left before beginning the run back up the hill and kinky back towards the right with turn eight, turning the run into a straight line just long enough for me to upshift another gear, then losing that gear immediately as I gave it a lift as I crested the hill with turn nine, throwing the car to the right and onto the infield straight.
At this point, I was a little bit closer to Alvarez than Ziegler behind, so going down the straight, I covered up the F-duct to get a bit of a speed boost and tried to make a move on my Ferrari replacement as we crossed the sector two line and entered the braking zone for La Caixa. I took a look up the inside but was ultimately too far behind to try another for now, so I snuck in behind the Ferrari through the left hander and then again through the left-hand kink of turn eleven before reaching yet another one of the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya's rounded, 180-degree corners. This one, turn twelve, was to the right yet again, and it swung Alvarez and I onto the briefest of straights before we reached yet another ninety-degree corner, this one to the right, as we bypassed the old penultimate corner and instead plunged downhill into the chicane section that was added for the 2007 race. I never got to experience the old final two corners, so instead I have to put up with this: ninety-degree corner to the left followed immediately by a ninety-degree corner to the right, rejoining the first and making for a much slower final corner: New Holland. Still though, the butchered remains make for a fast, right-hand sweeper directly onto the start-finish straight, and I was right in the slipstream of Felipe Alvarez here.
Coming down towards the end of the straight, I tried to take to the inside, cutting across the white line into the pit lane, but Alvarez used his one defensive move to cover that off - as there is a gentlemen's agreement in F1 not to defend overly aggressively since, you know, we don't have fenders or anything to lessen the blow, so a crash at the end of the straight might as well be an airplane crash - so I swerved to the left, positioning myself on the outside. Difficult, but not impossible, I knew what I had to do, and I had to start with braking later than Felipe Alvarez. Thus, for all the multi-million-dollar bespoke racing machines, precision-crafted brake calipers, and prototype racing engines, at the end of the straight, it all boiled down to a game of chicken, two championship leaders competing to brake the latest. For Felipe, this was his home race and he would love to win his second race for Ferrari here, so he refuses to take a step backwards when he really needs to be moving forward. Whereas for me, after an underwhelming Chinese Grand Prix where I finished eighth, I'm looking to protect my championship lead, thus, neither of us were willing to give an inch, even if it was only a battle for fourth at the moment. So, we both got on the brakes at the last possible moment, and I had maybe the slightest bit of my nose ahead, but I also had further to go from this outside position, so Alvarez continued on his line and was poised to pull ahead...only for me to still be there.
We touched wheels and I came off worse for wear. Felipe was able to stay on track and continue with minimal interruption, whereas I was pushed off track to the left and clattered over the kerbs, slowing down to minimize damage, which in turn meant that, once I did finally rejoin the track, not only had Felipe Alvarez disappeared into the distance, but I lost fifth place to Wilhelm Ziegler as well, relegating me to sixth behind the Mercedes. I got back up to speed and onto the racing line before I could lose any other positions, and the car felt alright - at least for the moment - but it shot me out of my rhythm and lost me any positive momentum. Rhythm matters, momentum matters, F1 races are long and physical, and it's always easier when you have the muscle memory and the flow helping you that little bit extra, letting you execute this corner as if you were on autopilot while your brain already plots out what you're gonna do in the next one. Anything that can be done with raw skill and frees up the drivers' brain to focus on the car ahead, defend for the car behind, or plot out a strategy, is a benefit. Obviously, that's not to say that you can drive fast without thinking, focus is already required, but when you're a driver at this level, it is remarkable what you can multitask with, what can feel like it doesn't require thinking.
"Do we have any damage to the floor?" I asked later that lap once I was on the infield straight and had a moment to relax, having fully stabilized the situation and become confident that my tyres were fine, the car was at least good enough to drive, and there was no imminent threat from behind.
"Checking, checking." Nicky responded "Alright, everything looks fine from our end, no visible damage, nothing hanging off the car, we would anticipate some minor damage to the floor and the diffuser, so perhaps a slight drop in aerodynamics, but nothing major. You can certainly drive through it."
"Copy," I responded, relieved to learn there wasn't anything wrong with the car and if there was any damage working against me, it was supposed to be something minor. Thus, I spent the remainder of the first stint trying to work my way back up to the Mercedes, hoping to pass Ziegler and then work my way back up to Alvarez and get ahead of the Spaniard. This isn't so much about him, he defended firmly and I'm sure he would rather not have had contact - I'm sure he was on the radio asking the team to check for any damage as well - but more about me, because I failed to pull the move off, made contact, and lost another place in the process, so I want to get back up there and redeem my mistake. That being said, if it was going to happen for me, it didn't seem like it was going to happen in the first stint, because all the cars were operating at a rather similar pace at the beginning of the race. Even the Red Bulls, which we expected from practice and qualifying to be the class of the field in the race, weren't all that impressive, with them maybe pulling a tenth or two on Anthony Harrison per lap, while some pundits predicted they were going to be a second faster than everyone else come race day. So, we were performing better than expected relative to the Red Bulls, but the performance sword cut both ways, since the Ferraris and the Mercedes were also performing closer than expected to us, meaning that, while Anthony was keeping in touch with the Red Bulls in the lead McLaren, I wasn't exactly able to devour the cars in between us in the other McLaren.
I was chipping away at the gap, sure, but that didn't matter for much, and it felt like all the gains I made on the straights to get closer to Ziegler were lost in the corners as I hit a wall of dirty air from the car ahead that made it unbearable in the corners. We had the same engine as the Mercedes and the better aero thanks to a newer car, but it didn't matter how good the aerodynamics were when you were up against the turbulent air that already had a front wing cutting through it and hadn't yet recovered from that. F1 cars are built to perform well in optimal, clean air conditions, but the end result of that is that the air coming off of the car is turbulent and scattered, rushing back into place to fill the hole that the car just punched through, thus no F1 driver wants to be the following car. Especially not at a track like Barcelona where teams have so much data, are so optimized, and the track itself doesn't do all that much to help the racing to begin with. Look, I knew I said I wasn't going to complain about Barcelona, and yes, it is often better than its reputation says, but it's hard to say that when you're running a pretty distant sixth after having won two races in a row earlier in the season. In any case, it seemed my chances in this race would depend on pit strategy...not great on a day expected to be a one-stop affair for pretty much everyone.
So, when the pitstops in question came, McLaren and I executed good stops for both of us, which, while it didn't result in a position change for me, it did help Harrison get up into second after a poor pitstop for Renner. The German Red Bull driver not only lost second, but also third, dropping to fourth place behind Felipe Alvarez as a consequence of his pitstop. Part of me grit my teeth at that, because it could've been me on that podium position if not for the incident earlier, but instead here I am stuck behind Wilhelm Ziegler still, all the way down in sixth place. Now granted, Alvarez has pulled together some strong race pace ever since we had our little tussle in turn one, but Harrison has shown even stronger pace - keeping in touch with Weaver in the lead and even setting the fastest lap of the race at one stage - meaning that, had I not picked up some floor damage, lost momentum, and got some dust on the tyre, I probably would've had some strong race pace from the beginning. I have to admit that it is a pretty miserable state of the race for me right now, because the floor damage is at just such a point where nothing is going to fail catastrophically, and where I can just about stay on Ziegler's diffuser, but severe enough that I don't have the pace to move forward at all. It's just this unbearable limbo.
Therefore, late in the race when Ziegler had a lockup entering the final chicane, I knew this was the moment where I had to strike. The silver, teal, and black Mercedes recovered and continued through the last element of the chicane and his final corner, but it was a compromised line, and I could smell blood, so my own silver and red car tore through the final corner and chased him down the straight. We were both on the racing line and I pulled to the right, taking to the inside, and going to try and make the move done, but then Ziegler - the seven-time world champion, an immensely talented driver who rebuilt Ferrari and brought them to their first world titles since the 1970s, no one can take that part away from him, but it is equally true that Ziegler also had his infamous collisions with Damon Hill in 1994 and Jacques Villeneuve in 1997, so this was perhaps seeing the other side of that amazing driver - cut across to the right, cutting across all the way to the right to block me. Now, the aforementioned gentlemen's agreement also clarifies that defensive moves should be proactive, not reactive. In practice, everyone tests that rule, because nothing is ever really proactive when you're defending from another car, but there is a difference between moving to make a move hard, and then moving in such a way to make the move impossible. Ziegler's lunge across track was downright dangerous, it forced me to lift and give up on my move down the inside, and it led to him pulling away in fifth place. I would not call that a fair move, and I know that, as someone in my third full season in F1, fourth overall, it's really hard for me to criticize a driver who made his F1 debut when I was still a toddler, but that doesn't change the fact that move wasn't right. Not at all.
"What the hell is going on? First Alvarez now Ziegler, this is ridiculous. How am I supposed to race if I keep having to deal with moves like that? it's ridiculous!" I complained over the radio, my frustration leading to Alvarez picking up a few stray bullets as well, even if I didn't think his defense was too over-the-line. In contrast, I felt like Alvarez was a firm, but hard move where I, unfortunately, was just the one to come out worse for fair and pick up some minor damage. Ziegler though was ridiculous; I really can't go anywhere if I'm going to race like that. The thing with Alvarez is that we had a bit of a feud in 2008 too, so there is a bit of a rivalry there, especially because we're the two title rivals this season as well, so there is reason to expect hard racing there. Wilhelm Ziegler is a midfield car fighting for fifth place at Barcelona, it's not a podium position or anything precious like that, he's not making every point count at this stage of the season, so there is no reason for him to have gone over the line like that. I get that Tommy Koskinen has had a string of high-profile performances lately, while Ziegler has been criticized as an underwhelming return for a driver of his caliber, so I understand if the pressure is getting to him, but that doesn't justify a move like that. Nothing really does quite frankly, for the defending car to swerve across the nose of the attacking car like that? it's ridiculous.
"Copy that Tamara, we're monitoring the situation and have reported to the stewards. Knuckle down and stay focused, we'll radio in if there are any changes. Get back to it." Nicky Morrison gave a firm response, telling me what I needed to hear and then telling me to get back to work. Fair enough, he's the engineer and that's what he's supposed to tell me, so I took a deep breath, collected myself, and started working my way towards Wilhelm Ziegler, looking to get back to his rear end and take the position all over again. I was the championship leader right now, I've not only proven that a woman can win a race, but I've gone and won multiple races, so I can't just now go and let myself get walked all over like this. I need to show these guys that they can't do these kinds of moves against me. Hell, at this point in the season, I can't help but wonder if it might be worth it to not back out, let the incident happen, and show these guys that if they try this type of shit on me, we'll just both crash out. It'll lose me points in the short term, but a long season gives me plenty of time to regain those points, and I probably will be better off regaining points if I remind these guys that they need to give me a respectable berth when racing me. Maybe there's no organized pattern here, maybe nobody is out here trying to disrespect me, it might just be a coincidence, but after facing two of these incidents in the same race, I can't help but think that a point needs to be made.
"Local yellow in sector one...it's Anthony! Harrison had a puncture coming out of turn three and it's thrown him into the wall, careful, careful, careful!" Morrison called out through the radio on the penultimate lap of the race, so as Ziegler and I came through the fast corner, we both took a wide line and even went off track to avoid any debris and pieces of tyre while seeing my teammate's care at the end of a pair of skidmarks, sitting stricken next to the wall as Anthony threw the steering wheel onto the nose and shook his head, very disappointed to have lost out on second place. An understandable feeling for my teammate, and considering that I pitted around the same time as he did, as well as the fact that I've spent most of my stint directly behind Wilhelm Ziegler picking up the dirty air from the German who, still, wasn't giving me a single fucking inch through all this.
"Any concerns for my tyres?" I asked, worried about suffering the same fate as Harrison.
"No concerns at the moment, just take it easy and bring it across the line now, you're in fifth." Nicky Morrison calmed me down. I glanced at Ziegler ahead, I glanced in my mirror at Harrison behind, and I took heed of two things. First of all: Wilhelm Ziegler wasn't going to make it any easier for me now given that he was doing borderline illegal - I consider it illegal, but I say borderline since the reaction from the team seems to be that the stewards aren't going to do much of anything about it - moves to defend fifth place, so I doubt things are gonna get any easier for fourth place with just two laps to go. Second of all, while I did want to reassert myself in the wake of the incidents in this race, I've already gone through most of the overtaking zones on this lap, and I really only had a handful of chances on the final lap, so I probably wasn't going to get through him anyway. The fact of the matter is I'm in fifth place right now and I'm probably going to finish in fifth anyway, while my teammate crashed out from a certain second place, so...I backed off a little bit. Weaver crossed the line to win the race, Alvarez finished second in his home race, Renner profited from my teammate's misfortune to take third, Ziegler got Mercedes a fourth place, and I coasted home in fifth as the sole remaining McLaren.
So, the points-paying results of the 2010 Spanish Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 25 points.
2: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 18 points.
3: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 15 points.
4: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 12 points.
5: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 8 points.
7: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 6 points.
8: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 4 points.
9: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 2 points.
10: Ximen Goikoetxea - Spain - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 1 point.
Both Spanish drivers in the field scored good results for their respective teams in the Spanish Grand Prix, two Brazilians make the points, and two Germans make the top four, but it was F1's sole Australian driver to take the glory at the first European race of the season. Likewise, Red Bull take their second win in a row, making China and Spain perhaps the beginning of a trend where Red Bull finally begins to bounce back after a series of race blunders pissing away their positive qualifying performances. Another driver who had a good performance for two weeks in a row was Lorenzo Barbaro, who took a fifth and a seventh in the last two races, not bad for my lanky friend in the Force India car. It's nice to see the heirs to the Jordan team, after a number of poor years in the guise of Midland, Spyker, and now Force India, has finally found its feet with a strong lineup and a distinctive identity with their white, orange, and green livery harkening to the Indian flag.
So, speaking of driver performances, the top six in the drivers' standings read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 74 points.
2: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 67 points.
3: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 60 points.
4: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 53 points.
5: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 49 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 49 points.
No points for Tommy Koskinen this weekend means that my Finnish former teammate slips out of the top six on his forty-six points. Likewise, Piotr Kaminski is just outside of the top six, with another consistent performance - despite first corner damage - bringing the Pole's points total up to forty-four points. Given that Vladimir Alexandrov narrowly missed out on the points with an eleventh-place finish, this was a pretty good weekend for Lotus overall, and that says a lot when Barcelona is considered a good indicator of overall car performance. Ultimately, it was less these guys' fault that they fell out of the top six, and more down to the fact that the Red Bull guys finally had a pair of strong weekends to bring them back into the top six. Indeed, for the first time this season, we have two Red Bulls, two Ferraris, and two McLarens in the top six in the championship, so things are probably starting to settle down into a recognizable form. Still though, should Matteo, Harrison, or even Weaver slip-up in next couple of races, that could easily bring Koskinen and Kaminski back into the fray. The top six have great cars, but, as I've said before, Tommy Koskinen and Piotr Kaminski have been two of the standout drivers for me this season, and I say that as the unexpected championship leader and the only one to have picked up multiple wins this season.
The matter of cars brings us to the top six in the constructors' championship, which read as follows:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 123 points.
2: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 116 points.
3: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 113 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 68 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 50 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 24 points.
Four different winners from the first five races across each of the three top teams has resulted in a ten-point spread at the top of the field, whilst in the midfield battle, a strong race from Wilhelm Ziegler does give Mercedes a bit of a buffer to Lotus despite the fact that Kaminski is closing in on Koskinen's points tally. I still don't think that justifies the swipe across the track that Ziegler gave me, but now, having gotten out of the car and looked over the race stats, it does calm me down a tiny bit to know that, at very least, he was fighting for something. Elsewhere in the field, Barcelona did its usual thing and really string the field out, with only eight cars finishing on the lead lap, leaving Goncalves and Goikoetxea in the points but also a lap down, making for an odd contrast. Even Ziegler and I were a minute off of the lead, with Ziegler crossing the line a minute after Weaver and me just about two seconds behind the German in turn. Even Felipe Alvarez was over twenty seconds behind Weaver, because Anthony Harrison was the only guy that had the pace to match the Red Bulls, and even then, he was still a firm second all race long, only getting up to that position because of Renner getting screwed over in a bad pitstop. So yes, Renner and especially Harrison faced some misfortune, but I don't think Weaver's win was really ever in doubt. The Australian was going to win this race no matter what happened. In any case, when I had to face the media at the end of the race, they weren't asking me about Martin's win, they were asking me about the incident with Ziegler.
"Hello Tamara, we heard a rather strong rant from you on the radio after the swipe from Wilhelm Ziegler, what do you have to say about that?" Katherine Symmons asked, the familiar redhead reporter might as well have been the one to ask me, though the familiarity only makes this somewhat more bearable.
"I don't want to cause drama with a seven-time world champion, but I stand by what I said in the radio. That was a very aggressive move and he forced me to lift in the middle of the straight. Every interaction I've had with Ziegler has been positive so I can't for the life of me figure out why he did that to me. Yes, his team is fighting Lotus in the constructors', but I'm fighting Alvarez for the championship lead right now, so I don't like it." I answered firmly.
"Have you spoken to Ziegler yet?" Katherine asked.
"I have not. I would like to though." I answered, trying to make it clear that I wasn't trying to start a feud or offend one of the greatest drivers in my lifespan, I just had a problem with this particular move and would like to have a talk about it. In the heat of the moment in the car, my mind was set on letting a crash happen next time this type of scenario happens, but out of the car and with a cooler head, yes, I'd rather talk this over than having to crash out of a race. One thing I haven't experienced yet in F1 is a really big horror crash, and I'd rather not go through one of those. Anthony had a sizable shunt this time out, but in terms of McLarens getting a puncture and crashing out in Barcelona, the cake goes to Jyri Kaasalainen in 2008.
The Finn in question had no luck in the Spanish Grand Prix, pulling into the pitlane on the reconnaissance lap with a gearbox issue and the team never managed to get it repaired and back on track. A horror crash in 2008, another retirement in 2009, and no laps on the board at all in 2010. This was also going to be a hard year for Kaasalainen, relegated from McLaren all the way down to Caterham, but he's not even the most impressive of the backmarkers right now. I know I'm biased - having grown up with her and all - but I'd call Tsirinskaya the best of the backmarkers at the moment, especially given the Marussia seems pretty firmly behind the Caterham. Caterham-Marussia-HRT seems to be the pecking order in the back, but Natasha has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to fight the Malaysian-licensed team.
"Look, it's just...Tripoli and I were three laps down, in seventeenth and eighteenth respectively, Lukas was four laps down behind me, and Shandar was already a lap down when he retired, and he didn't even make it to lap thirty." Natasha, the woman in question, complained as we entered my jet. I liked this particular change, because when I was a rookie, I had to travel with the Koskinens - and I'm not complaining, they were plenty generous in offering that - whereas now, in Natasha's rookie year, we basically have a ridiculously expensive Dassault trijet to ourselves. I'm sure McLaren is aware of the fact that she travels with me, and it is still their jet at the end of the day, but nobody has complained about it, so evidently, I'm allowed to travel with her "Matteo doesn't know that, even when Renner was in a Toro Rosso he had a competitive car, and Goncalves was a championship contender last year. None of them know what it's like to drive for one of these teams, none of them know what it's like to be multiple laps down, but none of the people at the front seem to care about what happens to us."
"I care," I pointed out, noticing each time I lapped Natasha and feeling a spark of pity for her.
"I know you do, I know, but you're the exception to the rule." Nat sighed. This was all tied into her campaign to become the third FIA director in place of the retiring soon-to-be-father, Hartmann. Renner is her main rival at the moment and the GPDA will decide in the meeting before the British Grand Prix, and being up against a popular, race winning driver hasn't filled the somewhat anonymous backmarker with much confidence. I think between us, we had a few friends on the grid who could vote our way - Barbaro, Harrison, Koskinen among them - but the problem is a lot of my friends are also Renner's friends. A consequence of coming up through the junior series at the same time I suppose, so that meant that it was going to be hard and unfair to make mutual friends have to choose between Natasha and Maximilian. It also doesn't help that, quite frankly, a lot of the younger guys tend to be the more reckless sort as well, so they might not fully appreciate the drivers' association, and therefore not care too much about who is elected to the trio of directors.
"Look, even if it doesn't happen this year, Rudolfo is getting up there too, so a seat could open up agai - " I began, beginning the difficult task of trying to cheer Nat up in case this doesn't work up, before being interrupted by my cell phone ringing "Hang on,"
"Are you up in the air yet or did I make it?" Ysabella Villarreal asked, breathing heavy, as if she just realized I was going to be taking off soon and rushed to her phone so she could call me before that.
"We're still on the ground, just got on the plane in fact, you're all good. How're you?" I asked, sparring an apologetic glance at Nat, only to see that my little cousin was far more cheered up - judging by her shit-eating grin - by watching me talk to my crush than she would've been with whatever I was going to say.
"Pretty good, pretty good. I woke up about halfway through the race and watched you claim fifth place. Congratulations by the way." Ysabella yawned, accentuating the fact that F1's European races aired early in the morning in the US, even in eastern timezone Miami, where the Venezuelan woman was still squatting in my house under the rather flimsy excuse of housesitting...not that I was about to tell her to leave.
"Thanks. It was a pretty frustrating race on my end but at least I was able to bring back some decent points for the team." I sighed, trying to make peace with my Spanish Grand Prix, but clearly still not too happy as to how things came out, especially given that, had I got past Alvarez cleanly, I could've been the one to inherit second place when Anthony retired rather than getting swiped across by Wilhelm Ziegler.
"Oh boo-hoo, the amazingly fast and talented F1 driver with two wins this season only finished fifth, how will she ever survive? Do you have a violin? I'll play a sad violin for you." Ysabella heckled, getting a laugh out of me.
"Why would I have a violin?" I asked with a smirk.
"I dunno, seemed like something you Russians would have." I could practically hear Villarreal shrug.
"I'm not even Russian..." I trailed off with a giggle.
"Listen, you speak Russian, your ancestors came from Russia, it's easier to say than Kazakhstani, okay?" Ysabella defended.
"Okay...Spaniard." I dropped with a smirk.
"Hmm...well played Shchegolyayeva, well played." the Venezuelan responded, accepting defeat on this particular issue, before both of us burst into laughter over the absurdity of the whole exchange.
"But yeah, I was fighting for fourth, then I got pushed off track and fell to sixth, and when I was trying to take fifth on track, a car almost took us both out for literally no reason. Then I got fifth place anyway, but only because my teammate's tyre blew up at the end of the race. Not exactly a great day at the office." I got back to the serious side of the conversation, still feeling the need to vent.
"Well, I did nothing because right now, the best thing I have going on is a Ferrari Challenge North America drive, so it can always be worse, yeah?" Ysabella snapped back.
"Hey, hey, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that. I'll stop complaining." I responded, perhaps a bit too desperately based on the fact that Natasha was literally covering up her mouth and laughing at me.
"Jesus Christ, are you insecure as a racing driver? I'm just teasing you Tamara, relax. I know you're faster than me and I'm fine with that." Ysabella seemed to laugh at me too, meaning my reaction really was overblown.
"I think if we went into the same car with the same amount of experience, you'd find that you can be just as fast as me." I argued, not wanting Villarreal to think that I thought I was better than her. I didn't, she really impressed me as a driver from what little I've seen - and I don't mean that in a patronizing way - and Dani Pieri, who has seen an awful lot more and even seen her lap times in the exact same car at Daytona, rates her very highly.
"Wow, you really are insecure, you are legitimately a ridiculous person sometimes. Tamara, you're a Formula One driver, you've won multiple races, you race for a top team, you are one of the best drivers in the world, male, female, doesn't matter, you're good. Stop selling yourself short and thinking that some random ass sports car racer in America is just as good as you. I'm not, that's not an insult, that's a fact. You're great, enjoy that!" Ysabella responded as if it was the simplest thing in the world and she just needed to get it through my thick skull...which might actually be what's going on here.
"It's just..." I collapsed onto the bed and looked up at the ceiling of the plane, not wanting to look at Natasha for this part "My last girlfriend and I broke up because she had some self-esteem issues. She was convinced that she wasn't good enough for me, that I was this big, famous racing driver type, and the further away I was from her, the more likely I was to find someone else and abandon her. The fact that I was racing in Indycar at this point, and she couldn't just leave her career and go to America meant that our relationship was basically torn apart. I like you, I think you're great, but I'm worried that this whole thing is a layer of humor over some actual resentment, maybe not on me, but at how your career has turned out? How your series is so much less glamorous than F1? Whatever it is, I'm scared there's going to be some actual resentment here, and I don't know if I can go through that again."
"Wow...okay, that is...yeah, that is something serious. Okay." Villarreal took a deep breath "This is just my sense of humor, I promise you that I don't resent you or wish I was you or whatever, I think you're really cool, I think I'm really cool when I look at the TV and go 'oh hey, that's my friend whose house I'm sitting in.' I tease you, I think it's funny to bring you back down to Earth and all that, but there's no resentment there. I mean...I was born and raised in a communist country and now I get to live in Florida and race a Ferrari 430, and I'm sitting in a mansion right now."
"My mansion," I interrupted, pointing out a potential source of resentment.
"Yeah, well you're not kicking me out so I'm still sitting in a mansion. Anyway. the point is that my life is a hell of a lot better than it could be. I never made it to single seaters, yeah, but that's not your fault. I wasn't cut out for it, but here I found a way to make a living driving race cars anyway, so I'm cool with it. I have no reason to resent you when I'm in a pretty privileged position too." Ysabella explained in a mature fashion, addressing my concerns and making sure that there was nothing really there to be concerned about. It was just jokes, good natured ribbing, just like most of this phone call has been, and knowing that, being able to tell myself that, took a massive weight off of my shoulders.
"Alright, thank you." I sighed contently.
"So, what's next for you?" Ysabella asked.
"Monaco, Turkey, and then I finally get to plop down on that couch with you during the North American races - Canada and Miami." I replied, smiling to myself that, combined with getting this weight off my shoulder, I was gonna get the chance to see Ysabella in person soon, and with this out of the way and everything else going well...I may just go ahead and act on the same crush that Natasha is delightedly mocking me over.
"It's nice here, getting to sleep in my own bed and walk to the track, I - hang on." I was in the middle of an interview in the Monaco Grand Prix paddock when Wilhelm Ziegler approached me. I preempted the German by greeting him "Hello,"
"Hi," he responded, caught a bit off-guard by me speaking first, but recovering quickly "I wanted to apologize over what happened last week, it was a harsh move, it was dangerous, and it's not the kind of man I try to be. I wish I had a good reason for doing that, but I don't, I got desperate, I panicked, and I made a stupid move...maybe I'm a bit rusty, maybe I've never raced you before and I don't know what to expect...like I said, I don't have a good reason. Sorry."
"Of course, thank you Wilhelm, I appreciate it. I'm glad we could talk about this, and I hope things are normal next time we come together on track." I responded, well aware that we were both on camera thanks to the interview cameras - who were loving this, hoping for drama, no doubt - and not wanting myself to come across any type of way. The seven-time world champion came to me, hat in hand, owned up to his actions, and apologized, so I'm not going to continue being stubborn or shoot down his apology, I just accepted it and hoped that things really would be better on track.
"Right, yes, I'll see you on track." Wilhelm shook my hand and left, the senior Mercedes driver going back to his own duties while I turned back to the camera and concluded this particular interview. As for being on track together, that would come sooner than we expected, as the tight, twisty nature of the Monte Carlo track didn't suit our car very well and didn't give us many opportunities to use our silver bullet in the form of the F-duct. In general, these longer cars with the full fuel tanks were starting to feel even more like trying to sprint a horse through a maze around here. So, McLaren was down in the pack, Anthony qualified in fifth, I qualified in eighth, and the two Mercedes cars split us. Rudolfo Goncalves for Williams and Giuseppino Leone for Force India were the cars behind me at the end of Q3, whilst the top four consisted of Henrique de Matteo of Ferrari in fourth, Maximilian Renner in third, Piotr Kaminski of Lotus splitting the Red Bulls with a shocking, impressive, and shockingly impressive second place, and Martin Weaver was on pole for the second consecutive weekend. Just after Wilhelm Ziegler and I had made up, we would be put to the test, lining up on the same row on F1's smallest, tightest track.
Five lights went out to start the race on said tightest track the following Sunday. At the sharp end of the grid, both Red Bulls got away well, with Weaver holding onto pole while Renner got a run so good Kaminski was left with no choice but to relinquish second place going into the first corner. I didn't exactly get the chance to dwell on that though, because I had problems of my own as Rudolfo Goncalves had a cracking start and forced his way through, shooting all the way up to sixth in fact. I was relegated to ninth place while Wilhelm Ziegler got ahead of his teammate, meaning the starting scenario that seemed so intriguing had already crumbled mere moments into the race. Scenarios didn't mean much to me though, so for now I just focused on the circuit, turning to the right for turn one and then beginning the climb up the hill. Turn two, Beau Rivage, was a kink on the run up the hill but the next real corner came with turn three, Massenet. As we crested the hill, we threw our cars to the left into the blind corner, tapping the brakes and downshifting as we did, because Massenet tightened as we came across the side of the casino. Then we arrived at the corner named for the casino itself, hitting the brakes and turning to the right in a nearly ninety-degree turn. At this point, began the run downhill, with us speeding away from the casino and then swerving to the right to avoid the famous bump in the road, before trending back to the left as we crossed the line to complete sector one.
The reason for said trend to the left was because we needed as much room as possible for the next corner, Mirabeau. Turn five was a hard braking zone and a hairpin to the right, meaning the cars were practically crawling as we came out of that turn, and coming out of it, we barely sped up at all before we were braking again for the iconic Monaco hairpin. This corner was so tight with the walls and the inside kerb that we actually had a different steering rack here compared to the other circuits, bringing us all the way around to the left, then plunging even further downhill before the lower Mirabeau corner, turning to the right, rolling beneath the old train tracks, and then braking as the track evened out below us. The ground flattened out through Portier, another corner to the right, a slow right-angle corner bringing us into the tunnel. This was the straightest, fastest bit of track we got here in Monaco, and I also knew that, because of the slow lap times, this was the shortest Grand Prix distance wise. I was down in ninth, I had less ground to work with than at any other race, and Monaco was notoriously difficult to race at, so if this was one of the few places that I could work with, I needed to take my chance, because I cannot afford to be stuck in a battle for eighth all race long. Especially because, quite frankly, we're probably gonna see a lot of attrition among the backmarkers, and with few gaps in the barriers, that can mean safety cars too, eating away at more of the time I had. Everything was telling me that I needed to take whatever opportunities I had, and this seemed like the best chance I had with my car.
Therefore, speeding into the tunnel, I rolled my leg onto the F-duct and tucked in behind the car ahead - Tommy Koskinen, his Mercedes relegated behind Ziegler at the start - and got as much of a draft as I could. I was right on his rear wing through turn nine, the right-hand sweeper that defined the tunnel section, then as we pulled out of the tunnel and emerged from darkness, I pulled to the left, taking the inside, and muscled alongside the Mercedes as we entered the braking zone. I hit the brakes, held my line, and felt the air rush past the left-side tyres as a mere inch - if that - separated my tyre from the barrier on the inside of the corner, then as soon as I was free, I turned to the left, just barely keeping my right-side tyres on the inside kerb of the Nouvelle chicane to keep my car between the lines. Now back up to eighth, I sped back up, gaining speed as I hit the fast right-then-immediate-left chicane to finish up turn eleven and get out of the Nouvelle chicane. This left me with a moment to breathe as I arrived on the brief, harbor-side straight before things got tense again with a relentless series of fast, completely on the edge corners.
First came Tabac, a tap of the brakes and a downshift - doing just enough to slow the car down enough to take the corner safely without losing the momentum through this whole back stretch of track - before throwing the car to the left, swinging it out all the way to the armco barrier on the exit, but as soon as I grazed the barrier, I was already throwing the car to the left for turn thirteen. The tyres had barely turned before I was already throwing them back to the right for turn fourteen, crossing the line to begin sector three as I drove fast the famous Monaco swimming pool. I didn't get the chance to dwell on it because I was already on the brakes again, slowing the car down just enough to take turn fifteen to the right, then keeping as much speed as I could, I hit the kerb on the inside of turn sixteen, drove out to the left, and then brought it all the way to the wall on exit, kissing the wall as I used every piece of track available to me through this tight, fast, relentless series of corners. Things calmed down just a bit after that, leaving me on a brief straight, trending to the left, before arriving in Rascasse and getting on the brakes again. In factuality, it was closer to a ninety-degree corner than a hairpin, but in practice, it very much felt like the latter as I slowed my McLaren down and then winded it out to the right in this tight, tight section. Now, with the pitlane entry on my left, the track and the Mercedes of Wilhelm Ziegler ahead, and the barrier on my left, I entered the final pair of corners.
I was on the brakes for the penultimate corner, turn eighteen, but at this point, it was less about braking at the optimal time and more about not crashing into the Mercedes ahead as these slow, twisty corners crunched the cars in together. Both silver cars turned to the right through the penultimate corner, building up speed and the Mercedes just pulling a little bit ahead thanks to the accordion effect now increasing the distance between us, however, thanks to the draft and thanks to the F-duct, he stopped pulling away as I threw the car to the left through the final corner - Anthony Noghes - and arrived onto the start-finish straight, with its slight trend to the right all the way down. The same engine, less drag on my car, and a tow from the car ahead meant that I had a good run on Wilhelm Ziegler, and I felt bold. I knew he apologized, so this wasn't about that, this was just about doing what I said I would do in Spain - reasserting my dominance, showing that I could race hard, and that you couldn't get away with pulling a reckless move on me. Therefore, as Ziegler covered off the inside and no doubt thought that he was safe, given that Monaco was so bereft of overtakes, I decided I was going to surprise him and seize seventh place with an audacious maneuver around the outside of Sainte Devote.
I braked late, pulled alongside and even had the slightest bit of my nose ahead. Wilhelm seemed to notice me, and seemed to back out, trying to avoid a crash, so everything looked good when I turned the steering wheel to the left to take turn one...only to hear an awful snap and not turn. I tried again, turning the wheel more, but nothing happened, and before I knew it, I clattered into the wall, smashing into the barrier on the outside of turn one. The foam barrier did its job, collapsing in and absorbing the force of the blow, so I wasn't harmed, but that was little consolation for me as I sat there, in a broken car, having crashed out of the Monaco Grand Prix - my home race - at the start of lap two.
"Dammit, dammit dammit dammit. I'm sorry guys, I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened, I thought I had the move done but the car just - it wouldn't turn. Damn. Ugh...fuck." I spoke over the radio, apologizing to the team for my part in the accident before removing the steering wheel and climbing out of the car, seeing that I brought out the safety car. The marshals ushered me behind a barrier while they started the process of recovering my car. I passed some people in the crowd who tried to offer their sympathies, but I ignored them for now - probably not the best move, probably gave some innocent fans a bad impression of me, but right now, I couldn't be bothered to be better - I was already unsatisfied with a fifth place in Spain, but now I was taking nothing home from the Monaco Grand Prix.
The points-paying results of the 2010 Monaco Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 25 points.
2: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 18 points.
3: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 15 points.
4: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 12 points.
5: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
6: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 8 points.
7: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 6 points.
8: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 4 points.
9: Giuseppino Leone - Italy - Force India-Mercedes - 2 points.
10: Maximilien Longpre - Luxembourg - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 1 point.
So the top three remain exactly as they were after turn one, with the Red Bulls one-two and Piotr Kaminski holding on to a podium position, making for an all Renault-powered podium. Henrique de Matteo and Felipe Alvarez both score points, whilst Anthony Harrison in fifth means that, for the second weekend in a row, McLaren only takes ten points from the race. Felipe Alvarez was classified sixth, but there's a bigger story there. There was another safety car right at the end of the race, the SC pulled into the pits to allow the cars to cross the line, and a wily Wilhelm Ziegler got a good run out of the penultimate corner and overtook Alvarez on the line for sixth...only for the stewards to take a dim view of that, say that he failed to respect the safety car line, and knock him out of the points entirely with a twenty-second penalty. This promoted Tommy Koskinen to seventh, both Force Indias to eighth and ninth, respectively, and Maximilien Longpre scored a point for Toro Rosso as well. The big story, in my opinion, was that after starting the season with a series of blunders that cost them their good qualifying performances, Red Bull has put together a pair of really strong performances, and I can't help but think we may have failed to capitalize on their weaknesses and will now be scrapping for wins against a much stronger Red Bull team. We knew they had a strong car and a strong driver lineup, but they were struggling in the races for awhile, and now they've fixed that.
Red Bull's resurgence is clear to see in the top six of the drivers' standings:
1: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 78 points.
2: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 78 points.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 75 points.
4: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 74 points.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 62 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 61 points.
A crash so bad it dropped me from first to fourth in the standings, while Red Bull takes over the top. They're tied on points, however Weaver was two wins to Renner's one, so he takes over the top of the standings. I'm not sure how I feel about that rule, because I understand that it's about quality of results, but isn't it arguably more impressive to have the same number of points without the benefit of more wins? It implies more consistency I suppose, but I suppose it is harder to win two races than one, so that fact needs to be acknowledged as well. Oh well, it doesn't exactly matter. The Red Bulls are both four points ahead of me, Alvarez is a point ahead of me, Piotr Kaminski slips back into the top six with his podium, sitting a point ahead of Henrique, while Anthony is just outside the top six on fifty-nine points. Tommy Koskinen is similarly close, sitting on fifty-two points. Like I keep saying, Kaminski and Koskinen are the most impressive midfield drivers to me this season, and the fact that we're a good fourth of the way through the season and they're still in the conversation speaks volumes of their performance level. All it took was Anthony's retirement in Spain for Kaminski to slip back into the top six as soon as he had a good result. Similarly, all it took was one mistake from me to slip from the top spot all the way down to fourth. Anyway, if Kaminski and Koskinen are the drivers impressing me, then Force India is the team impressing me...
The top six in the constructors' championship read as follows:
1: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 156 points.
2: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 136 points.
3: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 133 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 74 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 65 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 30 points.
Thirty points after the Monaco Grand Prix for a time that didn't even have thirty points to their name to begin with prior to this season. They are easily the most improved team going into this year and, had I been offered a seat at this version of Force India when I lost my Williams seat, I probably would have taken it. Of course, I have no idea where my career would be now if I went to Force India in 2009, probably not in as good of a place as it is though, so maybe I should just accept that history went the way it did and enjoy the good times. Because, while Red Bull has taken control of both championships and I fell down to fourth, I need to remind myself that my target for this year was just to win a race, I've already done that twice. I've proven that I belong here, the team likes me, I like the team, and because of them - and Ferrari last year - I had a run of fourteen consecutive points finishes from the 2009 European Grand Prix to the 2010 Spanish Grand Prix. Prior to this, the most consecutive points finishes I ever had was five with Williams, going from the 2007 Brazilian Grand Prix through the 2008 Spanish Grand Prix. Speaking of Williams though, with a seventh in 2007, another seventh in 2008, and being out of the sport in early 2009, this does make for my poorest ever Monaco Grand Prix.
I wasn't going to dwell on that fact, because I was still in a good place. To spell out how lucky I was, in comparison, Natasha failed to finish any of the first fourth Grand Prix, and since then has only managed an eighteenth in Spain and a fourteenth in Monaco. Even then, the fourteenth really wasn't a finish, as she was only classified due to completing 90% of the race distance. In reality, she was caught up in that backmarker pileup with Shandar Khan, Jyri Kassalainen, and Vladimir Alexandrov that bought out that safety car at the end of the race. In high attrition conditions and none of them likely to ever score points, the backmarker teams knew that that battle for the prize money - and, quite possibly, survival - would have to be decided by thirteenth places and things like that. Therefore, with an HRT, a Marussia, and a Caterham all fighting for position while the Lotus of Alexandrov was trying to fight his way through them after a botched strategy...it's little surprise that an accident happened. However, that fourteenth place for Natasha did put her ahead of Khan and Kaasalainen, whilst Alexandrov technically was in thirteenth thanks to his car managing the limp back to the pits. This may prove vital for Marussia as Shandar Khan was classified fourteenth in Australia, therefore Natasha was equalized an important result in the battle for eleventh in the constructors'. Caterham has the best pace, best reliability, and a thirteenth-place finish on their end, so they're expected to finish in tenth. Behind them though, Marussia clearly has the faster car than HRT, but their early season fuel tank issues prevented them from capitalizing in a lot of the high attrition races. As the established teams build up their reliability, there are going to be fewer and fewer chances for these guys to slip into the high teen positions. Of course, they can always hope for chaos, but chaos is nowhere near dependable enough when a difference of millions of dollars of prize money is on the line.
"Alright," Michael Coronet walked into the briefing room just above the garage here in Monaco - a result of the unique pitlane arrangement thanks to limited space and the lack of a traditional paddock - where the head engineers, the drivers, and a few other key players in the team were waiting "First things first, I want to know exactly what happened to Tamara's car on lap two."
"Of course sir," one of the guys who monitors my race from the computer, Owen, spoke up "We've gone over the footage and found this - when Rudolfo passed Tamara on lap one, there was the slightest bit of contact, his rear left to Tamara's front right. Fast forward a lap and we see this slight movement on the upper suspension arm. I'll replay it for you again, see that? We think the suspension was damaged already as the race began, but then under load in turn one, it snapped completely, which is why you lost turn in and hit the barrier."
"I didn't even feel that hit..." I remembered, thinking that Rudolfo was close to me on the start but not feeling anything or even getting a jolt to suggest contact. Granted, things were kinda crazy and I was focused on not losing more places off the start, but I'd like to think I'd notice contact bad enough to lead to a suspension failure.
"I admit, the incident does seem minor, but going over the whole lap and into turn one, that's the only time I see any kind of contact at all on the front right side." Owen explained.
"What about Tabac, or the swimming pool?" I asked, thinking about other places on the track where the front right comes close to the barrier.
"Here," Owen said replaying the onboard shot from Tabac and letting it play through the end of the swimming pool section "No visible contact in either one and no signs of tyre damage on the rear to suggest that. Obviously, the front was compromised in the crash so I can't get any data there, but it doesn't seem like you hit the wall in either case."
"Is it possible the part simply failed on its own?" Michael asked, inserting himself into the conversation.
"I suppose so, but we haven't had suspension issues anywhere else, and I wouldn't suspect one to happen there. We've definitely been through harder braking zones from higher speeds." Owen reasoned, giving a good case for this not simply being a random part failure. Of course, random part failures, by their nature, aren't exactly rational, but if it was going to break, why not brake in turn one at Spain, for instance? Which brought to mind...
"Was it from the wheel-on-wheel contact with Alvarez in Spain, maybe?" I asked, remembering that was a bigger hit and thinking it was perhaps responsible.
"No, we changed the suspension parts after Spain as a precaution." Nicky Morrison spoke up from the other side of me.
"What about practice, did you scuff the walls at all there?" another engineer, a Sean, asked this time.
"Look, it was a suspension failure, maybe aggravated by some minor contact, but nothing major. We would remember it if Tamara clattered the wall at any point this weekend, so whatever happened, whether it's the wall or Goncalves or nothing at all, we know it was minor contact at worse. How do we prevent this from happening again?" Michael asked, cutting off this line of speculation and getting to the point.
"We'll have to talk to the factory guys, make sure there aren't any problems with the parts they're fabricating, and work from there." Nicky proposed, giving us a starting point.
"Could suspension issues have played into the puncture in Spain?" Paulo, one of Anthony's guys, asked from his side of the meeting room.
"Right now we're treating that as a separate issue," Michael answered "However, that brings us to a larger problem guys. The last two races we've been slow, and we've lost out on good points thanks to stupid issues. I expect to see a better race from all of us in Turkey. Red Bull is back, they're dominating qualifying and they're running away with it in the races, we can't let that happen again in Istanbul. I expect each and every one of you to give it your all and to try and bring back a stronger result than this, alright? We need to move into the American rounds on a high."
"Of course sir," Owen responded, leading to a cacophony of "understoods," and "of courses," and other such affirmations. Michael Coronet was really a great team principal from what I've seen, and I can't believe that Williams let that kind of talent, that kind of personality get away from them. I understand that Sir Frank Williams made that team and wants to keep it a family business, but Coronet wasn't trying to take that away. He just wanted recognition for the role he played and a small slice of the action, nothing different than what Patrick Head enjoyed in the past and he's not a member of the Williams family either. I know Williams had the right to say no, but now Williams has lost the top driver lineup it had in 2007 and 2008, they've fallen behind Force India of all teams, and Michael and I have instead gone to a top team in the form of McLaren. I hate to say it, but out of all the fallout from the end of 2008, Williams seems like the clear loser.
As I gathered my stuff and left the briefing, ready to walk home and go lay down - I wasn't hurt in the accident, but the sudden deceleration still left my body with an ache, on top of the usual fatigue from a race weekend, even one prematurely cut short - I came across Anthony getting on a black and red motorcycle.
"Hey," I greeted.
"Oh, hey." Anthony greeted from the seat of the sports bike.
"You ride?" I asked.
"Yeah, it's an MV Agusta, an Italian bike. I've been a fan for a long time and I figured that, after what happened in Australia, maybe I should lay off the sports cars for a little while." Anthony answered, alluding to him getting pulled over in Australia a few months back.
"So you bought a crotch rocket?" I smirked.
"Eh, when you're exposed like this, the fear keeps you in check. For me, the fenders, air bags, and leather seats just mean no consequences, with this? If I do anything stupid, I know I'm gonna pay the price, so I ride reasonably." Anthony explained.
"Hmm, I guess that is...some type of logic." I giggled.
"Whatever works," Anthony shrugged in response "See you in Turkey, yeah?"
"Yup, see you there." I waved goodbye to the American.
Notes:
Hehehehehe dramatic irony.
Turkey and Canada next.
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 34: The Team's Resurgence
Notes:
Alright, so this week, I'm making it official, LatSoF1 will be forty chapter and will be followed up with a LatSoF1: Part II covering the 2011-2013 seasons. The plan, content wise, remains exactly the same - if anything, I'm going to expand it - so now worries. I do plan on continuing right away as well. For now though, let's get through the 2010 season, shall we? Turkey and Canada this time.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXXIV.
The Team's Resurgence.
"...Happy birthday dear Tamara, happy birthday to you!" my engineers sang out in off-key glory as the McLaren team - plus Natasha, as they let her into the team's hospitality center for this, bless them - gathered around a custom-made cake displaying a side profile of my helmet. Cyan and gold, they even included the white and red Vodafone stripe across the top and a bit of the Johnnie Walker logo peeking in from the visor. It really was a detail orientated cake, and I have to admit, that did concern me slightly. However, I think I'm just going to hope that someone on this team knows a talented, decorative baker in Istanbul and this cake hasn't been sitting in a refrigerator for the past two weeks after coming from England.
"Alright, hand me the knife, I'm gonna cut the first piece for her," Michael announced just as an engineer handed him a large cake knife.
"They trust you with that thing?" Anthony teased, referring to the blade.
"Well, the legal department had a battle over it, but they figured if anyone ought to have a big knife, it should be the one person they can't fire." Coronet joked, to the groan of one of our traveling lawyers. As he cut a piece, he turned to one of the engineers - Jacob, a guy who, while working on Tommy's car, was also part of the Williams team while Michael and I were there, and has since ended up at McLaren - and said "She first drove for us four seasons ago and we're just now celebrating her twenty-second birthday, can you believe that? These drivers just get younger and younger..."
"The team principals too." I teased in turn, pointing out that, for his level of seniority and the team he's in, Michael is rather young for a team principal. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if he turned out to have been McLaren's youngest team principal when he joined the team in 2009. In spite of his youth though, he seems to carry respect from the team, has a good relationship with the guys, and is leading McLaren through a resurgence. We've had a rough pair of races, taking just twenty points from the last two races while our rivals have pulled ahead in the standings, but we're in a much better state than we were in this part of the 2009 season. The team I mean, I wasn't in Formula One at all this time a year ago. Wow...just saying that really puts into perspective how far we've come in a year. This time in 2009, I was flying to Indianapolis to support Dani Pieri and the Andretti Green Racing team at the biggest spectacle in racing while also gearing up for my eventual win at Le Mans with the Peugeot team. By the end of that season, I'd be back in F1 with Ferrari, I'd go on to win a race with them, and that win, at least in part, has led to me standing here today, a three-time Grand Prix winner, a 24 Hours of Le Mans winner, and a Vodafone McLaren-Mercedes driver.
"Eh, least I got some gray hairs, I'll be fitting in soon enough." Michael responded, taking a dig at his own expense.
"Let's just hope you don't get any more this weekend, eh?" another engineer joked, referring to the aforementioned bad run of races that would give any team principal a stressful run of sleepless nights, especially not when, at the same time as we're stumbling, Red Bull is finally getting their act together and putting together a hugely impressive run of form. I've made it clear that I'm a bit of an F1 history geek over the years, what with my utter delight at being able to drive for Williams, Ferrari, and McLaren these past few years, and maybe it's because of that, that I don't actually like the Red Bull team all that much. Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the people there, nor their drivers, and if Red Bull had offered me a seat in 2009 while I was trapped outside the sport, I would have taken it in a heartbeat. From the privileged position of a McLaren ride though, I can say that they really don't have any history, any prestige in this sport. You look at Williams and McLaren, giants in this sport, you look at Ferrari, a brand as big as F1 itself if not bigger, and hell, even Mercedes has plenty of history in F1 as an engine manufacturer and in the 1950s as their own team. Even if they didn't, Mercedes-Benz is still a major road car manufacturer, so their name bears weight in the world of motorsports. Red Bull, on the other hand...is an energy drink manufacturer. Of course, they've built a hugely impressive team and are absolutely a title favorite this year, it's just...I don't see who sees Ferrari, McLaren, and Red Bull at the front of an F1 grid and decides to root for Red Bull. If they're a German or Australian rooting for their drivers, that's understandable, but someone being a fan of Red Bull as a team, specifically? It seems like an odd choice to me.
"Easy now," Michael admonished as he grabbed his own slice of cake, taking a spoonful of cyan-colored frosting into his mouth before saying "Seriously though, the first race on this track, in 2005, was won by Matti Hamalainen in a McLaren. Henrique had his three after that and Buxton took last year, but this year? McLaren takes back this track. We've had a rough run of races, sure, but we've also won two races this season. There's no other group of engineers, drivers...or hell, even lawyers, that I'd want on my team going into this race. You've all worked abundantly hard, you all get to celebrate right now for one of our star drivers' birthdays, but this weekend we get back to where we need to be. We're going to bounce back, yeah? Show Red Bull, Ferrari, Mercedes, Lotus and all the rest who the greatest team in Formula One really is, eh? This weekend, we fight for the win and give it our all!"
"Here, here!" Anthony cheered in response.
"Cheers!" I raised a spoon full of cake in a mock toast. I felt the same way, honestly. Last race I crashed out after a suspension failure mid-overtake, so to get back onto the podium - the top step, preferably - would be the perfect way to recover from that frustration and embarrassment. The fact that it would be a birthday win for me only makes the idea so much sweeter...not unlike this slightly too sweet cake, come to think of it...
"Tamara, question for you," a Turkish reporter - seemingly a last second replacement or maybe even some amateur, definitely not the regular sports reporter from the looks of it "Last race, you crash out, was there contact with Wilhelm Ziegler again or was it driver error?"
"Uhh no, it was neither. I qualified poorly in Monaco and I wanted to move forward, I had already overtaken Koskinen and I wanted to pass Ziegler, not because of anything personal, just because of the position. I go to overtake on the outside, I know it's risky, but I think I have it...and then boom, something snaps, and the car just stops turning. It was a parts failure on the suspension and, unfortunately, we hit the wall. Maybe I was working the car a bit hard at the start of the race to recover position, but it was not driver error. Nor did Wilhelm do anything wrong in Monaco, he's completely innocent as far as I'm concerned." I answered, not about to take blame for an incident that wasn't my fault, but not blaming the team either. Nor was I going to blame Wilhelm Ziegler. As far as the German told me, what happened in Spain was a one-time mistake and nothing personal, so while I did want to pass him, and maybe it was pettier on my end than my answer suggested, I wasn't about to blame him when he did back out of the corner and give me room. No, Wilhelm didn't force me into the wall or anything, that was down to the parts failure.
"Are you at all concerned for McLaren's reliability after problems two races in a row for Anthony and you, respectively?" an English reporter followed up quickly. The F1 media circus could be like sharks, and since that Turkish reporter found some blood in the water, all of a sudden, they were all swarming me when, in reality, I just wanted to move on from the Spain and Monaco drama and start fresh with a good result here in Turkey.
"At the moment it's nothing too concerning. We had problems, yes, but Red Bull had a bunch of problems to start the season, Alvarez had his retirement in China, and I know the team is working hard to make sure this stuff doesn't happen again. As far as I'm concerned, Turkey is a fresh start and we want a good run of results here and in the North American break to give us good momentum heading into the European summer." I shrugged off another media question, once again making sure that I spoke highly of the team and minimized our errors without making it seem like we had a culture of complacency. I understood that the media people were just doing their job, and that the drama and the eyes did ultimately help the sport, but I wish that I didn't always have to watch my words. If I say something bad about my team, then I'm selfish and ungrateful, or they'll say that the move to McLaren was ill-timed in spite of the times. If I act like nothing is wrong, then they'll say that there's no accountability at McLaren and that the drivers need to grow a backbone. I understand that these types of inflammatory, click-generating articles are, sometimes, what ultimately keeps the sport running, but I just wish that it wasn't me or the people that work so hard on my behalf being used this way. Of course, everyone else says the same thing, so that doesn't work either. Someone ultimately needs to look bad in these stories, and I suppose sometimes it's going to be me. Still, that doesn't mean that I'm going to make it easy on them, wording my quotes as carefully as I could.
Another aspect of this is that, for better, often enough, and for worse occasionally, I do seem to get a ton of media attention. Across articles and social media, I've seen all sorts of comments suggesting that I only get this kind of attention because I'm the token woman driver, that I don't have the personality to back up my popularity, that people support me just because of the aforementioned gender, yet I'm somehow also a marketing darling, that my results aren't all that special on paper, I've heard it all. I will say, to a degree, I am more popular than I would be if I was a man. However, I would argue that it's not my fault that, out of twenty-four slots on the grid, the only two women are myself and my little cousin. It's not my fault that I'm the only woman in contention at the front, the only woman that can get wins. I didn't ask for the extra attention, I didn't ask to be prominent in marketing, and I've made it clear that the media aspect is my least favorite part of the job. That being said, I recognize it's necessary, so I do try to give answers, and while I'm always keeping my words careful, I'm also always trying to give an answer. I could just be like Matti Hamalainen and blow off the media - and for whatever reason, the fans seem to love him for it, some calling his lack of personality the greatest personality in F1, and now lamenting its absence - but I don't want to do that. See this is the problem with this media shit, it leaves me constantly thinking if I'm giving good enough answers, if I'm appeasing all the various interests going into my car, or if I deserve to be getting any media attention at all.
I'm not going to complain about being an F1 driver, ever - especially not after that disaster of a winter between 2008 and 2009 where I had no idea what my future was going to be before settling into some good rides and working my way back to the sport - but yeah, the media aspect is definitely my least favorite part of the job. All the artificial drama and the media scrutiny? No thanks, I'd rather just get racing, and that's precisely what me and the McLaren team intend to do here in Turkey.
"And it's Red Bull, McLaren, Red Bull, McLaren at the front of the grid for a mixed start to the race. Martin Weaver continues the electric run of form that has put him at the front of this championship. In second place we have our 2008 world champion, Anthony Harrison, the only driver in the top four that is still winless in 2010, he'll be looking to change that today in Istanbul. Third place on the grid goes to Maximilian Renner who dominated Q1, dominated Q2, but fell to third in Q3...he'll be looking to avenge that result in the race today. Finally, in fourth place, Tamara Shchegolyayeva, the birthday girl, seeks to bounce back after crashing out last time out in Monaco. Four drivers across the top two teams going for the win, but it is not Ferrari that is their closest challenger today, rather, the Mercedes cars line up fifth and sixth, filling out the third row..." George Tarantano for Speed Channel summed up the situation on his grid walk better than I could, so as he worked his way down past the Mercs and down to the Lotuses, split by Henrique de Matteo, who was down in eighth, while Felipe Alvarez was all the way down in twelfth. This would be a good opportunity to gain points on the Ferraris, but as the American reporter hinted, our main opponent at this stage of the season does, indeed, appear to be Red Bull. Of course, we can't lose sight of Ferrari or else they might sneak up on us and snatch the championship - as Matti Hamalainen did to the McLarens of Alvarez and Harrison in 2007 - but yeah, Red Bull has the momentum and Red Bull has their cars in first and third this time out, so we need to do something about that.
Soon enough, the grid was cleared of reporters and mechanics alike, allowing the cars to take off for the formation lap, and just minutes after that, the grid had formed up yet again. It was a superficially similar sight to the start of the formation lap, but for us, it couldn't be any different: twenty-four drivers meant twenty-four pounding hearts, twenty-four drivers holding the clutch with their hand and the revs with their foot, twenty-four drivers watching, unblinkingly, at the light gantry. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Zero. Weaver took off from the grid followed by Harrison, Renner, and I, still locked into formation when we arrived at the first corner, getting onto the brakes, bleeding off the speed we gained accelerating off the line, and turning to the left to open the race. There would be no brakes needed for turn two, as a right-hand sweeper followed the opening left-hander, effectively swinging us onto a brief straight leading to the braking zone for turn three.
A bit wider, faster, and rounder than a typical ninety-degree corner, turn three still required a dab of the brakes, but we were back on the throttle immediately afterwards, giving us a burst of speed that was then squelched with turn four, a more boxy, traditional ninety-degree corner, albeit this time to the right. A slightly more significant burst of speed followed as Red Bull, McLaren, Red Bull, and McLaren reached the final two corners of sector one. Turn five was a left-hander, also somewhat slow and boxy, but it opened up into the faster, nicer turn six, kinking us onto the infield straight where the four of us thundered across the sector line to complete the opening third of the lap here in Turkey. Turn seven opened up proceedings for sector two with a hairpin to the right, but as the exit opened up, we were left on a brief straight before the best part of the track opened up. Left, left, left, left, and left again as we hit apex after apex, keeping the throttle as open as the car and the tyres would allow through the endless, flat-out corner of turn eight, Tilke's finest corner many would argue, this relentless series of high-speed apices deposited us onto a brief straight. The multiple corners within turn eight strung out the top four somewhat, but much like an accordion, we all compressed together yet again as we arrived in the braking zone of turn nine, losing all that speed that we kept through turn eight and the straight, slowing down as much as necessary for the ninety-degree corner to the left, bringing us onto my second favorite part of the track: the endlessly long back straight.
Beginning with a slight kink to the right, the straight continued on for a long while, me rolling my leg onto the F-duct inlet to get a bit of a speed boost. It wasn't enough to bring me to Renner's rear wing, but it was enough for those of us in the top four to begin breaking away from the cars behind, presently led by the Mercedes duo, Ziegler ahead of Koskinen at the time being. Thus, I was still in fourth as we thundered across the sector line to begin sector three, shortly afterwards kinking to the right once more in the flat-out, near effortless turn eleven. At this point, the cars were firmly pointed towards the braking zone of turn twelve. Now, riding out the straight as long as possible, keeping the throttle planted for as long as I dared, before finally the inevitable came, and my right foot lifted off the throttle, my left foot went down on the brake, and the fingers of my left hand began clicking down on the pedal, shifting down the gears and hearing the excess fuel spit out of the exhaust in those powerful backfire sounds, like a brief hail of gunfire to turn the act of slowing down into a movie-worthy action scene.
The lights and sounds show of braking soon gave way to the corner itself, at first seeming to be a ninety-degree corner to the left, turn twelve turned into a hairpin, depositing us directly into the final complex of corners. The pit entrance was directly ahead, but as it was the first lap, all of us instead turned ninety-degrees to the right for turn three and then almost immediately snapped back to the left to arrive onto the start-finish straight. I crossed the line to complete the first lap and thus, already, accomplished more in this race than either the 2009 event, where I wasn't racing in F1 altogether, or in the 2008 race, where I was taken out in a first corner accident. Small victories aside, the top four really had gapped the rest of the field, as it ran Weaver, Harrison, Renner, Shchegolyayeva, and then a good few car-lengths back from me, Ziegler and Koskinen. After that, you had Henrique de Matteo locked in the middle of a Lotus sandwich, with Kaminski running in seventh while Alexandrov was down in ninth. Barbaro rounded out the points positions, but not far behind him, was yet another Ferrari forming the middle of a sandwich. This time it was Felipe Alvarez, trying to come back after a poor performance in qualifying, but currently being stuck in between the lead Sauber of Yoshikazu Higashiyama ahead of him, and the Japanese driver's teammate, Victor Hartmann, behind him. All of that was to say that I'm in good shape to gain points on Alvarez in the standings yet again, but I still had a long way to go if I wanted to regain ground on the Red Bulls of Weaver and Renner ahead.
Unfortunately for me, Renner was just far enough ahead and was just quick enough through the corners that I couldn't simply breeze past him down the straights where my car was faster, and further up the grid, Harrison found himself suffering from the same problem, as he only really had one shot of taking the lead from Weaver, and the Australian took that opportunity away by forcing the American to take the outside, meaning the Red Bull was able to keep the lead under braking in turn twelve. Further back, Alvarez's day was complicated as Hartmann put up a fight, briefly got ahead of the Spaniard, and while he did drop back, Felipe lost valuable time by having to fight his old rival in the Sauber. There was a time in the early 2000s when Felipe Alvarez and Victor Hartmann were the two hottest prospects in Formula One, with Renault getting their hands on Alvarez while BMW got Hartmann. Their careers have diverged much since then, yet they still find themselves on the same track racing for the same position, despite now being in very different levels of car.
Alvarez's misfortunes aside, things weren't going all that much better for us. At no point in the first stint did either of us McLaren drivers get a real chance at overtaking our respective Red Bull rival, and the situation only got worse in the first round of pitstops. The slightest mistake on Anthony's stop - a bit of a delay on getting his front left wheel lug to engage - was enough for Renner to slip ahead into second, leaving the two Red Bulls in a position to get a one-two, while we had to settle for a three-four...only, that's not quite what happened. The first sign that this race wasn't quite over yet came when, Nicky Morrison - along with the engineers for the other top three cars, around the same time - came through with the following message:
"Fuel burn is higher than expected, we anticipate the cars ahead of you are going to slow down and we need you to do it too." my mechanic warned, and thus, Weaver, Renner, and Harrison went from trading fastest laps of the race to managing their pace, but I couldn't capitalize because I was in the same position. Now, with the refueling ban in place for this season, the teams are all running fuel tanks more than capable of handling the race distance, so we could run excess fuel if we wanted to be extra sure about that, however, excess fuel means more weight, so instead, teams tended to do the exact opposite. We would run the car with as little fuel as we felt was needed to get through the race. Starting deep in the pack, that might be a little bit more, as you might want some extra fuel in the tank so you can play with higher, thirstier engine modes in order to push for an overtake, but at the front of the grid, as all four of us were? It was a matter of getting the car as light as possible to get the best possible performance out of the small numbers of cars ahead. On days like this, where not only is the fuel number limited to begin with, but race data reveals we're using more of that fuel than we figured we would be...suddenly the situation calls for some rather substantial fuel saving.
"Copy that," I replied to my engineer. The thing with fuel saving, and you see this mostly in American oval racing - stuff like NASCAR and Indycar - is that the car ahead always has to save more fuel because they're the one acting against the most air resistance, effectively blowing a hole in the air for everyone else. In F1, things tend to get strung out enough that the only real benefit to the air situation is a tow on the straights, however, in rare circumstances such as this one, the following car may find itself in a more favorable fuel situation than the car that has to push against clean air. Thus, Maximilian Renner started gaining on Martin Weaver for first, and I started to gain on Anthony Harrison for third. As the Turkish Grand Prix entered its final third, we looked set to enter a battle of the teammates, only for one of those battles to suddenly and abruptly escalate into a war.
Renner had more fuel to play with than Weaver, so when the Australian had to take a big lift through turn eight, the German didn't, and Renner was gaining on his teammate going into turn nine. Weaver survived the corner and led onto the back straight, but Max Renner had a good tow all the way through turns ten and eleven, pulling alongside his Red Bull teammate. Weaver didn't like this, pushing him all the way to the left and nearly off the track, but Renner kept firm and pushed Weaver back towards the outside as he pulled ahead. It was Red Bull next to Red Bull as Renner aggressively tried to force Weaver to submit, going so far as to chop across his teammate's front once he thought he was clear...problem is, he wasn't. Weaver's front left hit Renner's rear right, the German speared to the right, punctured his tyre, and then slid off the line, nearly slamming into his teammate for a second time as Weaver went off as well, having picked up damage. Harrison and I were on scene by this point, seeing Renner stuck in the gravel off of turn twelve without any rubber on his right rear tyre, leaving him beached, while the damaged Weaver continued. The Australian had clear front wing damage and, while he wasn't able to make the pitlane on this particular lap, that just meant that he suffered for an entire lap longer, and then had to take that pitstop anyway to replace his front wing. All of this meant one thing: it was Anthony and I clear in the lead of the race, with no opposition anywhere in sight.
For Anthony Harrison, this was a chance for the American to take his first win of the season and properly get his year started, especially given that the next two races - Canada and Miami - were, respectively, the site of his first win back in 2007, and his home race. For him, this could be the perfect opportunity to generate some powerful momentum - if there was ever a moment this season where Anthony was going to win three races in a row, this was it, so he had to take.
As for me, I was in second place, I had been running in the draft all day, and I had fuel to play with. I took two wins to open the season, dominating in Australia and then using strategy to steal a crafty second win in a row the next time out in Malaysia. All of that put me in control of the championship, but since then, I took home four points from China, ten from Spain, and nothing at all from Monaco. I appreciate Anthony a lot, I know he's expected to be the number one at this team, I know it's inevitable that he's going to win races this season, and I know that we just had a front row seat as to how this could all go wrong thanks to what happened to the Red Bulls. All of that being said, after the run of races I've had, I needed something good, and I needed to assert myself. The best way to do that would be with a win, to show everyone else that I won't just sit back and be happy with a second place when I could go for more. No, that kind of attitude would just lead to guys like Felipe Alvarez and Wilhelm Ziegler driving me off the track, just like they did in Spain, because this is Formula One, and they're all sharks, sharks just looking for blood. Today, I have the fuel, I have the pace, and I have the opportunity to prove that I'm also a shark, not some passive victim.
Coming onto the back straight the lap after the Red Bull crash, I saw an opportunity. All I had to do was get a good run out of turn nine, pull ahead after turn eleven, and then I'd be in the clear, Anthony wouldn't be able to fight back because there were still yellow flags waving in the corner itself as the marshals were recovering Maximilian Renner's car from the gravel trap. Anthony knew that too though, so both of us were intent on being the one to lead going into the yellow flag zone. So, throwing the car through the kink of turn ten, I rolled my leg onto the F-duct, but I imagine Anthony did the same thing - the F-duct is simply aerodynamic, it doesn't take more fuel, and in fact it can actually help us save fuel since we cut drag and thus achieve speed more easily - however, I had the luxury to play with a higher engine mode, so I still had the speed advantage. Harrison was being craft, sticking to the left on the first part of the straight, then cutting across the track in a wide arc to take the right side after turn eleven, effectively using the corner to block me and then throwing me off my momentum by forcing me to then switch from the outside to the inside line. The inside line would normally be better, but with us neutralized by the yellow flags at the corner itself, I wasn't able to do anything with it. No, if the yellow flags were still going to be there next lap, I needed to get the move done before the corner, before any yellow flags could spoil the action.
"You're supposed to be saving fuel Tamara, we're in a good position for the team, let's not invite unnecessary risk." Nicky Morrison chastised as we got onto the start-finish straight. I wasn't close enough to try a move into turn one, nor was it my favorite overtaking zone, so I let it be for now and just seemed to do what my engineer was asking of me. I hung back, deliberately so even, but what I was really doing was monitoring Anthony, seeing where he was positioning his car, where he could be vulnerable, and where I could take advantage of that. Here I decided that I was going to try a move late in the race, ensuring that Anthony had little to no chance to respond - it wasn't exactly the fairest of moves, but it's fifty-eight laps for all of us, so I'm just planning based on the numbers - because I knew that, once I started pushing things, Anthony would use every drop of fuel left in his car to defend, or, indeed, to take the position back. Fortunately, this hanging back also gave me the chance to further improve my fuel situation, lifting and coasting as the tow from my teammate down the back straight was more than enough to keep me in touch. All of this meant that, when I did strike, I wouldn't have to save fuel pretty much at all, allowing me to secure the position.
On lap forty-eight, I made my move, popping back into a higher engine mode as we came out of turn seven and going aggressively through turn eight, keeping the throttle pinned through all of the apices, and I could tell that Anthony noticed. The American was taking it easy through the first apex or two of the corner, but once he could see that I wasn't, he got on the throttle and finished the corner flat-out, meaning it was two McLaren at full speed as we came out of the infamous turn eight and hit the braking zone of turn nine. I was as aggressive as my tyres would allow, compressing the gap between us, and hoping the draft coming out of this corner would be enough to make sure the spring doesn't just decompress as soon as we're out of the braking zone. Anthony unintentionally helped me out by going defensive and trying to break the tow, meaning he was weaving and extending the track while I just went to the right with more engine more and full use of the F-duct, pulling alongside in turn eleven and then pulling ahead as I braked late for the corner. However, as I slid out onto the exit kerb while Anthony swept back in, having pulled the over-under on me, I realized that he, to a degree, allowed me to pull ahead.
I would try my damnedest to prove that Anthony made a mistake though, so the outside kerb turned into the inside for turn thirteen and I was ahead through the final corner as well, but onto the start-finish straight, Harrison must have been in a good engine mode once again. I took to the right, hoping to outbrake him on the racing line, but this time, the American was plenty aggressive, braking late on the inside. I thought for a moment that I might have it done anyway, but then we made contact - tyre on tyre contact, so no real damage - leading to me bouncing off him to the right, falling back to second place. There was no damage on either car, but with the Bridgestone logos on our tyres scuffed up and the cars having come close to crashing out already, the engineers were getting more assertive now.
"Come on now Tamara, this is silly. It's a one-two for the team, keep it that way." Nicky Morrison's tone was harsher this time, as if he was giving me the order to stand down and keep second place.
"Where were these messages when I was ahead?" I asked in kind, wondering why the team couldn't have told Anthony to stand down on the main straight. After all, we didn't touch when I overtook, we touched when he took the position back.
"Don't argue with me right now Tamara, both cars need the points." Nicky shot down my argument, pointing out that both cars had rather dreadful races in Spain and Monaco, with each of us only taking ten points from those two races, so the team taking forty-three from this one - especially when Renner and Weaver looked sure to finish one-two maybe just ten laps ago - would be a good result. That being said, I wasn't trying to mess up the team result, I wanted us to still score forty-eight minutes, I wanted to share the top two spots on the podium with Anthony, the only difference is I led one lap of this race, now I wanted to lead the last one. I was pulling into the slipstream of Harrison again on the back straight, when another voice came through the radio.
"Goddammit Tamara, stay in position, that's an order!" Michael Coronet practically yelled into the microphone, and at that, I glanced at Anthony one more time, glanced at the amount of fuel I had left, and just rolled my leg off the F-duct, slowing down and coasting into turn thirteen in second place. I had speed, I had fuel, but I also had a direct order from the team principal I respected not to push things, so I reluctantly settled down in second place. Come the end of lap fifty-eight, I would cross the finish line two seconds behind Anthony Harrison to take a one-two finish for McLaren.
"Good job guys, hope you're happy with that." I kept my post-race message to the team brief, trying to remain positive even if I lacked the enthusiasm. Anything and everything else I had to say would come behind closed doors.
So, with that, the points-paying positions of the 2010 Turkish Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 25 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 18 points.
3: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 15 points.
4: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 12 points.
5: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 10 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 8 points.
7: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
8: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 4 points.
9: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 2 points.
10: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Sauber-Ferrari - 1 point.
A McLaren one-two, while Martin Weaver built up enough of an advantage over the Mercs that, even with his damage and his unscheduled pitstop, he was able to remain on the podium. The same could not be said for Maximilian Renner, whose day ended in that gravel trap, the television cameras picking up a shot of the German walking away gesturing that Weaver was crazy...which admittedly is not how Weaver saw that particular incident. Red Bull drama aside, it was a strong day for Mercedes and a not as strong day for Lotus, the British team only managing to get Piotr Kaminski in the points, with Alexandrov finishing a lap down and in fifteenth. Both Ferraris finished in the points as well, while Yoshikazu Higashiyama finally opens the accounts of the struggling Sauber team this year.
So, with the top two in the championship losing out on a one-two and one of them failing to finish altogether, there is some movement in the top six of the drivers' championship standings:
1: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 93 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 92 points.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 84 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 79 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 78 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 69 points.
With Henrique de Matteo on 67 points and Tommy Koskinen on 62 points, there is plenty of competition for sixth place in the standings, but at the moment, it still belongs to the Polish Lotus driver, Kaminski near single-handedly keeping that team in contention for the best of the midfield while the rookie Alexandrov sits on just four points. The inevitable result of which is that Mercedes, with two drivers in the fight, continues to edge out a gap over Lotus in the constructors' championship, as seen in the top six of that particular points table:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 176 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 171 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 146 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 96 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 73 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 32 points.
With the understanding that the race put us in control of the constructors' championship and put me just a point off of Weaver for the lead, I can understand why the team was so nervous and just wanted to get both cars over the finish line as soon as possible. That being said, had we simply managed to finish with me in the lead and Harrison in second, we would be leading both championships. Sure, Harrison would still be behind Alvarez, but in my opinion, it is better to be first and fourth than second and third, especially when it comes to the end of the year. We're still a long way away from that, I know, I'm just making the point that we're not capitalizing on every point for either car at the minute. I like the fact that we are, conceptually, free to race each other, but I just feel like we aren't being as ruthlessly numerical as perhaps some other teams would be in our position. That being said, what's done is done, so I'm prepared to move on and try to do better in Canada...of course, the problem with that is that the team itself isn't quite ready to move on.
"Alright, explain yourselves." Michael demanded of both of us once we presented ourselves in the office he had in the team's hospitality center, using the kind of tone a disappointed parent would use with their unruly children...and I have to be honest, this situation doesn't feel all that removed from that.
"I qualified ahead, I was leading when the Red Bulls crashed, and I was under the impression that we were both supposed to save fuel and take it easy to get to the end of the race. When Tamara demonstrated that wasn't the case, I got back on the power and took the position back, then you radioed in personally and said the situation was handled, and I should go back to saving fuel. So I did." Anthony explained first, using a professional voice and a mature vocabulary, like the student who sincerely believed he was in the right and had a reasoned explanation for his actions.
"I saved more fuel during the race and I was in a better position. I didn't make any contact while I was pushing for position, I knew we had a back, and, as far as I've always been told, we are free to race. Plus, I'm ahead in the championship standings." I made my own case, firing back with the fact that, up until this point, we were always treated as if we had equal status. Of course, I assumed that Anthony would be number one as he was champion with this team, but given I have two wins already and we've gotten all upgrades to the car at the same team, equal status and free to race seems to be the de facto norm for us. I mean, after what happened in 2007 between Felipe and Anthony, I'd imagine the team would make it abundantly clear if there was a clear number one and number two driver dynamic.
"Did either of you take a moment to consider that the Red Bulls just crashed into each other, and we were given the race lead in an event where we clearly didn't have the pace to win?" Michael asked as if it was the most obvious question in the world. A rhetorical question as it turns out, because he continued before either of us could respond "We start second and fourth, the only laps we lead are when Tamara pits later than the Red Bulls, and after those pit stops, we're down to third and fourth anyway, now we're propelled into the best possible position. What is it about that situation that made the both of you think "gee, this would be a bloody great time to give my boss a heart attack?""
"Look, I'm sorry Michael, but I got pushed around in Spain and I got taken out in Monaco, I all of a sudden had the chance to go for the win here, so I took it. I thought that kind of attitude was why you hired me." I made eye contact with the team principal, explaining that this is my job. The fact that I'm willing to fight for the win on a day when I seemed destined to finish fourth is why I'm in this seat and Jyri Kaasalainen isn't. Of course I was going to try and fight back, and doubly so I was going to do that coming off the back of two bad races.
"Well, the same thing happened to me the last two races. I retired on the last lap in Spain - which is why you finished fifth, if I may add - and I finished fifth in Monaco. I took exactly the same amount of points from the last two races as you did. I needed a good result here as much as you did. Didn't stop you from trying to overtake me." Anthony took a different approach, focusing on me rather than the team principal.
"I know that - and believe me, I want to see you win this season too, at this point, I want us both to fight the Red Bulls for the championship - but I'm also not the one that took any risks when passing you. You're the one that cut across me in turn eleven and you're the one who bumped me off in turn one." I argued with the black man, perhaps getting uglier than I intended, but also not willing to take all the responsibility on this one.
"You were fine in the end." Anthony shot back, minimizing the risk in his actions.
"And you know I was going to be fine, how?" I asked, knowing full well that he had no idea what was going to happen to me when he did those moves. In the heat of the moment, in the adrenaline and anger that fuels all of us racing drivers, he had no idea what exactly was going to happen when he cut across me or when we touched wheels. He probably knew it was me he was fighting, and he probably mentally calculated that the move was worth the risk, but you never know how these things might go, how the other might react. You might have every confidence that your move is going to be clean only for the other driver to do something unexpected and for both of you to end up in the gravel trap, bringing your day to a premature end.
"Enough!" Michael shouted, bringing our attention back to him "Calm down, both of you. You're teammates, friends even. You both had your reasons for going for the win, you both acted dumb in spite of that, and we're all fortunate enough that it worked out without injury. Be grateful for the result, appreciate that hundreds of people work hard for you two to go around in circles every weekend, and make sure this doesn't happen again, alright?"
"Okay, okay." I accepted, sighing "I'm sorry Anthony, I have two wins this year, you haven't won yet. There's a lot of season left, neither of us is the number one driver right now...I should have just let it be from the beginning. I'm glad both of us finished the race."
"Yeah," Anthony offered his hand, shaking mine "I was a bit too aggressive today, you had the fuel to fight, and you took your chance. You're a racing driver, that's what you do, and I respect that. We drive for the same team, we're pushing forward, and we're leading the championship right now, that's what really matters. Less fighting, more moving forward, yeah?"
"Of course," I agreed, completing the handshake and shooting Anthony a smile before looking back over to Michael, who seemed satisfied with that. We cleared the air, there wasn't any bad blood between us, and we could move on to the Canadian Grand Prix. There was one more thing, leaving me with a smirk on my face as I turned to Anthony again before he left the room "Two years ago they thought we were dating because we sat next to each other once, imagine what the media would make of this, eh?"
"Oh God, don't even make me thing about that..." Anthony laughed. Yeah, we were good now. Let's just hope this particular truce survives the next time we meet each other on track in anger.
"Ugh," I groaned as I collapsed onto my bed once I arrived in Miami. Due to a combination of needing to land to fuel up the jet and the time difference from Turkey, it was Monday night by the time I got to North America, and by next Wednesday, I'd be on the private jet again to fly into Montreal...though, at very least, Miami to Montreal is a shorter flight than Istanbul to Miami. Meanwhile, a somewhat bemused looking Ysabella Villarreal hovered behind the bed.
"Long flight?" she asked, flippantly.
"Turkey is far." I observed, eloquently. Nice to Istanbul was a fairly long flight by European standards, but it's still just European standards, so not all that bad at all. Nice to Miami, for a transatlantic flight, isn't all that bad either, but somehow, putting that together for a flight over the entire Mediterranean and the entire Atlantic really left me exhausted. Yes, I suppose I could have slept on the flight - and I did rest, a little bit - but even a pampered private jet with a bed in it isn't quite the same as sleeping inside a grounded home or apartment.
"So, are you going to sleep?" Ysabella asked.
"Yeah, I'll get up and change in a minute." I sighed, just enjoying laying on my front on the bed at the minute.
"So, should I...?" Ysabella trailed off, leading to me turning around partially to look over at her, seeing that the Venezuelan was dressed in a tank top and some shorts, like she was about to go to bed here. Right, she's been staying here, she probably has more clothes over here than at home, so it makes perfect sense for her to stay here and sleep. On the other hand, I only have one bed in this place at the moment, I'm not going to send her to the couch, and it's basically up in the air that we're both interested in each other, we just haven't had a formal talk about it. Thus, in short, there's one bed, it would be awkward for me to tell her to go home, but it would also be awkward for her to sleep next to her maybe-girlfriend.
"Lay down, you dork." I said, grabbing her hand and pulling her down onto the bed, putting an arm around her once she laid down next to me.
"So, are you just going to sleep in jeans and a jacket?" Ysabella asked with an audible smirk.
"I might, it's my damn house." I responded, also wearing a smirk at this point.
"You enjoy that threat, don't you?" she observed.
"I use it well, I think." I toyed with her.
"Sharp tongue, I like that in a woman." Ysabella went dirty.
"You do? Sounds painful." I took it literally.
"Eh, what's wrong with a little bit of pain?" she stayed firmly in the dirty zone.
"I'm gonna assume that's a joke." I laughed.
"What if it isn't?" she challenged.
"Well, is it?" I asked, looking up at her. The two of us made eye contact for a long moment before we both broke at pretty much the same time and ended up laughing like a bunch of stupid little schoolgirls.
"Yeah no, I'm not into any weird stuff, and hell, even if I was, I haven't had nearly enough sex to figure that out." Ysabella answered.
"Well, we'll have to change that." I mumbled with a smirk.
"Yeah, we wi - wait, what?" Villarreal tripped over her words and blushed at my latest remark.
"Nothing," I laughed "I'm gonna go change, and then we're going to sleep together - in like a platonic way, you know, like friends...or roommates."
"Yes, roommates..." Ysabella smirked. With that, I grabbed some clothes and slipped into my bathroom, then I came out in some sleep clothes and got some rest. I am glad to finally get some time off in my new house and with my new potential girlfriend, but I'm also coming off of one race and just have two weeks before another race. After Canada comes the new event in Miami the immediate next weekend, and then after a short break, we get back to Europe where the summer gets rather relentless with race after race after race, all the way until the summer break. After that, we immediately get back running with the Spa and Monza doubleheader, then we go to the Atlantic GP in France before flying to literally the other end of Europe for the Russian Grand Prix. We get another short break after Russia but then we get the longest stretch of Asian flyaway races in F1 history with Singapore, Japan, and a whole new race in the form of the Korean Grand Prix, then crisscrossing the globe yet again with Brazil and then the season finale at Abu Dhabi. The Vision60 plan didn't quite work out the way that the FIA planned, partially because of the recession, partially because some races were ready early, some are ready now, and some won't be ready for another few years, but it has still resulted in a longer calendar than ever before. That is going to wear on the drivers, we're all going to have bad days, we're all going to have good days, and we're just going to have to hope that we have more good days than bad. For me, McLaren had a good race in Turkey, and Anthony and I both like Montreal a lot, but there was no Canadian Grand Prix last year, so nobody quite knows what to expect when this new generation of Formula One cars arrives at the Ile Notre Dame for the first time since 2008.
It's not quite a typical street circuit, it's not a permanent racing venue either. It's both the perimeter roads of a small island in the St. Lawrence River and quietly one of the best tracks on the F1 calendar. It's difficult to describe at times, but it's the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, the home of the Canadian Grand Prix. So then, it seems like qualifying would be an exciting proposition? Well, not quite. First of all, all throughout the weekend, it was cloudy and relatively cold, the surface was new compared to 2008 - probably justified, given the track break-up issues we experienced in 2007 and 2008 - and has gone relatively unused, and the end result of that is the tyres aren't getting up to temperature, so we're wearing them out without the benefit of getting the grip. Second of all, and perhaps because of the first, drivers have been grazing the wall all weekend long, with Anthony having taken his turn with the wall of champions in FP3. Third of all, on top of all of that, it rained last night, meaning that whatever progress we made on Friday was washed away come Saturday. We did what we could to build up rubber again in FP3, but the track was still pretty virgin going into qualifying, so it was going to be a struggle for all of us. That being said, we have been quick all weekend long, if a bit unstable: I set the fastest time in FP1, Maximilian Renner did, admittedly, go faster with his P1 time in FP2, but Anthony went faster still in FP3...the same session where he hit the wall, mind you.
"I'm just testing the limits, feeling it out." Anthony teased his engineers, relieved that it wasn't a major hit and didn't break anything. FP3 crashes can be devastating for drivers because if you damage the car too badly on Saturday morning, your team only has a few hours to get the car fixed for qualifying on Saturday afternoon. Thus, a crash in a practice session - something which is normally harmless - leads to you missing out on qualifying, which means starting all the way down to twenty-fourth, which means that you have a world of work to do come race day on Sunday.
"Weaver's changed his gearbox! He's gonna have a five-place penalty!" an engineer called in, having the steward's document confirming the Red Bull driver's penalty. So, it won't be a fourth consecutive pole position for the Australian, but it still leaves five top team drivers fighting it out from pole, plus the midfield vultures of Tommy Koskinen and Piotr Kaminski just waiting to strike, plus whoever else on this twenty-four driver grid who might get lucky on a dry, but slippery track and take a shock pole position. This was Formula One in its prime, I think: it's hard, it's unpredictable, and there's just a hint of danger in the air. So, I went out and did my qualifying runs: 1:16.365 in Q1 put me in fifth, behind Harrison, Renner, Alvarez, and Koskinen, but ahead of Kaminski and Weaver. Still just Q1 though, nothing was resolved quite yet, at least not at the sharp end of the field. Thus, we all went out again for Q2, the second qualifying session, and again, I managed to transfer over in fifth place. I set a 1:15.755, so I had taken half a second out of my lap time, but Harrison, Weaver, Renner, and Alvarez were still ahead of me.
"Where do I need to improve?" I asked my mechanics as we prepared to get out for Q3, the top ten shootout to decide who was going to start where.
"Anthony has a tenth on you in the chicane, you can push it harder." Nicky Morrison answered, meaning that half the gap to my teammate was in this one pair of corners alone, so I'm clearly braking too early and not pushing the boundaries on the wall of champions quite enough. Of course, I can't push it too much, or else I'll crash out and might earn myself a penalty for changing parts in parc ferme, putting me in the same situation as Martin Weaver.
"Copy, I'll do it." I replied before heading out for my Q3 run on the option tyres, on low fuel, ready to push the boundaries of the chicane as much as possible. Coming off of the back straight, I hit the brakes as late as I could, shifted down the box, flicked the car to the right and then snapped back to the left, hitting the inside kerb, hitting the outside kerb, and then riding out to the exit kerb along the wall of champions. The air rushed between the wall and my Bridgestone tyres and I pulled off of the kerbs and onto the straight, thundering down towards the line to start my lap. I got a good run through the chicane once, now I just needed to be ready to do it again at the end of this lap though. For now though, the track was trending to the right, setting us up for the braking zone for the left-hander.
Turning to the left in the nearly ninety-degree turn one, I hardly had a moment to put the power down before it was on the brakes again for turn two, this time to the right, swinging through the half-circle and getting back on the throttle for the brief straight that followed. The straight followed the perimeter of the island before the first chicane, briefly, plunged me into the interior, braking, turning right, and then sawing the wheel over to the left as I plunged through one of the few small elevation changes on the island circuit. As soon as I was out of the chicane, I was going through the flat-out turn five, swinging me to the right and onto the briefest of straights, where I crossed the timing line to complete sector one: one down, two to go. For now though, I was hard on the brakes for the ninety-degree corner to the left that was turn six, and in a gap that was just too short to be considered a straight but just too long for this to really be a two part chicane, I sped up briefly before throwing the car to the right, getting back on the power and back on the perimeter roads of the Ile Notre Dame.
So coming out of turn seven, it was a fairly long straight, but a fairly long straight meant that there was a significant braking zone at the end of the straight. I glanced over to the left, seeing the numbers on the meter boards getting smaller and smaller, and like a game of chicken, I let them get as small as I dared, knowing that there was time to make up by being aggressive under braking - like Anthony was - but also knowing that there was plenty of time to lose by going off into the paved runoff in a corner like this. So, I picked my spot, pressed down with my left foot, and turned the car to the right, getting my right foot down onto the throttle as I was still getting off the brake, and throwing the wheel to the left in a flurry of mixed movements to get the car through the chicane as quickly as possible. Toying with the inside kerb on entry and coming perilously close to kissing the wall on corner exit. I executed turns eight and nine well, now it was just about getting on the power early and riding out this straight with the slightest trend to the left, crossing the second sector line in the process: now there is only one left.
Sector three opened with the infamous Montreal hairpin, the hardest braking zone on the circuit, with paved runoff going on into the distance and a wider exit than you would expect, here, it was about getting the car slowed down, turned one hundred and eighty degrees around, and then accelerating out of the corner with as much speed as the Mercedes engine in the back of my car could muster. I was fully on the throttle, I was clicking up the gears as the engine revved all the way to 18,000, and I was utilizing the F-duct to its full capacity. Ever since this track first joined the F1 calendar in 1978, this part of the track has taken various shapes: at one point, the pitlane and start-finish straights were back here, at one point the Casino chicane was among the most defining features of the track, and at one point, this circuit was basically just a series of medium-length straights separated by chicanes at various speeds. Well, in the current iteration of the track, having taken shape in 1996, the organizers have gone with simple elegance: all the way from the hairpin to the final chicane, we are flat-out on the Casino straight, the longest and fastest straightaway on the Quebecois circuit. I was exceeding two-hundred miles per hour at the end of the straight but, in the blink of an eye, that speed was gone as I slammed the brakes, threw the car to the right with savagery, and then shot it back to the left, graving the wall of champions as I got onto the throttle yet again, ripping down the straight as I tried to make all that speed back and then some before thundering over the line to complete my lap.
"How was that?" I asked, panting after that lap, coming off of the adrenaline lap of a flat-out lap, having pushed hard from final chicane to final chicane and beyond as I did everything I could to reduce the deficit to my teammate.
"You set a 1:15.450, that's good enough for fifth, but we will start fourth tomorrow with Weaver's penalty. Anthony is on pole." Nicky of Morrison answered matter-of-factly, giving me the time first to show that, despite everything else, I had indeed improved my lap time each session, having gone three tenths faster in Q3 than I did in Q1. The problem is that everyone around me went faster too, leaving my teammate three and a half tenths ahead of me on pole, then Renner and Alvarez were both lining up ahead of me despite being just a few hundredths of a second faster than me. At that point, I can't really blame myself though, as a hundredth of a second is next to nothing, the human eye would probably struggle to determine who crossed the line first if they saw Maximilian's lap, Felipe's lap, and my lap. The eye test doesn't matter though, because there are computer sensors in each car showing the gap, and the gap shows that I'm only good enough for fourth place here. It was hardly disastrous, I could certainly work from fourth tomorrow, but it still hurts to have given my all and still been that car behind my teammate who has the exact same machinery than me. It was one thing in 2007, when I was a relatively unknown rookie up against Tommy Koskinen - sure I had won the 2006 GP2 Asia title, but Tommy had won the 2005 GP2 title, the premier one, especially back then, and he was seen as the future of the Williams team, especially with a year under his belt already - and it was still fine in 2009, when I was coming back to F1 rusty up against a world champion teammate in the form of Matti Hamalainen. Now though? It's difficult to say.
On one hand, Anthony is just as much of a champion as Matti Hamalainen, on one hand, Anthony Harrison is the future of McLaren in the same way that Tommy Koskinen was seen as the future of Williams back then, but on the other hand, I'm here now because I'm a proven quantity. I have three F1 wins to my name, I've won Le Mans, I've won in Indycars, I've driven for Ferrari, I drive for McLaren - playing second fiddle to a world champion isn't good enough anymore. I know my goal was to just win a single race this season and prove that I can do it, but I did that, and rather than resting on my laurels, I'm adjusting what I want from the season. I am justified in doing so, I'm not being ungrateful or mopey, McLaren has given me a car good enough to challenge for the title, and I've been doing that rather well so far, but I need to be doing better in qualifying, especially because Anthony is one of the fastest raw talents out there in qualifying, so he's the first obstacle to becoming world champion. It doesn't matter if the team is good enough to win the championship if my teammate always starts the race as the team's best shot at winning. Oh well, there's nothing I can do about Canada at this point, all I can do now is hope that I move forward in the race.
Every race up until this point, twenty-four cars still started the race, but one or two of them - usually one of the three backmarker teams - had to start from the pitlane after a last-minute change of some sort. Today marked the first time that all twenty-four cars lined up on the grid...and we still found a way to fuck it up. We survived the formation lap, we survived the first light, second, third, fourth, and even the fifth, but the fifth light was still on when Vladimir Alexandrov jumped the start and fired off the grid. The lights went out and the rest of the grid got moving a second later, but Alexandrov's closing speed was still that much faster, and on the narrow pit straight with walls on either side, Vladimir had to take to the grass to try and dodge. It's been a rainy weekend, so the grass was still moist, and he was on slick Bridgestone tyres, so the Lotus driver spun out. The Sauber of Victor Hartmann arrived on scene and had to take evasive action, narrowly avoiding a horror crash. Alexandrov wasn't the only spinner though, because after Henrique de Matteo and Giuseppino Leone bumped into each other a few times going into turn one, the Italian in the Force India also spun out, taking to the paved runoff outside of turn one. Up front though, it was Harrison, Renner, Alvarez, and I in the top four, the leaders unchanged.
There was another incident right at the end of the first lap: James Buxton and Yoshikazu Higashiyama tangled going into the final chicane, leading to the Briton straight lining the chicane and needing to lift to avoid getting a time penalty, effectively surrendering whatever time he gained. The Japanese driver was not able to capitalize though, because he tried to continue despite the contact, taking the chicane and promptly clattering the wall of champions, leaving him with suspension damage. Yoshikazu was, thankfully, able to drive the car up to a gap in the walls, so we avoided a safety car, and the race then settled comfortably down into the first stint of the race. Part of the reason for that was that everyone was still struggling with tyre temperatures and grip, meaning that all of us leaders on the option tyres took our first stops early, like, super early, like, single digit laps early. I took my first pitstop on lap six, while Anthony pitted a lap later from the lead, both of us switched onto new option tyres. Without the stress of a start and with the field more spread out, we were able to take these tyres significantly further, with Anthony taking his final scheduled pitstop on lap twenty-six to take the prime tyres to the end of this seventy-lap race, while I followed suit a lap later.
It was all going well and good for Anthony and I up front, but three notable anecdotes happened during this stage of the race. First of all, at the conclusion of his first stop, Wilhelm Ziegler was pushing to retain position ahead of Piotr Kaminski, who had previously stopped, and in the battle between Lotus and Mercedes, things got heated, with Wilhelm pushing both himself and Kaminski onto the grass in the first chicane. It could have been a nothing incident but combined with Ziegler's recent exploits against me in Spain, along with some of his infamous schemes, such as the crashes in 1994 and 1997, and his Monaco parking job as recently as 2006 - to prevent Felipe Alvarez from outqualifying him - the fans and the media were beginning to question the German's F1 comeback. The second incident was that Maximilian Renner dropped back from the front pack once he started nursing a gearbox problem of some sort, removing another potential rival from this race, and combined with Weaver's penalty earlier in the weekend, it seems to hint that Red Bull still might have reliability issues, and that should benefit us going forward. The third incident was, more or less, just a funny note, and that is the fact that, for a brief moment, before taking his second pitstop, Maximilien Longpre of all people led the race. It's not as consequential as the first two strategy moments, but it's rare these days to see a Toro Rosso lead, and it might be the first laps led for a Luxembourgish driver.
"Weaver leads but he is yet to pit, yet to pit. You are currently in provisional third, Alvarez and Harrison are ahead of you. You can get them both." Nicky Morrison came over the radio as I started to settle into the final stint of the race. Weaver had gone with an alternate strategy - he had to, given he started deep in the pack - and took primes for his middle stint, meaning Anthony has to chip away at the pitstop advantage right now. We all know that, eventually, the Australian is going to pit for options and drop behind us, but that also means that he'll be on fresh soft tyres at the end of the race while the rest of us are on worn hards, so we all want to build up as much of a buffer as possible before that happens. In any case, my pace is good right now, and I'm closing in on the Ferrari ahead and my teammate ahead of him at the moment. If I play my cards just right, I might just be able to come out of this race in the lead.
Well, Weaver's strategy really didn't work out because his prime tyres essentially gave up late on, leading to the three of us closing up to him in the rear. There was a brief moment where all of us seemed to stall for a moment and just observe the Australian, trying to figure out what exactly the Red Bull was doing, but then we all struck in our individual ways. First, Anthony Harrison outbraked Weaver into the hairpin and took the lead, next Alvarez got a better exit from the hairpin and steamed past the Red Bull on the straight, and finally, I got a draft from Weaver as he carried on straight into the hairpin, separating from him as I threw the car into the chicane, continuing on in the hunt for Alvarez while he pitted. Weaver was out of the picture and Renner was holding on for dear life, hoping that his gearbox can make these final twenty laps of the race. All of that is to say that Felipe Alvarez is now the only thing standing between me and the second McLaren one-two finish in a row.
I got into the tow of Alvarez down the start-finish straight and then had another chance at it coming out of the six-seven chicane. On the F-duct, on the power, and in the draft, I hunted down the Ferrari ahead and pulled to the right, taking a look but not quite managing an overtake into turn eight, instead following the Spaniard through the eight-nine chicane and getting my third pop at the cherry on the road down to the hairpin. I pulled to the right again, getting my front wing alongside Alvarez as we reached the braking zone - with my front wing up there, Alvarez couldn't close the door on me, he wasn't going to get away with this one, and my presence was going to force him to take a wider line. That being said, as a result of us both braking late to challenge into this chicane, smoke shot from both of our tyres as we each suffered with a small lockup, meaning that neither of us got through the chicane particularly well. So, both of us were rather slow and suboptimal on the hairpin exit - which was also allowing Anthony Harrison to disappear into the distance and build a gap - and came out side by side. Alvarez got on the power better and pulled marginally ahead, but I knew that I was going to be faster by the time we got to the end of the straight, but Alvarez knew that too, so he wasn't going to make it easy on me.
Felipe planted himself on the inside, not letting me try my usual bullshit and pull to the right. No, I was going to have to try it on the outside...but I didn't have to make it easy on Alvarez in the process. Thus, first I swerved to the right, the extreme inside, making Alvarez shift direction to squeeze me against the wall, shutting down the move, but also losing some of his momentum, allowing me to slip back into his slipstream. I hesitated in the draft for just a moment, getting a moment more of the draft, before pulling to the aforementioned left and trying a move on the outside. With Alvarez's defensive movement and my superior speed pulling me alongside, perhaps faster than he was expecting, it left me just about even with Alvarez while also being on the better racing line. The Asturian tried to make it difficult for me, braking late into the final chicane, but I broke even later, and the momentum of the right positioning forced Alvarez to back down and let me through, chopping across the right and then back left as I pulled onto the start-finish straight, crossing the line up in second place. I didn't consider Alvarez an enemy anymore, despite what happened between us two years ago on this very track, but he was certainly a rival, and that meant that Alvarez was always going to make things difficult for me. Case in point, this battle could have been resolved the first time we got onto a straight, but with Alvarez driving like a champion - driving like a lion, really - but Felipe dragged it out for more than half of a lap. The Red Bulls are going to do everything in their power to interfere, Anthony has been working hard these past two races to put himself back into contention, but something about those first few races of the season makes me think of Alvarez as my chief championship rival, and I imagine that the feeling is mutual. Perhaps it's inevitable, given that Alvarez won the first race of the season and then I went on to win the next two, both of us instantly announcing ourselves as contenders.
"Good work Tamara, nicely done, get after Anthony now." Nicky Morrison congratulated me after the overtaking, and with good reason, before over the course of the following lap, I proceeded to gap Alvarez nicely, truly turning this Grand Prix into a two horse race between the McLarens.
"Are we free to race?" I asked, a fair question given the debacle of Turkey.
"All looks good on his car, all looks good on your car, you are free to race. Just be careful." Nicky answered, a hint of apologism in his voice, as if the team was trying to immediately reestablish the rules of engagement following what happened in Istanbul.
"Copy," I responded eloquently, focusing more on the track than the radio. I used a lot of track and then some in the fight with Alvarez, meaning that I got into the waste and rubber off the line - basically, little bits of rubber that get ripped off the tyres over the course of the race, which, even on a rainy weekend, gets to be a lot. So, first I worked the marbles off of my tyres, running hard enough to basically burn the excess rubber off the tyres and get back onto nice, even slicks. After that, it was a matter of standard pushing - braking late, using the F-duct down the straights, and getting a tow from a backmarker car when I could - and then the third element was just fighting against the clock, making sure I made it to Anthony's rear wing before he made it to the checkered flag. However, the team was doing things fairly, so as much as they were telling me that I was free to race and encouraging me to close the gap to Anthony, they were also telling the American my lap times and telling him where I was gaining speed on him, meaning that, once I got to within two seconds of Harrison, I was instantly hit with my teammate setting the fastest lap of the race. The message was clear: Anthony was in control of this race, and if I was going to push him, then he was more then capable of pushing back.
I wasn't crazy about giving up this race, especially not after what happened at the last race, but the way I saw it: Anthony started in the first position and finished in the first position, whereas I started in fourth and fought my way ahead of Renner, ahead of Alvarez, to take second place. It was the second consecutive one-two finish for McLaren, it was enough for us to consolidate our hold over the constructors' championship, and it was enough to put me into the championship lead by one point over Anthony Harrison, who was now all the way up to second after not even featuring in the top six a few races ago. So yeah, I played second fiddle to my teammate for two races in a row, but I had two consecutive wins earlier on in this season as well, so I figured I was still holding my weight against my teammate. I mean, of course I was, I was ahead of him in the championship, if only just, so yeah, I really should be proud of myself given that I wasn't in Formula One to begin with this time last year. I came into this season just wanting to prove I belonged in a top team, and instead, I have found myself leading both championships a third of the way into the season. Australia and Malaysia were early races, Red Bull wasn't up to snuff yet, so those can be considered flukes, lucky results - especially given those were both mixed conditions races where team strategy absolutely played a role - but here, despite still having not won a third race this year, I've worked my way into a dominant position that nobody can argue with.
So, let's get to the actual numbers, shall we? The points-paying positions of the 2010 Canadian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 25 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 18 points.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 15 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 12 points.
5: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 10 points.
6: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 8 points.
7: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 6 points.
8: Maximilien Longpre - Luxembourg - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 4 points.
9: Giuseppino Leone - Italy - Force India-Mercedes - 2 points.
10: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 1 point.
Two McLarens, a Ferrari, two Red Bulls, a Mercedes, a Lotus, a Toro Rosso, and both Force Indias. With Wilhelm Ziegler in eleventh, Ximen Goikoetxea, and, in a bit more of a stretch, Henrique de Matteo in fifteenth, we were rather close to multiple teams getting both of their drivers into the points positions. That did not quite happen, but what it means is that today was a good day in the standings if you're in a McLaren, a Red Bull, or a Force India, but not quite as good for a Ferrari fan or a Mercedes fan. Speaking of the standings, the drivers' standings read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 110 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 109 points.
3: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 103 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 94 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 90 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 75 points.
No points for Henrique de Matteo means Kaminski remains in the top six for the time being, while two consecutive one-two finishes for McLaren means that the two of us, plus Weaver, are the only cars to break one-hundred points. In fact, the Brazilian continues to sit on 67 points after a miserable Canadian Grand Prix, dropping him not just to seventh, but actually down to eighth as Tommy Koskinen now sits on 70 points following his sixth-place finish. Ultimately though, the best storyline of this weekend is the fact that Anthony Harrison has regained his crown at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. There are some drivers who have circuits associated with them, for instance, Henrique de Matteo won the Turkish Grand Prix three years in a row from 2006 to 2008, Wilhelm Ziegler dominated the French Grand Prix at Magny Cours back when that existed, and Maximilian Renner famously took that shock win in Monza in a Toro Rosso. For Anthony, I think the track I associate with him is Montreal, and he hasn't won here all that often, I acknowledge, but he won his first race here in 2007 and he's won again in 2010 to put McLaren in control of the constructors' championship. Having spoiled the first-place result, the top six in the constructors' championship read as follows:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 219 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 193 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 161 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 104 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 79 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 35 points.
Considering that Ferrari is my former team, I am somewhat sad to see them having gone from a one-two finish at the very start of the season to a somewhat distant third behind both McLaren and Red Bull. I hate to say it, but Henrique de Matteo just hasn't been performing to the same level as Felipe Alvarez. Now, that does not necessarily mean that Henrique is the problem, but the fact that he was out for half a season after a major injury at the Hungarian Grand Prix last year is a possibility. Another possibility is that, with the arrival of Felipe Alvarez, Ferrari has found their number one driver again. That being said, Wilhelm Ziegler was definitely the number one driver in 2006 and Matti Hamalainen was probably in the same position in 2007, yet in those two years, Henrique de Matteo still managed to take a total of five wins. Furthermore, Henrique was no doubt second to reigning champion Matti Hamalainen at the start of 2008 but managed to turn that around and be Ferrari's main championship challenger against Anthony Harrison. I just don't see a clear route to that in 2010.
Henrique is still a quick driver, obviously, and he has had his moments this year, but he is getting comprehensively outperformed by his teammate in a way that other drivers aren't. I was out of the sport for a time and I was able to get up to speed relatively quickly, same with Giuseppino Leone in the Force India who spent two years out of the sport before his return. Granted, neither of us were out injured, but Wilhelm Ziegler broke his legs in Silverstone 1999, missed half the season, and then went on to win five world championships, so this seems concerning. Something needs to get better for Henrique de Matteo and quickly, because this is only Ferrari's fifth podium finish of the season. Ferrari as a team is underperforming considering that they won three races in quick succession at the end of the 2009 season, but Felipe has been comparatively better of the two, so Henrique needs to start picking up some slack.
I'm not saying I could be doing better, mind you, because standing here on the second-place spot on the podium and having retaken the championship lead, I am quite happy being at McLaren. We've taken four wins to Red Bull's three and Ferrari's one, we've only suffered one reliability issue - arguably two, considering the part failure that led to my Monaco crash - and we're carrying positive momentum going into Anthony's home race, the Miami Grand Prix. Last time that Anthony won the Canadian Grand Prix, he won the following race in America as well.
Notes:
Miami and Valencia up next.
Also, as you can see, I've officially put this into a series. For now, the plan is to put this and LatSoF1 Part II into that series, taking Tamara's story in first-person from 2007 to the end of 2013. I do think by that point, I'll take a break from this for a time, maybe even explore other types or motorsport or other eras of F1, but I'm keeping my options open and might return to this universe, even after the seventy or so chapters of LatSoF1. I'm keeping the future open, because all I know for sure right now is that I'm writing forty chapters of this and then I'm writing at least thirty chapters for LatSoF1: Part II. Wonder if I should come up with a better name than that, but it is literally just part two of this idea...hmm, I don't know. The idea behind this all was "wouldn't it be interesting if there was a Kazakh rookie in F1 in 2007?" and it was feature crept from there. I am proud of it, of course, I just don't think I imagined it becoming the longest thing I've ever written with by far the largest word count per chapter.
I guess I just like rambling about old F1 too much. Weird because I literally went to sleep fifteen laps into yesterday's race, the 2023 Australian Grand Prix...oh well. That's more than enough out of me.
Chapter 35: The Top of the World
Notes:
Alright guys, I've introduced a few original tracks already, but here we have an anachronistic track. Yup, I've made the 2022 Miami GP track part of the 2010 F1 calendar. Some cool stuff before we get to that though.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXXV.
The Top of the World.
"My next guests are a pair of amazingly talented racing drivers that, this weekend, will be setting the high-speed world of Formula One alight in Miami Gardens, Florida for the Miami Grand Prix. We have America's own 2008 World Champion, Anthony Harrison and his three-time race-winning teammate Tamara Shchegolyayeva of Verizon McLaren-Mercedes!" David Letterman announced before gesturing over to the stage, marking our cue to enter. Anthony came first, dressed in a black unbuttoned suit, white undershirt, silver earrings, and a matching silver watch with a black face and white numbers. I was dressed in a short sleeve, knee-length black dress, matching high heels - ones that made me almost as tall as my 5'8 teammate, actually - and had my face and hair done up by the Late Show team to a level I would have never done myself. Then again, I've never been on American late-night television before, so this is a new experience for me altogether. For now, I just followed Anthony's lead, waving to the crowd and then walking over to take a seat next to the man who has risen to the top of late-night television after Conan replaced Leno...and he also the part-owner of an Indycar team. So needless to say, it hardly helped my nerves when David asked me the first question, even if it was mostly a little bit of light ribbing over my fairly long, unusual name "Did I pronounce that correctly? Shchegolyayeva?"
"Yes, that's fine. It's only ten letters in Cyrillic, you know?" I answered, trying not to seem too awkward. Apparently, I did something right because I got a few laughs from the crowd and got David to ask a follow-up question.
"Right, which brings us to a lot of things. You're a woman of many firsts - first woman to win a Formula One race, first woman to drive for Ferrari, first woman to drive for McLaren. But you're also the first driver, period, to come from the Soviet Union into top-level motorsports." the career interviewer asked.
"Yes. So, I was born in what is now Kazakhstan in 1988, and obviously the Soviet Union fell a few years later. My dad was able to secure some logistics contracts during the fall - mostly trucking but some rail stuff, even some air freight - and when he sold off those businesses as a profit, he was able to move the whole family to Monaco. At that point I fell in love with racing. I started begging my parents for the chance to be able to race myself and finally, for my fifth birthday, they got me my first kart and I started learning how to drive it. A few years later, I was able to start racing in the south of France." I answered, easing into my history as a racing driver. Remembering that 1992 Monaco Grand Prix and the year of asking for a kart that followed, even as my mother was worried sick about something happening to me in the kart. I suppose that's part of the reason there's so few women in racing: nobody wants to see their little girl get hurt in a karting accident. I was persistent though, I begged and begged, and now it's finally gotten me to the top of Formula One.
"Five years old?" David asked, incredulously. I'd assume that, from his racing team related activities - and don't get me wrong, Bobby Rahal is a veteran racing driver and the guy who made the team, while David Letterman is a talk show host, so yes, I know who is really in charge, but at the same time, you learn things from being involved in a racing team for well over a decade - David knew that drivers started in karts that early, but his audience didn't. For most people, especially in America, which is not much of a karting country in comparison to Europe, the thought of a toddler in a go kart is a bit crazy.
"Yes, May 25th, 1993." I answered.
"And how about you? How old were you when you started?" David turned to Anthony, taking the attention and pressure off of me, at least for a moment.
"Well, my background is a bit different than Tamara's. I wanted to get into a kart at the same team but my dad was a truck mechanic in the army, he met my mom while he was stationed in England, and then before I was born, he brought her back to America. So I loved the same type of racing, but it wasn't as accessible for the money we had and the place we lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So, I wanted to get into a kart at age five, but I couldn't. What my dad did for me instead was that he got me an RC car, and I drove that until I was six and I got my first kart for Christmas." Anthony gave his own story, and I was reminded again of the relative difference in privilege. It's weird to think because Anthony is a couple years older than me and we debuted in F1 in the same year - with Anthony in a far better car, no less - so he had the better start in F1, but in terms of our overall careers? I definitely had the better start. Even with the half-decade Anthony has over me, I was still probably driving a newer, better, more expensive go-kart as a kid than he was. Anthony's family downright bankrupted themselves in support of his racing career before the Harrisons hit a massive stroke of luck in 1998 when Anthony managed to impress Ron Dennis and convince him to back his racing career.
"How'd you do with the remote-controlled cars?" David asked, leaning back in his seat with a smile.
"Oh, I was great - won a state championship at age six." Anthony nodded with a smirk, impressed with himself.
"Against other kids or...?" Letterman asked.
"Oh, kids and adults too. It was good." Anthony upped his six-year-old self.
"He can drive cars and he can control them remotely too. He's a multifaceted man, folks." David laughed to the audience before following up with a different question "Last time you guys raced in the United States was in Indianapolis in 2007?"
"Right," Anthony answered "Racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is just like nothing else and I'm so glad we got to race there - and I had the privilege to win that last race in 2007. Then in 2008, the year I won the championship, we didn't race in the US at all. Last year we didn't race in North America at all, so now I'm really glad to have gone to Canada, raced in Montreal, to be here in New York City with you guys, and to be flying out to Miami tomorrow morning. There was a long time there in the 90s when I felt like I was the only F1 fan in all of America and things got a little bit better with the race in Indy, but then that went away too, but we have some great partners in Miami, it's my home market, and I'm really excited to see how the race goes."
"That's right, Formula One has had a lot of different venues in the US over the years, what makes this one special?" David asked, getting into the part that was really the core of this interview: promoting the Miami Grand Prix.
"It's a race around Dolphin Stadium. The owners there have the Miami Dolphins, obviously, the Marlins baseball team, it's hosted the Super Bowl this year, and now they're going to have a Formula One Grand Prix. They're planning on a massive stadium renovation in the coming years. They want to build an amazing sports complex out there in Miami Gardens and it's an honor to be a part of it." I answered, this part was easier since it was pretty much just memorizing the script that the race promoters gave us to say at some point in the interview.
"Anthony has talked about his connection to the Miami area, but you have one too, right Tamara?" David asked, knowing that the script was part of the deal here but not finding much interesting in it, instead moving the focus back onto me.
"Yes. I actually quite like it here in America, I was racing here early last year before I made it back to F1 and during the last offseason I bought a house in Miami. I'm excited to get down there and spend some appreciable time in it now because, ever since January, I've been flying all over the world." I responded, smiling a bit at the thought of the time I've been spending now that I'm back in North America, and enjoying myself with Ysabella Villarreal as well.
"You hear that Miami? You have two local drivers at the Miami Grand Prix, this weekend at the Miami International Autodrome around Dolphin Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. Watch along at home on Fox and follow the rest of the Formula One schedule on Speed Channel." David Lettermen went to break with a good plug for our American TV partners - which is good, given that Letterman's CBS is a competitor - including the fact that the Miami Grand Prix will be getting midday network TV coverage. There have been US F1 races before, of course, but there feels like there is an energy here. We have an American champion driver in the form of Harrison, the two of us just finished an interview on the biggest late-night show in the country right now, and even the sponsors are getting in on it. For instance, at the start of the interview, Letterman introduced us as driving for Verizon McLaren-Mercedes - there's a reason for that. Vodafone owns 51% of the American cellular provider Verizon and the latter company is going to feature on our branding in the Miami Grand Prix for the next few years. There's also plans for a United States Grand Prix at a purpose-built circuit in Austin, Texas and an American Grand Prix in New Jersey, just across the river from New York City, and subject to those races materializing, Vodafone has agreed to run Verizon branding at those races. This means that this is more than just a scheme from Formula One Management or about capitalizing on the popularity of a driver like Anthony Harrison, there are monied interests pushing for the resurgence of F1 in America.
Also, as one final note, Verizon has become a prominent partner of Team Penske and especially the #12 car of Damian Peters, so the strange trend of Penske and McLaren sharing sponsors continues.
"Ooh...well, look at you being a gentleman...gentlewoman? You get the point." Ysabella teased as I came around my black Mercedes SLS AMG with its red leather interior - given to me by Mercedes-Benz to own - to open the gullwing door for the Venezuelan and offer me hand as I helped her out of the car. The Miami Grand Prix was just days away at this point, but I managed to find time to take Ysabella out for a proper date in an art deco restaurant right along the ocean in Miami Beach. This was the side of Miami that was iconic, the kind you see in the movies, the shows, and in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, not quite the suburban sprawl of Miami Gardens, Florida. That's not to put down the track or the race - FOM did try to get something done in downtown Miami but got forced out thanks to local bureaucracy - the same reason, I imagine, that the Dolphins and Marlins are playing in a stadium so far from the center of Miami to begin with. Regardless of the reasons and regardless of some of the derision calling this place a "parking lot track," I'm trying to be more positive about it, and not just because I was told to on the Letterman interview. Coming back to the United States and capitalizing on the popularity of Anthony Harrison is exactly what I think F1 should be doing, and Miami Gardens is right next to Anthony's hometown of Ford Lauderdale. Furthermore, the area has proven it's close enough to Miami to support two major league sports teams, so it should be plenty capable of supporting a Grand Prix as well. Finally, while this is a parking lot, tracks like Albert Park and Long Beach have proven that, with intelligent designers and good planning, you can create a good sequence of corners through a parking lot. This just takes things to a grander scale, and I'm not ready to pass judgement until I race on it.
"The point is you look nice." I smirked as, still holding her hand, we entered the restaurant. This wasn't an official appearance, I wasn't actively representing the team or its sponsors right now, and even if I did get recognized and caught, it wouldn't be revealing anything which wasn't common knowledge to begin with. I was okay here, I was safe here, I don't need to focus on the media circus, I should just focus on my date. Yes, this Grand Prix seems to be a big deal and yes, we are all hoping that it's going to be a success, but it's still Miami. This is a massive city and, quite frankly, it's not like I'm the only brunette with an eastern European accent in Miami Beach. Still, just as a bit more of a precaution, I had the reservation made in Ysabella's name. The Venezuelan woman did shoot me a glance when the maître d said Villarreal, but didn't comment on it, and soon enough, we were sat at a private enough table with a view of the beach.
"It's a nice table..." Ysabella trailed off as she looked around the restaurant. I couldn't help but frown when I saw that she was finding all of this rather expensive...especially once she opened the menu.
"Hey," I reached over the table and gently grabbed her hand "Why are you worrying about this price? I can afford it."
"I know I just...look, you don't need to spend all this money to impress me." Ysabella sighed, voicing her discomfort.
"I know I don't need to, but I want to. I want to eat nice food on Miami Beach, and I want to do it with you." I tried to defend myself, not liking the fact that the date was going in this direction already. This was supposed to be our first real date, taking advantage of the time I had now that I was in North America for Canada and this race, and hopefully be the start of a more successful relationship, but instead, this was already taking a rocky turn. I knew that there were some concerns over status and jealousy in this relationship, because we're about the same age and we're in reasonably similar demographics, but I managed to get to F1 and she's not even in the top level of American sports car racing, let alone the top level of motorsports as a whole. We are in completely different worlds in terms of career, so I can see the opportunity for resentment, but she promised me awhile ago that she wouldn't let that get to her. Now though, status has again become a problem, and while it's not exactly about the previous motorsports issue, it's about money, which I consider as intertwined. Formula One is how I make my money, whether that be from my contract with McLaren itself, various endorsements I have, such as with Mercedes-Benz or Hugo Boss, or from bonus clauses based on performance. Being resentful about the amount of money I have and want to spend on her, is, from my perspective, being resentful about the differences in how our careers turned out.
"I know, I know. Please understand that I'm not trying to insult you or anything, I'm just uncomfortable with this. I'm trying not to be, but it's going to take me time to get used to this stuff." Ysabella reasoned, trying to explain that this wasn't a conscious decision, but this wasn't going to be something that goes away immediately either. So, it's going to be a recurring problem, but, given that this isn't a conscious thing, it might not be a major issue.
"You're fine staying in my house." I pointed out, still trying to be gentle.
"Christ, now you're going to make me feel guilty about that too." Ysabella giggled "I don't know, the way I think about that is that it isn't about me, you just asked me to watch your house for you and help set it up, so I thought of it as a job...though I guess that we're well past that now."
"Well, just try and think about this as my dinner that I invited you along to." I proposed, trying to frame this in as similar a lens as I could.
"Great, now I'm a third wheel at my own date." Ysabella smirked. I was just about to argue against that point when I stopped myself and realized that she was doing her regular thing - she was using humor to distract herself from her own anxieties. So, rather than trying to build her up from a mood that wasn't just going to go away on the first date, I instead decided to go back to the humor. Distract her from this, get the dinner back on track, and maybe still come away from this date with an overall positive outlook.
"Yup, this is between me and my food, you're just along for the ride." I smirked.
"Well, maybe I should have you eat me instead." Ysabella went dirty...again.
"That can be arranged." I managed to get out even as I blushed, which only made Ysabella laugh at me more. Okay, mission accomplished, things got better for us, we ended the date on good terms, and we went home together. We didn't go along with Ysabella's suggestion - not quite yet anyway - but we did sleep in the same bed, so I think my romantic life is back on track going into the Miami Grand Prix.
"Alright, going for a flying lap now." I informed my crew over the radio as I hit the brakes at the end of the long back straight and negotiated the final hairpin - but not the final corner - at the Miami track, right at the beginning of FP1. I was among the first to get out there in this session, and there's good reason for that: despite all my success this season, I've been playing catch up, as I haven't raced the majority of these tracks since 2008, while my opposition got to race there last year. Miami, however, is new territory for everyone, which should help me in the key area where I've been missing out relative to the other frontrunners: qualifying. I tend to start anywhere from like fourth to ninth and, while I think I have been doing a surprisingly good job of converting those results to good, consistent races, having an even playing field in qualifying will hopefully give me the first opportunity of the year to win on merit, rather than just judging the conditions correctly and coming out with a tyre advantage. The race after this, the European Grand Prix at Valencia, should also be a good opportunity for me, as the race was moved from the first race back from the summer break to the first race of the European summer, giving me my first opportunity on a track where I raced last year.
Still though, I had to prove that I could actually be decent at this circuit, so, coming out of the hairpin, I threw the car to the left and then swept back to the right to arrive onto the start-finish straight, beginning my first lap in anger at the Miami Autodrome. The pitlane was to my right and beyond that was the open-top Dolphin Stadium, with its San Siro-like cylindrical ramps, paired together at each corner of the stadium, and its seats in orange, the secondary color of the Dolphins team. Of course, summer was more baseball season than football season in America, but even the Florida Marlins' diamond in the middle of the stadium couldn't change the fact that this place was clearly an NFL stadium first and foremost. Still, both the Dolphins and the Marlins were working with us to put together this event, and I'm told it was actually somewhat of a logistical nightmare to work out the timing of this race with the Marlins' excruciatingly long baseball season. American sports tend to play hundreds of games a season and it really does seem shocking to me as an outsider. In any case, the straight wasn't that long, so I turned my attention back to the task at hand for the first braking zone. Downshifting, keeping my left foot planted, and putting my right foot down just as my left one was coming off, I threw the car to the right for turn one.
Turn two was an effortless kink to the left, building speed all the way, but turn three was a different matter entirely, almost behaving like a couple of distinct corners. It began with the slightest kink to the right, but then required a lift mid corner as it kinked again and again until we emerged on a brief straight parallel to start-finish, just on the other side of the stadium. Up next came the S curves, first lifting for turn four as the straight gave way to a flick to the left that then immediately shot back to the right for turn five, then back left for turn six, which then tightened into the hard braking zone for turn seven. Coming out of the other side of turn seven, a kink to the right made turn eight, bringing me onto a long, flat-out section of the track. In practice this whole section was a straight along the top of the circuit, however, that would make it too long for Formula One's regulations, so, much like the embankment section in Russia, flat-out corners technically divided up this straight. In this case, It was turn nine, the slightest kink to the right, and then turn ten, the return to the left, bringing us to the straight proper, a high-speed run down to the braking zone of turn ten. A ninety-degree left-hander, they built a wide swimming pool and a mock beach section on the inside of this corner, but I didn't dwell on that much, as turn ten opened up the tightest and twistiest bit of this particular circuit.
The braking zone of turn eleven was followed by the briefest burst of speed before arriving in the parabolic corner of turn twelve, a slow, winding turn to the right where I was really only able to start building up speed on the exit. I kept that said as I snapped to the left for turn thirteen but lost it soon afterwards as I arrived to the fourteen-fifteen chicane. It was left then right as I passed beneath the spider web of highway exits and overpasses connecting this stadium area to the nearby interstate. The concrete maze above left a shadow over the brief straight that followed, getting on the throttle and building up the gears just to lose it all through the tight ninety-degree left-hander of turn sixteen. Coming out of the corner it felt like a tunnel with the overpasses above and a bridge over the track directly ahead, with the walls on either side, but as I sped away from the corner and rose up following the underpass, the track opened up for the endlessly long back straight. Here I rolled my my leg to block the F-duct and used all the speed my Mercedes engine could offer to maximize this straight. Of course, by now other teams have introduced their own answer to the F-duct, their parts arriving when the European calendar began in Spain, and those who didn't make that deadline will no doubt aspire to have something upon the return to Europe in Valencia, and if not there, than any team with legitimate, competitive aspirations will target the British Grand Prix, the home race for most of the F1 grid. All of that means that our neat little invention isn't as unique as it once was, however, we still have - and will continue to have - the best version of it.
No other car is built around the F-duct like ours is. Most other cars with an F-duct require a driver to use their hand to block the air gap because they couldn't or wouldn't wrap it around the cockpit in quite the same way. For us, it's a natural system: you use the F-duct down the straights, so you enable it with your left leg, and then when you need to get your left leg off the F-duct and onto the brake, that's when you want the rear wing to come back to functionality anyway. The actions complement each other. Meanwhile, even at this, which has been a relatively flat, inoffensive track thus far, I wouldn't want to be throwing the car through turns eight, nine, and ten one-handed as I try to get the advantage of the F-duct through the not-so-straight straight. So, while other teams may have copied our idea, we still have it incorporated into our car the best and get the most out of it, so even if our advantage down the straight has been reduced, it is still present. So, needless to say, this early in FP1 with no competition, both my first sectors were purple, and I was on course to repeat that feat as I entered the final sequence of corners once again. On the brakes for turn seventeen, accelerate out of it and throw the car to the left for turn eighteen, then swing it back to the right for turn nineteen and throw all the momentum onto the start-finish straight, crossing the line with as much speed as my McLaren MP4/25 could offer.
"Alright, good work. Obviously, that was the fastest lap of the session so far. Everything seems good on the installations on our end, how about yours?" Nicky asked over the radio as I cooled down from the lap and headed back into the pits.
"Good, the car feels good. There's a few adjustments I want to try when we get to the garage, but I think we're in a good position." I responded, being careful what I said over the radio channels in case this stuff was going to get broadcast over the TV. Still though, the changes I wanted were relatively trivial: a bit more front-end bite for the corners without adding on too much drag for the straights. No radical changes or anything like that, just the usual business of finding the balance between being fast down the straights and responsive in the corners. The McLaren was a good baseline, but I had three practice sessions to refine this setup before things really started to matter, first with qualifying where the pecking order was set and you would learn whether Sunday was going to be an easy day or a hard day for you, and then the race itself. My strong suit, the race is where I can go toe to toe with my teammate, beat him even. In qualifying, when Anthony Harrison is giving his 100% and then some, he's impossible to beat - and not just for me, anyone on the grid would have a hard time keeping up with the American when everything goes right for him on a Saturday - but in the race, when you have to measure tyres, save fuel, and push perhaps more to 90% than 100, that is where I can shine. I have the ability to be consistently fast, even if I don't have the raw talent to set those downright alien lap times in qualifying.
Of course, an edge in the races at places like Australia and Malaysia is one thing, because there have also been plenty of races where Anthony had the edge over me: Bahrain was one, Spain and Monaco as well, before our respective accidents, and, obviously, last time out in Canada. Maintaining that edge here in Miami is going to be difficult, because this is home territory for Anthony, and the fans in attendance have demonstrated that quite clearly. My teammate is going to be pushing hard to win this race, and it's going to take a lot from me to hold him off, not to mention the Red Bulls, the Ferraris, and anyone else that might try and interfere with my race. McLaren lucked out in Turkey and were in a league of our own in Canada, but without prior experience on this track, nobody quite knows what to expect from the Miami International Autodrome. That, I suppose, is what we're all here to find out, after all.
"Tell me something," Natasha began as we both stood in our corner of the driver's parade truck, waving to the fans as it took the F1 circus around in the morning before the race as a sort of calm before the storm. This was America, so some things were different about it: mainly trading the flat-nosed Mercedes for a big, long American eighteen-wheeler in the form of a Freightliner, and the aquamarine with white and orange trim painted runoff was certainly a unique sight, but the tension in the air? The energy? That was all Formula One. It didn't matter if it was Europe or Australia or Brazil, a home race or a country you've never been to, there's always anticipation before a Formula One race. These various bits of pageantry, tradition, or build-up can get unbearable at times, constant reminders of the stakes and expectations at hand, but that's part of the appeal, isn't it? I mean, racing wouldn't be nearly as fun if nobody cared about the results. That anxious wait for the race was part of the reason why drivers were so keen to break off into their individual bubbles during these things, as talking to a friend was a welcome distraction from the pressure and the media attention that was closing in at times like this. Still, I had a feeling Natasha was about to ask about something more than just some distracting small talk. I was proven right when she asked "Do you think I could be winning if I was in a Mercedes right now?"
"Hard to say for sure, but...I honestly have to say no." I answered "It's nothing against you - you know I'm proud of you - it's just that Mercedes has a pair of very talented drivers to begin with. Tommy Koskinen is going to be a star of the future with the speed he has, while aging or not, Wilhelm Ziegler has won more than anyone else. He knows what he's doing in a Formula One car. So, taking the fact that neither of those guys have a win yet, and how competitive things have been at the front of the grid? I don't think it's possible. I mean, you have to think that, as good as Mercedes and even Lotus have been this year, the top three teams have always been better. It's common enough that a few of us have a bad team, meaning that Mercedes or Lotus can take a podium, but to take a win? That requires all six of us - both McLarens, both Ferraris, both Red Bulls - to have a bad day at the same time. I just don't see that happening."
"Still though, I'd take being a seventh-place car with the occasional fluke podium any day of the week over what I have now." Natasha sighed, before getting into her rant "I mean, really, is it so much to ask that at just one race, we can at least fight with the Williams and Toro Rosso cars ahead? I know points is too much to ask for with this car, I know, but just once I'd like to prove that this car can fight against other F1 cars just so I can feel like I'm actually in this sport rather than just a part of whatever shitshow the FIA has in mind with these backmarker teams."
"Look, it's bad. I know it's bad, and I'm not going to patronize you and say that it's good, but you've qualified nineteenth again. You're part of a shitshow, that's true, but you're clearly the fastest and most talented one there. I mean, where's Casemiro? Behind the Caterhams. The other teams can see exactly how rough it is for you and can see you clobbering your teammate week after week, racing hard against experienced guys like Tripoli and Kaasalainen." I tried my best to convince her that there was a bright side to her, once again, failing to break out of the backmarker group of cars and qualify ahead of some of the "real" teams rather than the dubious new blood. That being said, with guys like Ivan Tripoli and Jyri Kaasalainen driving for Caterham, Natasha is actively proving herself against guys who, in their prime, were good enough for Renault, good enough for McLaren, even. For a rookie in the circumstances she's in, that's pretty good, especially because, unlike anyone else in that backmarker mess, she's got that link with Mercedes-Benz. Ziegler and Koskinen have contracts sure, but Mercedes supplies engines to Force India and McLaren as well as their own team, so while I'm not saying she's about to become my teammate or anything, I'm saying she has the backing of some powerful people who can get her a better seat if she plays her cards right. Marussia is terrible and, on top of that, powered by Cosworth, for Mercedes isn't going to keep the talented junior driver they inherited from Honda there forever. I can't say I know Mercedes' plan for her - Lauda neglected to tell me that part when Mercedes was courting me last year - but I have to imagine that they have more in mind for her than just trundling around towards the back of the grid for the rest of her career. No, that would be a waste of Nat's time and Merc's money.
"I see what you're trying to say, I do, but really...we have more than half the season to go, so none of that makes me feel any better. 'You're doing great, you'll have a better future' really doesn't do much for me when I know I still have, at minimum, more time left in the Marussia than I've already gotten through," the blonde sighed, unhappy to be stuck in the middle of this nightmare, regardless of whether or not things will get better for her in 2011. At the moment, she's still stuck in a terrible car with a terrible team that has terrible prospects. Meanwhile, I'm trying to tell her that it's not all that bad while my team has locked out the front row of the grid, with Anthony taking pole position for the second week in a row and me narrowly taking second ahead of Maximilian Renner. So, I'm here telling her that her situation isn't all that bad when my situation is clearly better - of course she isn't going to respond well to encouraging words from the luxurious position of Ferrari and McLaren. Even my worst days with Williams were better than what she has to put up with now. It's a tough place for her to be, but, with those aforementioned links to Mercedes and with her determination, I have to imagine this turns out well for her in the end.
For now though, she's right: she's stuck in a Marussia, and things seem pretty crappy for her right now. In contrast, as I've said, I'm in a McLaren and we're on top of the world right now, with me leading the championship, Anthony having won the last two races, and us locking out the front row of the grid. That being said, it's not all glitz and glamour at the front of the grid, because the great run of races we've had means there's pressure to perform, and the rest of the grid will quite literally be lining up to have their shot at taking us off our throne. First there's Maximilian Renner in third for Red Bull, the wonderkid for Red Bull in qualifying but, even as Red Bull has improved, he's still one who has taken a hell of a lot more from qualifying than from the race. With three pole positions and just one win, while his teammate has taken two, including the prestigious Monaco Grand Prix - while Renner lost out on a win in Turkey thanks to the Red Bulls crashing into each other - Max will be looking to take this one away from us and narrow the gap to his teammate in the standings. Next up is Piotr Kaminski in fourth, the Polish Lotus driver having done a heroic job in qualifying to split the Red Bulls, leaving Martin Weaver down in sixth. Kaminski will be trying to maximize results for Lotus given that he tends to be left fighting Mercedes one-handed in the standings, so he'll need whatever results he can get. As for Martin Weaver, he won't want to finish behind the Lotus, so for the sake of pride, he'll be pushing forward as well. After Turkey, I doubt he'll want to finish behind his teammate either, so Weaver might be giving it everything this race.
Further back, the Ferraris of Felipe Alvarez and Henrique de Matteo will be wanting to close the gap to their rivals ahead after qualifying seventh and eighth, respectively, while the Mercedes drivers of Wilhelm Ziegler and Tommy Koskinen will no doubt be disappointed after qualifying ninth and tenth. I suspect that the team's lack of aerodynamic development when they were still Honda is catching up to them. Mercedes is putting a lot of time and money into the team, yes, but they're making up for a largely stagnant 2010, and I suspect that may be the reason why Mercedes is lacking a sharkfin, F-duct, and some of the other aerodynamic trends that are present on the 2010 grid. Nevertheless, Wilhelm and Tommy will both be thinking that their car is better than ninth and tenth, so they'll be pushing forward as well. McLaren seems to have the advantage on Sunday morning, but it's not until the race on Sunday afternoon where we'll know for sure how the grid shakes out. I'll be doing everything I can to win from second on the grid, but the same can be said of any one of these guys.
"Go, go, go!" Nicky Morrison did his by now customary shout as the race started. Anthony and I rocketed off the grid with roughly equal starts, himself on the outside - the racing line - and slightly ahead, but myself on the inside, so if I got a good enough start, I could've outbraked Anthony and taken the corner, albeit with a tighter angle to take and less momentum, as the balancing act. That didn't happen, at least not now though, so I had to settle for second place off the line, while Piotr Kaminski shot ahead of both Red Bulls to take third place in the Lotus. That actually played to Anthony and I's advantage, because by the time we got to turn eight and the top of the circuit, we had already broken ahead of the rest of the pack, putting a few car lengths between the two of us and the Pole behind, who was currently holding up the rest of the field behind him. The F-ducts and our Mercedes engines down the straight, plus back straight coming out of turn sixteen sealed our advantage, so, coming out the braking zone of turn seventeen, I knew that one of us was going to win the race, and it might as well be me.
As soon as the car was pointed to the right for the sweep of turn nineteen onto the start-finish straight, I got onto the F-duct, stalling out the rear wing to eliminate as much drag as possible while also getting into the draft of my teammate ahead and keeping it there until the braking zone of turn one, where I pulled out to the inside and made my move. Getting onto the brakes as late as I could, Anthony and I both went relatively wide in turn one but kept it on track as we went side-by-side through turns two and three, but the inside of turn one meant I was also on the inside for turn three, so as we emerged onto the other side of the stadium, I was in the lead. Anthony wasn't letting up though, keeping right on my gearbox through the esses and then pushing things in the braking zone of turn seven. I stayed ahead through that and through turn eight on the exit, but Anthony was all over me coming onto the flat-out section at the top of the circuit. By the time we kinked to the right for turn nine, we were side-by-side again, and as we kinked to the left for turn ten, his Verizon McLaren-Mercedes was ahead of mine as we got onto the straight bit...but not by much.
Drafting again, I took to the right in an attempt to dummy out Anthony and take the inside, but the American was staying put...shame for him that the track was just wide enough for me to try it anyway. As late as I dared, I swerved to the left and took to the inside, throwing my car into the lead but then immediately facing the consequences of my actions as I was left dangerously close to running off the track into the paved runoff. I hit the brakes, threw the wheel to the left, and just narrowly managed to keep it on track and ahead of Anthony...though I lost all my momentum in the process. Still, this twisty section of corners made it hard for Harrison to try an overtake, so I was able to survive a few moments longer...though as I came out of turn sixteen and onto that endlessly long straight, I knew that there wasn't much I could do. Still though, I unleashed all the weapons in my arsenal. I parked my car on the apex in turn sixteen, making Anthony lose his momentum as well, since there wasn't any way past me, and I launched on the straight when I decided to, accelerating in the narrow part of the straight beneath the underpass, and then weaving to break the tow as the straight widened out...all while using the F-duct. I was giving it everything, but eventually Anthony faked me out too and was able to swerve and send it around my outside, retaking the lead through turn seventeen and then the final two corners.
"Hold on now, keep it tight for now. Let us solidify our lead and then battle it out after the pitstops, okay?" Nicky Morrison asked over the radio.
"I don't want to finish behind for the third race of the row, you can give the order to stop fighting once I'm in the lead." I responded. I hoped that one wasn't going to get broadcast because I could tell it could come across as ungrateful. In fact, it's quite the opposite, I know the team has given us a winning car for multiple races in a row and the team just wants to guarantee good results after some of the rougher races we've had earlier this year, and I want to win for this team. Hell, I want Anthony to win for this team too, but the thing is, we're both sitting here on two wins. I won two races in a row at the beginning of the year, Anthony has won his two in the middle of the year, and now we're trying to figure out which one of us is going to be the first one to win three races this season. Obviously, I want it to be me, Anthony wants it to be him, and we'd both like the team to back our decisions. in Turkey, the team backed Anthony and he won the race, in Canada, the team let us fight but only, it seems, because they understood that Anthony was controlling the race and had plenty left in the tank. Here, the McLarens are poised to once again dominate the race, and I want things to play out to my advantage this time. I know I've achieved my personal goals, I know I'm leading the championship, and I know that Michael Coronet is already impressed with me, but I don't think any of those things are reasons to become complacent.
"Roger that. Can you at least promise you'll be careful?" Nicky asked after a moment, sounding somewhat exhausted.
"I promise." I swore before continuing my pursuit of Anthony, all the while the two of us building a ten second gap to the rest of the field while the Red Bulls were still struggling to get ahead of the Lotus of Piotr Kaminski. So, on the softer option tyres, it was going to be a shorter stint for us, nevertheless, there were still a few moves I managed to try before we took our footsteps. First, coming out of turn ten I took to the inside and nearly got alongside Anthony going into the braking zone, only to have to surrender the position as he defended vigorously. Second, at the same spot on the next lap, I managed the move again but the speed advantage was such that Anthony could do nothing but let me through. That being said, down the back straight Anthony got a good run on me, pulling alongside in turn seventeen and retaking the lead down the start-finish straight. I was preparing to take a third attempt down the start-finish straight on lap nineteen of fifty-seven when Anthony pulled into the pitlane and made his stop, so now I knew that I was going to have to push hard for the overcut.
"Push hard, we're boxing this lap." Nicky echoed my thoughts exactly as I took advantage of finally having clear air to lay down my personal best in sector one thus far, then I set a purple sector two to go fastest of anyone, and I was set to score the fastest lap of the race when, coming out of turn eighteen, instead of hooking to the left, I kept right and drove down the pitlane, getting on the limiter and beginning the 60 mile per hour crawl to my box. I turned into it and hit my marks, immediately feeling the car pop up as the front and rear jackmen instantly fell into position. Already as the car was going up my team was getting to work, four wheel gun operators at once pointing in and pulling the trigger, then four tyres came off courtesy of another tyre changer per wheel, and then another set of four men brought in the new tyres, fresh primes for a long second stint to close out the race. The wheel gun operators pulled their triggers again, the pneumatic hoses spinning the central wheel lugs into place in the blink of an eye, and then already I was being let back down onto the ground. No more refueling has made pitstops an awful lot faster this year, so in mere seconds I was out of the box and driving down the rest of the pitlane, but we still don't know whether or not it was enough.
"Push, push, push, it's for position!" Nicky shouted as I got off the pit limiter and sped onto the track, glancing in my mirrors to see I just emerged out of the pits ahead of Anthony Harrison in turn two. That being said, Anthony had the momentum, and he had the heat in his tyres, while I was going to be simultaneously learning the feeling of the harder tyre and heating mine up. I used these in practice, of course, but a few hours of practice on the weekend of doesn't match up to the servers' worth of data and experience we have from the regular circuits, so I'm still learning as the pressure is one, while Anthony has a lap more worth of experience and a clear mission to regain the lead after narrowly losing it on pit strategy. Thus, try as I might to get up to speed as quick as possible through sector one, Anthony was still able to close right up to my gearbox and followed me into the esses. Left-right-left-left-left as the esses bled into the hairpin and then turn eight, two teammates pushing hard, not just to be the first in the team to win three races this year, not just to be the one to win a place that, by now, we can both claim as somewhat of a home race, but also to assert dominance. From Anthony's perspective, I strolled into his team, the one he worked his whole life to get into, and then proceeded to win two of the first three races. Harrison wants to regain control of the team and regain his confidence, and I understand that, but at the same time, I don't want to be dominated. I've shattered my expectations - and probably everyone else's expectations - for me this season so far, I've proven I'm a grade above Jyri Kaasalainen, and I'm, you know, leading the goddamn championship. I'm not being arrogant when I say I've proven I'm among the top drivers in F1 right now, so I deserve to be Harrison's equal. Not a number two driver, not a number one driver either, I am just looking to assert equal status.
So, to achieve our individual goals, the American attacked and the Kazakh defended. Anthony closed up to me through turn six and then felt bold enough to try a move around my outside in turn seven, but he was impatient there rather than waiting for the more typical overtaking spot in the braking zone of turn eleven. This may have been what saved me, as I braked late enough to defend my position and then took my optimal line through turn eight, arriving in the flat-out section of the track - where my tyre temperature didn't really matter. This is where a combination of the F-duct and the Mercedes engine was enough to keep me in charge. As for Anthony Harrison, well, he lost momentum when I outbraked him, so although he managed a visually impressive switch-back on me, coming from the outside to the inside behind me, he wasn't able to actually do anything with it as I was already disappearing into the distance. Thus, for the first time all race long, there was a clear, consistent leader as we entered the second stint, and I was lucky enough for it to be me. I knew full well though that Anthony may just be saving fuel and tyres to ensure that he has a proper weapon with which to attack me with once we reach the closing stages of the race. After all, this one pitstop structure tends to require us to save fuel and tyres every race, and with just a lap difference in our tyre life, Harrison may be hoping I take the life out of my tyres building a gap, while he saves enough that he can come back and overtake me with ease on less worn tyres while I'm floundering on the last of my tread.
Fuel saving is necessary because we are now required to run the whole race without refueling, which means running a full tank of gas at the beginning of each race. However, doing that is heavy, so in reality, the teams try to run the bare minimum amount of fuel they can and leave their drivers to live with it over a race distance. Some would say that it's not a very exciting way to race, with the drivers and engines holding back all race long, and sure, they might be right, but the fact is that Bridgestone makes the tyres that the FIA wants them to make and the fuel suppliers trying to minimize weight has always been the goal in Formula One. So we're minimizing weight, minimizing pitstop time, and minimizing the number of pitstops, the end result of which is that everyone needs to bite the bullet at some point in an F1 race and slow down, save the appropriate amount of fuel to make the end of the race, and make sure that the tyres can make it on one stop because doing otherwise, this year, would be strategic suicide. So, all that being said, maybe Anthony was taking his bullet now and letting me lead, but if that's the case, it may be a blunder regardless, because I proceeded to lay down the gauntlet in terms of lap time until I could manage the gap and do my fuel saving.
So, once I had taken the lead after my stop, I guaranteed it with several fastest laps in quick succession, and then I started conserving the race once I was six seconds ahead of Anthony. I felt pretty secure about my situation now, six seconds ahead of my teammate and it was another ten seconds back to third place Renner, who had ultimately had to wait for pit strategy to get him ahead of the Lotus of Kaminski. This race seemed like it was in the bag...perhaps then, it is purely the nature of Formula One that something had to go wrong for me and threaten a certain victory. That was when seven-time world champion Wilhelm Ziegler took too much of the inside kerb coming out of the turn seventeen hairpin, lost the rear, and then came all the way around with his rear slamming into the wall on the outside, most likely smashing his gearbox in the process. Needless to say, the Mercedes driver's day - and it had been a good day as far as I could tell, as he had stayed ahead of Koskinen all race long and was running safely in the top ten - was done, and with him stranded on track and also blocking the usual entry into the pits, a safety car was inevitable. The problem was, at this point, we had less than ten laps remaining in the race.
"Are we going to restart the race?" I asked over the radio, at this point desperately hoping that this safety car would just take us to the end of the race and be done with it. I worked so hard to build a gap, to then control that gap as I conserved tyres and fuel, and then, when I was within touching distance of the end of the race, suddenly the whole grid is bunched up right behind me looking to take their shot.
"Unknown at this time, a car has never had to be removed from there before. We'll update you as soon as we have more information." I couldn't help but sigh - not on the radio button, thankfully - at Nicky Morrison's unhelpful reply, but I did fundamentally understand it. We've never raced here before, no one has lost it at that particular spot at any point in this weekend, and even when we had seen cars crash or retire in this weekend, no car needed to be recovered under the high pressure of a late race safety car. Sure, there were a couple of yellow flags as a backmarker car conked out and needed to be rolled behind the wall, but all of those were the kind of slow incidents where the drivers managed to roll their car into a good spot. This was the first situation where we had a safety car at the Miami International Autodrome, and the first time that the American marshals were going to be put to the test. Now, ultimately what they ended up doing was backing a recovery vehicle out of pitlane, lifting the car onto the flatbed, and then driving the flatbed back into the pitlane half a corner later, so, while there wasn't a clear gap in the barriers, the marshals had made it work plenty quickly. Another lap of sweeping up any carbon shards and putting quick-dry sand on any spilled oil later, Nicky Morrison called in with what was probably good news for the show, but bad news for me "Okay, safety car in this lap, we will have a two-lap sprint at the end."
"Copy." I responded, trying not to let my disappointment show. So, I establish a sizable lead and McLaren dominate the race, but now, not only is my lead in question, but McLaren's lead is in question. Maximilian Renner isn't sixteen seconds back anymore, he is right behind Anthony, and Weaver is in the mix too, not to mention the Ferraris who are right there as well. This has been the McLaren affair all race long, but now...it seems like whoever is the boldest of the top six will be the one to win. That being said, I have two things going for me, one: McLaren has had the speed all race long, so long as someone doesn't throw themselves ahead of us in turn one, we should be fine. Second of all - and this will help with one - I'm the leader, so I decide when we go. To that end, I crawled the car out of turn seventeen, weaved my tyres down the brief straight that followed - and, somewhat cheekily, even threw a wheel into the quick dry just to throw up some dust and disrupt the cars behind. Of course, I then weaved to get any quick dry off of my tyres, still making the grid behind me move painfully slow. Given what I've done behind the safety car before, some drivers probably felt like I was going to leave this until the line and then just punch it at the latest possible moment. The problem with that is, if they're expecting it, it's not an unexpected move, so instead, what I did was, in my opinion, quite clever.
Coming out of turn nineteen, I made it look like I was still weaving to get heat into my tyres, but instead I punched it there and then, letting the angle of my tyres carry me towards the pit wall and then swerving back to the left just to turn right into turn one, not only catching the rest of the grid by surprise but also working to break the tow down the main straight. My plan worked on one level, because Max Renner and especially Martin Weaver were caught unaware, left fighting the Ferraris as the McLarens blasted off into the distance, but the problem was...it was both McLarens. So, despite all the gaps and fighting and potential interference on the safety car research, we were back to the first stint of the race, where Anthony and I were nose to tail with a gap to the rest of the field and carte blanche to fight for the win. If anyone on the internet complains that this race was boring because McLaren dominated, they have zero appreciation for F1 drivers, because relentlessly battling your own teammate in the heat and humidity of Miami in June? Not easy.
Anthony would make his first move by pulling alongside in turn ten, but I kept myself planted on the inside and squeezed him - not into the wall, just enough to make him uncomfortable - going into the braking zone for turn eleven. Despite Anthony's best efforts to brake later than me, I retained the position and had good momentum into the twisty bit. Advantage Tamara. Harrison tried again coming down the back straight, but keeping my car planted in the middle during the narrow section of the straight and then making Anthony question where exactly I was going to position my car, so despite the long straight and the draft, I managed to hold him off yet again and retain the lead through this dangerous part of the track. Advantage Tamara. Thundering out of the final few corners and onto the main straight to start the final lap, Anthony had another run on me again, I once again took over the inside and made him work for it on the outside, but this time it was enough for the American. On the final lap of his home race, Anthony Harrison pulled ahead in turn one. Advantage Anthony...until he locked up and went wide. Losing his tyre advantage and needing to scrub off marbles, plus losing the momentum he had, Anthony would do what he could to try and get back towards me, but it was too little, too late. Advantage Tamara. Thus, after the first corner, the final lap was pretty much a victory tour for me, coming out of turn nineteen, swinging it to the right just like I did on the restart to pull alongside the pitwall and salute my crew of guys to celebrate our third win of the season.
"Woo! Congratulations guys. My God that was a race...I'm sweaty, I'm gross, but we won the race. Thank you, guys, thank you. Congratulations to Anthony too, that was a nice, hard battle and we never touched. It takes excellent drivers and respect to do that. Wow. Okay...I need a shower but I'm proud of you guys. Couldn't have done it without you. Thanks." my post-race radio message was probably a bit more subdued than usual thanks to pure exhaustion, but I tried my best to sound grateful to the team regardless, and also made sure to play up Anthony's role in this as well, since I know a lot of the crowd was probably rooting for him. I hope I don't get booed on the podium, I have a house here too after all...
Anyway, the points-paying results of the 2010 Miami Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 25 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 18 points.
3: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 15 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 12 points.
5: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
6: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 8 points.
7: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 6 points.
8: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 4 points.
9: James Buxton - Great Britain - Williams-Cosworth - 2 points.
10: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 1 point.
No points for this, but it is absolutely an accomplishment worth noting: Natasha Tsirinskaya managed to drag her Marussia all the way up to 13th place, matching the best result of any of the backmarker teams - Jyri Kaasalainen's 13th place in Australia - but the Caterham driver did it with an awful lot more attrition. Cars did have to retire for Natasha to get up there - both Saubers and Ziegler for one - and Giuseppino Leone had issues as well in the second Force India which dropped him back, but it's still a great result given the level of equipment she's in. Hopefully that will go some way towards relieving the back of the grid angst she's been feeling as of late. It doesn't do much for her in the top six of the drivers' standings, however, which read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 135 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 127 points.
3: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 111 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 106 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 105 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 81 points.
Kaminski's 81 points just barely keeps him in the top six compared to Henrique de Matteo's 77 points and Tommy Koskinen's 74. McLaren continues our excellent run of races with a third consecutive one-two finish to give us a strong advantage in the standings, while Red Bull are making themselves the clear second and Ferrari, admittedly, are languishing in third at the moment. Ferrari started the season with a win but just haven't been able to get back there ever since. Ferrari's slip in form since the beginning of the season shows in the top six of the constructors' championship:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 262 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 216 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 183 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 108 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 85 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 36 points.
Red Bull have scored pole position at every single race this year except the last two at Canada and Miami, but in spite of that, we are in control of both championships. Despite how badly things went for us in a couple of races this season, I think it's fair to say that we have the better race car, even if Red Bull has the clear advantage in outright speed. Of course, there is still plenty of time for things to change, because the European Grand Prix marks our return to the continent after this duo of North American flyaways, so I'd imagine our opposition will be coming with upgrades. Granted, so will we, but the relentless push of development and progress in F1 always comes with winners and losers. We will have to see how things down out on the streets of Valencia.
"Congratulations," Natasha hugged me as I left my trailer the evening of the race, freshly showered and dressed in jean shorts, black and white converse, and the day-glo red victory polos that are part of every McLaren win - I enjoy having a post-win tradition like that - along with the customary red cap, though even that was a rarity this time, as it said Verizon rather than Vodafone.
"Thanks, you did great too." I congratulated her on her efforts as we began leaving the track...though not before giving back to one of the fans that sticked around this long after the race, still hoping to get a glimpse of their driving heroes. The crowd in Miami was pretty good actually - I think 60,000 people or so on race day, but that was a sellout since, at least for the first year, they didn't want to stress local infrastructure any more than a typical game at this stadium. I would imagine that, with confirmation that this event was a success - and the backlog of tickets I've heard about - they'll try and steadily increase the capacity going forward.
"Tamara!" an American-accented fan called out, a tall man with an orange polo, a reddish-brown beard, sunglasses, and one of those old Marlboro McLaren caps called over "You did great today! Could you please sign this?"
"Sure," I accepted, walking over, grabbing a pen, and signing a boxed diecast with a #8 McLaren MP4/25 in it. Getting scale models signed was actually something that was fairly often at American races, and I got used to doing it at the Indycar races, so I wasn't too surprised by the request. Furthermore, I did appreciate that an American fan who, at very least, was visiting the Miami area, if not from here, picked out a model with my number rather than Anthony's. Now, it was fully possible that he was just a McLaren fan and they sold out of Anthony's models, but I chose to believe the better possibility "Who should I make it out to?"
"Andy." he answered, thus I signed a quick little personalized message - something along the lines of "Glad you enjoyed the race Andy, Tamara Shchegolyayeva" just as an added bit of care. The cynical side of this was also that, if he's not actually a fan and is just looking for signed merch to sell on Ebay or whatever, I just made it a lot harder for him to sell. So, if he's an actual fan, he gets a personalized message, if he's just looking to profit off my win, he's going to have a harder time doing it. It's a win-win as far as I'm concerned. He seemed like a legit fan though "Thank you. You did good too."
"Aww, thanks." Natasha smiled, just glad to get recognized. I gave her a look too, as if to tell her "See, you're in F1 too, dummy" but she actually took things a step forward and pulled something from her bag - another Marussia cap, quickly scribbling on a signature before going "Hey, take this too. Thank you for coming to the race."
"Aww, you do care." I teased as we walked away. Win, thirteenth, whatever, I was just glad that we both got to receive a little bit of recognition. Yes, there are dedicated fan events that can be taxing, and yes there are fans in the paddock that can get problematic or entitled, but every once in awhile, you get one of these quiet, stress-free fan interactions that reminds you that it is all worth it. We're bringing F1 back to a part of the country - the third largest country in the world and its largest economy, mind you - that hasn't seen it since those Sebring races in the 1950s, and we're bringing real, legitimate fans out. The kind of fans that can recognize a race winner well after the race without her helmet or race suit or anything beyond the typical race gear and can even go a few steps further than that and also recognize a backmarker driver like Natasha with just a little bit of context. It's just a nice moment to cap off a good time for both of us going into a week off before all this starts again at Valencia to reopen the European leg of the season.
"And we are underway in the European Grand Prix!" a British commentator shouted somewhere or some other as I fired off of the grid from seventh place. Hardly an ideal qualifying session, I must admit, but the same applied to the team in general, with Anthony only managing third place as Red Bull resumed normal service and locked out the front row of the grid once more. So, Renner led from Weaver, then Harrison, and between me and my teammate were the Ferraris of Alvarez and Matteo, along with the Lotus of Kaminski in sixth. Behind us, there was no threat of the Mercedes - as neither of their cars made it through to Q3 - and instead it was the Williams cars rounding out the top ten along with Alexandrov, perhaps hinting that Buxton's points-scoring form from Miami was a fluke. There was a lot of race left before we'd know for sure though, and I demonstrated that by pulling alongside the black and gold Lotus through the fast right-hander of turn one. Sweeping through on the inside, I was able to take the position with ease going into the braking zone of turn two, putting me up to sixth in the first recorded move of the race.
Turns two and three formed a right-left kink bringing us onto another short straight and another braking zone, but this time, things got heated as Anthony made contact with Weaver while trying to pass him. Left through turn four and right through turn five, all of us were watching and waiting to see what would happen between the two, but in the end, the American was able to keep going in second while the Australian started to drop. I had to abort an attempted move on Henrique de Matteo going into the braking zone of turn eight because, in the previous kinks of turn six to the left and turn seven to the right, I was forced to stay behind the Brazilian as he both shot ahead of the slow-moving, struggling Australian. Martin Weaver would pit at the end of this lap and then work on regaining ground, but in the meantime, the rest of us braked hard for turn eight, turned to the right, and then snapped back to the left as the kink of turn nine through us onto the bridge. Twenty-four Formula One cars of various states of competitiveness and condition thundered across that bridge and into the braking zone for turn ten, the next ninety-degree corner on this track, and another right hander as it happens.
Fortunately, the gentle sweep of turn thirteen to the left brought us onto the long, flat-out straight section of the course, running alongside and then beyond the marina. Here, with a good draft and the usual F-duct tool at my disposal, I pulled to the right and managed to overtake Henrique de Matteo into the chicane. Right through turn twelve and then left through the chopped apex of turn thirteen, allowing me to throw the car in at some speed down the short shoot before the braking zone for yet another ninety-degree right-hander. Coming out of turn fourteen - and in spite of the twin kinks of fifteen and sixteen to the left down this particular straight - I finally had a moment to breath and take stock of my situation. Maximilian Renner was in the lead, my teammate, Anthony Harrison, was in second, and Felipe Alvarez was third in the Ferrari, which left me in fourth place. Kaminski right into the first real corner, getting ahead of Weaver thanks to his own misery, and now overtaking Henrique into the chicane...not a bad first lap at all, if I do say so myself.
It wasn't quite over yet, I remembered, when I slammed on the brakes for the hairpin to the right of turn seventeen, turning my silver and red McLaren - back in Vodafone colors for the remainder of the season - with the Valencian Community branding just beyond the exit kerb on this corner. Coming out of the hairpin, I began the last section of the lap, effectively consisting of a relentless series of fast kinks with concrete walls on either side, looking to punish anyone that wasn't perfectly in line. Needless to say, there weren't going to be any more position changes, not on this lap anyway. So, left through turn eighteen and then right through turn nineteen, and right again through turn twenty, blasting the cars onto a short straight. I took a deep breath to regain my composure before we were at it once again Turn twenty-one, a kink to the right, then kinking back to the left with twenty-two, still left through turn twenty-three, and then sweeping right through turn twenty-four. Just as the walls finally gave way and the track widened up again, I realized I was already braking for the final hairpin, turn twenty-five to the left, bringing us back onto the start-finish straight. I continued on in fourth place, sticking close to the Ferrari of Alvarez and biding my time, meanwhile, Weaver made his pitstop to replace the damaged front wing. This would result in an extreme difference in speed, as Weaver was now at the very back of the grid thanks to his early and unscheduled pitstop, but he now had a more or less intact Red Bull with which to regain position. Thus, it would be the fastest car reeling in the slowest cars as Weaver tries to claw his way forward on what is perhaps one of F1's tightest and most walled circuits outside of the historical outlier that is Monaco.
Perhaps then, we should have all seen that disaster was coming. I mean, come on, it was an angry, vengeful Weaver looking to get back to the front of the grid as quickly as possible and being willing to plow his way through the back of it in the process. That being said, what none of us noticed was that Jyri Kaasalainen had also picked up an issue at some point during that first lap, and now the veteran driver - left to rot in the Caterham - was going to be the first car on Weaver's list, and thanks to both having made pitstops, Weaver was in striking distance before any of us knew it. Weaver was trying to maximize the tow from Kaasalainen for as long as possible before diving ahead in the braking zone for the chicane, but, one thing he forgot to account for is that, with way less downforce and worse brakes, the Finn was hitting the brakes well before the Red Bull. The Australian tied to react, he did, but his attempt to swerve to the right came too late, and his front left side slammed into the rear right of Tripoli with such force that it slammed Jyri into the wall and sent Weaver into the air.
The loss of his front wing combined with his speed going into the corner threw Weaver's nose into the air and that only meant more air was rushing beneath the car, generating lift and sending the whole thing airborne. Momentum carried the car forward as it did a backflip and landed on its front, only to immediately spin over back onto its bottom, meaning that, despite everything, when Weaver finally slammed into the war, he slammed into the wall right side up and nose first. A miraculous stroke of luck combined with the safety equipment doing its job meant that the Australian was alright. A hit like that - with enough force that he bounced back off the wall and wound up stranded in the paved run off facing back down the straight - would have been fatal not very long ago at all. Hell, a bit further down the straight it could have been fatal, as this accident happened just after these guys passed beneath a sponsor bridge.
"Is he okay?" I asked as, obviously, the safety car was called out and the race was suspended.
"Weaver is coming out of the car on his own power. He's shaken, but that's to be expected after a crash like that. Kaasalainen is okay too." Nicky Morrison answered, likely worried because, given his position on this car, he probably worked with Jyri Kaasalainen when he was at the team. The Englishman quickly composed himself though and got back to business with "And stop this lap, we are stopping this lap."
Thus, I made my stop on that lap, switching from the options to the primes. On these rarely used streets, the tyres could last a long time compared to some of the more abrasive, purpose-built venues like Barcelona, so despite the fact we were less than ten laps into this race, my strategy was complete. Further up ahead, there was drama though, since Renner and Harrison reached the safety car before getting to the safety car line on the start-finish straight, which meant that they were allowed to pass. Renner in the Red Bull passed without issue, but my teammate didn't reach the safety car until the final corner, hesitated for a moment as he checked with the team for confirmation, and by the time he had that information, he had already rolled across the safety car line, meaning his then overtake of the SC was illegal. Meanwhile, I received a boon as Alvarez, Matteo, and Kaminski all got stuck behind the safety car before making their stops, meaning that my timing actually put me into a net third position...problem is I was actually fifth at the end of the safety car period, as neither Sauber pit. Thus, with all these safety car complications of who reached the SC line where, who pit and who didn't, and whether or not Anthony broke a rule, the order when the SC came in on lap fourteen looked like this: Maximilian Renner, Anthony Harrison, Yoshikazu Higashiyama, Victor Hartmann, myself, and then a couple more midfield cars between myself and the Ferraris of Alvarez and Matteo. Weaver was out of the race and Alvarez, Matteo, and Kaminski were all stuck in the midfield, so, while Renner may still be in the lead, this may be yet another great day for McLaren.
As the race restarted, Max and Anthony disappeared into the distance while I did battle with the Saubers. I managed to pull to the inside of Hartmann and overtake the German going into turn two, but his rookie Japanese teammate was proving my difficult, which was a problem, since the leading duo was disappearing into the distance as everyone else was stuck behind these two mediocre cars on worn tyres. All the while, Alvarez wasn't making much progress, as the Spaniard seemed more interested in politicking over the radio and trying to get Anthony penalized than actually doing his own race. I did have to admire Felipe's dedication to being F1's pantomime villain at every possible opportunity, and I also had to admire Yoshikazu's driving skills. The Japanese driver made an immediate impact when he subbed in at Toyota during those final two races of 2009, and he's carried that through well with Sauber. Yoshikazu had plenty to be proud of, and it was annoying the ever-living hell out of me as I failed to get through at turn twelve, as I failed to get through at turn seventeen, and as I failed to get through on turn two of the next lap. I was frustrated enough to be stuck behind the Sauber as the front two got away from me, but by day took a turn for the worse when...
"Anthony has been given a drive-through penalty, drive-through penalty. He will serve it as soon as possible. Meanwhile, you need to get ahead of Higashiyama and build a gap because you are also under investigation now." Nicky reported.
"For what?!" I demanded, literally not having the slightest clue as to what I could have done wrong.
"Speeding under safety car. Hartmann, Kaminski, Goncalves, Buxton, Alexandrov, Leone, Barbaro, and Longpre are under investigation as well." Morrison answered, calmly rattling off a third of the grid as if all of us being under investigation was a normal thing.
"Unbelievable." I sighed before getting off the radio and back to work. Anthony would add insult to injury to my situation by taking his drive-through penalty - meaning he had to take to the pitlane and drive down its whole length on the pit limiter for no reason as a penalty - and still emerging ahead of me, revealing just how much time I was losing to the leaders by being stuck behind the Saubers. No wonder why Natasha just wanted to be able to fight these guys in the race, because if these guys are this much slower than the lead, it must be utterly demoralizing to have to drive around in a car so slow it can't keep up with the Saubers. It's a shame too because there's good people at Sauber, it's just that the team went in the wrong direction with developing their 2009 car, and then BMW pulled out, leaving the car without the funds to develop as it is returned to privateer service. So, a car with the wrong concept to begin with, a year behind the development curve, and losing their bespoke BMW engines for customer Ferrari units...I understood why Sauber was so much slower this year, and I know that Higashiyama is just trying to make the most of a bad situation, but every moment I spend trapped behind him is a moment that absolutely destroys my race. So finally, going into the braking zone of turn twelve, I pulled to the left, taking the undefended outside, and simply outbraked the Sauber going into the chicane. I had to slam the brakes and lose a lot of momentum just after making the pass, but once I was able to throw my car ahead of Yoshikazu and prevent a counterattack, I was up into the podium position, now I just needed to make sure that I kept it.
So, I spent the rest of the race making sure I had a buffer to the cars behind, but it ended up not being much of a problem. Higashiyama was dropping back as his tyres finally wore out and he still needed to take a pitstop, so he was quickly out of contention, while Kaminski, Goncalves, and Barbaro behind were all in the same position as I was. The next car that was neither under investigation or still had a pitstop to make was Felipe Alvarez...who couldn't stop bitching on the radio. Thus, despite the threat - and the eventual five second penalty that myself and everyone else under investigation for speeding received - the end of the race turned out rather anticlimactic for me. I did, however, set the fastest lap, so at least there's that.
The points-paying results of the 2010 European Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 25 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 18 points.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 15 points.
4: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 12 points.
5: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 10 points.
6: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 8 points.
7: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Sauber-Ferrari - 6 points.
8: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 4 points.
9: Maximilien Longpre - Luxembourg - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 2 points.
10: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 1 point.
Ferrari qualified well at the track where, last year, Matti Hamalainen finished third and I finished fifth upon my return to Formula One, so based on last year, perhaps this should have been a good race for Ferrari. Instead, getting stuck behind the safety car rather than pitting screwed them in this race, so badly that, even with a speeding penalty, Kaminski finished well ahead of the Ferraris in eighth and eleventh...despite being caught up in the same situation. Yeah, try as I might, I can't quite explain Ferrari crumbling in this race as badly as they did, but it shows in the top six of the drivers' standings:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 150 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 145 points.
3: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 130 points.
4: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 111 points.
5: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 110 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 93 points.
Ferrari's struggles as of late are also apparent in the top six of the constructors' standings:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 295 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 241 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 187 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 109 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 97 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 44 points.
It's not going great for Ferrari, and if they don't start winning soon, it's going to turn into a two-team race for the title rather than three. I raced for Ferrari for half a season, I like the team and I make no secret of that, and the fact is...it feels better to be fighting Ferrari for the title than Red Bull. McLaren vs. Ferrari, those are the two best teams in Formula One, they have so much success and history, fighting each other in the 70s with Lauda and Hunt, in the 80s with Ferrari being the closest challenger to the TAG McLarens of the mid-80s, and then again in 1988 when Ferrari was the one to spoil McLaren's perfect season. Twice in the 1990s Ferrari and McLaren went toe-to-toe, with Prost challenging Senna at the beginning of the decade, and then at the end of the decade with Ziegler chasing Hakkinen. The Hakkinen-Ziegler feud would continue into the 2000s with new names like Goncalves for Ferrari and MacGowan and Hamalainen entering the fray for McLaren. Hell, even in 2007 and 2008, it was about Ferrari fighting McLaren. Ferrari, McLaren, and Williams, those are the teams that have defined F1 history for my entire life, those are the teams with the history and the pedigree. F1 changes, of course it does, so I'm not complaining about Red Bull rising to the top, I'm just saying that it feels more special when it's Ferrari fighting McLaren. Oh well, I suppose I should be happy enough to still be talking about the championship this late into the season - not just in the conversation, but on top of the world right now. I am twenty points clear of Renner, meaning that, unless we have a truly terrible run of races, Anthony and I will still be first and second in the title after our team's home race at the British Grand Prix.
Beyond that though? Who knows. The European summer is the densest part of the season, and we'll have a relentless run of races with Britain, Germany, and Hungary all back-to-back-to-back. This could prove to be a decisive moment in the season too, because whoever comes out of these three races on top will go into the August break as the leader, while everyone else is going to be chasing going into the second half of the season.
Notes:
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 36: Felipe is Faster than You
Notes:
Hello everyone! As I hinted at last chapter, I was going to title this chapter Back-to-Back-to-Back to emphasize the relentless series of three races in as many weeks in one chapter. However, I also noticed this was the 2010 German Grand Prix chapter, so...obligatory meme title time!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXXVI.
Felipe is Faster than You.
"I feel like I should be wearing a hard hat." Natasha smirked as we walked into the Silverstone paddock, entering a changed circuit. To make a long story short, Donington Park of 1993 European Grand Prix fame was supposed to host the British Grand Prix from 2010 onwards, but Donington's money dried up and the required upgrades could not be made in time. Silverstone, meanwhile, was able to get money and was in the process of renovating the track completely...and I mean that literally, the track is in the middle of renovations. The layout has already changed, bypassing Bridge and Priory, instead going with an infield loop section. That part is all well and good - the track is longer now, has a different character, it's going to be interesting - but the facilities have not yet been completed to match. The new "Wing" paddock and the complimentary pitlane and start-finish line, between Club and Abbey, will not be finished until 2011, so we're pairing this new layout with the existing start-finish and pit infrastructure between Woodcote and Copse. So yeah, there's construction going on at the track as we speak - since, you know, there need to be new permanent grandstands to go with the new Wing pitlane and the infield loop - and the track itself is in flux. That not-very-short explanation after all, however, may play to my advantage, because the new layout acts as an equalizer at a track I haven't raced at since all the way back in 2008...and that was an infamously wet race to begin with.
"Could be worse. I hear South Korea is running way behind schedule too, so this might not be the only construction site we race at this year." I noted, waving to some British fans waiting just behind the barriers already, this earlier in the weekend. Silverstone may not have been the first choice for 2010 - for financial reasons as far as I can tell, though that whole 2003 priest incident probably doesn't help - but one thing that the FIA can't ever say is that this place doesn't bring the fans out, because there's always a massive crowd here and they're always among the most passionate fans. The fact that I'm doing well for a British team - the British team at this point, with McLaren fighting the rather cosmopolitan Red Bull and the distinctly Italian Ferrari at the front of the field - probably helps boost my popularity. For better or worse, I don't think I'm unpopular anywhere really. There are always going to be fans that disparage me for being a woman or those who know about my sexuality making homophobic comments - the F1 paddock seems to have more or less adopted a don't talk about it approach, which I'm fine with, but we can't exactly scrub the news from the internet - but I don't think that I'm the enemy in any country. I was worried that I might get some resentment in Spain over my brief feud with Alvarez or in Brazil for when I replaced the injured Matteo at Ferrari, but neither country's fanbase has seemed to turn against me, as far as I can tell.
"Well...maybe we should have gone to the other Korea instead." Nat joked.
"Ugh, could you imagine? Some concrete track in the wilderness with a purpose-built hotel and airstrip, armed soldiers stopping anyone from stepping out of line?" I played into the stereotypes of North Korea.
"To kick off the race, they launch a missile." Well, whatever wrong things I said were just trumped by Tsirinskaya.
"Are we even allowed to say this when we were both literally born in the Soviet Union?" I pointed out.
"I'm not sure if the Soviet Union was quite the same type of bad, you know? Authoritarian and secretive, sure, but not quite North Korea." Nat theorized.
"Well, I was three and you were a newborn, so maybe we're not the best people to ask." I laughed before getting to the elephant in the room "We certainly couldn't be racing drivers if we were good Soviets, at least not at Silverstone."
"A Soviet racing team seems like it would be fun. The People's F1 Team, with fifteen republics of expertise and a full committee of party appartchiks to police us." Natasha continued the joking.
"Eh, I'm sure Bernie would love to get a drink with them." I smirked, taking a dig at our beloved Mr. Ecclestone.
"Representing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Natalia Yevgeniyevna Tsirinskaya of the Kyrgyz SSR and Tamara Anatoliyevna Shchegolyayeva of the Kazakh SSR! Racers of the world unite!" Nat impersonated a Soviet announcer and used the Russian trope of full names, including patronymics. I wasn't the biggest fan of patronymics to be fair, though it doesn't help that one: I have a strained relationship with my father ever since we had our blow-up over 2009 race plans, and two: neither Anatoliy, nor uncle Yevgeniy, have names that seem particularly pretty from a western perspective. Natasha and Tamara are fine names, fairly applicable to the west as well, and our last names are what they are, but the patronymics are a bit much. Nevertheless, the use of them is considered proper and respectful in Russia, and I suspect we'll be hearing them in a much more serious context come the race in Saint Petersburg.
"I'd be faster." I teased.
"Wanna bet?" she challenged me, the dirty blonde facing me down.
"Well...we'll see who comes out of this race better." I got her back before walking away.
"Hey! That's not fair!" she chased after me. A nice little moment of brevity with my friend before a series of highly competitive races. I have a fair few friends in the paddock - Natasha is the closest because she's family, but there's Lorenzo and Anthony, Tommy, even Max Renner I'm pretty good friends with, but things can always get strained when there's a race followed by a race and another race. There was already a point during the Turkish Grand Prix where things got strained with Anthony, and now the title battle is only getting more serious because we're now properly in the second half of the season. Red Bull took a win at Valencia, but we scored more points, so they'll be trying to avenge that, while Ferrari will be looking to get their first wins since Bahrain in the coming races to get back on track, while Anthony and I have no aspirations of slowing down in the coming races. So many drivers looking to compete at the sharp end of the field, any moment could stress these relationships, so when Natasha and I are having a good moment before the race weekend, I'm glad to savor it, because things might just get a lot more frustrating for me going forward.
"I ran over the kerbs hard, I need to scrub the lap." I reported over the radio in Q2 as I coasted onto the start-finish straight after having gone wide and clattered the exit kerbing on Woodcote. I don't know if I just didn't notice this in 2008 since the race was wet and we didn't run the kerbs, or if it is a result of the new layout, but the kerbs on Silverstone have been killing me all weekend. The track is paved and flat - the result of it being built over an old World War II airstrip - so the nature of the track encourages you to run wide and push the kerbs...only for the kerbs here to be particularly rough and harsh, leading to the car bouncing, losing speed, and - in extreme cases - taking floor and even suspension damage. So, having lost my momentum as a result of taking too much exit kerb through the final corner, I was prepared to back off, do another preparatory lap, and then take my Q2 attempt. It wasn't ideal but it would have to do, at least until...
"Negative, negative! We do not have time. You need to push now!" Nicky Morrison announced we were up against the clock, so, pretty much as I was rolling over the line at reduced speed, I had to slam the accelerator and start speeding up. Now we were in trouble. The compromised speed did mean I could just about throw the car to the right through Copse with just the smallest lift, the getting back on power as I ran along the pit exit straight before reaching the iconic Maggots and Becketts section. Once again conscious of the rough kerbs, I flicked the car to the left, then right, then straight for the briefest moment before it was left again with a big lift, then right, and finally flicking left onto the Hangar straight with turn six, Chapel. The longest straight on this configuration, Hangar gave my F-duct and Mercedes engine the chance to breath, hopefully doing something to alleviate all the time I must have lost down the start-finish straight. Yes, most of that was before the start-finish line, but there is a huge difference in crossing the line at full speed compared to just accelerator from a cruising speed as I come to the lap.
The straight came to an end with the hard braking zone and right-hander of Stowe, bringing me onto the south end of the circuit. Turn eight, a slight kink to the left coming out of Stowe, got me back in line with the track and onto a brief straight before the Vale chicane. Another hard braking zone, then a left-right chicane, accelerating out of it as I threw the car to the right through Club, coming onto what will, from 2011, be the new start-finish straight. A half-constructed grandstand on one side, a half-constructed paddock on the other, I sped past the construction side and into turn twelve. The new Abbey corner was a faster right hander, just about flat-out except for the bump in the track as the new surface meets the old, one which has been catching drivers out all weekend. Most recently in FP3 where, at the end of the session, Maximilian Renner had a front wing failure over the bumps, breaking one of Red Bull's two new prototype front wings. The other was taken off of Weaver's car and put on Renner's for qualifying, much to the chagrin of the Australian. The Renner-Weaver drama seems to be creeping back up since that last flashpoint at the Turkish Grand Prix, but I didn't have time to think about my rivals right now, since I needed to try and gain as much speed as possible through this new arena section.
Turn thirteen was a flat-out kink to the left that led into turn fourteen, a hairpin to the right that immediately led into another hairpin, turn fifteen to the left. These twin hairpins served to focus the cars in front of two grandstands and add a number of overtaking opportunities. Nevertheless, I wasn't here to give the qualifying fans a long look at my car, so I sped out of the arena section and threw my car to the left through turn sixteen, taking the fast kink onto the new Wellington straight. A part of the national circuit here - and known to those who did their junior series work here in Britain - this long infield straight replaced the old Bridge and Priory corners, instead producing another overtaking zone as the straight gave cars a chance to get a run on each other. The overtaking opportunity in question was turn seventeen, the new Brooklands corner. Gone was the old hairpin and in was a newer, wider corner - just about ninety-degrees - to the left, making an archetypal outbraking opportunity. Nevertheless, coming out of Brooklands, I gave the slightest burst of speed before getting on the brakes again for Luffield. All the way around to the right and running alongside the grandstands, Luffield spit me out onto the old perimeter road of the airfield, now - for the last time - the start-finish straight for the British Grand Prix. First though, the kink of Woodcote to the right, just after pit entrance.
"Shit," I cursed as I sped out of Woodcote this time and crossed the line at speed - avoiding the kerbs with care this time - but still immediately got the feeling that it wasn't enough.
"That is fourteenth, fourteenth place. We do not advance." Nicky Morrison reported matter of factly, taking care not to show any emotion in his tone, but that emotionlessness told the whole story anyway. I was a McLaren driver, I was the championship leader for Christ's sake, but a little too much kerb and some misjudged timing was enough to leave me all the way down in fourteenth place, languishing well behind my rivals. Come the end of the top ten shootout in Q3, the Red Bulls would lock out the front row, Renner ahead of Weaver, Alvarez would take third, and my teammate would take fourth. Koskinen was fifth, Kaminski was sixth, Henrique de Matteo was seventh, hell Wilhelm Ziegler was tenth and Lorenzo Barbaro was eleventh. That meant that the only Mercedes powered car I outqualified was Giuseppino Leone, who was lining up in fifteenth, just a single row behind me. I was in a top team at their home Grand Prix, but I was just about the worst car running perhaps the best engine at a track with multiple long, engine-dependent straights. In short, I underperformed in qualifying, by a lot. I would need to do a hell of a lot better in the race.
Scenario: British Grand Prix. 2010. Silverstone International Circuit. Starting Position: Fourteenth. Objective: Finish as High as Possible.
Target Number One: James Buxton. British. Williams F1 Team.
Result: As the lights went out, I shot ahead of Buxton immediately, instantly moving up to thirteenth place and challenging the Sauber of Higashiyama as we swung through Copse. Meanwhile, at the front of the grid, Martin Weaver fired into the lead and pushed his teammate wide, letting Anthony Harrison slip into second and forcing Max Renner yet further off the line. Nevertheless, I was up into thirteenth and moving forward, while the same could not be said for Felipe Alvarez. From third on the grid, the Spaniard already dropped behind Harrison and now Piotr Kaminski, which was a problem, because the Lotus would reveal itself to be a much slower car over the course of a race. In any case, coming out of Copse, I was well ahead of the 2009 champion and focusing on the driver that, just barely, made his F1 debut in 2009...only for Buxton's 2009 title rival to unexpectedly enter the picture.
Target Number Two: Maximilian Renner. German. Red Bull F1 Team.
Result: Coming through Maggots and Becketts, Renner went wider still, going off track, through the grass, and into the gravel. As the German was crawling through the gravel trying not to get beached - and throwing up a cloud of dust in the process - I passed him along with the rest of the field. In the space of a handful of corners, Renner fell from the lead of the race to the back of the field, while his teammate was already running down the Hangar Straight. New front wing be damned, Red Bull's hopes of winning the British Grand Prix now lie not with the German, but with the Australian.
Target Number Three: Yoshikazu Higashiyama. Japanese. Sauber F1 Team.
Result: Renner ran wide but nobody crashed, and everyone was ahead of the cloud of smoke, so there were no yellow flags and certainly no safety car to stop me now. Thus, coming out of Chapel, I was right on the diffuser of the Sauber ahead, and with the machine at my disposal, it was no contest down the straight. Already as we passed beneath the sponsor bridge, I passed ahead of Higashiyama and pulled ahead, clearing the Japanese driver. From fourteenth, I was now up to eleventh, and the next target on my list was Wilhelm Ziegler. The seven-time world champion in the Mercedes had lost a position on the start to Lorenzo Barbaro in the Force India, and that meant that he was going to be easy prey for my faster, better car with the same engine. Thus...
Target Number Four: Wilhelm Ziegler. German. Mercedes GP Petronas.
Result: Pulling to the inside and outbraking him, I took the position with ease going into Vale. Up to tenth and into the points.
Target Number Five: Lorenzo Barbaro. Uruguayan. Force India F1 Team.
Result: Lorenzo Barbaro was a friend, but he didn't stay ahead of me much longer, as I overtook him going into turn fourteen, the first hard braking zone of the arena loop. This meant that I was now the third-best Mercedes engined driver, behind only Harrison and Koskinen, both of whom were fighting at the sharp end of the grid. I wanted to get up there, but it would take some more time and effort. Luckily for me, I wasn't done yet.
Target Number Six: Henrique de Matteo. Brazilian. Scuderia Ferrari.
Coming down the Wellington Straight, I got into the draft of Henrique de Matteo. The second Ferrari was yet another car to lose positions off the start, but he had the strongest car I was once against thus far, and he was going to put up more of a fight. Coming out of turn sixteen, Henrique placed his car right in the middle of the straight, ready to react to whatever I was going to try down the straight. Henrique decided to be harsh on me, first moving to the left, and then swerving back to the right once I tried to go around him. It was a bit unsportsmanlike - especially for the high standards of the very fair Brazilian - but I imagine it was colored by desperation. The Brazilian was having an awful year and this was shaping up to be yet another awful race, so yeah, he was going to do everything possible to minimize damage. Nevertheless, he was now committed to the outside and that cleared the way for me to simply outbrake him into Brooklands and take the position. Coming onto the start-finish straight, I started lap one down in fourteenth, but I was starting lap two up in eighth place.
"Beautiful, beautiful work Tamara. That was a lap of the gods there." Nicky Morrison praised, and things only got better for me there, because in Copse, Rudolfo Goncalves banged into Victor Hartmann while passing the Sauber. At first it seemed like just a bit of aggressive negotiations, but coming onto the Hangar Straight mere seconds later, the German's car started falling apart. The Sauber's rear wing fell apart and left carbon strewn all across the track as I passed him for seventh place, bringing out the safety car and crunching the grid together. This could play into my hands, because I had a fast and race-y car, and now all the time I lost to the leaders while fighting through the field was going to be erased. Things got better as Morrison gave me a follow up message under the SC "It seems that, back on lap one, Felipe and Piotr had an incident, seems that Alvarez passed him off track and has refused to return the position. We believe a penalty is coming his way."
And thus, it did. Felipe was given a drive-through penalty for overtaking off-track. To add insult to injury, Alvarez wouldn't be able to serve it until after the safety car period was over, thus the grid would be all bunched up and he'd get set to the back. Conversely, Maximilian Renner, who went off at the beginning of the race and fell back so much that he was on the verge of getting lapped, now had the grid constricting in front of him, putting him back in the game. So, the running order now looked like this: Martin Weaver led the race from Anthony Harrison, then Tommy Koskinen was third, Alvarez was fourth for the time being, then the struggling Piotr Kaminski, and then the Williams of Rudolfo Goncalves was in sixth, the last car ahead of me. That would change quickly as I slipped ahead of him on the Hangar Straight when the race restarted, moving me up to fifth, and that became fourth at the end of the lap when Felipe Alvarez pitted to serve his penalty. At that point, the story of the race was more or less over for me - I would execute my pit strategy and chase down my former teammate Koskinen to finish within half a second of him at the end of the race, but I still wasn't able to get the move done before I ran out of time. No, the story of the race wasn't at the front, rather it was the story of Maximilian Renner fighting back, rising through the field, while both Ferraris languished in the back. Felipe Alvarez was sent out of the points by the penalty and then Henrique de Matteo just dropped like a brick out of the points for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me. He qualified alright, I didn't touch him when I passed him, and as far as I can tell, he didn't pick up damage anywhere else, and yet he still finished fifteenth, one place behind Alvarez even.
So, speaking of finishing positions, the results of the 2010 British Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 25 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 18 points.
3: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 15 points.
4: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 12 points.
5: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 10 points.
6: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Sauber-Ferrari - 8 points.
7: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 6 points.
8: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 4 points.
9: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 2 points.
10: James Buxton - Great Britain - Williams-Cosworth - 1 point.
"Not bad for a number two driver," was the controversial radio message from Martin Weaver that ended the race, indicating that not all was well in paradise. The front wing incident - taking the better part off of Martin's car and putting it on Maximilian's after Max broke his own version of the front wing - seems to just be the latest in a serious of perceived slights that makes the Australian feel like Renner is the golden boy and he's just the back-up driver. Well, this number two, this back-up driver, went and won the British Grand Prix in dominant fashion after Max Renner fumbled the pole position. Nevertheless, Max's race, I think, is a brilliant display of damage limitation, having fallen to the back of the grid, likely taken some damage, and nearly getting lapped at the beginning of the race, and turning that into six points that might prove crucial come the end of the year, while Ferrari dropped the ball with both of its cars. Damage limitation could describe my race as well, as I started fourteenth with little hope of defending my championship lead from the Red Bulls, and ended up finishing the race in fourth, definitely in podium contention. I know I've built up a bit of a reputation for being better in the race than in qualifying, but that first lap was really something. You could put me in that exact same situation a thousand times and I'm not sure if I'd be able to do that again. Whatever that was, it was something special, something beyond what I'm usual capable of, and I have to be proud of it. I've chased down Anthony Harrison to win the Singapore Grand Prix for Ferrari, I took advantage of mixed conditions to seize back-to-back wins early on in this season with Australia and Malaysia, and I proved that I could win in the dry for McLaren in a fair fight with my teammate at Miami, but this might just be my most impressive performance thus far. With my qualifying record being what it is, I would certainly say that opening lap was the best thing I've done over the course of one lap in F1.
Nevertheless, it was not enough to hold onto the championship lead, as revealed by the top six in the drivers' standings:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 163 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 162 points.
3: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 136 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 136 points.
5: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 110 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 93 points.
Anthony takes the championship lead by a single point. Now, it is hardly a monumental gap and I have more wins so far, so I win in the event of a tiebreaker, but Anthony has experience in tight title battles, while I do not. On the other hand, we were just about finished with the races I missed last year, and half of the 2009 season I did do was a strong one for me, so I may well get stronger as the season goes on. That being said, with three wins in the first half of the season, I'm not sure what else there is to do. Australia 2009 was a weird race with high attrition - including guys like Renner and Kaminski crashing out, plus the whole penalty saga between Harrison and Tripoli - while Malaysia 2009 was a rained-out mess that was called at half distance, while Miami was a new event to begin with, so my wins all came in strange circumstances compared to the year before, in addition to being weather affected two out of the three times. All of this is to say that maybe experience or lack of it didn't really matter for me so far this season, and maybe I can't depend on it coming to my benefit going forward. Formula One is many things, but logical is rarely one of those things.
Further back, Weaver and Renner are tied on 136 points - creeping back into the fray with wins in the last two races after McLaren had some dominant performances in Turkey, Canada, and Miami - but the Australian's win today serves as the tiebreaker in his favor, three to two. Skipping Ferrari for the moment, Piotr Kaminski failed to score points today, but his scintillating form as of late is just enough to keep him ahead of Koskinen. Now on 90 points thanks to his podium today, Tommy is back on track and the battle for best of the rest is heating up once more. Just as tight as the battle at the front of the grid, I can't wait to see which of them ends up on top come the end of the year - if it's even one of them, as Force India and Williams seem to be coming alive as well. Kaminski and Koskinen have been the stars of the midfield thus far, but there's still half a season to go, and I can't wait to see how their battle will shape up. As for Ferrari...to put my thoughts simply: they need to win, and they need to win now. Felipe Alvarez is falling behind in the title fight, Henrique de Matteo has sat on 77 points since Miami and has now fallen behind both Piotr and Tommy, and their struggles are really starting to show in the constructors' standings.
The top six of which read as follows:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 325 points,
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 272 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 187 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 126 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 97 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 48 points.
So yeah, both Ferraris failed to score points and that means they're over a hundred points behind us - hell, they're nearly one hundred points behind Red Bull too at this point - and even Mercedes is inching closer to them. Ferrari has a win at the Bahrain GP, they have a proven two-time world champion in the form of Felipe Alvarez and Henrique de Matteo was within a point of being the 2008 champion. It's a good team with a good car and good drivers, they deserve to be a part of this title fight, but they just haven't been able to mount a consistent challenge and that makes me sad. Meanwhile for us, we performed well at Silverstone and ensured we scored the most points of any team here at the British Grand Prix. That solves the Vodafone and the McLaren portions of our home race, but there's still the Mercedes contingent to satisfy, and that will have to come next time out in the German Grand Prix. I wasn't here for the German GP last year, but that won't affect me thanks to the circuit rotation, as last year was a Nürburgring year, while this year they're back at Hockenheim for the first time since 2008. It was a different set of regulations, sure, but in 2008, Anthony Harrison won the race while Jyri Kaasalainen was fifth, so there's hope there. There's hope in Hungary too, because Harrison won the 2007 and 2009 editions, while Jyri Kaasalainen's only F1 win came at the 2008 Hungarian GP.
There's hope for us going into the next two races, but Red Bull has won the last two, and Ferrari needs to start winning again sooner rather than later, so none of us really know what to expect from Hockenheim next weekend.
A set of wet and mixed weather practice sessions before things finally dried up for qualifying led to a somewhat unusual grid. Maximilian Renner was on pole, but surprisingly enough, it was the Ferraris of Felipe Alvarez and Henrique de Matteo, in second and third, respectively. Ferrari had a miserable race in Great Britain, as discussed, and a miserable season overall since Bahrain, so this good qualifying performance will hopefully lead to better things for them. Martin Weaver comes off his dominant British GP performance with a somewhat lowly fourth here in Baden-Wurttemberg, while I sit in fifth place. I outqualified Anthony Harrison, surprisingly enough...or perhaps less surprising than normal, given that Anthony has had somewhat of a terrible weekend so far, including a crash in FP1. Elsewhere, Piotr Kaminski was the best of the rest in seventh, while the rest of the top ten was filled by the Mercedes, mixed together with the Williams cars. Force India had a strong start to the season, but Williams is experiencing a resurgence now, while Barbaro could only manage fourteenth and Leone was all the way down in twenty-second, two positions behind Natasha, even. All in all, nothing too unusual happened in qualifying, but there are still trends to be aware of, even as we all put on the option tyres and prepare for a dry race.
As the five lights went out, all hell broke loose on my side of the grid. Max Renner launched off the grid okay but then seemed to immediately bog down, like the launch was fine but the acceleration wasn't there to follow up with it. So, as the German floundered off the grid in his home race, he cut to the right, trying to squeeze Alvarez to the pitwall to block him from overtaking, but it was all in vain, as Alvarez slipped ahead in turn one...for second place. The reason for this was that, coming off of the grid, Henrique de Matteo had perfect reactions, swinging the car around the both of them on the outside to take the lead. All of this meant that, as I arrived at the fast right-hander of turn one, I had nowhere to go - Max Renner directly ahead, Henrique on the left, Felipe on the right, and Weaver alongside. I had to brake and turn onto the straight slowly, however, with Weaver in the same mess, I was able to slip ahead of him as we arrived on the northern straight, taking fourth place. So, heading into the braking zone of turn two, it was Henrique de Matteo leading the race ahead of his teammate, Felipe Alvarez, with polesitter Maximilian Renner in third in his Red Bull. I was fourth and in the hairpin like turn two - braking, turning to the right, then facing kinks to the left and right with turns three and corner - Anthony Harrison overtook Weaver for fifth place, meaning the Ferraris were running line and stern, the McLarens were running line and stern, and the Red Bulls were split. This could prove to be an advantage for both of us teams later in the race.
In the old days - well I say that, it was as recent as 2001 - Hockenheim was a fast loop through the forest with only a few chicanes and the arena section at the end to slow the cars down. Now though, the old track has been reclaimed by the forest, and instead, coming out of turn four, we arrived on this long, sweeping straight with a gentle curve to the left all the way down. This ended with turn six, a hairpin to the right, which joined us back on with the old track...for just a moment at least. Coming out of the hairpin, it was a brief straight before turn seven kinked us to the right, taking us into brief infield loop, overlooked by the tall, steep Mercedes-Benz grandstand. Baden-Wurttemberg, the southwestern state of Germany, is somewhat of a hotbed for the German automotive industry, with Mercedes-Benz and Porsche based in Stuttgart - long-term McLaren sponsor, SAP SE, a software company, is also based in the state - and that's actually part of the reason why Hockenheim became one of the homes of the German Grand Prix. In any case, right in front of that grandstand, we hit the brakes for the ninety-degree left-hander of turn eight. Turn nine was the slightest kink to the left, straightening up the entry for the next corner, before turn ten, another ninety-degree corner, brought us back onto the old circuit once again, and onto yet another brief straight. From this point onwards, the circuit is more or less the same as it was back in the old days of the long, fast forest circuit.
Mobil 1 was a hard braking zone, a ninety-degree corner to the right bringing me into the infield loop. The Ferraris, Renner, and I thundered out of turn eleven with grandstands looking down on us before braking for the wide hairpin of turn twelve, bringing us around to the left before spitting us out onto a short acceleration zone before the fast left-right chicane of thirteen and fourteen. A brief straight before braking again in a squared off right-hander, bringing me alongside the drag strip and in the shadow of the grandstands again, wrapping around the final two corner. The pitlane entrance was on our inside as we swept through the final corner, the Sudkurve to the right, bringing us onto the start-finish straight to begin lap two. Thus, the first stint began, with me trying my damnedest to stick with the leading trio but losing time despite everything, leading to my team changing plans: so, on the back straight, I let Harrison past to attack the cars ahead while I dropped back and conserved my tyres. We were all on the same supersoft compound, the option tyres for this event, but I was going to be gentle on my Bridgestones and go long. In effect, I let Harrison go ahead and attack, burning up his tyres, while I was going long.
"Renner has pit." Nicky Morrison reported on lap twelve, putting me back up to fourth as my strategy began to manifest itself. The idea was for Renner to get clear air and undercut the Ferraris on strategy, but it wasn't really going to work out for him, because over the next laps, Matteo, Alvarez, and Harrison all pit in quick succession, keeping the order of the cars preserved. Meanwhile, with the other guys struggling in traffic - and, this hurts to say but it's true, Henrique de Matteo was the weakest link in that chain, and he was the one leading it, so all of them could only go as fast as the struggling Brazilian was managing - I was actually managing to set faster lap times. For a moment, I started thinking that I might be able to make this strategy work, but then the drama began. Once they cleared the backmarkers, Henrique de Matteo lifted the pace and then lifted it again after Alvarez attempted to overtake his teammate, only for Henrique to fight off the attempt. Felipe was left in second and the pace was increased, but that only seemed to make the Spaniard angrier. Tucked behind his teammate, Felipe bitched and moaned about being faster, about Renner closing in on them both, and demanding that Ferrari do something to get him ahead. This brings us to the key issue of the race.
Ever since the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix - ironically enough, down to Ferrari's doing - when Rudolfo Goncalves was ordered to let Wilhelm Ziegler by at the final corner so the German could win the race, team orders were banned. Austria was a blatant move and totally unnecessary, as Ziegler had dominated the season up to that point and would continue to dominate. Ferrari would've lost nothing if they kept the positions as they were, but instead they changed the result of the race to benefit their number one driver, and the whole world saw them do it. So, team orders are banned in Formula One and any team caught doing so would be punished. Now, in their post-race defense of all this, Ferrari would actually go ahead and cite the example of the McLarens at the Turkish Grand Prix, saying that we used team orders and were not punished, so Ferrari should not be punished either. The critical difference is this though: we were ordered to maintain position, not to change position. Effectively, the radio messages at Turkey for us were more along the lines of the Jordans at the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix than the Ferraris at Austria 2002. Ferrari, meanwhile, ordered the result changed, just like they did in Austria eight years ago. There is a difference in the rule book between maintaining a result and changing the result...at least that's how Michael Coronet explained the defense that our legal department came up with to us. So, that's the legal background of this whole situation, now lets get back to what actually happened on the afternoon of July 25th in Hockenheim, Germany.
First, I came in for my pitstop on lap twenty-two - ten laps after Renner did, despite starting on the same tyres - and emerged in fifth, behind the leaders and my teammate, but crucially ahead of Weaver, so it was still a gain from the start as far as the team was concerned. Next up, Henrique de Matteo, now in the lead and in clean air, pulled a gap of three seconds, seemingly putting the situation to bed...except the opposite was happening. See, the reason that Henrique de Matteo got that gap was that Felipe Alvarez backed off, got clear air, and decided to demonstrate to Ferrari himself what he could do. So, with a gap to his teammate, Felipe started flying, putting together the fastest lap of the race and ending up right on Henrique's rear wing in practically the blink of an eye...only for Henrique to extend the gap again as he set the fastest lap. So, the Ferraris started trading fastest laps, the gap between them opening up and closing over and over again like an accordion, while Maximilian Renner dropped back, unable to match the pace. The situation should have been over then, Henrique demonstrated he was able to maintain the same pace as Felipe if pressed, Renner couldn't keep up, Harrison was even further back than that, managing the gap ahead of me and preventing me from making any forward progress either, while Weaver was dropping back from both of us with some sort of cooling issue. There was no more reason for the Ferraris to press the situation, and certainly not twenty laps after all of this went down when the race was entering its final stages anyway. Yet that didn't stop the pained voice of Ronnie Sanders, Henrique's long term race engineer - the same one I had when I filled in for him at Ferrari when he was injured - coming through with a message he clearly didn't want to say but was ordered to say nonetheless.
"Okay, so, Felipe is faster than you. I repeat, Felipe is faster than you. Confirm you understood the message." Ronnie spoke loudly and clearly into the radio. Perhaps that code was the best Ferrari could come up with, or maybe Ronnie knew this was a bullshit order and wasn't even trying to hide the illegal team order from the FIA. In any case, Henrique didn't respond...at least not verbally. Instead, on lap forty-nine, Henrique de Matteo coasted coming out of the hairpin, allowing Felipe Alvarez to take the lead and then obediently slotting in behind him. The Santander logo on the back of Felipe's rear wing likely telling the Brazilian all he needed to know about why he was letting the Spaniard through. Knowing Ronnie, the gentle soul that the Englishman is, what really convinced me that he was being ordered to say something he vehemently disagreed with was the following radio message "Sorry about that."
You don't apologize for doing something completely fair and legal. Yet, that is what Ferrari did in the 2010 German Grand Prix, and the results of the event - at least for now, we'll see if appeals or arbitration changes anything in the future - read as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 25 points.
2: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 18 points.
3: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 15 points.
4: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 12 points.
5: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
6: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 8 points.
7: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 6 points.
8: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 4 points.
9: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 2 points.
10: Vladimir Alexandrov - Russia - Lotus-Renault - 1 point.
Ultimately, the most severe punishment that Ferrari would receive is a $100,000 fine, and the result of the race would stay as is. Needless to say, a hundred grand is a slap on the wrist for someone as big and successful as Ferrari - and hell, I now drive for a team which, in 2007, was fined $100 million for possessing Ferrari data despite the fact that the FIA could not prove that it was ever actually used in the construction of the car - so yeah, this feels like somewhat of a slap to the face. Now, obviously my position on Spygate is biased as a result of the fact that I now drive for McLaren, and in all fairness, McLaren could have simply used Ferrari data to help them build a car that was better than Ferrari rather than building a straight up copy, but that is neither here nor there. The point is that in this race, Ferrari used illegal team orders clear as day to achieve a result that they preferred. At no point in the race was Felipe Alvarez about to pass Henrique de Matteo on merit, the only way he accomplished it was with team orders - because every time he built up a buffer and attacked, the dirty air would eventually shut down his charge, no matter how much faster he was on the laps catching back up to his teammate - which Alvarez expressly demanded over the radio. The team complied and everyone heard the orders. Bitterness aside, the FIA did say one thing that I did agree with through all this: if Ferrari is going to come up with code words - no matter how blatant - and cite these examples of McLaren and Red Bull using team orders in some form, then perhaps the struggle against team orders is futile. Teams are always going to want to influence results and there isn't really anything that the FIA could do to prevent that from happening. I mean, the ban has been around for eight years, and it didn't stop Ferrari today.
You could argue that there is a certain shame to breaking the rules like this, even if there isn't a punishment. The problem is that I don't think Ferrari's sponsors care - these are the same companies that have no issues sponsoring a car that is still receiving money from Philip Morris and, until recently, was carrying the barcodes that were designed specifically to subliminally advertise cigarettes illegally. If Shell didn't care about that, we can't rely on them to suddenly care now. In any case, Ferrari experienced a resurgence today. The same could not be said of Williams, who, despite their strong qualifying performance, ultimately squandered the race and were left to bring home their cars twelfth and thirteenth. Close to the points, yet tragically far from them at the same time. In any case, these mixed fortunes, right or wrong, are having an affect on the driver's standings, and that shows in the top six:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 175 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 172 points.
3: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 151 points.
4: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 144 points.
5: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 135 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 99 points.
Ninety-nine points to Matteo's ninety-five and Koskinen's eighty-four points is enough to keep him in the top six, though Henrique de Matteo has taken a big, big step towards dethroning him in this race. It would have been a successful dethroning had he been allowed to keep the win, but I suppose that the great and powerful Felipe Alvarez couldn't possibly be asked to surrender seven points. I know I'm not exactly jumping to lose seven points either - after all, I'm within three points of the championship lead at the moment - but here's the fact: Felipe already has a win this season, while Henrique de Matteo is approaching a year since his life-threatening crash at the Hungarian Grand Prix last year. Henrique could have used the confidence boost from a win a hell of a lot more than Felipe, and by instead favoring their lead driver, I fear that Ferrari may have broken Henrique for forever. Who knows if he will ever get the winning urge again now that Ferrari has so cruelly denied him? Perhaps I'm overreacting, perhaps I would be doing the exact same things in Felipe's shoes, but the point is, you're never going to win every race in a reason. It pays for a team to have two race-winning drivers, preferably on equal status - like McLaren does right now - but Ferrari will never go for that. After the Ziegler years, the number one and number two culture is burned into Ferrari, and the nearly equally matched Hamalainen and Matteo couldn't change that in 2007 and 2008.
Anyway, the top six of the constructors' championship read as follows:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 347 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 295 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 230 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 132 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 104 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 48 points.
Thus, a one-two finish and a maximum forty-eight points - ill-gotten or not - is enough for Ferrari to build a stable buffer, now firmly closer to Red Bull than they are in the midfield. Likewise, Lotus joins the top four in being over one-hundred points, reigniting the championship battle with Mercedes, even as Force India and Williams threaten to enter the fray for the midfield as well. Not in this race though, as neither constructor managed to score points, and instead, the spoils were divided amongst the top five teams, all of which managed to get both cars into the points. Alexandrov has been the weak link so far - and that's not entirely his fault, given that he's a rookie and Piotr Kaminski may just be in the form of his life right now, perhaps even better than his winning days with BMW Sauber a few years back - but if he can finally turn this result into consistent form, then Williams might have a hard time taking the fight to Force India. Like I said to Natasha before Miami, even if she was in a Mercedes, she would still need all six cars from the top three teams to have a bad day in order to win a race. Likewise, now to get into the points, the likes of Williams and Force India need for someone to slip up between the six of us, the two Mercedes, and the two Lotus entries. Even then, it's one point for tenth, two points for ninth, four for eighth...these are rather petty numbers when it's the midpoint of the season and Force India already has forty-eight points. My run in early 2008 was so critical for Williams at the time because early in the season you see that inconsistency and unreliability. By the time you get to Europe and especially by the time you get to the midpoint in the season, the top teams will have already worked out the great majority of their gremlins, making for less points-paying opportunities for the little guys.
That, too, is why it's crucial that Anthony and I are one-two in the championship at this point. Would I like to still be ahead of Anthony? Of course, but that ship has sailed, and we need to fight for what we can get. Red Bull has been winning races as of late, and for better or worse, Ferrari is back to having winning pace again. That means that, as McLaren, our strategy now should be to maximize consistent results and hope that Red Bull and Ferrari spend too much time focusing on each other and on the wins to overhaul us. Obviously, we want to win - me especially, given that the second half of the season allows me to finally see some tracks I have experience with, in the current generation of cars...or at least, the closely related cars that have the same aerodynamics but a different refueling policy - and we will take the wins where we can get them, but like I keep saying, there's a lot of competition out there right now, and we can't win every race when the numbers game looks like this. So, we need to just focus on taking as many points as we can when we do get the opportunities.
In any case, that was the German Grand Prix for me. Not quite the race-winning performance of Miami, or even the two McLarens on the podium and leading the championship performance from Valencia. Hell, I didn't even have the benefit of having that amazing first lap and recovery drive to look back fondly on like I did at the British Grand Prix. Instead, what I got from Hockenheim is that I outqualified my teammate but squandered it, the team and I tried an overcut strategy to put me back into the race, but we just stayed out a little too long for us to use the traffic to our advantage. Ultimately, even if I did time my pitstop to perfection and came out in the lead, I'm not sure if it would have mattered anyway, because I had no answer to the blistering pace that both Henrique de Matteo and Felipe Alvarez were capable of when they really put their foots down and went for it. Nobody did today, which is why Max Renner's charge amounted to nothing. No, Ferrari was going to win this race no matter what. Realistically, Ferrari was going to get a one-two in this race no matter what. All of that is what makes it such a tragedy that they had to go and change the result to suit their lead driver. The storyline coming out of this race could have been "Ferrari is back" but because of those team orders, now the headline is a little bit longer, reading "Ferrari is back to their old tricks." I don't believe that Ferrari is a dirty team, I know the people there and I know that they are good people, but when they go ahead and do stuff like this, they make it really hard for me to defend them, especially as I'm now one of their chief competitors.
"So yeah...now I'm in a Hungarian hotel room." I told Ysabella Villarreal over the video call as I sat on the Budapest bed dressed in a black and white Boss tank top and some white shorts. Given the time difference and my exhaustion from the trip - as well as my visit to the track for a track walk and some early pre-race briefings - I was quite ready to go to bed as soon as this call was over.
"Cool...I'm still in your house." Ysabella smirked.
"You know, you don't have to treat it like it's just mine at this point, you've been living there for months." I smiled.
"Oh, how domestic." she joked "Seriously though, I do appreciate it, but let's not pretend I have any ownership stake in this place. You're the big, famous international racing driver, I'm the random Hispanic chick that drivers a Ferrari around Mont-Tremblant."
"Not quite...you're the random Hispanic chick that driver a Ferrari around Mont-Tremblant for third place!" I praised, noting that her recent performance was actually a good one. I didn't like it all that much when she was down on herself for our relative career trajectories. The fact of the matter is that I am a fast driver, and I seized the opportunities present to me to make it to F1. I did not take all those years of Kazakhoil and plugging a government-dominated company I disagree with for that long to not be racing in the pinnacle of motorsport. Still though, I don't horde this over here, I don't consciously surround her with reminders that I am a better driver, because I don't really feel that way. I am good at what I do and I'm proud of that - I won't apologize for that ever - but the fact of the matter is that Ysabella is plenty good at it too. For a girl born and raised in Venezuela, sometimes I feel like she doesn't really appreciate the fact that she lives in the United States making a living off of a racing career. I'm sure plenty of girls from Venezuela - and Kazakhstan for that matter - would kill to be in her position. It's okay to be frustrated with the state of your career, especially when your friends are in better places than you, but it's not okay to be constantly miserable about if when you're in a luxurious position of being a full-time racing driver and get to throw a Ferrari around track as a living. For all my faults - and I know there are many of them - I always try to be aware of the fact that I am in a privileged position. As much as I am talented, I am here because of an awful lot of luck and money too, and all of this could be over tomorrow. I could lose my job or get injured or even die in a crash, and the world of Formula One would move on regardless soon enough. Perhaps I'm being harsher with this rant than I intend, but the point I'm trying to make is that, I know Ysabella didn't dream of being a Ferrari Challenge North America driver when she was a little girl, but she's there now, and that's a really cool place to be for 99.99% of the world's population. She's in a good place, getting good results, and should be happy with that.
"Thanks...though I hear next year they're replacing it with a support race for the Canadian Grand Prix." Ysabella noted. The Ferrari Challenge currently has a Canadian doubleheader with Mont Tremblant and then a support race for the Indy Toronto race - gee, I wonder who won that last year - but it seems that from 2011 onwards, the plan is to have Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and then the Indy Toronto. I suppose that makes sense, after all, this doubleheader no doubt made a lot more sense in 2007 when the Champ Car series had Mont Tremblant and Toronto on back-to-back weekends in July and needed a support act to help fill out the weekend. Mont Tremblant hasn't hosted Indy since, so the options for Ferrari Challenge to stay up north in Canada are to either try and persist with a standalone event - unlikely to succeed - or support either the F1 Canadian GP or the later Indy Edmonton race. As much as I liked my time in Indycar, I agree with Grand Am - the governing body for most sports car racing in the US...except the American Le Mans Series that I technically competed in for one race during the Sebring 12 Hours last year - that I would rather see my series paired with F1 at the Montreal circuit than a temporary course at Edmonton's city center airport.
"We could be sharing a paddock." I smiled...leaving out the fact that I have no idea where they would keep the support class at Montreal. The only thing I could think of is sending Ferrari Challenge to a temporary pit structure along the back straight, back where the F1 paddock used to be in the 1978 version of the track.
"We could...the good old princess and a commoner story." and there it goes again. Just as I thought we got into a good thing, Ysabella has to go right back to moping about her career. This is, I might add, something that she promised wasn't going to be a problem when we started this relationship. I know this is a petty issue, I know I shouldn't be bothered, but it keeps being an issue and I don't know if I can take another Roksana situation...especially not right now that I seem to be in the middle of a title fight. This time last year, I was in the Toronto paddock with Daniella Pieri thinking that I might try out an Indycar on an oval and maybe accept life without Formula One, and now I'm fighting for the world championship and my biggest competitor right now is my own teammate. Does all of that make me a hypocrite though? Ugh, I can feel the doubt and the guilt creeping in now. I'm mad at Villarreal for being bitter over how her career has turned out, because her bitterness might distract me from my own career. This is why I would rather just not deal with this stuff at all, because I just start feeling guilty and hating myself for my part in it.
"So much for everyone being equal, eh?" I decided to joke instead, realizing there was too much turmoil going on in my head right now. So instead of any reasoned arguments, I just defaulted to our shared backgrounds, me a child of the Soviet Union, herself a Venezuelan.
"As equal as Ferrari drivers anyway," Ysabella cracked her own brutal joke before asking "Tell me about that though, give me the inside scoop."
"I wish I had some insider knowledge to give but I really don't. I know that, when I listened back to the messages after the race, Ronnie Sanders didn't sound happy to give the order. I also know that Ferrari's trying to bring up the Turkish GP stuff from our team in their defense." I repeated to her what I already knew before I started doing some editorializing "So here's the thing, I don't think that is going to stand up in front of the appeals panel, but we haven't done ourselves any favors with that one. We should have just let the Turkish GP play out naturally. Maybe I would have won, maybe Anthony would've held me up, but we wouldn't have crashed. We're not that type of drivers. But we had to give the stand down order, so even if the situation is different, we're just giving Ferrari material to drug up."
"Look, I'm on your side about this, but isn't the situation kind of fine as is? Anthony gets two wins, you have three, he's just a bit ahead on points, and both of you are ahead of everyone else. Isn't that just like...fine?" Ysabella asked. Oh, so when it's her career, she can complain endlessly but when I bring up the time the team actively told me to stand down - something which is currently getting thrown back in our faces by Ferrari as well - suddenly I'm being ungrateful. I bit my tongue though and tried to keep the resentment in check. The fact of the matter is that her question is a legitimate one and I can't let the fact that I'm peeved at her career misery cause an issue when the conversation seems to be going well. I don't want to be the one to cause the problem.
"I'm fine with the situation, I've moved on. My problem is that Ferrari is trying to distract from their blatant cheating by bringing up some shit I thought we moved on from, and it's bugging me." I explained, instead trying to vent my frustrations.
"Okay, okay. I see what you're trying to say." Villarreal either saw the nuance or decided not the press the issue, and honestly, I was fine with either one. I tried not to dwell on what that relief meant for the state of our relationship. Fortunately, Ysabella didn't let me dwell on it for too long, since she changed the subject "Do you think that Santander has anything to do with it?"
"I mean, it's possible. Spanish title sponsor, Spanish driver...but Santander is expanding massively in Brazil too. Henrique de Matteo is from Sao Paulo and that's exactly where they just launched their South American expansion. Besides...I can't judge them too harshly, their sponsor." I smiled sheepishly at the last part.
"See, I was wondering how you knew so much about a random bank...at first I thought it might just be because you're a dork, but now? I see the real reason." Ysabella mocked me.
"Hey! I'm not a dork!" I lightly defended myself.
"Oh please, you're the nerdiest Formula One driver I know!" she heckled.
"I'm the only F1 driver you know!" I shot back.
"Hey! It's not my fault you haven't properly introduced me to your cousin." she brought up another thing.
"That's beside the point," I dodged that playful bullet "How am I a dork?"
"Do you think other F1 drivers look up historical Russian flags for their one-off helmets?" she smirked, referring to my early attempts at planning for the Russian GP, where I intended to run another special helmet design in the same vein as last year. I've done a few special helmet designs, such as the glossy Singapore special in 2008 or some of the unique ones I had last year, but this year I've been lagging behind Maximilian Renner. Max seems to love bringing special designs filled with little references to each race, and I'd like to start bringing some special designs as well. My usual design is very much based on the Kazakh flag - as the only F1 driver from Kazakhstan, it seemed like an apt design, after all, plenty of drivers decide to showcase their nationality on their helmet, such as the Union Jack JB of James Buxton or the Asturian colors of Felipe Alvarez - so at the Russian GP, it seemed apt to bring a Russian design. I'm an ethnic Russian, I speak Russian, and it's as close as I get to a home GP - besides Monaco at least - so I want to do something special...but at the same time, I don't want to promote the current regime. So, last year, my burgundy and gold design was inspired by the Russian national team, this year, I plan on doing something historic. Not only does it promote Russia without promoting the regime, but it also harkens back to the era of Russia my ancestors actually lived in before settling Central Asia. Plus, on an aesthetic level, there's something more interesting about these historic coat of arms type designs that the current white, blue, and red horizontal tricolor.
"If I ever see you in a Venezuelan helmet design, you're gonna get it." I mock-threatened.
"Get what?" she smirked dirtily.
"Oh, come on," I laughed "You always make it dirty."
"Ah, you love me for it." she laughed too.
"Yeah, yeah," I calmed down. This was fine, this was okay.
"Good luck in Hungary, yeah?" she wished me good luck, signaling that the call was winding down, and I was quite fine with ending it here. We started in a good place, got into some territory that gets on my nerves, but we're ending up back in a good place.
"Yes, thank you." I smiled before ending the call. Alright, for all the controversy of Germany, it's over, we have to assume that Ferrari keeps the one-two and walks away with nothing more than a fine, and we move on. We can't dwell on Hockenheim, we need to focus on winning Budapest.
"Tamara, you're starting all the way down in eleventh place after a disastrous qualifying, can you tell us a little bit about it?" I understood that Katherine Symmons of the BBC was just doing her job, but as I stood in front of my car, dressed in a racesuit, sunglasses, and the obligatory red Vodafone cap, I wasn't exactly thrilled to hear her expositing about my clearly bad situation. Much less that she now expected me to go into detail about this for the BBC Sports website.
"Well, quite frankly, we set the car up thinking it was going to rain in qualifying and the rain never came." I gave the short, blunt version first, something that would have satisfied my old teammate Matti Hamalainen, though unlike the prestigious Finn, I continued on "We were fine in Q1 - faster than Anthony actually - but for whatever reason, we couldn't get it to work in Q2 and all of a sudden James Buxton knocks me out of the top ten by, what? Two hundredths of a second? Yeah, it hurts but whatever has happened, happened, now we have to live with it."
"Many drivers are expecting it to be difficult to overtake today. Martin Weaver says there's a seventy percent chance that the race will be decided going into turn one. Is a recovery drive even possible today?" Katherine asked, referring to the tight, difficult nature of the Hungaroring circuit. The old adage goes that Hungary is like Monaco without the walls, and it certainly is a tight, twisty circuit where overtaking is rare. That being said, we had a thunderous start at the British Grand Prix so maybe we can do more work into turn one than expected.
"For sure it's going to be difficult but me and my team will try our best. We'll try into turn one, we'll try on the first lap, and we'll try on strategy. Just because something is hard does not mean it's impossible." I answered. Of course it was possible, anything was possible before the race, but yeah, it was going to be difficult to score points today, let alone multiple points. Still though, the car has pace - Anthony qualified up in fifth after all - so I'll do everything in my power to move forward and we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out. To that end, a mere twenty minutes later, now strapped in the car, wearing a helmet, and lining my McLaren MP4/25 up on the grid, I watched those five red lights come on to see what I could get out of this race.
The lights went out and it was go-go-go at the Hungarian Grand Prix. At the front of the field Maximilian Renner shot off from pole position and into the lead, while Felipe Alvarez managed to outdrag Martin Weaver into turn one, putting his Ferrari up into second place. Likewise, Vladimir Alexandrov of all people got an amazing start, not only clearing the Mercedes of my former teammate Tommy Koskinen, but briefly shooting ahead of my current teammate Anthony Harrison in turn one for fifth place. Further back, I had a good, albeit somewhat more modest start to the race, overtaking the Williams of James Buxton for tenth. I slotted in behind the Sauber of Victor Hartmann as we arrived on the scene of turn one. A triangular hairpin to the right, turn one ground us to a halt and shot us out, leaving us accelerating as we tore to the right through the the kink without a number and onto the short straight. We passed under the sponsorship bridge and crested the hill before beginning the downhill braking zone for turn two. A more circular hairpin and therefore faster, turn two leveled us out and brought us around to the left and spit us out at even faster speed. Piotr Kaminski was the car ahead now and I had to lift for turn three - a fast flick to the right - as I was forced to take the corner at the Lotus' pace. Thus, now began the run up the hill, the same climbing straight where, last year, a spring came off of Rudolfo Goncalves' suspension and hit Henrique de Matteo right in the visor, the horrifying near-tragedy that led to my return to F1 and my brief stint with Ferrari. So, on that morbid reminder of the dangers of F1, we crossed the first timing line to complete sector one.
Sector two opened as we crested the hill, tapped the brakes, and threw the cars to the left for turn four. I had considered taking a look around Kaminski here, but with the narrowness of the straight and the sudden arrival of the corner, I opted to play it safe and stay behind the black and gold car, as frustrating as that was. Thus, I was still in tenth as we arrived at the next corner, turn five. A parabolic corner too wide to be a hairpin but too slow for comparisons to the famous parabolica of Monza, the corner brought the two of us around to the top of the circuit and onto the briefest of straights before the chicane. Down the straight, on the brakes, and then left-right in fast succession through turns six and seven, an even briefer straight followed before the kink of turn eight. Fast and to the left, but needing a dab of the brakes, especially this early on with cars full of fuel, turn eight led immediately into nine. Braking again and this time turning to the right, the circuit finally opened up again on the exit of nine, with the fast kink of ten to the left being a barely noticeable corner. Turn eleven was more noticeable, requiring braking before the nearly ninety-degree corner to the right that brought us across the second timing line and into sector three.
Now on a straight, I tried to use the combined power of my engine and the F-duct - as this was one of the few parts of the track that played to our cars' strengths - to get alongside Kaminski, but the Pole was having none of it, cutting me off and forcing me to stay behind his Lotus as we arrived to the second ninety-degree corner in a row, again to the right. Turn twelve brought us into the final section of the track though, the twin hairpins and the little straights between them. So, accelerating out of turn twelve for just a moment before we arrived in the braking zone of turn thirteen, a hairpin left that looped around like the letter U. Coming out of turn thirteen, we had the pit entry on our right, but we stuck to the left for just a moment longer before braking for the final corner. Another hairpin, this time to the right, turn fourteen looped back like the coils in a toaster, bringing us around alongside the dividing wall of the pitlane and depositing us onto the start-finish straight. Here, I once again tried my luck against Kaminski, trying to take the inside but that just brought me out into the clean air - which wasn't an advantage here, as Kaminski was still close enough to Koskinen ahead to get a draft, while I pulled out of line, hit the brick wall of oncoming air, and did nothing with my passing attempt. I was forced to remain behind Kaminski for another lap. This was what Weaver and the other drivers were talking about when it comes to Hungary. The Hungaroring is a neat little track, fun to drive, but it's not the easiest to race in these big, powerful cars. I was finding that out already, because I've only made it past one car and the only retirement on the first lap - Ximen Goikoetxea who retired with an engine issue of some sort - was behind me anyway, so no gain for me. This might just be a long day...
"Safety car, safety car! Lorenzo has wing damage." ...but perhaps not! Lorenzo Barbaro lost his wing at some point or another on lap fifteen and strew enough debris across the track to require a safety car. Not great news for the Uruguayan as it was bad enough for him to pull into the pits and retire the car, but it was good for me, because I took a gamble that would take me right to the front of the field...I didn't pit. So, while Maximilian Renner was cutting into the pitlane at the last second, as Koskinen's crew failed to fit a tyre properly and sent it flying off his car into the Williams pit crew, and as the Lotus drivers double-stacked, I was safely outside of the pits. The same could not be said about my teammate however, who was coming in for his stop while Lotus, rushing to get Kaminski out of the box as soon as possible - the Pole was already left waiting for his teammate to finish up because this happens to be the one track where Vladimir seems to be faster - inadvertently released Kaminski right into the back of Anthony's car. Now, Kaminski is the driver, his job is just to wait for the lollipop man to give him the signal to go, he can't see the pitlane properly from his little left-side mirror, so when he gets the instruction to go, he floors it and hopes the team got it right. In this case, the team did not get it right. Kaminski speared into the gearbox of my teammate and left the both of them out of the race. Harrison from fifth place, Kaminski from ninth...both out of the race on lap fifteen.
It would have been a gain for me had I not bypassed all of this to begin with and shot up right to second...behind only Martin Weaver, who had the same idea. For Weaver, who lost second off the grid, the idea is for him to stay out, use that magical Red Bull pace that Max Renner has been showing off in clean air, and get ahead of the Ferrari to rebuild the Red Bull one-two. For me, my plan was to use the straight-line speed to stick with Weaver for as long as possible to hope he can pull me forward, and then stop and hopefully come out in a better position than tenth. I was the only hope for McLaren now who just lost a car that was in fifth place, so scoring a top five or better would be even sweeter. That being said, all the cars on fresh tyres pulled up to the back of us under safety car, so if this didn't work out for me, I could easily be swallowed up and fall back to tenth or worse before I even get to take my pitstop. All of that is to say that Weaver and I were gambling at this point: he lost out on the start, I lost out in qualifying, and now we were both about to either make it big and fix our mistakes or dig ourselves in an even deeper hole. To make a long story short, when the safety car - lengthened by the pitlane incidents - ended on lap twenty-five, for Weaver it worked out, for me...it didn't.
For Weaver, he was able to pull away once Max Renner got stuck behind Felipe Alvarez and couldn't get past, meanwhile I fell behind the both of them and then watched the lead three disappear into the distance. Weaver was eventually able to build enough of a gap to pit and clear the Ferrari and his teammate, then marched off into the distance once again given that he now had the freshest tyres of the leaders. I, however, fell back to tenth place, narrowly staying ahead of the Sauber of Yoshikazu Higashiyama as I rushed to the braking zone of turn one, trying to retain track position despite my colder tyres. I held him off on corner exit and down the second straight, then jerked the car to the left right before the braking zone for turn two to seize the inside and make sure I stayed ahead. Once I was through the kink of turn three and up the hill, I knew I was safe from the Sauber and my tyres were hot enough that the newness allowed me to build a gap. I wasn't going to get ahead without help though...fortunately for me, help did arrive, from a former nemesis no less. See, the Mercedes of Wilhelm Ziegler was also having a miserable day, not able to use the power of the Mercedes engine and not having the aerodynamics to compensate for it. When Wilhelm's former teammate, Rudolfo Goncalves, now in a Williams, came down the start-finish straight on fresh tyres to overtake him, Ziegler had yet another Spanish GP moment...yet somehow even worse. Coming down the straight at fast approaching two-hundred miles per hour, Rudolfo took the extreme inside as Ziegler went defensive...but Ziegler went more and more defensive.
At this point, myself and Higashiyama came onto the main straight, seeing the cars ahead of us all the way over to the right, way off the racing line on the left-hand side. It quickly became apparent that Ziegler was squeezing his former teammate into the wall, giving the Brazilian the option to either back out or see the two of them get into what was effectively an aircraft crash next to a concrete wall. Goncalves lifted, allowing the two of us on the racing line to pass him for ninth and tenth, respectively, while the stewards took a similarly dim look over Ziegler's actions. Whatever good will the seven-time world champion had was gone after his audacious Spain swerve and doing it again - to his former teammate no less, with a concrete wall on the opposite side of the Brazilian - was a step too far. The German would be taken out of contention by a five second stop-go penalty, promoting me to eighth, Higashiyama to ninth, and Goncalves back into the points in tenth. Rudolfo's radio message in the heat of the moment said it all, really: "What is he trying to do? He could've killed me!"
Eighth is as far as I got in the 2010 Hungarian Grand Prix. The points-paying results of which read as follows:
1: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 25 points.
2: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 18 points.
3: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 15 points.
4: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 12 points.
5: Vladimir Alexandrov - Russia - Lotus-Renault - 10 points.
6: James Buxton - Great Britain - Williams-Cosworth - 8 points.
7: Victor Hartmann - Germany - Sauber-Ferrari - 6 points.
8: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 4 points.
9: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Sauber-Ferrari - 2 points.
10: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 1 point.
Good days for Red Bull and Ferrari, not a great day for McLaren as one car is taken out through no fault of his own and the other languishes in the midfield all race long thanks to her botched qualifying efforts. For what little justification it is, with the narrowness, the short straights, and the resultant difficulty in overtaking, Hungary was always probably going to be our weakest track this season. I had hoped that the recent competitive history of McLaren here might make a difference, but I suppose Formula One doesn't care that your team has won the last three races here if your current car is badly suited to the track. On a brighter note, it was a good day for Williams and Sauber, both teams beginning to chip away at that gap that Force India built over the course of the season so far. Rudolfo Goncalves in particular probably got some joy over the fact that, despite everything, he was the one to finish tenth and Wilhelm Ziegler had to settle for the first of the losers in eleventh. To end on a more positive note for McLaren, two things: one: the next few tracks, Spa and Monza, should suit our car better, and two: with Anthony failing to score any points, believe it or not, I was still able to take the championship lead back today.
That brings us to the top six in the drivers' championship, which reads as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 176 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 175 points.
3: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 169 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 166 points.
5: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 153 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 107 points.
So, going into the summer break, things are truly tightening up. I go into the championship lead by a single point over Anthony while both Red Bulls are gaining on us, and even Felipe Alvarez is now within a win of taking over the standings should he win and the rest of us fail to score points. It's an unlikely scenario, but I'd say McLaren only coming home with four points from the race we've won every year since 2007 was an unlikely scenario as well. The fact that McLaren is still leading both championships is a testament to the hard work we did in Turkey, Canada, Miami, and Valencia when we did have the pace, because as of late, we've looked like the third best team and sometimes not even that. To accentuate how things are heating up at the front of the field, with Tommy Koskinen and Piotr Kaminski both failing to score points thanks to their respective pitlane mishaps, Henrique de Matteo is now in the top six. We're back to it being about the three best teams, their two drivers, all six of us within a hundred points of each other in a points system that gives a fourth of that per win. Martin Weaver has the most wins out of everyone with four, I'm right behind on two, while Anthony, Max Renner, and Felipe Alvarez all sit on two. Nobody has been able to lay down a gauntlet this season, nobody has been able to stay in control for long, and nobody knows quite who is going to win at the end of the year when the checkered flag flies in Abu Dhabi.
The battle is similarly tight in the constructors' championship, where the top six reads as follows:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 351 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 335 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 260 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 132 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Brackley, Great Britain - 114 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 48 points.
Red Bull is just a handful of points behind us now, Ferrari is creeping back into the fray, while the battle between Lotus and Mercedes is creeping up again as well, given that neither team has been shining very much as of late. Williams, however, has been, and if my count is correct, they now sit on 42 points, a mere six behind the Force Indias which seemed so strong for the first half of the season. To add insult to injury, Williams is using the same Cosworth engines as the new teams of Caterham, Marussia, and HRT, proving that the engine has potential if those teams develop the talent and knowledge to harvest it. With a sixteenth-place finish, Natasha wasn't able to harvest much from it, just performing at the level of the car, finishing ahead of her teammate and the HRTs and just behind the Caterhams ahead. The running order may seem to be consistently Caterham ahead of Marussia ahead of HRT, but there's a battle brewing there as well, as none of these minnow teams seem like they'll be scoring points soon, so whenever there is a race of attrition, these teams must count the thirteenth, fourteenth places and hope that they end up better off than their opposition, because millions of dollars of prize money are on the stakes. These backmarker teams may not be fighting for points, but they are fighting for survival.
Battles at the front, battles in the midfield, battles at the back of the grid. I was born in 1988 when McLaren was running unopposed at the front of the grid, I grew up in the 1990s when Williams had the technological brain trust of a small country going into their cars filtered through the aerodynamic genius of Adrian Newey, and I started racing cars professionally as Ferrari was dominating the 2000s with the Wilhelm Ziegler regime. I know that Formula One can be a dominant, even boring affair at its worst, so seasons like this, where everything is competitive, where any one of us could, realistically, be champion? That is something we have to appreciate, because we don't know what will happen in 2011 or 2012 or ten years from now in 2020. All we know is that, right now, F1 is great, F1 is competitive, and seasons like this are the reason we fall in love with the sport. Now you have McLaren, now you have Ferrari, and now, in the form of Red Bull instead of Williams, you have the genius of Adrian Newey all battling it out for the F1 championship. That is a glorious thing. That is something people are going to remember next time somebody is dominating F1 and making it all seem boring again, whether than be next year or in three years or ten or thirteen.
Notes:
Can you tell I wrote the conclusion to this chapter after a very lame 2023 F1 sprint race in Azerbaijan?
Anyway, hope you enjoyed! Ciao everyone!
Chapter 37: Dramatic Swings of Fortune
Notes:
Hello everyone! Just wrapped up the semester so I should have more free time now, hopefully the chapters will go a bit more smoothly for the next few updates. This one and the next one will just be two races per chapter but then we'll be back to three races for the Asian rounds. Please let me know what you think about the three races a chapter format and whether or not that should be something I bring back for LatSoF1: Part II.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXXVII.
Dramatic Swings of Fortune.
"Thank you," I thanked Ysabella Villarreal as she handed me a pencil - something annoyingly hard to find when you're an adult, since you tend to lose all reason to have one - but anyway, with a pencil and a piece of printer paper, I had what I needed right now. My amused Venezuelan girlfriend - who I've been fortunate enough to spend a few weeks with as F1 entered its traditional summer break - sat down next to me, saying nothing but her bemused expression telling me all I needed to know. She thought I was being a dork, and she probably had a point here.
It was important to me though. The summer break was the traditional reset point for drivers, taking a few weeks off to get our heads screwed on straight before getting back out there for the final push in the last third or so of the calendar. This year it was in particular interest for me for two reasons: first of all, because I was in the title fight for the first time in my F1 career, and second of all, because this is the part of the calendar that I had recent experience with, having raced this part of the season last year in my stint with Ferrari. Spa, Monza, Bordeaux, Saint Petersburg, Singapore, Suzuka, Interlagos, and Abu Dhabi are all the same as they were last year. While Korea is new for everybody, as its one of those vestiges of the Vision60 initiative to bring the biggest, most diverse F1 calendar for its sixtieth anniversary, only for a global economic crisis to throw that plan into disarray. So, these rounds represent the most even playing field I'm going to get all year, thus I want to make sure I make the most of those rounds. To that end, today I'm taking a look at how Anthony and I have matched up thus far, and where I need to improve.
To start with qualifying: I outqualified Anthony Harrison at Australia, Malaysia, and Germany, while Harrison outqualified me in the remaining ten races. Three out of thirteen races aren't the best numbers, I freely admit that, but there are a number of caveats that work in my favor: first of all, it's been a trend throughout my career that I'm stronger in the race than I am in qualifying, second of all, on the opposite end, Anthony has a reputation for being one of the fastest and best qualifiers on the grid. So, you take a bad qualifier like me and put me up against a world champion teammate known for qualifying well...of course I was going to get beat in this regard, especially when you consider that I missed most of these races last year. Take Miami, a track that is an even playing field, and while Anthony did outqualify me, it was us being first and second, so the team was hardly complaining there. All of that being said, going into the tracks I raced in 2009, I really need to be doing better vis-a-vis my teammate in qualifying. There are nine races remaining, I want to outqualify Anthony at least three times there. Outqualifying Anthony a third of the time has to be doable for me if I'm going to be a championship contending driver, and again, with these tracks having featured last year, I really should outqualify Anthony as many times in the remaining races as I have in the season thus far.
In the races, things are much closer between the two of us: first of all, Anthony had an engine failure in Spain while I finished fifth, whereas I had a part failure that led to me crashing out in Monaco, where Anthony finished fifth, so that cancels out quite nicely. The only other race where one of us failed to finish was last time out in Hungary, where Anthony, who was running ahead of me all race long, got taken out in a pitlane incident while I went on an alternate strategy for track position but couldn't hold on, finishing eighth. That wasn't a particularly flattering race for either of us, so I won't be counting it. That leaves us with ten races, a nice even number to work with. In Bahrain, Anthony finished third, I finished fifth, so a point for Anthony. In Australia, the mixed conditions led to me taking the win while Anthony finished sixth, so a point for me ties things up. We scored a one-two in Malaysia despite going on radically different strategies, once again in mixed conditions, but I finished ahead, so I'm up 2-1 at this point. Anthony ties it back in China with a sixth for him and an eighth for me, which isn't flattering for either of us, but brings us back on level with 2-2.
Disregarding Spain and Monaco, as mentioned, we move to Turkey and Canada. A pair of one-two finishes for the team with Anthony winning both times brings it to 2-4, but a third one-two in a row at Miami, with myself coming out on top that time, brings it up to 3-4. I knew at the time that we were performing amazingly in that sequence of races but going through the results again...we had four one-two finishes in the first nine races, in a season that has been cutthroat competitive thus far. We really were on top of the world at that point. Our winning streak ended in Valencia when Max Renner won, but with Anthony in second and myself in third, we were still the top team, but this does mean that the head-to-head matchup falls to 3-5. In Britain Anthony had a much smoother ride home to second while I seized fourth through the skin of my teeth, but that still means we're at 3-6. The last race we're counting, Germany, had me outqualify Anthony and then go on an alternate strategy that put me into the lead of the race for a time, but when I did pit, I ended up behind Anthony, finishing fifth to his third, which means he actually wins the head-to-head matchup 3-7.
"Wait...how in the hell does that work?" I vocalized, checking over my scribbled-on notes to see if I made a mistake at some point. I saw I startled Ysabella with my sudden outburst, so I explained to her "I'm ahead of Anthony in the points but he's beaten me seven times in the races, and I've only made up four points in races he's missed. This whole time I thought the race head-to-head was just about even, but this...it's dumb."
"Well think about it this way: literally every time that that Anthony won, you finished second, but when you won in Australia, he was down in sixth. So the two one-twos at Malaysia and Miami when you were ahead cancels out both his wins and then you scored seventeen points on him in a single race." Villarreal explained, grabbing the pencil from me and demonstrating, crossing out the races as she went and even circling Australia for my benefit...it was kinda cute, though it also made me feel just a bit stupid for not figuring it out myself. I attended school for as long as possible despite my racing commitments and my dad even arranged a tutor for me when the racing and the flights became too much for me to manage traditional schooling, but in all of that, math was never my strong suit. I suppose that's somewhat ironic, given that I spend my whole career surrounded by the most precise numbers this side of rocket science, but you don't need to know long division to muscle a car through Maggots and Becketts. There are plenty of engineers and aerodynamicists that take care of the numbers on my behalf.
"Oh wow...so I built a seventeen-point lead and then squandered it over the course of the first half of the season...and now I needed a free four points from Hungary to get back ahead of my teammate...I don't think the point of this was to suddenly feel worse about the first half of my season." I legitimately thought that, race to race, I was doing better compared to Anthony - I had the championship lead after all - and I won three races to his two, but now I'm realizing I've basically squandered all the points I've gained from winning those three races and now I'm just a solitary point ahead.
"I mean...like I said, it shows that you do a better job when Anthony outraces you than he does when you outrace him. You're only ever like a place or two behind him when he does well." Ysabella reasoned "And to be fair...yeah you're leading the championship, but you're new to the team, shouldn't you be thrilled with your season?"
"I should be and to an extent, I am. But the fact that I'm performing this well means that I have to be targeting more, I can't get complacent or else I'm never going to be able to run with these frontrunners ever again." I explained. Yes, I've knocked all my expectations out of the park thus far, but I can't just rest on my laurels, every great result needs to become the new baseline. I need to constantly push myself forward, push myself into doing better, because that's what Felipe Alvarez does, that's what Anthony Harrison does, that's what the Red Bull drivers are doing.
"Tamara...you're already a champion. You won GP2 Asia in 2006, you've won four F1 races, and you have a long-term contract with McLaren. You're safe in Formula One, no one is going to drop you if you fall behind Anthony a bit at the end because everyone was expecting for Anthony to mop the floor with you this year. You've already done more than enough to prove you belong exactly where you are. I mean, for Christ's sake, you guys have four one-two finishes together and you're both young as hell, McLaren would sign you both for the next decade if they could." Ysabella reasoned, trying to systematically break down my anxieties. She's using GP2 Asia to make the argument that I can be an open wheel champion at a high level, then using my race wins as an argument that I could do it in F1 too - after all, Johannes Koskinen won the 1982 championship with just a single win, his first career win no less. Then the contract thing was supposed to give me a sense of security, along with the relatively low expectations at me. McLaren is a British team and the British media cares an awful lot more about my Anglophone teammate than they do about the girl from a weird country with an even weirder name, after all. By all logical levels, this should have had some effect on me, but it really didn't do much to calm me down. I could see that Ysabella was really hoping it would calm me down though, so for her benefit, I decided that I could at least fake it.
"Okay...okay. Thank you. Thank you." I said as I took a deep, shaky breath.
"Are you okay?" Ysabella asked, not entirely convinced it seems.
"I will be." I answered noncommittally, glancing at the paper for a moment before shrugging, crumpling it up, and throwing the ball of paper somewhere else where it couldn't bother me. At that point I leaned against Ysabella and let her put an arm around me. I wasn't lying about that part, because over time, she did calm me down...though I still had to promise myself that, going into the second half of the season, I was going to do everything in my power to reduce the deficit to Anthony, not just in qualifying it seems, but also in the race. It's going to be a lot of work, but it's something I need to do if I want to take advantage of the opportunity presented to me. We have such a good team and such a good car - we've made mistakes, yes, but so has every team - no one this year has ever seemed unbeatable, but Anthony and I have come the closest. We've been fast, we've been perhaps the most consistent, and we're one-two in the drivers' standings and leading the constructors' standings. McLaren has not been able to win both championships since 1998, and right now, we are in a position to do so with nine races remaining. We have to take advantage of this moment, and I have to do anything and everything I can to be the one who comes out on top.
So, I had my heart set on performing better in both qualifying and the race, and the team seemed to have the exact same idea going into the Spa and Monza double-header. Our car had always suited long straights and high speed - thanks to our strong engine package and the F-duct's ability to stall the rear wing down the straights - so we were hoping to maximize results at Spa, with its endlessly long, uphill Kemmel straight and at Monza, which is so fast throughout the lap that it's called the Cathedral of Speed. We weren't taking any chances though, so we brought a new low downforce front wing to the race. Unfortunately for us, our rivals weren't resting on their laurels either, with Ferrari having taken the summer break to introduce a new floor, new diffuser, and new rear wing structure - it's not quite as dramatic as the B-spec car they brought to Valencia this time last year, but Ferrari were hoping for a dramatic upturn in fortune - whilst Red bull, who seems to have reclaimed the title of best car, brought some new brake ducts. Everyone could tell immediately that those brake ducts had nothing to do with improving cooling, rather they were about moving weight around and improving the car's balance. Minimal weight requirements in F1 kept climbing, so you couldn't just make a car lighter if you were having balance issues, instead you needed to be intelligent with how you moved the weight around, with Red Bull seems to be doing here. So, we brought upgrades, but with Ferrari throwing the kitchen sink at their car in hopes of returning to the championship fight and Red Bull refusing to rest on their laurels, the result was far from guaranteed. As if to add insult to injury, Spa was doing it's usual thing and throwing up yet another complication: the weather.
"It was raining when we came in, drying out now, and it'll be raining again when we get on track." I complained to Natasha as we left the GPDA meeting, hoping to distract her with the current conditions before she could dwell on the negative.
"Maybe I should take the rain as a omen then. It rains when I get bad news and it rains when I drive a bad car." Nat instead took it as the perfect launching point for her rant. So, despite some delays in the voting process, we finally figured out who would be the third GPDA director alongside Rudolfo Goncalves and Henrique de Matteo. Unfortunately for Natasha, that choice was Maximilian Renner. The popular driver prevailed over Nat's arguments for getting the back of the grid represented. I voted for her, I think at least a couple of our mutual friends did, and I think she must have found some sympathetic ears amongst her fellow backmarkers, so I think the vote must have been close - maybe that's why we didn't get an answer at the British Grand Prix - but ultimately, it fell the German's way.
"In fairness, it was raining for him too." I pointed out, hoping humor would do some good.
"How do you know? Maybe it's all sunshine and rainbows for him." Nat responded flippantly, which I guess is sort of like humor, so a start I guess?
"Well, I should hope not, we'll be checking how our data matches up today." I joked, bringing up the real fact that, as per usual, the team would be looking at the Red Bulls, Ferraris, and even the leading Lotus and Mercedes cars throughout the practice sessions. Testing and even practice times always need to be viewed through a grain of salt - you can never be quite sure what conditions the other cars are running on, you can get tyres and stint length sure, but fuel load, aero set up? Those things are harder to figure out and rival teams won't exactly be sharing. Despite all of that, it still ends up being useful to see how you compare to your rival cars, where they're faster, where you're faster, and where the delta ends up. Don't treat it as gospel because you don't know exactly how that is going to play into the race, but you can't disregard it either, when data is limited, you need to take when you can get.
So, if it were somehow possible for Max to be running a dry version of Spa while the rest of us were slumming it in the wet, all our comparisons would be effectively useless. There isn't exactly a universal level of rain to measure up against dry conditions, and even dry conditions can vary depending on things like rubber accumulation, temperature - both ambient and track, surface material, place, etc, etc. The point is, if FP1 is wet and FP2 is dry, it's hard to compare data because the conditions and the demands are different, so if a driver could somehow run different conditions at the same time as everyone else? The data would be completely useless. I suppose this is an absurd amount of detail for a joke, but the point is that free practice sessions are all about information, about the track, about your car, and, especially, about everyone else's car. This is especially true at times like this when so many people are bringing upgrades. Cost cutting and the financial crisis is making testing, particularly in season testing, a rarity, so these practice sessions are often the only time to see how you stack up to the competition before it's suddenly time for qualifying and the race, and everything is on the line. It may not do much for the fans, but for the drivers and the eggheads at the team? We couldn't race competitively without it.
If there was ever going to be a scenario where one driver had a dry track and another had a wet track, like I talked about earlier this weekend, it was going to come on race day, because conditions were all over the place. The track was dry - for the moment anyway - and it wasn't raining directly above the track, but it had rained heavily overnight, meaning that putting a wheel into the grass would spin you out because it's soaking wet out there. Furthermore, over the mountains, there is rain, and that rain is going to hit the track...but when exactly? And where? Hungary is a compact track, Silverstone even is relatively compact, Hockenheim now is a fairly compact track, but Spa? Spa covers an awful lot of real estate from La Source to Les Combes to Stavelot. We could easily have a situation where the driver in the lead gets to break away on a dry track while the driver in second is still stuck in a precariously wet part of the track. I would say that was inevitable today, because the rain has to hit some part of the track first, and if that system is slow moving enough, we as a grid may have to decide if we want to have grip in the wet section of the track and lose time everywhere else and we overheat our Bridgestone tyres, or have the performance for most of the lap only to hit the wet patch and be skating on the knife's edge with disaster just around every corner. This is what makes Spa-Francorchamps special, but this is also what makes the track terrifying. This place has history, it's climbed quite a few lives before, and if we don't show the track its due respect today, it may claim lives again.
To that end, Martin Weaver was on pole, having went into the summer break the best way possible with a win in Hungary, taken the chance to relax, and came back here today in the best way possible. It's not a Red Bull front row lockout though, because my teammate Anthony Harrison has taken second, setting himself up well for success. It wasn't even a Red Bull 1-3, because Piotr Kaminski as well was doing heroics in that Lotus, putting that black and gold car all the way up in third, and only then did we get to Maximilian Renner in fourth. I was starting one position behind the German in fifth - I should've been further up the grid, put on fresh options on my final Q3 lap, I locked up at the very first opportunity in La Source and spent the whole rest of the lap wrangling it back into fifth place...actually setting a purple sector three in the process, meaning I might have even been in contention for pole if I hadn't botched my sector one - while Henrique de Matteo was the lead Ferrari in sixth. Rudolfo Goncalves was seventh for Williams, Lorenzo Barbaro eighth for Force India, James Buxton lining up directly behind his teammate in ninth, and Felipe Alvarez filled out the top ten. With Koskinen in eleventh and Wilhelm Koskinen getting sent to the back as a further consequence for his dangerous driving against Goncalves in Hungary, Williams is actually the top midfield team today. It's nice to see my former team doing well, because even though my leaving Williams was far from the cleanest affair, they still gave me my first chance in Formula One, and if they hadn't dropped me for 2009, who knows if I'd be where I am today. For all I know, there's a timeline where I would still be sponsored by Kazakhoil and still driving for Williams, my attempts to move forward with Renault thwarted by the fallout from crashgate.
"Alright, get out there and make me proud, yeah?" Michael Coronet leaned over the cockpit and shook my hand before walking away, the grid clearing up to let us twenty-four morons begin the formation lap around Spa. Dark clouds above and rain on the way meant that my visor was just about clear - running any tint at all would make it feel like I was driving at night with how dark it is. The Kemmel straight with its trees all around did nothing to alleviate this mood, nor did the run down the hill and into Pouhon when things seemed to open up...open up, but not brighten up. Down Blanchimont and along the forest again, the darkness was back, and it seemed to hover as we came through the bus stop and onto the start-finish straight yet again. The garages on one side, the grandstand on the other, and the threatening clouds above as we retook the grid, knowing that the next time we rolled off, it was going to be for real.
Martin Weaver evidently didn't get the memo, since he sputtered off the grid with a clear problem, allowing Anthony Harrison to take the lead, meanwhile, behind Weaver, Kaminski took off on his outside and instantly overtook him, while I just followed the Pole through to take third place, holding off Maximilian Renner for the tight hairpin to the right that was La Source. Accelerating out of the hairpin at a triangular angle to the start-finish straight, turn two was the slightest kink to the right that got us almost parallel to it. This was also where the track seemed to bottom out, just before the iconic run up the hill. Flicking to the left for Eau Rouge, flicking back to the right in turn four as we climbed the iconic hill, and then flicking it back to the left as we crested the hill with turn five: Raidillon. Here I locked my car in behind Kaminski, getting as much of a tow off the back of the Lotus as I could, as we swung through the kink of turn six to the right and onto the Kemmel straight possible. It was still uphill ever so slightly and that meant that his Renault engine was pushing hard, but my Mercedes engine was pushing harder, and I had a more complete F-duct on my car than he did. Unfortunately for me, Kaminski was a hard man to overtake, and he stubbornly planted his car on the inside. Nevertheless, I swerved to the left, trying to take the outside and turn it into a McLaren one-two to kick off the second half of the season in the best way possible. Both of us pushed it to the edge in the braking zone for Les Combes, but eventually, the inside of the Lotus gave Piotr the advantage, and I had to settle in behind him for the right, left, right sequence of corners that made up this particular corner of the Belgian circuit.
Coming out of turn nine, the run downhill began, with McLaren-Lotus-McLaren-Red Bull the top four as Harrison, Kaminski, myself, and Renner ran out of turn nine, down the brief straight, and into the braking zone for turn ten, the wide, half-circle corner to the right that is Bruxelles plunging us further down the hill. Another brief straight before an abrupt turn to the left through the no-name turn eleven and onto a longer straight. We just barely flattened out at the bottom of the hill when it was time to throw the car to the left through Pouhon. Holding the throttle down as much as I dared and lifting my foot only slightly when it was necessary to keep on my line, holding the car through all the apices until the corner finally spit us out onto a brief straight. That brief straight almost immediately bled into the braking zone of turn thirteen, to the right, which bled into turn fourteen to the left, with an even briefer straight separating these Campus corners from the following Stavelot complex. Stavelot itself, a ninety-degree corner to the right, with a kerb on the outside inviting drivers to push the margins while a gravel trap beyond that punished any driver who pushed too far, brought an end to sector two, as the line followed corner exit. Turn sixteen, a fast but still ninety-degree-ish corner is where the modern Spa-Francorchamps rejoined the classic layout, a high-speed run along the edge of the forest.
I planted my foot on the throttle and rolled my leg onto the F-duct, not needing the extra downforce through the high-speed kinks of Blanchimont - turns seventeen and eighteen - and was shaping up for a move down Kaminski's inside into the braking zone of the bus stop chicane, however, before we reached the right, left chicane that almost seemed to be made up of two hairpins with its Z-shape, I saw the first few phantom drops of rain. I stopped myself and settled into third for the moment, watching as my teammate and Piotr ahead both continued on...and I decided to follow them. The rain way on the way, but track position was a valuable thing, so I was going to stay right here in third to see how the conditions developed, waiting until either the team called me in or the opposition forced my hand.
"Safety car, safety car!" and then Nicky Morrison threw yet another spanner in the works, because with conditions only getting greasier behind us, Goncalves slammed into Alvarez. The Ferrari seemed to slow and hesitate into the chicane, likely because Felipe was weighing whether or not to gamble from eighth place and pit for intermediates, and the Brazilian veteran behind slipped in the greasy conditions, slamming into Alvarez. Alvarez was forced wide and let another few cars by before diving into the pits for a strategy change and, likely, some repairs as well. However, Rudolfo's car was stranded in the runoff of the bus stop chicane, so the safety car was needed.
"What are the weather conditions?" I demanded, hoping that, with the race neutralized, we might be able to pit with everyone else and avoid a strategic mix-up altogether.
"It's tricky," Morrison began, uttering perhaps the least helpful words possible "It is raining in La Source, on pitlane, and in the bus stop and Eau Rouge, but the rest of the track is dry. We do not believe intermediates tyres will hold up if you ask them to go through Pouhon in the dry."
And this was precisely the problem I predicted before the race, the rain was coming in over the tip of the circuit, but the whole rest of the track was dry, meaning that these conditions were utterly treacherous - as I watched both Harrison and Kaminski nearly lose it through Eau Rouge even at safety car speeds - but, just like Morrison predicted, the rest of the track was bone dry. Intermediate tyres aren't meant to operate on a dry track, so making the tyres work hard through Pouhon and the other corners is just going to make them cry out for mercy, while the dry tyres aren't going to give us any grip at all through the bus stop, La Source, and Eau Rouge, which can be pretty treacherous corners in their own right. Fortunately, the safety car had neutralized the race so we didn't have to make the choice between stability in the wet fourth of the track or speed in the dry seventy-five percent of the track. Unfortunately, the experienced marshals at Spa had Goncalves' car cleared away in time for a restart at the end of lap three. Fortunately though, it had stopped raining in the bus stop by time. It was still very damp, but going into the restart, I had a shred of hope that maybe things weren't going to be so bad after all.
Of course, things couldn't possibly be that simple. So, right as my teammate was going to restart the race, Piotr Kaminski lost it under braking for the bus stop chicane and slid off the track - allowing me to legally pass him for second before the line. Anthony then punched it to restart the race and it was two McLarens running into La Source as, behind, the rejoining Kaminski and the charging Renner tried to figure out positioning amongst themselves. Under braking, Anthony slipped forward, deeper into the corner than he intended, but kept it on track enough that, as I took the corner cleanly and with momentum, he was able to cut across me and muscle his way back ahead, taking out a chunk of the left side of my front wing in the process.
"Unbelievable! Anthony just hit me!" I complained over the radio.
"Copy that Tamara, we saw, but the damage is minimal, damage is minimal. Your wing is intact, please hold onto position. We are trying to break away from the pack." Morrison responded, the English engineer trying to call me down.
"Well, it doesn't feel minimal!" I voiced one last bit of frustration but did as I was told, slotting into second and doing my best to keep up with Anthony through the first stint of the race. Behind me, Maximilian Renner had managed to get ahead of Kaminski going into La Source and was not up to third place, but with the comparatively weak power of his Renault engine, he would need an almighty run down the Kemmel straight to have a chance at me. So, even as Harrison disappeared into the distance, I continued to struggle with front wing damage, and Max Renner refused to leave my mirrors, I still had the straight-line speed and more than enough straights on this track to keep my car planted in second. That would change on lap fifteen, where, once again, it started raining in the exact same area as earlier in the race. Now under pressure and well into a stint, all of us at the front decided to grin and bear it for a lap, needing more of this massive circuit to get wet to justify a switch onto the intermediate tyres. The bus stop at the end of lap fifteen was difficult, both of us were rather grandmotherly and ginger into La Source to open lap sixteen, and mere moments later, a big lift through Eau Rouge made me think I was going to lose second place only to find out that Renner had just as big of a moment behind me. After that though, the circuit was dry enough that we returned to status quo...at least until we got back to the bus stop chicane at the end of the lap.
My thought process was simple going through blanchimont: we're already seeing rain drops here, so in a few laps time, the rain is going to spread, and we'll have to switch onto the intermediate tyres. For the time being, both Renner and I are on option tyres going into a wet patch of track where both of us would do well just to stay on track and avoid an incident. There is no way that Renner tries a move into the bus stop chicane right now. Thus, I authoritatively took to the inside line and braked earlier, not wanting to risk things into a wet corner when nothing seemed to be on the line. Now, there are two possibilities for what came next: first, the innocent option is that Renner was surprised at how early I braked and took avoiding action, only to immediately find out why I was being so careful and lose the car, losing control and spearing into the side of my car. The less generous explanation is that Renner saw an opening, consciously went for an overtake on the outside, and then realized how utterly stupid that was in the wet, lost control, and speared into the side of my car, ruining both of our days. Regardless of the exact reasoning, the end result is the same. Maximilian Renner went to the outside, lost it, and smashed into the side, tearing my sidepod open, smashing up my radiator, and leaving me to coast the car over to a gap for the marshals to recover it. My day was over, while Renner immediately limped into the pits to repairs, so whatever his reasoning was, he was continuing on and I wasn't going to get an explanation any time soon.
"I'm okay guys, I'm okay." I informed my crew before getting out of the car, as naturally the safety car came out due to my stricken car and all the pieces of bodywork and shattered Red Bull front wing left on the entry to the bus stop "I was trying to be careful in these conditions but Renner just forced the issue and smashed into me, I think I would've lost the engine if I continued with the uhh...without the radiator."
"Copy that Tamara, you did the right thing. We're glad you're okay." Morrison replied matter-of-factly before I climbed out of the car. To add insult to injury, in the time it took to recover my car and clean up the mess...it had stopped raining and the track dried out again. Of course the rain would come back again - for real this time - and the remaining cars would have to make a pitstop and switch onto the wet tyres, but it didn't matter to me anyway. Nor did it matter for Felipe Alvarez who brought out the third safety car of the day when he ran over a kerb on fresh wet tyres and the difference in slickness on the two surfaces was enough to spin him around and throw his car into the wall. Nor did it matter for Maximilian Renner, who did finish the race, albeit so damaged and hit with a drive through penalty that he only managed fifteenth. So, the race continued and there would be a top ten, but with three championship contenders out of the race, it would be a critical flashpoint in the season.
So, without further ado, the top ten of the 2010 Belgian Grand Prix reads as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 25 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 18 points.
3: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 15 points.
4: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 12 points.
5: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 10 points.
6: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 8 points.
7: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 6 points.
8: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Sauber-Ferrari - 4 points.
9: Vladimir Alexandrov - Russia - Lotus-Renault - 2 points.
10: Giuseppino Leone - Italy - Force India-Mercedes - 1 point.
It could have been a one-two finish for McLaren for the fifth time this season, but even with me getting taken out, it's nice to see my teammate getting the race win. I suppose that this is when it's easiest to be happy for your teammate getting the win, when you get taken out and there was literally no chance of you getting that win instead. It did, however, mean that Anthony outqualified me, was outracing me before my retirement, and now gained twenty-five points on me, so it was hardly the ideal start to my fight back period. That being said, I was hardly the only one facing misfortune, with championship contenders Felipe Alvarez and Maximilian Renner also failing to score points. Needless to say, all of this has severe ramifications for the top six in the drivers' standings, which reads as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 200 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 187 points.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 176 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 166 points.
5: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 153 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 119 points.
Piotr Kaminski's podium performance puts him on 114 points, but with Henrique de Matteo finishing just behind, the Brazilian retains his place in the championship top six. The both of them will be having to watch over their shoulder for Tommy Koskinen, who sits on 92 points, still quietly lurking in the fray. Obviously, Tommy isn't as close as he once was, but there are still enough points left up for grabs that, should either of them have a slump, my former teammate could definitely capitalize. Capitalizing has been something which Williams has been failing to do as of late, because for the last couple of races, they've had a fast car, but they've let a lot of points slip through their fingers, and today, the Force Indias came out of nowhere to turn a six-point lead over Williams into a seventeen-point lead as my former team fails to score points today. Since I've already started talking about it, the top six in the constructors' championship leads as follows:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 376 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 353 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 272 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 146 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 131 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 59 points.
With Williams still sitting on forty-two points, Force India has indeed stretched their midfield advantage. As for the top of the midfield, Wilhelm Ziegler has scored 54 of Mercedes' points compared to Alexandrov who has scored just 17 of Lotus' points. Both drivers scored points today, but Ziegler is definitely pulling his weight more for Mercedes than his counterpart is at Lotus. Of course, I very much doubt Wilhelm Ziegler returned to F1 to be compared to Lotus' second driver, so while I think he feels an affinity towards finally driving for a German team and being back in the sport he loves without the constant pressure of winning titles for Ferrari, I do have to wonder how long this return is going to last. I hate to say it, but I can't help but wonder if this return may just be damaging Ziegler's legacy. When he retired in 2006, he retired after battling for the championship all year long with Felipe Alvarez and mentoring Henrique de Matteo all the while. Now though, Wilhelm is getting beat weekend after weekend by a driver who was a mere rookie in that 2006 season. Yes, he took a long time out of the sport and could be rusty, and yes, he is significantly older than most of his opposition - I mean, I was quite literally a toddler when he made his F1 debut - but how long can you really make excuses for a seven-time world champion? Of course, for all I know, Ziegler doesn't particularly care for legacy. Maybe Wilhelm has decided that he prefers driving to being retired and will take being second fiddle to do it. Though if that were true, why do the swerve on me in Spain and the squeeze on Goncalves in Hungary?
Oh, I suppose that does bring one positive to Ziegler's case: he started deep in the field thanks to his grid penalty from Hungary and still managed to finish just behind his teammate - albeit in a race that saw three frontrunning cars ahead of him drop out - so he clearly still has something. That being said, when the media approached me after the race, I had a slightly different German in mind, though penalties were perhaps still on the table...
"Hello Tamara, we've heard some harsh words directed at Maximilian Renner from your team principal, Michael Coronet, and we've since had Renner throw his hands up and take responsibility for the accident. What is your take on the incident?" Katherine Symmons asked, evidently trying to wrap up a storyline with me. So it seems that Michael, the angel that he is, has come to my defense and put the blame squarely on Renner, whilst the German, to his credit, has thrown his hands up and admitted that it was his fault. Given that Coronet has said the harsh part for me and Max is apologetic, I'll take a friendlier route with this than I perhaps would have without that context. I suppose that the redhead is doing me a favor there in exchange for me giving her a good interview.
"Well, I appreciate that Max has taken responsibility and I look forward to speaking to him, because I think the accident is pretty clear. We were going into a wet patch of track, we've already lost cars in that corner, and I decided to play it conservatively because I didn't think Renner was going to try anything. Unfortunately, maybe he was just coming in too quickly, got caught by surprised, and didn't have a choice, but the point is that he swerved to the right, lost the car, and ended my day while also ruining his. I'm glad that he's taken fault, I'm also glad that they gave him a penalty in the race, and I hope that in the future, he remembers we're both in the championship fight and can't make every weekend an all or nothing weekend at this point. All that being said, I know Max, I've raced with him since we were both in Formula 3, and I know he's a good guy, so I'm not going to make this a bigger issue than it used to be. He learned his lesson when he finished fifteenth in a race he could have won." I explained, calmly making my case, making it clear that I felt that this was entirely on Renner, and that this wasn't the type of driving that I think was suited to championship contenders. This is all stuff that Max knows - or should know, anyway - and he's taken responsibility, so yeah, I'm not going to rub it in more than this. I don't want the media to try and turn this into a feud because he seems to be a good guy outside of the car by all accounts, even if this and the incident with Weaver in Turkey seem to hint at Renner being a very different character once he gets in the car.
Maximilian Renner didn't seem interested in making this a big feud either, since he would come over and apologize in person in addition to taking responsibility in front of the media. He's not a bad guy, I just think he's made a few bad decisions when overtaking and this was one of them. You don't bump wheels with your teammate at high speed in Turkey, and you don't try an overtake around the outside in the wet on dry tyres in Spa. Oh well, it's not like we can change the result now, neither of us scored in the Belgian Grand Prix and both of us will be hoping to bounce back in Monza. The long straights should suit our car, but this is also the track that Maximilian Renner won his first race at back in 2008, so if it happens to be a wet race, maybe he can get a good result there again. I can tell you one thing though, last time I raced at Monza, I was doing it for Ferrari, I saw the passion that they had. The Ferrari fans loved Matti Hamalainen for winning them the championship in 2007, showing that there was a future even without Wilhelm Ziegler, and in my short time there, the fans even loved me enough to give me the nickname of "l'Aquila," the eagle. Now both of us are gone and Ferrari has Felipe Alvarez instead, signed for a ton of money and so far, only bringing them two wins. For the Italian press, they may accept nothing less than a win from Alvarez in his first Italian Grand Prix in red, so he'll be giving his all too. So a dry race should benefit McLaren, a wet race should benefit Red Bull, and rain, sleet, or shine, the Italian fans will be demanding a Ferrari win. That's an awful lot of drivers going for the win at the cathedral of speed, and only one of us is going to be able to win that race.
"I hope they aren't still mad at me." I grinned nervously at Natasha as we walked into the paddock at Monza. As much as the Italian fans christened me with a nickname, their press also seemed to feel betrayed when I signed with McLaren. Of course, I felt my reasons were very justified - Ferrari didn't have a seat for me so I went for the best possible seat available to me - but we'll see how that plays emotionally with the fanbase that lives and breathes Ferrari. I get it on some level, because that Ferrari and McLaren rivalry has been a thing for so long and it has had some particularly intense flashpoints as of late: the Wilhelm Ziegler and Mika Hakkinen rivalry opened this decade, then we saw the rise of Matti Hamalainen, first as McLaren's challenger and then as Ferrari's replacement for Ziegler, and as Hamalainen took that replacement role, we saw the Spygate scandal go down between both teams. As recently as 2008, McLaren and Ferrari battled it out for the title in controversial fashion, and then the very next year, both teams fell behind Honda and Red Bull, both teams suffering, and Ferrari in particularly suffered when Henrique de Matteo had his accident and was ruled out of the second half of the season. Ferrari was at rock bottom in August 2009, and then I joined that team, I was part of them taking a one-two finish at Belgium, the win and podium in Russia, and my maiden win in Singapore. I helped rebuild that team after it seemed like the regulations and the crash tore that team down, then at the end of the year, as far as the fans are concerned, I betrayed them and went to their biggest rival. If they even know that there was no place for me at Ferrari in 2010 and my choices were between Sauber, Mercedes, and McLaren, they didn't care. At least, that was the worst-case scenario that I was scared of.
"Anthony is leading the championship and there's bad blood between him and Felipe, so the silver lining is that he's probably top of their shitlist." Natasha argued, referencing the meltdown - or at least the fan-perceived meltdown between Alvarez and Harrison at the end of their season together at McLaren in 2007, the one that ended with Hamalainen snatching the championship from the both of them - and the fact that, for better or worse, I no longer had the biggest target on my back anymore. I've led the championship a lot this year - often at a narrow margin but leading nonetheless - and now it's Anthony's turn to do it. I've fallen behind not just him but also Martin Weaver, so while I'm still ahead of Alvarez in the standings, Natasha is probably right, I'm not the main target. It's obvious that Alvarez is targeting the championship - he didn't go to Ferrari to lose - but the question is, is that even possible for Ferrari at this stage? They've won in Bahrain and Hockenheim, that's two races, and, in all honesty, Felipe Alvarez hasn't been setting the world alight when he hasn't been winning. He would need a tremendous second half of the season to take the championship from fifth in the standings at this point, and retiring in Belgium is not the most promising start to that. Granted, Renner and I also retired in Belgium, but that's why Harrison and Weaver are one-two in the standings right now, because the two Anglophone drivers were the ones fortunate enough to score points when the rest of us didn't.
"Well, let's hope they check the car number before booing then." I quipped.
"I'll let you know what the reaction is once you lap me." Natasha quipped back, making it clear that her situation was worse.
"I'd rather you watch the mirrors than the grandstands." I smirked.
"Hey, let me take a look and maybe I'll even hit the guy behind you, help you out a bit." she jokingly offered to "help."
"Just make sure that driver is Alvarez, then we'll really be winning the popularity contest." I brought it back full circle.
"Hello!" Lorenzo Barbaro greeted, the tall Uruguayan in the garish white, orange, and green Force India gear stretching out his arms as he welcomed us.
"Hey Lorenzo," I greeted.
"Buongiorno," Natasha greeted with an exaggerated Italian accent.
"How're you feeling?" I asked, ignoring my little cousin's nonsense with little more than a smile and a slight roll of the eyes.
"Pretty good, this was a good race for me last year and I like the fans." he answered.
"At least someone's happy here, I think I'm playing the role of the enemy this weekend," I brought him up to speed.
"Well Natasha is in a red car too, so she'll probably get more cheers than any of us." Lorenzo joked, bringing up the fact that Nat happened to drive the other red car on the grid, albeit red, black, and white compared to Ferrari's current red and white scheme.
"Hey, they better like me here, I've won here more than anywhere else." Nat feigned anger, bringing up her time in Italian Formula 3 in 2007, as well as the fact that she had success at Vallelunga in both 2008 and 2009 whilst representing AS Roma in the Superleague Formula series.
"Yeah, but that was for Roma, this is Milanista country, I think." Lorenzo brought up the fact that, in partisan football politics, driving for AS Roma might actually be a bit of a curse given that Monza was firmly in the north and firmly in Lombardy.
"Well Ferrari and Juventus have the same owners and that's never seemed to bother them." I pointed out, bringing out the fact that the Milan and Inter fans who make the trek out to Monza don't seem to be bothered by supporting the Agnelli family's Scuderia Ferrari despite the fact that the patriarchs of Turin also happen to be the owners of Juventus, which has a long running rivalry with both Milan and Inter. That might actually be a good thing for me then, because if they're willing to overlook the fact that their F1 team shares an owner with their football nemesis, perhaps they'll overlook the fact that their little eagle now drives for their racing rival.
"Well today I'll be AC Monza, because my car is red, bankrupt, and easily mistaken for something much better." Natasha joked, referring to the local town's team, one often confused for the much more illustrious AC Milan.
"What team am I then?" Lorenzo asked, intrigued.
"Well does any team here wear orange?" Nat asked.
"Are y'all forgetting your racing drivers?" Anthony laughed, coming across our little scene.
"Oh, you're just hating because you think it's called 'soccer.'" Barbaro mocked in response, pronouncing the last word with a mock American accent.
"Hey, I didn't see the three of you racing around a soccer stadium this year, it was all football. Dolphins baby, represent!" Anthony puffed out his chest, mocking us. Championship leader? For sure, enemy number one for the tifosi? Perhaps, but was he rattled? Not really. Harrison seemed to be taking in stride, cracking jokes with the three of us in the lead up to this weekend. Maybe he'll handle the pressure well and really start building a streak here. Regardless of what he does though, my goal remains the same: do what I can to reduce the deficit to Anthony in both the race and qualifying, stay in the championship fight for as long as I can, and if I can't win the championship, at least do everything in my power to ensure that McLaren ends up winning their first double since 1998. Anthony and I are great drivers, we had the best run of races out of everyone this season for awhile there, and we have a real chance to give McLaren their first constructors' championship in the twenty-first century and just their second drivers' championship in the decade. Anthony's won that first championship in 2008 so maybe that's why he seems to be coping with the pressure better, but all the same, he knows as well as I do that it would be something damn special if we could bring McLaren a double this year.
By the time we got to qualifying, various accusations had been thrown around the paddock about teams using flexible bodywork to circumvent the rules. Ferrari and Red Bull's front wings were perceived to have been bending throughout the Belgian Grand Prix weekend and some went as far as to say flexing wings to increase downforce and circumvent the rules were enabling Ferrari's late season resurgence. In response, Red Bull and Ferrari found some evidence that our floor of all things here at McLaren had failed some initial flexibility tests and thus needed strengthening, and thus it turned into a whole thing. Not being one for drama, I just tried to focus on the driving, and it was going well for me this weekend: I was fourth in Q1 behind Matteo, Alvarez, and Harrison, whilst starting in Q2, Alvarez took control whilst I slotted my car into second. Now on the initial runs in Q3, the most obvious trend developing was that Anthony and I had diverged on setup, and it was working out better for me at the moment. Anthony, being the true speedster that he is, decided to go with a setup that had more potential speed down the straights but wasn't giving him the stability he needed through the corners, whilst my setup was maybe a bit weaker at the very ends of the straights, but I had the corner performance to preserve as much of that speed as possible. Anthony's logic is that, this is Monza, all the overtaking happens down the straights anyway and the corners tend to be one line, thus all he needs to do is have the speed to get ahead and stay ahead. I felt that was all well and good when battling through the pack, but with the strengths of our car, I was very much intending to get up into clean air and lead the race, thus I needed performance down the straights and through the corners to build a gap.
All of this, of course, assumes that I can qualify well to begin with, which has always been the challenge for me. At the moment, the Ferraris are the clear leaders, with Alvarez in provisional pole and Henrique de Matteo in second, while I was in third, then I was followed by the Red Bulls who were struggling at this high-speed track with a car designed for aerodynamics and cornering. Red Bull's Adrian Newey, somewhat facetiously, said that they would be better off taking the whole rear wing off at this stage and just using the front wing and double diffuser to keep the car on track. Regardless, the point is that Red Bull is still a strong car, but right now, Weaver could only manage fourth and Renner fifth. My teammate, Anthony Harrison, was struggling the most of the top six at the moment, sitting in sixth and closer to Koskinen and Kaminski behind that he is to the Red Bulls ahead. He really could use more downforce just to plant the car through the corners that little bit more, though with qualifying having started and us well inside parc ferme by now, there's little that he can do at this point. The only changes left at his disposal are messing around with wing angle, but who knows, maybe that little bit of extra downforce will be enough to just give him the confidence to attack through the corners and defend his championship lead. I, however, was in contention for my first pole position of the season, and damn was I going to try and take it.
"Do you need anything else for this last run?" Nicky Morrison asked as the moments ticked down before the final qualifying runs to clear out Q3.
"Nothing special, I don't need a tow, I just need clean air and time to work." I answered, wanting to keep it simple. A lot of drivers appreciated a car ahead to both act as a marker and give a tow down the straights, but for me, they were more trouble than they were worth, and your teammate trying to give you the tow could easily ruin your lap just out of sheer miscommunication. I didn't want to take the risk, I didn't want another car clogging up my vision, no, I was in provisional third with nothing to lose at this point, so I just wanted clear track ahead and the chance to maybe do a better lap.
"Copy that. 3...2...1...alright, go." Nicky counted me down as the team lowered my car and then let me loose in the pitlane, turning right, heading down its length, and then turning left onto the track to begin my outlap. Heating up the tyres and getting the car up to speed, I also got one last look at the corners, the braking points, and mentally preparing myself for the final chance at qualifying. I'm third right now, but with the pace of this car and this Mercedes engine down the straights, there's no reason for me not to contend for my first ever F1 pole position. Thus, coming out of Parabolica at high speed, I crossed the start-finish line to begin my final lap at speed. Accelerating up to two-hundred miles per hour and then losing all that speed in the space of a hundred meters as I hit the brakes for turn one, downshifting for the tight, slow chicane to open the lap. Bleeding off the speed, I turned left and then immediately right, taking to the kerbs to steal as much from the corner as possible, but taking care to avoid the car-wrecking yellow "sausage kerbs" placed beyond the standard red and white stuff. Having negotiated turns one and two, I accelerated again as the track trended to the left and then straightened out where it rejoined the old track at the end of the chicane.
There were once three circuits at Monza: first, the turn off to the right for the high speed, banked oval, then the right turn onto the trapezoidal junior circuit, but I stayed straight all the way until the final right turn: Curva Grande for the Grand Prix circuit. Turning to the right as fast as I dared along the perimeter of the circuit, the long turn three led to a brief straight, one which both brought an end to sector one and deposited me in the braking zone for the second chicane. Braking hard for Variante della Roggia, I turned left through the ninety-degree turn four and then cut over the kerbs to the right as I snapped back on acceleration to the right for turn five, closing out the chicane and accelerating to the northern tip of the circuit. As soon as I started climbing through the gears it was back down on the brakes for Lesmo 1, the circuit tightened as just a bit of kerbing, gravel, and grass separated us drivers from the forests of the Royal Park of Monza. A short shoot between the Lesmo corners led to another tap of the brakes for turn seven, then a turn to the right as I powered down back down the circuit.
On the power and on the F-duct, I charged down the straight and through the rest of sector two, meeting the oval once again as we straight included an underpass beneath the upper edge of the high-speed ring. Shortly after this, the straight climbed into the braking zone for the third and final chicane. Tapped the brakes for Ascari and then throwing the car to the left, seeing red and white exit kerbs, green painted paved runoff, then sandy brown gravel in my peripheral vision as I focused in on the fast sequence of corners. Throwing the car to the right and then back to the left, riding out onto the paved runoff on exit as I preserved as much speed as possible. I straightened the car onto the back straight, rolled my leg onto the F-duct again, and sped down the straight with all the power I could get out of this car. The F-duct, which was helping me so much at this stage, was the subject to yet another minor controversy brewing in the background. Our version has been well-integrated into the chassis and uses the left leg, as that leg is only used for braking these days, and naturally, when you want to brake you don't want the F-duct, and when you want the F-duct, you don't need the brake. Other teams have implemented less elegant solutions, and that came to a head last weekend when Felipe Alvarez, amongst others, was seen to take Eau Rouge and Raidillon one-handed, using his left hand to block Ferrari's version of the F-duct to get that little bit of extra speed down the Kemmel straight. The end result is renewed calls to ban the F-duct for 2011, with some even suggesting this was some performative activism on Ferrari's part to get the FIA to step in and ban our much more effective version just because the best version of their F-duct requires the use of a driver's hand.
Regardless of what may come of the F-duct in the future, I still had that speed boost at my disposal today. Thus, I kept it plugged for as long as possible before rolling my leg off of it and slamming my left foot down on the brake for Parabolica, losing just enough speed to be able to turn the car all the way around to the right, then getting back on the throttle as I was still in the middle of the corner. Building speed already as I rode out to the exit kerbing on the far-left side of the track, I now trended to the right, trying to make the run to the line as short as possible and I dumped everything at my possible to complete this final qualifying lap.
"Great work Tamara, that is P2. We are P2." Nicky Morrison reported in matter-of-factly.
"Argh! What's the gap? Just under a tenth of a second. Alvarez set a 1:21.9, you set a 1:22.0." Morrison reported as I coasted the car into the pits. It wasn't going to be pole, but at least I'm on the front row and hopefully that means I can fight for it in the race. My race engineer confirmed this as he continued "You've split the Ferraris, Matteo starts third, Weaver fourth, Anthony is in fifth, Renner is sixth, then Koskinen, Buxton, Kaminski, and Goncalves."
"Copy, thank you guys. We'll give our all tomorrow." I promised. It wasn't the best result, but I should be glad that I'm upset with P2. After a season of getting outqualified by my teammate and having been taken out last race, it feels good to have outqualified my teammate, gotten on the front row, and still felt like more was achievable. Elsewhere on the grid, this is definitely a great performance by Ferrari, having both cars qualifying in the top three, whilst my teammate managed to recover and split the Red Bulls. He's on an overly aggressive setup that doesn't seem to be working for him, but the Red Bull as a car isn't meant for this, so I guess it turned into a contest of who was less screwed there. Other than that, Williams had another good day in qualifying, but it remains to be seen whether or not they'll have the race pace to back that up this weekend. What does seem to be clear is that I'm definitely playing the role of the enemy today, because as the Italian track announcer read out the top three in qualifying, I heard a big cheer from the crowd when they found out their man was in pole position, and then another big crowd when they found out Henrique de Matteo would be lining up third, directly behind his teammate on the grid. However, when he called out me in second, the crowd was rather silent. A few cheers from the neutrals I think, and maybe a couple of boos from hardcore tifosi, but mostly just a comparative silence between two big cheers. I suppose the good news is that it wasn't an overpowering amount of boos, but the message is clear either way: the crowd wants a Ferrari win tomorrow, and right now, I seem to be the biggest obstacle to that.
"Are they going to boo me if I lead?" I asked Rudolfo before the race, seeing the Brazilian as someone who might know a thing or two about the situation. He left Ferrari after 2005 and then won the Italian Grand Prix with Honda in 2009, so while the timetable is different, he's still the one with experience in taking the lead of the Italian Grand Prix for another team.
"I honestly can't say. They didn't boo me but it was a long time after I left Ferrari, besides, I wasn't competing directly with Ferrari for the win last year." Rudolfo shrugged "If you want to win, you're going to have to pass Alvarez, and that might get a bad reaction from the crowd. You might get booed on the podium too if you take the win from Ferrari. That being said, play nice to the crowd, give them a good show, and race the Ferraris in a fair way, and I don't think it'll be too bad."
"Alright, thank you." I nodded at the Brazilian, accepting that was probably the most fair and realistic advice I was going to get.
"Good luck out there," the veteran gave me a handshake.
"Thanks, you too." I meant that, I wanted to see Williams do well, they were my first team after all. I wanted to see Ferrari do well too of course, but it was harder to cheer for them when I was directly invested in the fight. I could be a true neutral in the midfield fight though, because I could support Williams since they were my former team, while I could also support Force India since that meant my friend Lorenzo Barbaro was doing well. In any case, i made my way up from Rudolfo's grid slot in tenth all the way up to second. It wasn't technically the best seat in the house, but I did have a clear view ahead of me, and if I could get a good enough launch from the right side of the grid here, then I would be able to slip ahead of Alvarez into turn one. Yes, he had the racing line and a better entry into the corner, but turn one was tight enough and awkward enough that, if I had a wheel ahead, he'd have to wait for me to take the corner or take to the sausage kerbs and screw his own race that way. I didn't want the second option to happen though, both because I still wanted to see Alvarez do well - but just for sentimental Ferrari reasons, but to take points off the Red Bulls in the championship battle as well - and because forcing Alvarez off track and damaging his car is a good way of pissing off those Italian fans I'm trying to stay in the good graces of. I don't want to win this race in the wrong way, but still, to win the Italian Grand Prix? Ferrari or not, it's one of the marquee events of the F1 calendar, and that's something that I still don't have in my modest collection of wins. Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Miami? They're all race wins and I'm proud of each one, don't get me wrong, but how nice would it be to add Monza to that list? A proper historic track to be the feather in my cap for this season.
Thus, when the five lights went out some thirty minutes later to start the race, my McLaren powered alongside the Ferrari of Alvarez on the start, the partisan crowd forced to watch me overtake Ferrari's superstar whether they liked it or not as I outbraked him into turn one and squeezed ahead. Coming out of the first chicane, I was in first, followed by the Ferraris of Alvarez and Matteo, and then my teammate got up to fourth, the straight-line speed setup finally getting him some purchase as he sped past the Red Bulls at the start of the race. In fact, the American had a good run on the Brazilian ahead, first taking to the left to try and overtake him on the outside - knowing that would turn into the inside for Variante della Roggia - but then swerving back to the right as Henrique went defensive. Now he would be on the outside going into the four-five chicane, but his straight-line speed was giving him the advantage he needed going into the corner, edging ahead. Unfortunately, that advantage went away in the corner, as his lack of downforce meant he had less air resistance under braking. The advantage swung back to Henrique de Matteo as he was now on the inside and better on the brakes, but Anthony was trying anyway...and predictably, things ended in disaster. A hard front suspension hit forced Anthony offline and into the paved runoff, popping over the sausage kerbs as he let the grid through, waiting for an opening to rejoin.
Anthony would try his best to continue, but ultimately, the suspension damage was too severe, his front left wouldn't turn, and the American was left with no choice but to find a marshal post and retire the car. Fortunately for me, he managed to do it in a timely fashion and parked the car in a good location, meaning that the car was already clear by the time I came through sector two on lap two. The same held true for Yoshikazu Higashiyama, the Japanese driver had immense pace as of yet and was really starting to impress for Sauber, outshining his experienced and highly rated teammate Victor Hartmann. Today though, Higashiyama would suffer a gearbox issue on lap one and have to pit and retire the car at the end of the lap, managing to do so without bringing out any trouble for the rest of us. Two bullets dodged, I took the opportunity to relax and try and build a gap. To a degree, I was doing well, because early on in the first stint, I was already gapping the Red Bulls, the Mercedes, and the Lotus cars, but unfortunately, the same could be said about Felipe Alvarez and Henrique de Matteo. The three of us were just in an inseparable pack spread across maybe five seconds at the front of the field. We're faster than everyone else by a mile but none of us are able to break away from each other.
"Henrique has pit, Henrique has pit." and thus, Ferrari took advantage of the fact that they had two cars against one and split their strategies. Now, I knew that Ferrari was probably going to keep Alvarez out that little bit longer in second to try and overcut me, but if I didn't react, then Henrique de Matteo might undercut us both on the warm prime tyres. For Ferrari, no matter what happens, they can put one of their cars into the lead and Germany has shown that, rules or not, they have no problem with ordering one of their cars past the other, so even if Felipe is second, they can give him the lead and the championship points. For McLaren though, we've already lost Anthony Harrison from this race, so my car in the lead is our only remaining hope for the race. We need to react to Henrique de Matteo's pitstop, because if we don't, he'll have the momentum and the speed on the new tyres, but if we do that, we release Felipe Alvarez into clean air and give him the chance to extend his stint, go long, and then pit at the optimal time to get the jump on us both. One of these Ferraris was going to be on the race-winning strategy, and if I was going to win this race, I needed to cover off that winning strategy. The only question now is: which strategy is better?
Henrique's strategy would give me the immediate speed, but why would Ferrari put their second driver on the better strategy? Logic then points to Alvarez being on the winning strategy, but as mentioned, does any of this even matter when Ferrari is perfectly willing to order Henrique to stand down and let Alvarez by? Whichever Ferrari ends up ahead doesn't really matter to Maranello, but what absolutely matters to Woking is that I stay ahead of the Ferraris. Therefore, if Henrique de Matteo is on the fast strategy, I need to react, even if every bone in my body is screaming out for me to watch Felipe Alvarez. I knew this very well may be the wrong move, but I did as I was told and pit the lap after Henrique de Matteo, switching onto fresh prime tyres. For what it's worth, I exited ahead of the Brazilian and retained second place - Ferrari definitely wanted to take a one-two finish at their home race - so I was clearly doing something right. Now we just needed to see what would happen when Alvarez took his pitstop and where exactly the battle for the lead would shake out.
A few laps later, Alvarez made his stop. The time delta showed us neck and neck as I came out of Parabolica, trying to make it to turn one before Alvarez, who has now left his pitbox, but was still stuck on the pitlane speed limiter until he got to the exit. The Spaniard was unleashed to accelerate as I crossed the start-finish line, the red and white Santander-sponsored Ferrari taking to the left onto the pit exit line, still ahead of me, but the momentum was with me...but the braking zone was right there. Ultimately, just like the inside worked out for me on lap one, the inside worked out for Alvarez on pit exit, so I was stuck behind him through the first chicane. Felipe took the lead, but he was on cold tyres and I was right there...the win is still in reach. Coming through Curva Grande, Alvarez was making his car as wide as possible, but I still had the speed, I just needed to try and make it work, thus I swung to the left and tried to muscle through on the inside.
Alvarez had me covered, pushing me out onto the exit kerb and threatening to push me further out into the gravel if I didn't back out. My only options seemed to be to either risk putting a wheel in the gravel and potentially taking us both out or giving up the move and potentially letting Alvarez get away on warmer tyres. Instead, though, I decided to take a third option, lifted just a bit to let Alvarez come out ahead and make him think that I was letting off, but then swerving to the right and accelerating again as I was now on the outside. I lost momentum and I was on the wrong side of the track, but I think I managed to rattle Alvarez with that move and he was still on cold Bridgestones that were only just coming up to temperature: I still had half a chance. Coming into the chicane, I braked later, momentarily putting my nose ahead into the lead, but then as I went to turn left, I had no choice but to wait for Alvarez to take the corner and retake the lead. I had taken the lead for a moment, but Alvarez, to his credit, managed to brake late enough and was firm enough on the inside that he retained position.
There was no chance for me through the Lesmos or down the ensuing straight, and through Ascari, Alvarez heated his tyres back up. I was lapping quickly, but the problem is that Felipe Alvarez was lapping just as quickly, and Henrique de Matteo was lapping within a few tenths of us only a couple of seconds behind. I was effectively boxed in, because I wasn't lapping any faster than Alvarez ahead, so I wasn't making any headway, but I also couldn't try an alternate strategy in the closing stages or even relax at all, because then I'd love a position to Henrique. All I could do is push hard, try and stay in touch with Alvarez, and finish in second. I did manage to set a few fastest laps of the race and eat a few tenths off of Alvarez, but every time that I set a fastest lap, Alvarez responded with his own fastest lap, answering my every move until he finally set what would stand in the record books as the fastest lap of the race on the penultimate lap. At this point, with Alvarez just about two seconds ahead of me and Henrique de Matteo about five seconds behind me, I finally just relaxed and took the car home in second. I had taken the lead at the start, I gave it my all in the first stint, but fundamentally, two things worked against me that race: the Ferraris were just as fast as me, and I didn't have my teammate for company. I was never able to build a gap or break away, and that meant that when Ferrari decided to go 2v1 on me, there wasn't really anything I could do.
As the fans in red cheered for their superstar driver, the points-paying positions for the 2010 Italian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 25 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 18 points.
3: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 15 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 12 points.
5: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 10 points.
6: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 8 points.
7: James Buxton - Great Britain - Williams-Cosworth - 6 points.
8: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 4 points.
9: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 2 points.
10: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 1 point.
Last race Anthony Harrison capitalized on pretty much all the other title contenders having a bad race to take the championship lead, while today, the rest of us had a good day and he retired. Second place Martin Weaver also had a bad day, slipping back a number of places on the start and finishing behind a Mercedes as well as his teammate and the three of us in the top three. Speaking of contrasting fortunes, after a couple of races where Williams showed promise in qualifying only for them to fail to capitalize on the race, Williams finally clawed some points back against Force India. That being said, Force India built up a pretty big gap when Williams was struggling, so my former team still has some work to do if they want to overcome the team that I could've driven for in 2009. In any case, with these dramatic swings of fortune in the past two races, the top six in the drivers' standings read as follows:
1: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 200 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 195 points.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 194 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 178 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 178 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 134 points.
Anthony came out of Belgium with a 13-point lead over Weaver, a 24-point lead over me, and had more than a win's worth of points over everyone else. Just a week later though, Anthony had just five points over Weaver, six points over me, and both Alvarez and Renner were within a win of overtaking him. Even Henrique de Matteo, who has had some properly rancid luck at points this season, can't be discounted at this point. If these last couple of weeks have demonstrated anything in the title fight, it's that none of us are safe, because one weekend you could be winning while your rivals score no points, and the next weekend you get taken out on lap one while your rivals all score points on you. It would take a radical swing of fortune for Matteo to take the title, yes, but before the summer break, he was trapped in a battle with Kaminski and Koskinen, now the Pole sits on 118 points and Koskinen just on 102, so Henrique is finally streaking away from them. This also means that Ferrari is beginning to stretch away from Mercedes and Lotus in the constructors' championship, coming back towards Red Bull and us here at McLaren. The tight battle, right now, is between Force India, who stays on 59 points after failing to score today, and Williams, who jumps from 42 points up to 49. Force India retains their spot in the top six, but Williams is now just ten points behind and seems to have the pace advantage now. The only question is: has Williams cracked their losing streak or is this race the outlier? If this is the new normal, Williams could definitely still take sixth.
So, having thoroughly discussed the top six in the constructors' championship, the exact order reads as follows:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 394 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 373 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 312 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 158 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 135 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 59 points.
To put into perspective how tight the championship battle has gotten as of late, McLaren, Red Bull, and Ferrari are all within one hundred points of each other in a points format where a team can take as many as 43 points home in a single weekend. Furthermore, we're going into a pair of races that anybody would struggle to predict the results of, as they were a pair of new events last year. The Atlantic Grand Prix in Bordeaux and the Russian Grand Prix in Saint Petersburg. Anthony won in Bordeaux last year, so that's a benefit for McLaren, but the same could be said about Hungary and look how that worked out. The Hondas filled out the podium, but the problem is that the Mercedes this year is almost the same car as the Honda was last year thanks to how stagnant Honda was with updating the car, meaning Mercedes has been left on the backfoot all season long. Mercedes might have good pace there, but their car might have also declined enough that they lack their pace. In which case, I was fourth and Matti was fifth for Ferrari, so with the Ferrari F10 now coming into its own in the second half of the season, they seem to be the most likely competition. Of course, I also seem to remember the Red Bulls having a miserable day in Bordeaux last year, and I'm not sure if we can depend on that again. Anthony was quick in Russia as well before his retirement, and that long embankment straight calls out for the McLaren MP4/25, so that should be a good day for us.
For now though, I got to cross that bridge over pitlane and stand on the Monza podium. It wasn't a win, but it was the next best thing. Furthermore, as the Ferrari crowd cheered out for an Alvarez win, they also seemed to cheer for me. I gave them a good race, an entertaining show, and in the end, Ferrari won regardless, so by playing the role of the good opposition, it seems that the tifosi forgave my sins. I'm sure some would have preferred a one-two finish, but I think the Italian fans like having competition, they like to see Ferrari drivers have to fight for it and win regardless. The Italians are partisan fans, but they're also legitimate fans of the sport, so they love the suspense of a narrow victory.
Notes:
Here's a random PSA for those of you who have been underwhelmed by F1 this year: watch MotoGP and Indycar. Both of which are having great, highly competitive seasons. Indycar has had its fifth different winner is as many races yesterday and is going into the Indy 500 next. As for MotoGP, the Bugatti circuit at Le Mans is supposed to be a mediocre track but it put on an amazing race. I was already impressed with the sport after watching Portimão, Argentina, and COTA, but seeing them race at Jerez and Le Mans? Otherworldly. Could not recommend enough, even if it is a bitch and a half to watch in the US. This has absolutely nothing to do with the story but watching the MotoGP post-race coverage as I post this, I figured I'd treat you guys with some of my thoughts on irl motorsport in 2023. A special gift for y'all on AO3 - don't tell the FFN crowd. :P
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 38: A Plane, Two Race Tracks, and a Nuclear Reactor
Notes:
Alright guys, we're coming up towards the end of part one, so I hope you're enjoying it.
PS: Today I learned you can have longer chapter titles on AO3 than on Fictionpress/FFN.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXXVIII.
A Plane, Two Race Tracks, and a Nuclear Reactor.
"...yeah, there. He's already coming out of the pits as he enters my view, momentum is the only reason it was close. Ferrari played me that race." I commentated as Nat and I sat on my private jet's couch, rewatching the Italian Grand Prix. After Felipe had come out of the pits ahead of me and my charge ahead failed, they went back and showed a replay from my onboard camera - the subject of this conversation - and it became even clearer here that I really was on the backfoot when trying to retake the lead. Focusing on driving and down low in the seat, when milliseconds matter, you can miss things, things might seem closer or further than they really are, but from the camera view? Alvarez really did get the overcut on me and no amount of magical late braking or wheel banging through turn two was going to change that. Ultimately, rewatching the race only seems to confirm what I believed all along: Ferrari made sure I had to watch both Henrique and Felipe, trying to cover off two strategies with one car, and that really just meant that finishing second was an accomplishment in of itself. Ferrari was doing everything in their power to take a one-two finish there and I managed to hold onto my starting position despite that.
Still, having led the first stint and having done it at a track as legendary as Monza? It hurt to lose out on that one. With the inevitable banning of the F-duct and the planned return to KERS for 2011 - it wasn't ever necessarily banned, but the teams agreed not to use it this year to avoid another 2009 situation where some teams had it, some didn't, and some switched back and forth, and the cost savings were hardly a downside in a series still impacted by the financial crisis - who knows if I'll ever have a straight line weapon like this next year. Sure, the regulations are fairly stable, and we'll still have the Mercedes engine advantage, but a lot of variables are changing on top of F1 already being a constantly changing sport. Now granted, I don't think the McLaren is suddenly going to devolve into the HRT on the straights, and I do think that we probably should still be the leaders on the straights in 2011, but enough is changing that I can't envision us having the same advantage. If Ferrari managed to win the Italian Grand Prix against the power of the MP4/25, surely, they'll be able to do it again with a car that's a better match, and that's not even mentioning whatever aerodynamic trickery Red Bull will think up to avenge their underwhelming 2010 performance. Look at me though, being the archetypal Formula One driver - I'm in the middle of a massive title battle this year and I'm still fussing over what's going to happen next year.
"I still can't believe you're running that little wing and getting that performance through the corners." Natasha's observations were entirely divorced from my rant but came out with such a defeated voice that I couldn't help but be stunned by them. Seeing my reaction, she explained "Marussia literally doesn't have a low drag setup, we run our normal wings with as little downforce as we can manage through the corners, and with this pig of a car, I still need a lot to feel even remotely stable through the corners. I'd understeer all the way into the wall in Curva Grande if I tried running that wing angle on my car."
"Yet somehow you still finished seventeenth - ahead of both Caterhams." I tried to focus on the positive here, mainly that Natasha was once again the best of the backmarkers yesterday.
"First of all, Tripoli retired so it doesn't really count. Second of all, if you get to complain about not winning, I get to complain about finishing seventeenth." Natasha responded with a smirk.
"It's my plane, I get to do whatever I want." I retorted in mock anger.
"What are you gonna do, throw me out?" she countered.
"I just might!" I teased.
"Ugh, imagine the headlines "F1 championship contender killed in rapid depressurization - F1 backmarker also reported missing."" Natasha gestured as if the headline was coming up in front of her.
"At least you'd get a mention." I joked "I wonder if they'd go with championship contender and not Le Mans winner for my headline, how many F1 race wins does it take to trump Le Mans? And how close do I need to be to the championship to be labeled a contender anyway?"
"You are so overanalyzing my imaginary headline." Natasha shook her head.
"It's a long flight." I shrugged.
"It literally is not." Natasha argued, pointing out to Milan to Nice is, in fact, a rather short flight. In fact, we had just gotten to the midpoint of the race where Alvarez had taken control of the race and we were probably going to have to strap in for the landing soon enough.
"Alright, you win...bitch." I admitted defeated...begrudgingly.
"Save it for your girlfriend." Nat got another one out at my expense.
"You know what? I will. I'm going to be on speaker phone with her the whole drive home and you're just gonna have to sit through that." I mock threatened.
"Ugh, don't make me take a rental car." she feigned disgust.
"Even better, then I'll get my Mercedes all to myself." I smirked.
"I'd love to know what that feeling is like." Nat joked, referring to her own contractual situation. She was contracted to Mercedes, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that, performance or not, both Tommy Koskinen and Wilhelm Ziegler were going to stay, at very least through the end of the 2011 season, which meant that Natasha was going to have to deal with another one of these novel-for-F1 loan arrangements. Natasha was pushing behind the scenes to get Mercedes to move her up to their customer team, Force India, but as of yet, she hasn't seen anything close to a confirmation of that. At the moment Mercedes seems content to leave her with Marussia for another season, while the fact that she has to perform with a Marussia isn't exactly helping Nat impress the alternatives to Mercedes enough for them to buy her out of her contract. I know I keep telling her that F1 teams are aware of the level of her team and will be impressed with her performance regardless - and I do believe that to be inherently true, they can see her finishing several positions ahead of Lukas Casemiro each weekend - but is anyone going to be impressed enough to buy out a contract over a driver who has only so far proven they can finish thirteenth? Thirteenth in a car good for twenty-first, yes, but still thirteenth. That meant that she was forced to wait on what Mercedes would give her, and right now, a factory seat seems off the table and even an upgrade to Force India seems dubious at best. I can't help but be reminded of my situation in 2008, trying to impress Williams enough for a 2009 contract because every other team that was as good or better wouldn't have a vacancy until 2010. Fortunately my situation ended up working out, but would the same be true for Natasha? I can't guarantee that.
The only thing I was sure of was that our next race was the Atlantic Grand Prix, racing in France at a race that, still, cannot use the name "French Grand Prix" due to contractual disputes with Magny-Cours, who never had a contract to host a race in 2010 in the first place. Formula One is a grand place where pointless controversy can be made of anything, which is why in 2007, we once had the one German race called the European Grand prix, and why in 2009 and 2010, the sole race in France is called the Atlantic Grand Prix. I suppose it at least makes for some good branding, with the circuit called the Circuit de l'Atlantique after all, so perhaps in some French boardroom somewhere, this all screams of synergy and other such corporate buzzwords.
"Alright, so what do we need to know before the race?" Michael Coronet asked as the engineers and drivers gathered in the back of the garage on Saturday evening for the last full meeting we were going to get before the race. At present, on the other side of the thin, temporary wall, our two cars sat, covered up and under FIA surveillance in the standard parc ferme procedure to make sure we couldn't make any last second changes between qualifying and the race. The days of switching engines, gearboxes, and setups between qualifying and the race are long gone, seen as far too expensive and unfair for the smaller teams that couldn't do the same. Now, F1 was all about conserving engines and gearboxes for multiple race weekends in a row, and even walking into the garage during parc ferme could lead to a team being penalized severely. So, there was nothing we could do to the car to increase our chances of winning, but in a title fight this tight? With a chance to win the constructors' championship for McLaren? We had to do something, hence this meeting. Putting together the best brains at the team in the hopes of giving us that little extra edge.
"The track is fairly compact, all things considered, and that means the main straight isn't the longest, but the track is fast and has a number of small acceleration zones. It isn't the ideal for our car, but we'll have to work with it." Owen, one of the guys who monitored my race began. All the while I remembered coming out of the round, U-shaped final corner and onto said main straight, speeding onto it and using the F-duct to get whatever advantage I could get. This was exactly the problem that Owen was talking about, because this track is high speed and features a lot of short straights, but it's all acceleration, not top end speed. Just as I was getting into the sweet spot where the Mercedes engine really had an advantage over the Renault and the Ferrari, I had to brake for the hairpin of turn one, turning to the right and hitting the throttle for a burst of acceleration, then lifting as I flicked the car to the left for turn two, leaving me right in the wider, more circular hairpin of turn three. Turning right again, turn three left me on one of those short straights that was filling the conversation, before getting into the next proper braking zone in turn four.
"It may be possible to overtake into the penultimate corner, less likely the final, but the main hairpin is where it's likely to happen. So, at very least, we'll have an advantage at the one part of the track that seems to matter." Paulo, Owen's counterpart on Anthony's car, interjected. That much was true, as I recalled braking into turn four, just a bit tighter than ninety-degrees, it was a bit too narrow for overtaking, and as we got out of the corner, we began the run up the hill, another power dependent section, but again, the engines were close to each other in performance, and our grunt was at the top end when the F-duct could reduce drag and our engine just kept going, here accelerating up the hill, all the engines, from the Mercedes all the way down to the Cosworth, were close enough that it didn't really matter. Then flinging the car to the left and back right for the fast uphill chicane of five and six on the sand dune, it was about high-speed cornering. Almost as soon as the track straightened up again, we were braking for the top of the hill, turn six. At first it was around ninety-degree to the right, but right on corner exit, we dipped back down to the right, then left and right again throw turns seven and eight for the chicane, and on exit to that, turn nine swung to the right, running down the sand dune. The positioning of the two chicanes was just close enough to turn six that neither of them were any good as overtaking opportunities, and it also choked out six's potential. Paulo had a point then, if we could use what little front straight there was to our advantage, the Red Bulls and Ferraris really didn't have an opportunity to come back to us.
"The Red Bulls will be strong down the hill and through the fast sweepers, none of the straights there are long enough for the Renault to top out." Anthony pointed out, looking concerned. That's true, this part of the track doesn't suit our car as well, running down the hill through turn nine and then swinging back down to the left, the track evening out just in time to tap the brakes, throw the car to the right and then left through turns eleven and twelve, depositing me onto another brief tease of a straight before tapping the brakes again before turning the car to the right for turn thirteen at the northern extremity of the track. Like two corners at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, turn thirteen exited onto a short shoot before a flat-out turn fourteen to the right - our speed tempered by the braking for thirteen - speeding down another tiny straight before the first of the two U-shaped corners. Turn fifteen, curving to the right, was like Mugello's Correntaio, but instead of leading into a chicane between the corners, the brief straight that followed the penultimate corner led directly into turn sixteen. This U onto the main straight brought me right back onto the part where our car is the strongest, but the run up to the line was still only good enough for fourth. Third for Anthony, second for Renner, and Weaver on pole. The situation seemed to be playing back towards Weaver, but we were still close, we just needed to find a way to make our one advantage work.
"That's true, everything depends on the straight." Paulo agreed with his driver "Should we just go with a low downforce setup then?"
"No," I spoke up for the first time in the meeting "We're stronger down the main straight anyway and we can't be at an even bigger disadvantage down the rest of the track. Our goal should be to be as close to Red Bull as possible through the rest of the track and then let the engine do the work down the main straight."
"We know it was good enough for second at Monza." Nicky Morrison agreed with me.
"But we don't know what I could've done at Monza. If it can get me ahead of the Red Bulls, I'll try it." Anthony decided, looking for any way to get back into the conversation for the championship after his retirement at the Italian Grand Prix. Once we do get back into the garage tomorrow morning, adjusting the wing angle is one of the few things we can do before the race, so I suppose that, if he wants it, it is possible. It's still not something that I want to do.
"Either way, the one stop should be faster. So, both of you do what you're comfortable with and push as hard as you can." Michael decided, figuring that at this point, we should just go with whatever we think will give us an advantage and work with it. If this meeting has accomplished anything, it's that we don't have a magic bullet to reduce the deficit to the Red Bulls, so if Anthony wants less downforce and I want to match the Red Bulls through the fast corners as much as possible, then it'll give a placebo effect if nothing else. It's hardly the best game to be playing right now, but the Red Bulls took the front row rather commandingly, so we're pretty much just grasping at straws today. The only good side, I suppose, is that we're ahead of the Ferraris, with Alvarez in fifth, Ziegler putting on a surprisingly good performance to put his Mercedes up into sixth, and Henrique de Matteo in seventh, just ahead of the other Mercedes of Koskinen. With any luck, the Ferraris and the Mercedes will get all mixed together and battle while we in the top four disappear into the distance, blunting Ferrari's charge forward for the time being.
"Safety car, safety car!" Nicky Morrison called out roughly two-thirds of the way into the race. Suddenly, my race seemed to fire back into life. The Red Bulls led from the start and maintained that lead - Weaver over Renner - even through the pitstops, whereas I initially clung onto fourth behind Anthony, but eventually as Anthony's tyres wore out, his aerodynamic setup wasn't giving him enough to work with. Anthony began to fade and dropped behind me by the time we made our one and only pitstop for the day. That is when Ferrari seemed to come alive, with Felipe Alvarez eating towards us and eventually even overtaking Anthony for fourth, dropping my teammate down to fifth place. So the good news was that all the gap the Red Bulls built up over me was gone, and I had a chance to fight for the win. The bad news was that Felipe Alvarez was now right on my gearbox and seemed to have the edge over all of us at the moment. The only problem is that these aren't actually the positions we're in, these are the net provisions, where we'll be after everyone takes their pitstops.
After the various mad dashes to pitlane and pitlane crashes - me managing to pit from the lead just before a safety car and keep a podium position before succumbing to contact at Australia 2008 for instance, Henrique de Matteo and Umberto Petronelli getting disqualified for leaving a closed pitlane at Canada 2007, and then the pitlane crash between Harrison, Hamalainen, and Koskinen at the same event a year later - the FIA finally decided to adjust the pit procedure under safety car. What happens now is that we get a delta on our steering wheel's screen to follow until we get to the start-finish straight, at which point we can either pit or continue on at reduced speed to the safety car queue. So finally, you could pit under safety car, and due to everyone else essentially being at pitlane speed as well, next to no time was lost if you could pit at the perfect time. Who were the beneficiaries this time? Henrique de Matteo and Wilhelm Ziegler. battling with each other for sixth and seventh all day, the two former Ferrari teammates started out on the prime tyres and ran them long into the race. At this point, they were running on bare tread, and we were starting to catch them before they even made their stops, so everyone was sure that they'd fall right back to where they've been all day long.
Now though, Henrique de Matteo and Wilhelm Ziegler were exiting the pits, one-two, on fresh option tyres while the rest of us were on prime tyres that already had half a stint of wear on them. Oh snap. Just like that, two cars that weren't in contention all day were now leading the Atlantic Grand Prix.
"Oh, come on, that's ridiculous. If they do this, everyone is just going to wait for a safety car and then get a pitstop for free!" I complained over the radio, seeing for the first time what this rule change could mean, and not liking it. Now if a driver felt like it was going to be a wreck-fest of a day, they could just slap on the hardest tyres they had, go long, and then get their mandatory pitstop done cheaply under safety car. Not to mention the fact that now, whenever there's a safety car, everyone is just going to make a mad dash for the pits to pit then so they don't get screwed over. I admit that I don't entirely know what the FIA was trying to accomplish with this rule change, but I can't imagine that this is it. If this is their idea of strategic competition, I don't like it.
That being said, Formula One does seem to be a bit upset that, when they got rid of refueling on safety grounds - or at least perceived safety grounds, given that Indycar drivers are just as exposed, and they still do refueling - that the races just turned into one-stop affairs. Everyone tends to start on the options to break away from the field and then switch to the hards for a longer second stint. There are a few exceptions, sure, but it tends to make strategy a rather simple ordeal. F1 has asked Bridgestone about playing around with the tyre formula to maybe make it more varied or exciting, but Bridgestone has, in that Japanese way, made it very clear that this is what is right, and they are not interested in producing a gimmick tyre. F1 may want a degrading tyre to spice up the races, but Bridgestone is in F1 to promote their tyres, and degrading tyres don't exactly inspire consumer confidence.
"Copy that Tamara, stay focused. We are now in fifth place." Nicky Morrison cut off my complaints with a back to business approach, reminding me that, as much as my situation has changed, it hasn't changed that much. My goal is still to fight for the championship, and Martin Weaver, Maximilian Renner, Anthony Harrison, and Felipe Alvarez are my rivals in that regard. Henrique de Matteo and Wilhelm Ziegler? Not so much. Of course, I could say that, but this might be the beginning of a renaissance for Henrique de Matteo just over one year after his horror crash, at a track he missed the debut race at, no less. A Mercedes taking second place from one of us could also have championship implications if things remain this tight throughout the rest of the year. The points system may be slightly different, but it's still very close, at least this year, and 2007 and 2008 tell me all I need to know about what the difference between 15 points for third and 18 points for second. My goal first and foremost was still to score more points than my championship rivals, but if either of the front two falters, I need to seize my chance. Because the difference between merely beating my rivals and beating my rivals plus getting a couple extra points might make the difference in the end of the year on that desert night in Abu Dhabi.
Henrique wasn't making it easy on me - with Alvarez nowhere in sight, he was looking to make up for Germany, no doubt - so as we rounded turn sixteen, he promptly fucked off into the distance. Wilhelm Ziegler followed some way behind. Initially, the Red Bulls and I thought he might still have a chance against Ziegler if nothing else - while behind Harrison tried to use that advantage down the straights to get back at his former teammate, now in red, for fourth - but once we came through those first three corners, the tyre advantage became apparent. Ziegler's tyres were fresh, new, and softer than ours to begin with, and when we tried to follow the lines he could do, our worn out, dusty tyres covered in grime and bits of loose rubber? Well, in true French fashion, they protested. Henrique de Matteo disappeared into the distance at a fast rate, Wilhelm Ziegler followed at only a slightly slower pace, while Weaver, Renner, and I? In comparison, we were crawling. Even our crawl eventually spread itself out, as our tyres were in no condition to fight and were screaming out for mercy in the dirty air of the cars ahead, so soon enough, we had to drop back just to make sure we didn't make our own situation worse. Believe me, none of us felt this was ideal.
In the end, there was nothing to be done. Henrique and Wilhelm were simply too fast, and our tyres simply weren't competitive at this stage. I suppose the FIA will only use this to justify their attempts at meddling with the tyres further, seeing a race decided by the majority of the grid being content on mediocre tyres because the track position lost via a green flag pitstop was too great unless everyone else pit too. But was the answer really just to put tyres that degrade so much we won't have a choice but to pit? I don't think so, it's not introducing variety, it's more mandating everyone pits slightly more often at slightly shorter intervals. Without fuel strategy, if the tyres perform well for a certain amount of laps, then everyone is pretty much just going to run that amount of laps. Hell, even Henrique and Wilhelm ran the tyres for the same amount of time as we did, the difference being they ran the primes first and then the options, as well as the safety car making the pitstop free.
So, with all that being said, the results of the 2010 Atlantic Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 25 points.
2: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 18 points.
3: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 15 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 12 points.
5: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
6: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 8 points.
7: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 6 points.
8: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 4 points.
9: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 2 points.
10: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Sauber-Ferrari - 1 point.
It took nearly two years for it to happen, but for the first time since he lost the championship despite his best efforts at the 2008 Brazilian Grand Prix, Henrique de Matteo is a grand prix winner again. I don't mean to cheapen this victory, but without the safety car, I anticipate that the order would've looked something like this: Weaver, Renner, Shchegolyayeva, Alvarez, Harrison, Matteo, Koskinen, Kaminski, Ziegler, Higashiyama. I could be wrong of course, and they would've been on faster tyres anyway at the end of the race so they may have made up a lot more time than I'm expecting, but the point is that they still would have finished deep in the pack. In any case, the rules are the same for everybody and anyone could've been in that position. Their teams put them in the position to take advantage of a loophole, an oversight, maybe even an intentional gimmick, whatever this pitstop thing is, Ferrari and Mercedes were there to capitalize on it. The teams put them there and Matteo and Ziegler executed it flawlessly - sitting there, just behind the Red Bulls on the restart, I couldn't fight anybody. All I could do is watch the red car disappear into the distance with the silver and teal car following it a few seconds later. It wasn't a conventional win, it was probably luckier and more circumstantial than both wins, but a win is a win, and nobody can take that away from our top two cars today in the field. Henrique is a winner again, and despite everything else that's pissing me off today, I have to say that, I'm proud for the Brazilian. As a bonus, any guilt over winning Singapore 2009 in Henrique's car seemed to dissipate, because he got that win.
Needless to say, an unexpected winner has had championship implications in the top six:
1: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 210 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 206 points.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 204 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 190 points.
5: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 186 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 159 points.
Thus, sixty-one points covers the top six with six races remaining. The high speed, embankment run on the northern edge of Saint Petersburg for the Russian Grand Prix, the nighttime thrills of the Marina Bay streets for the Singapore Grand Prix, the historic samurai curves of the Suzuka Circuit for the Japanese Grand Prix. The ambitious new plan to build a city around a race track in South Korea for the Korean Grand Prix, the iconic plunge between the lakes in Sao Paulo for the Brazilian Grand Prix, and the day to night finale in the desert for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Six races across three continents means there are 150 points still on offer, but the way this year has gone, nobody is honestly going to score all those points. This year has been so competitive, and nobody has been consistent enough that I even consider Henrique a legitimate contender at this point - even if he is mathematically secure and will be for some time yet - but the top five? We're all within a win, and the Belgian and Italian Grand Prix prove how quickly twenty-five points can be gained or lost.
Things are just as tight in the constructors' championship, where the top six reads as follows:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 410 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 400 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 345 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 180 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 137 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 59 points.
No points where exchanged in the battle between Force India and Williams. All the top six cars finished, plus both Mercedes were in the points, plus Kaminski, plus the Sauber of Higashiyama, and that left no room for either of those teams. This did mean that the midfield battle stayed alive, while Red Bull was just ten points behind us in the constructors' championship. On one hand, I should be - and I am - concerned by that, because Red Bull is the enemy, and we should be the ones winning all the trophies. But on the other hand, with this new points system and this record-breakingly long calendar, I'm very impressed that the season is still this competitive this deep into the championship. With all the contrasting fortunes and unexpected race results, I would've never guessed that McLaren and Red Bull would be just ten points apart in all of this. That, I suppose, is indicative of the sheer level of competition, because nobody can break away as a team either. Mercedes did take the opportunity to give them more a buffer over Lotus, whereas a string of consistent results from Ferrari pretty much means that they're secure in the top three of the constructors' championship regardless of what happens. Still, with forty-three points per race in this case, it's going to take awhile to mathematically eliminate anyone in the constructors' championship. Make no mistake, this is going down to the wire just as much as the regular drivers' championship is.
As soon as her bags were set down, Natasha collapsed into the couch on my private jet, frown clear on her face. She finished eighteenth in the race, splitting the Caterhams, which is honestly pretty good given that the Atlantic Grand Prix wasn't an attrition heavy race, so I didn't think it was the race. On the other hand, she has been getting pretty upset with Mercedes as of late. She's been pushing hard for Mercedes to put her into a Force India seat - she's even told me that she asked my father if she could get money from Goliath to sweeten the deal, which might not be a bad call considering that Force India seemed willing to take it for 2009 - reasoning that she could at least be doing as well as Giuseppino Leone. The Italian driver was performing very well considering the gap between his Toro Rosso stint and his Force India stint, but he hasn't been as strong as Barbaro, and if Natasha can have the muscle of Mercedes behind her and money? It could happen. That being said, Mercedes doesn't seem to want to wield that type of power over Force India - though it should be noted that this isn't anything novel, in the early 2000s, Ferrari treated Sauber as somewhat of a feeder team, with Henrique de Matteo being the most prominent example of that, as well as the Red Bull and Toro Rosso thing, obviously - and they seem content to leave Natasha at Marussia for the time being. So yes, it is something frustrating for her, and she has been upset by it, but somehow, I don't feel like that's why she's upset.
"What's wrong?" I asked as soon as I put my own stuff down.
"How's Villarreal?" Nat asked, deflecting, or at least, that's what I thought she was doing.
"Come on, talk to me." asked gently, trying to get her to open up after the deflection.
"No really, tell me, how is it with her?" she protested, not looking me in the eye, a blush beginning to creep on her face. I sat down on the left-hand side seat and looked over to her, beginning to realize what this was about, and not quite knowing how to deal with it.
"In what way?" I asked calmly, addressing this conversation with seriousness.
"I don't know, how do you feel when you're with her?" she asked, raising her voice, sounding more desperate now. Okay, she's been dealing with this for awhile, probably hiding it from me, and now it's finally boiled over and she needs to hear something. She's finally gotten to Formula One and it's not quite what she always dreamed of being in a backmarker team, she tried to carve her own path and get a GPDA position, only for the grid to reject her and vote for Renner, and on top of all of that, she's reached that critical point in her career. Much like I was in 2007, she's finally reached Formula One, all those days of relentlessly pushing herself in the junior series are over, all those days of nothing but competition are over, she's gotten to the top - even if it may not feel like it all the time with the car she has - and the world is starting to open up for her. She's seeing grid girls, she's seeing all these different places in the world and all their different stances on sexuality, and she's seeing me comfortable in my own skin, now on my second long-term relationship. In short, she's finally starting to ask questions about her own sexuality.
"I feel good, really. She's funny, she's beautiful, she makes sure to keep me down to earth whenever I get trapped in my own stupid head. Roksana always seemed to struggle with me being a celebrity, and Ysabella struggles with it too in a way, but Roksana approached it with self-loathing, she approaches it with raised eyebrows and a sharp tongue. I know it might sound a bit weird, but it's nice to have someone who calls me out on my shit." I told her, trying to be as honest and clear as I could to somebody that didn't have any experience with this stuff. In a way, I felt like I was my 2010 self-talking back to my 2007 self. At the same time, with how frustrated I've been getting with Ysabella as of late, maybe I needed this too. I needed to just speak, out loud, why I like spending time with her and what I like about her. The same part of her that gets resentful about driving a GT car - which isn't all too dissimilar from Natasha's situation with Marussia, mind you - also makes sure I don't get too big of an ego on me. For all she complains about me being this magically fast F1 driver, she's also quick to label me an ordinary dork. The second one I find remarkably refreshing in a world of headlines, reporters, and championship battles.
"When did you realize you liked her?" Nat asked, a bit calmer, sitting up a bit straighter, but still not quite looking directly at me - but she was listening intently.
"With her it was a bit odd. We met through Dani, and I think she was purposefully trying to set us up together, we clicked pretty quickly. I enjoyed her personality, I liked going back and forth with her, and we seemed to be halfway dating before we ever formally became anything. I guess that's where her being in the US hurt, because we've pretty much been together for most of the year, but we've only actually done stuff together for...well, it feels like it's only been a few weeks." I shrugged. We met right before the preseason started for F1, so really, the only time I've spent with her is the two North American races and then the summer break, which amounts to what, five weeks? Five weeks I couldn't entirely devote to her, mind you, so yeah, we've been together according to the calendar for awhile, but in practice? It doesn't feel like we've gotten very far in our relationship, which feels weird to say about someone who I've had sex with who is currently, no doubt, in my house in Miami.
"Why would she do that?" Nat asked, now looking at me.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Daniella, you two were together for a little bit, so why would she just - " Nat began to ask before I cut her off.
"Oh that, yeah, no, not really. Dani and I had sex and I think she was more into me than her, but I think we both know it was a pretty desperate, stupid move for the both of us. I cheated on Roksana, and she revealed a crush she was probably trying to keep secret. I think her introducing me to Villarreal is a pretty clear, unspoken sign that we're just going to remain friends and not do that ever again." I explained.
"You seem pretty calm about it all?" Nat seemed confused.
"I am. I dunno, maybe it seems weirder from the outside, but I think with me and Dani, we're just content to move on from that." I shrugged.
"So, it was basically just casual sex?" she asked, by now fully banking her head to the side, almost like a confused puppy - it was kinda cute.
"Well...yes and no. I think she on some level wanted a relationship and accidentally pushed too far, while I was just...unhappy with how things were going with Roksana, and I needed some sort of release." I explained, trying to explain a series of emotionally charged, bad decisions that, for the most part, everyone has moved on from relatively well. Roksana probably got the worst of it and I admit I hesitate to reach out to her and find out how she's doing, but it was hardly a homewrecking situation for her either. A rough couple of weeks no doubt, but she was always financially independent and successful on her own merit. I guess in a way, she was tragically right about never wanting to end up like a trophy wife. The fact that she was never dependent on me made it easier for her to move on after our relationship fell apart, even if it can't do anything for her mental state or her sense of self-worth.
"Do lesbians even have casual sex?" she asked innocently and I couldn't help but bark out a laugh before I stopped myself.
"I mean yeah, there's straight people, gay people, lesbians, whatever, all having casual sex. I think that type of thing depends more on the person than the sexuality." case in point, for myself, there's little interest in it, but Roksana told me plenty of stories of flings or attempted relationships so short they might as well have been flings.
"But I thought - " she cut herself off and sighed "I went on the internet, and I read these things that people say about lesbian sex, they talk about it being so delicate, compassionate, loving, so different than regu - than straight sex."
"Oh God," I laughed again "Nat that sounds like it was written by a college student."
"Oh," she groaned, head in her hands out of embarrassment.
"Hey, come on now." I tried to coax her out of it "What I think that might be is a lesbian who had straight sex, didn't like it for obvious reasons, and thought that lesbian sex was so much better. In reality though? I don't think it's all different. I mean bisexual people exist - Dani's one of them - so there must be something that men can offer, otherwise they'd just be with women."
"So, what was it like for you?" Nat asked, finally looking at me again, her eyes a bit teary and lip quivering, showing this was hardly an easy conversation for her. I was nervous when I came out to Natasha and I had pretty much figured myself out by then, Nat still seems like she has so much to figure out before she's ready to even attempt a relationship with anyone.
"Well, it depends. With Roksana, she was very much the teacher, and I was learning it from her. I feel like that's why that part of the relationship worked so well for us, because for all the fame and the F1 and the stuff working for me, she had experience with romance and lesbianism and all that stuff. It was a way of equalizing things for her, and as I started to get more comfortable in myself and with my sexuality, her advantage went away, while I was still the F1 driver, traveling all over the world, meeting all these people that weren't just a fringe journalist from Marseille catering to a tiny audience. I didn't need her to be anything more than that, but she could never accept that, she was never comfortable with the inequality." I began.
"With Daniella, it was nothing really. She was so excited to show me Indycar, show me America, and I guess at some point she started to want more from me than I wanted from her. But with things collapsing with Roksana, I was in a bad state and I just wanted to feel good and be loved by someone who didn't have all these hang-ups. So I went and proved Roksana was right all along." I shook my head as I continued, recognizing my mistake there, even if it's been too long to take back any of it.
"And now with Ysabella, it's weird. I think the reason why she likes me and the reason why she resents me are one in the same. She sees me and so often she just sees this awkward, dorky girl that likes to stay at home and cuddle up on the couch, no different than her really. But then she can't help but remember than I'm an F1 driver, that my career has gone so much further than hers, and there's nothing special about me. I'm just a normal person, not even a particularly good one either. I'm socially awkward, I spend too much time in my own head, I overthink things constantly...but despite all that, I get to drive for Scuderia Ferrari and McLaren and all these teams that she could only dream about. So, she loves the person I am, but she can't wrap her head around the fact that I'm like this, that I'm like her, but I'm in F1 and she's in Ferrari Challenge. And that's the whole difficulty in our relationship. I want her to see me without just getting bitter over job, because I'm scared that if she's going to be resentful, then it's just going to be another Roksana situation, and I don't want to make that mistake again." I sighed, probably bringing out more or myself than is actually helpful to Natasha right now, but I guess I needed this conversation too.
"Wow...now who sounds like a college student." Natasha showed the briefest smirk as she joked about me psychoanalyzing my own relationships despite not being the slightest bit qualified to make any one of these judgements. I guess she had a point there.
"Yeah yeah, but that's how it is." I rolled my eyes "I know this probably didn't help much, but my experiences haven't been the typical lesbian experiences either. Of the three people I've been with, one was a reporter that interviewed me, one was my teammate, and the teammate introduced me to the third."
"No no, it helped. It did." Natasha assured me before she sighed "Sorry for bothering you about this, I've just been thinking about it for a long time and trying to figure it out myself and I've just gotten nowhere."
"Hey, it's fine. We're family as far as I'm concerned, I'm glad to help." I shot her my best reassuring smile before asking "So, what do you think you've figured out?"
"Well...I don't think I'm attracted to men. I don't know if I'm attracted to women or not but...I guess I want to try? And I guess that's already a lot more than I want with men?" she squeezed out her words, showing just how uncertain she was "I don't know what to do."
"Yeah, I suppose I'm lucky that I had Roksana there, making me realize all this and helping me through it while we went, but...I think I can still help you. Not in the same way Roksana did, obviously, but...guidance I guess." I offered, the best I could do, really.
"Guidance..." Nat seemed to mull it over before deciding "Yeah, thank you. That...that would help."
"Great," I smiled before bringing up the tour we were going to go on once we were in Saint Petersburg "First order of business though...I doubt you're gonna meet somebody in a Russian nuclear reactor."
"Hey, don't judge, it might be nice. A pretty Soviet scientist with glasses on her nose, a long white lab coat, standing there with her heels..." she trailed off with a smirk, seemingly joking, at least mostly.
"First of all: that sounds pretty gay to me, second of all: the Union hasn't existed for basically your entire life, why does she have to be Soviet?" I teased.
"Hey, listen, they're still calling it the Leningrad plant, so I'm still going to call them Soviets!" Natasha joked back. So maybe she was a lesbian, maybe she wasn't, but she wanted to get something off her chest, I discussed it with her as best as I could, and now we're back into a joking mood. I think I did pretty good as an older cousin or big sister or whatever you want to call me.
"So, what was it like?" Ysabella asked over the phone a few days later, as I lounged in the hotel room after the reactor tour.
"Impressive, but also scary, you know? Driving through these forest roads south of the city and then suddenly the trees open up and you just see this massive concrete building, with these four giant, featureless gray boxes, and you just know each of those boxes holds an actual, real life nuclear reactor. Then there is this one, thin, white and red cooling tower that looks exactly like the one at Chernobyl." I began, just trying to describe the feeling of seeing these things. Now, I sit in an F1 car for a living, I have a 750-horsepower engine essentially bolted into my spine every time I get in the car, so I have a distorted understanding of power, but even that doesn't even register as a speck in comparison to this thing. Think about it, four reactors, four engines, basically, and it can power an entire city with ease - one of the largest cities in Europe, no less. Five million people fueled by four sources of power. To put into perspective how ridiculous this is, the aforementioned Chernobyl disaster? That was the explosion of just one of these RBMK reactors, the Leningrad plant here has four of them. This weekend I'm going to be propelled forward at two-hundred miles per hour down the embankment straight on the other side of the Gulf of Finland, feeling eight cylinders moving at 18,000rpm mere inches behind my head, but I cannot stress how utterly insignificant it seems in comparison.
"Gee, a Chernobyl comparison, that makes your girlfriend feel great about this trip." Ysabella chastised.
"Hey, come on now, two power plants of the same make in what was the same country look alike, that's all. It doesn't mean anything; they've learned from Chernobyl...at least I hope they did." I tried to convince her, because while I did think she was joking, I think there was a hint of real concern there.
"Real convincing," she joked.
"Yeah, I know, but hey, if I grow a third arm, you'll be the first to know." I joked back.
"I better be. If it pops out during the race, you better hide it for me!" she made me shake my head as I suppressed a giggle. This was good, these are the moments I like with her.
"Anyway, so we park in front and there's this plant director guy, lab coat and all. He goes and gives the standard "Hello Tamara Anatoliyevna, Natalia Yevgeniyevna!" stuff, standard Russian things - " I began when Villarreal interrupted with a country.
"Does that stuff bother you?" she asked.
"What the patronymics? Eh, not really. It's how the language works and they mean it as a sign of respect. Like in America, they would call you Ms. Villarreal or whatever, here the respectful thing is to use your first name and your patronymic. And you get your last name from your dad anyway, so is it any more sexist than calling me Ms. Shchegolyayeva? I don't think so. It's how they do it there, it's meant to be nice, and I don't think it's worth the hassle to change it." I explained.
"No, I get that, I just meant constantly being reminded of your dad when things are like...strained between you two." she clarified.
"Oh, that." I sighed "Yeah I don't know. He's still my dad, complaining isn't going to change that, and he did try his best to get me a drive in Formula One, even if I didn't like what he had to say. I suppose it looks better now that Force India is actually a competent team, but like...could you blame me for not seeing that in 2008? Hell even in 2009, they only really had pace at Spa and Monza, so like...my half season with Ferrari was undoubtedly better than whatever I could've done with Force India. So I guess that in the end it doesn't really matter, everything worked out in the end, didn't it?"
"I mean...yeah. But you still don't talk to him?" she asked, sounding confused and delicate, like she wanted to know this but wasn't sure if it was a touchy subject, like maybe she shouldn't be pushing this over the phone in what's otherwise a good conversation.
"Yeah...at this point it's not so much anger, it's more just like...I've gotten where I want to be, I have a new agent, life is good. I can be independent from him, and I kind of like it." I tried to explain my feelings on this. I knew it was pretty shitty of me, I knew that I could be doing a better effort with my last remaining family, but...on the other hand, I also felt like I didn't really need to. Natasha is my family, Ysabella is my family now, I don't feel the need to cling onto a blood relationship. And I know that sounds ungrateful, because I know my father spent millions of dollars on my career and is now spending just as much money on Natasha's, sponsoring her at Marussia and potentially even upping that sponsorship if Natasha gets her move to Force India after all, but does that have to be transactional? Am I obligated to talk to him and have a relationship with him just because he supported me? Yes, this is a lot more money than traditional parenting, but his job as my father was still to support me to the best of his ability, and throwing money at his daughter's racing career is hardly the worst thing for a post-Soviet oligarch to spend his money on. All that being said, he is my father, he does love me, and he did a lot for me...so maybe I should be obligated, for familial reasons, not financial ones. I guess this is part of the reason why I don't face this issue, it's easier to just not think about these difficult things when I ignore them, and a championship battle is certainly keeping me busy.
"Look, I don't want to step all over your life, what happens is your decision and it's not my place to push here. But...as someone whose dad died early in my racing career; I wish I got to spend more time with him." Ysabella offered, her voice cracking just a bit to show how much he meant to her. More women are getting into motorsports, but it's still male dominated, probably will be for the rest of our lives and beyond, and that means that almost every female racing driver got into it because of a passionate dad or at least one that wanted to support her racing career. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I've never seen an example where a racing driver's mother was the one pushing hard on the racing side, it feels like it's always been the fathers who take a leading role with this stuff, so in the awkward world of learning to race in Venezuela and eventually working her way into the United States, I'm sure Ysabella's father was a constant presence in her racing career until he just wasn't. I sighed.
"I...I'll keep that in mind, okay?" I offered.
"Just like...appreciate what you have, alright?" Ysabella gulped.
"Okay." I nodded, knowing she couldn't see but hoping she got the message anyway.
"So," she cleared her throat and got back into the swing of things "How was the reactor?"
"Right, so we got to take a tour inside, see the control room, the turbine hall, we even got to stand on a catwalk and look down into the top of the containment structure, seeing this big circle with all these different colored boxes. The plant director tells us that the colors represent the control rods, neutron regulators, pressure tubes, all these things. I thought it was a decorative floor patten at first but no, it's the top of the reactor and every color corresponds to something that keeps an actual freaking nuclear reaction under control. It's insane." I tried to convey the feeling of looking at this aesthetically pleasing floor pattern and then realizing that, nope, it's not just a tile circle or whatever, it's the top of a reactor structure, and I might as well be looking down into Chernobyl. Maybe I'm not doing a good job explaining it, but I felt a reaction in my best down to my stomach at that, just realizing what I was looking down at and the sheer power below. I know I keep saying this, but this scale, this power, goes some way towards making you feel small.
"That must've had your nerd brain going." Ysabella heckled.
"Oh yeah, it's a struggle to wrap my head around for sure. Especially when all the scientists working there just get used to it and treat it as a mundane thing. There are people that work in a place that has more energy than Hiroshima and Nagasaki like it's a normal thing." I voiced my shock.
"Well, I'm sure they feel the same way about what we do, you know? I mean my best friend went from 23rd to 6th at the Indianapolis 500 a few months ago, and my girlfriend drives 200 miles per hour on rainy tracks on dry tyres saying that the conditions are fine, that's pretty crazy too." Ysabella noted, mentioning my career but without bitterness in a way that was almost a huge relief for me. Villarreal was referring to Daniella Pieri's performance at the 2010 Indianapolis 500, where she recovered from a disappointing qualifying to take sixth place, finishing ahead of all four Penskes and all but one of her teammates - Rio Andretti got a podium, good for him - in a downright heroic performance. Meanwhile, for me, she's referring back to Malaysia, where I stomached out the brief rain on dry tyres and thus had a pitstop over the field at the end of the safety car. So yeah, I guess it is a matter of perspective to an extent, but I haven't gotten bored of what I do, I'm impressed with it every day and grateful for where I'm at, so I can't imagine trudging through a nuclear reactor would get boring either.
"Or getting podiums in a Ferrari," I noted that she was doing some pretty damn cool things too.
"Hey, I guess that's a shared experience for us." she accepted, actually taking the remark pretty well, and if I wasn't already holding back a sigh of relief at her reactions, I was now, because this phone call was going well. This was a good day.
"Yup, but hopefully I can do a bit better in a McLaren." I responded, turning my focus onto the upcoming weekend. Last year Matti and I cycled to the lead after Anthony Harrison had an issue, but Maximilian Renner was charging up the field and, while I did hold him back long enough to protect Hamalainen's win, I did fall back to third in what was, essentially, my home race. The goal was to do two better today, and the championship battle was all the enticement I needed. At the time of the 2009 Malaysian Grand Prix and the 2009 Indianapolis 500, I wasn't in Formula One at all, but then I won Le Mans, then I won the Toronto Grand Prix, and not only did I come back to F1, but I came back with Ferrari. I gave Ferrari a one-two finish at Belgium, I held onto a podium at Russia, I won the Singapore Grand Prix, and I impressed so much in half a season that I got a seat with McLaren. Now Australia, Malaysia, and Miami, three wins later, I'm fighting for a championship, I'm the only woman that has ever gotten to this point, by far the most successful, and every good result takes me one step closer to turning that dream into a reality. Anthony was dominant last year before his problem and I was damn good in my Ferrari too, so now I'm in a McLaren which is even stronger in a straight line this year, so I have to seize the opportunity to have a good race. Red Bull and Ferrari are closing in so if I can have a good day in Saint Petersburg, I need to maximize.
"I hope so too, good luck out there, yeah?" Ysabella wished me well, signalling that the phone call was wrapping up.
"I will thank you." I responded, biting my lip for only a moment before adding "Hey Ysabella?"
"Yeah?" the Venezuelan asked.
"I think we're going to be okay." I said with a smile, this phone call went fantastically well and combined with remembering all the good things about her as I talked to Natasha back on the plane...I feel more confident about this relationship than I have in months. I don't know if I've been internalizing that well or if Ysabella has seen me struggling, but either way, I want to tell her that I think things are going better and I hope she takes it the right way.
"I'd like that." she responded, probably smiling too. Given well, received well.
"Good." I let myself smile fully.
"Love you," she responded a bit hesitantly, voicing that for the first time in our relationship.
"I love you too." I responded, not letting myself hesitate. Ysabella was being vulnerable with me and she needed to hear it, so I let myself show the appreciation and the relief as I voiced my feelings for her. I know the end of the season is going to be hectic, but I can't wait until I get to see her for real again. For now though, this call is enough, this call is good, and this is exactly the kind of mindset I want to have as we go into the final European race of the season.
Given that Vladimir Alexandrov was an actual Russian driver - from nearby Vyborg no less, literally just up the Primorskoye Highway from Saint Petersburg, serving as the second city of the Leningrad Oblast - I was no longer the focus of all the media attention. Unless Kazakhstan decides to build a race track, this is also close as I'm going to get to a home race though, and, for better or worse, it is where my ancestors were from. To that end, I had a special helmet this weekend, this time harkening back to the Russian Empire - the regime under which my ancestors began moving from the empire's western interior to the distant Kazakh steppe - in the form of a design which was basically the same as the football kit tribute I had last year. Instead of maroon red and gold, however, this was yellow and black, with the impressive black double-headed eagle on the back of my helmet contrasting beautifully with the yellow base color. It was admittedly somewhat spoiled by the whites, red, and blacks of Vodafone McLaren and the various sponsors, but that was unavoidable. The point is that I once again managed to find a way to show my appreciation for the country without glorifying the current regime. I guess it's not much better to glorify the Russian Empire, but one: it no longer exists and nobody is exactly calling to bring it back, and two: I'm about to start my final lap in Q3, so I don't exactly have time to dwell on it.
"Push, push, push!" called out Nicky Morrison as I came through the final corner, turning ninety degrees to the right onto the start-finish straight. The future Lakhta Center skyscraper's foundations on my right, the pitlane on my left, I sped underneath the start-finish gantry to begin my final lap. I made it into the top ten, I was in contention for pole, and it was about damn time I bring the fight to Anthony in qualifying. So, storming down the relatively short start-finish straight, I slammed onto the brakes for turn one, popping down the gears, turning the car to the left, and giving it a burst of acceleration on the exit of turn one. That didn't last long until I tapped the brakes again, for another ninety-degree corner, but this time to the right as turn two snapped me parallel to the start-finish straight. Accelerating out of here for real, I threw the car to the right for the apex of turn three full throttle and then did the same for turn four, the two corners almost functioning as separate apices for the same flat-out corner. The full speed part finally came to an end with the braking zone of turn five, a ninety-degree corner to the left. Bleeding off the speed, making the turn, and then firing out of it, coming into the fast right-hand kink of turn six to end sector one.
Almost as soon as I crossed the line for sector two, I was in the braking zone for turn seven, the hairpin. Turn one had some ninety-degree corners, but it was overall pretty fast and carried some momentum, the whole track did really, so the slowness of the hairpin was almost jarring in comparison. Not jarring enough to keep me here for long though, because soon enough, I was charging out of it, accelerating all the way as I swept through turn eight to the left, riding along the Lakhta Embankment all the way. My leg was sealing the F-duct all the way through the corner, the feeling of the car just barely staying in line without the rear downforce almost harkened back to the 1960s, the era before wings, when you only had mechanical grip to depend on through fast corners as you perilously gripped the car. There was no crash or even much of a slide for me though, the car remaining compliant despite the stalled-out wing, letting me relax just a bit as the exit of turn eight turned into that long, long back straight along the bay, that defining feature of the circuit.
Having truly maximized the straight, I was hitting the rev limiter at the top of seventh gear when I finally got off the throttle, got off the F-duct and slammed the brakes for turn nine. Shooting past the two-hundred-meter board and letting the car get as close to the hundred fifty board as I dared before simple physics dictated I have to brake if I want to stay on the circuit. And stay on the circuit I did as I turned to the left, into the chicane. Left for turn nine, right into turn ten, and then left again through turn eleven, coming onto the briefest of straights as I crossed the sector line to finish sector two and enter the roundabout. Throwing the car to the right to enter the roundabout in turn twelve, and then grinding through turns thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen with as much speed as my McLaren MP4/25 could keep, winding the car in and in until finally it snapped out to the right for turn sixteen, mirror turn twelve. A whisper of a straight followed before a ninety-degree corner to the right in the form of turn seventeen brought me onto a longer straight.
Accelerating now, I tried to maximize speed through the rest of the lap. The chicane of turns eighteen to the right and nineteen to the left almost reminded me of the old harbor chicane of Monaco in that it was basically just changing lanes...albeit with the walls a bit further out, thankfully. Now lined up with the straight coming out of turn two, all that was left was to complete the box. So, coming down the straight before turning to the right through the ninety-degree penultimate corner, giving it another burst of gas to mirror the space between turns one and two. The pit entry was on the inside as I tapped the brakes for the final corner, turning the car through a final ninety-degree left in the form of turn twenty-one. Spitting out onto the corner, once again running next to the construction site, I was on the F-duct and on the throttle as I gave it everything, trying to erase the distance to the line as quickly as possible in a mad dash to the finish.
"It's looking good provisionally." Nicky Morrison began over the radio as I slowed down and tried to catch my breath on the in lap. I gave it everything I had on that lap, I know I always do that in qualifying - it's the point after all - but that felt like something different. If that wasn't good enough, then maybe I'm just not good enough for scoring poles "Renner was four tenths down on you at the sector line but he seems to gain a bit back through sector three. Okay he's out of the roundabout...through seventeen...looks good in the chicane. Looks good in twenty...fast through the final corner too...we're watching...okay."
"What's the damage?" I asked, knowing that, with Renner behind me and sector three probably being the section of the track that suited the Red Bull the best, there might be a cause for concern here.
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva," Nicky Morrison began dramatically, causing my breath to hitch...you didn't deliver bad news this dramatically "You've taken pole for the Russian Grand Prix by 0.183 seconds."
"Woo! Thank you guys, thank you. We have a rocketship in a straight line. Let's make it count tomorrow, yeah?"
"You got it Tamara. First career pole position, enjoy it!" Michael Coronet chimed in, joining over the radio. Wins at Singapore 2009, Australia, Malaysia, and Miami 2010, but no pole positions...until today. I wanted to improve in qualifying relative to my teammate, and today, I've done that the best way possible. Today is only Saturday though, and Anthony Harrison had pole last year before running into an issue, so with a fast Red Bull lining up alongside me, with Weaver in third, and with Henrique de Matteo running high after a winning and pipping my teammate for fourth on his final lap, there will be plenty of competition. The Ferraris double-teamed me in Italy and now the Red Bulls seem to be in position to do the same thing...I cannot allow that. Speaking of Ferrari, they won this race last year, and while they may not seem like the biggest threat with Matteo in fourth and Alvarez the team leader in sixth, the way I remember it, Matti Hamalainen and I didn't qualify all that well last year either, and we still managed to put the cars in first and third. Ferrari cannot be discounted, but I was that Ferrari in third and I proved last year that I can hold off Maximilian Renner for a long time at the Lakhta Embankment circuit, so I suppose tomorrow we'll see if it's the car or the driver that matters more here.
"Alright, the grid is forming up behind you. You've won before and today you get to start from the best seat in the house. Good luck out there and have fun." Michael Coronet messaged over the radio as I took the pole position grid slot - on the outside looking into turn one, putting it on the racing line - which seemed like both a gift and a curse. The gift was, obviously, that I already had my car in front for once and I was in the optimal line for turn one, but the curse was that Renner was on the inside, meaning that if he got a good launch and put his car alongside mine, the optimal racing line didn't matter. I couldn't exactly turn in when there was a Red Bull in the way, not unless I wanted to end both of our days - and likely our championship campaigns - early. So yeah, in somewhat of a less dramatic reversal of Senna at Suzuka 1990, I'm questioning whether having pole position on the racing line is better or not.
In the end it didn't matter, because when the five red lights went out and the Russian Grand Prix began, I got an excellent launch off the line. Both of us on the front row did really, as did Henrique de Matteo from the second row who shot up from fourth to third. Weaver, in contrast, bogged down off the line, and soon found himself battling side-by-side with my teammate Harrison as Alvarez swerved behind them, the Spaniard like a hungry wolf just looking for an in behind them. Already coming out of turn two at this point, I led the top three as we began gapping the rest of the field, taking advantage of the fact that Weaver, Harrison, and Alvarez were all battling behind. The place is technically a street circuit, even if probably eighty percent of the tarmac is only used for racing - the exceptions being the run along the embankment itself and the roundabout, and even the bit of track connecting them bypasses the actual intersection - so that makes ir somewhat narrow, with the threat of walls if anyone pushes too hard. It wasn't so bad in sector one where the paved runoff, painted in red, blue, and white as an unsubtle reference to the Russian flag, but heading into the hairpin? The track noticeably got tighter and remained that way, more or less, until we got out of the roundabout section. All of this worked to my advantage during the first stint of the race however, as my Bridgestone Potenza options meant I was quick, beginning to gap the rest of the top three even as we as a whole gapped the rest of the field. The situation holding firm until I made it to my pitstop.
"Go, go, go!" Nicky Morrison called out once the lollipop man released me, exiting my box, running along the rest of the pitlane until i was of the limiter, and then turning right as the pit exit deposited me on the inside exit of turn one. Renner and Matteo pit around the same time as I did, but I did end up losing the lead - for now anyway - as Weaver went long in his first stint, finally in clear air, the Australian was trying to escape from Harrison and Alvarez to settle comfortably into fourth place. It seemed to just be about fourth place, but last race showed what a safety car could do to the race, and Monaco proved that Weaver was a threat on the street circuits, so I wasn't able to fully relax until Weaver finally took his pitstop a whole eleven laps later. This released me into the lead, released his teammate Renner into second, and even the Ferrari of Henrique de Matteo sailed on through, but Weaver was able to do exactly what he wanted, coming out in a stable fourth position, finally able to turn his attention towards forward progress rather than fighting the cars immediately behind him.
Fourth place began third place for Martin Weaver at roughly three-fourths of the way through the race, but Red Bull wasn't exactly cheering. An oil pressure issue of some sort left Renner losing speed, and soon enough, the German was left with no choice but to take the car to pitlane and retire it, lest the Red Bull lose an entry entirely. It was a terrible choice to make all around, as Red Bull sacrificed a second place deep in a championship battle, but if they hadn't, it's entirely possible that Renner's engine would've blown up anyway, and then Maximilian would not only fail to score at Russia but go into the next race at Singapore with an engine penalty. Cost cutting and sustainability means engines have to last longer and longer, but making a V8 engine that can run bulletproof at 18,000rpm for multiple races in a row is an almost unthinkable challenge, so mistakes do happen. Renault, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, Cosworth...these are all very serious companies with tons of pedigree when it comes to engine building, yet every single one of them has experienced countless engine failures in racing. All things considered, an oil pressure issue that could very well mean the engine is just fine to run at the next race is a minor problem to have. Still, try telling that to Renner right now.
Nevertheless, the loss of Max Renner that late into the race - and without a safety car, given that he did make it back to the pits on his own power - only strengthened my advantage. Henrique de Matteo was fresh off a win at the Atlantic Grand Prix and driving for the same team that won the race last year, but he still didn't quite have that outright championship contending speed he had in 2008, so he's fortunate to follow up his win with a second place. Likewise, Martin Weaver inherited a podium after a blunder of a start that left him chasing the pack all day, with little success. He did, however, lead a chunk of the race in the middle, so even as I took pole position, set the fastest lap, led the most laps, and won the race, Weaver denied me having a truly perfect day. That didn't dissuade me in the slightest though, and nor did it make the commentary call any less special when I crossed the line.
"And so it is then, Tamara Shchegolyayeva crosses the line to win in Saint Petersburg! From pole position to utter domination in the race, she is putting all her rivals on notice, because this was a powerful, powerful performance!" the English commentary called out. Utter domination...I cannot describe the feeling of hearing your name in that context. This is my fifth race win, and I've had some pretty special ones - chasing down the win at Singapore, judging the conditions to perfection in Australia and Malaysia, and then dueling with my teammate for the third consecutive race at Miami and finally coming out on top at his home race - but domination is something else entirely. The cherry on top is that last year, being adopted as the home driver, having already helped Ferrari win, I was really thinking this could be my chance to take a race win, only to run behind Matti all race long and then drop back as I fought to hold Renner back. Finishing third last year meant that Russia was the one that got away, the first win that could've been, and today I've redeemed that. Not only have I redeemed it and won my fourth race of the season, fifth overall, but now I get to go into the race where I did finally get that first win last year. Yeah, Singapore won't suit the McLaren nearly as well as this track, but after this performance, will anyone really be comfortable counting me out? I don't mean to get arrogant, but it feels unbelievably good to be here right now, to have won this race, so let me indulge in my emotional high a little bit.
As I celebrated my win, the points-paying positions for the 2010 Russian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 25 points.
2: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 18 points.
3: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 15 points.
4: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 12 points.
5: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 10 points.
6: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 8 points.
7: Vladimir Alexandrov - Russia - Lotus-Renault - 6 points.
8: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 4 points.
9: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 2 points.
10: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 1 point.
So, Henrique follows up his win with a second place, as said, Weaver's long first stint enabled him to clear Harrison and Alvarez who remained fourth and fifth, respectively, while both Lotus cars had a good day. Piotr Kaminski finishes best of the rest yet again whilst teammate Vladimir Alexandrov finally has a good day, at his home Grand Prix no less, so the Russian fans have that to be happy about. Of course with me winning, plenty are once again adopting me as their driver, which I am flattered with - for all of Russia's faults and for all my very real concern of their government, they're still race fans, many of whom have absolutely no say in what their government does - it's nice for a win to be popular with the fans, especially with how quickly words like "boring" and "uneventful" get thrown around these days. Elsewhere on the grid, it was a day of damage control for Mercedes, with five points going some way to limit the damage of Lotus scoring fourteen. Rudolfo Goncalves also finishes ninth, bringing the resurgence of Williams back into play after both Force India and Williams failed to feature in the points last time out in France.
So, with me getting a good result while my rivals struggled, the top six in the drivers' championship now look like this:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mecedes - 229 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 225 points.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 218 points.
4: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 196 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 190 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 177 points.
At the top of the standings, I'm at the top, but with just four points ahead of Weaver and eleven ahead of my teammate, taking a second-consecutive win at the Singapore Grand Prix would certainly go a long way towards giving me some breathing room to work with. Of course, there will be a lot of people trying to deny me that follow-up victory - Weaver and Harrison among them, naturally - but Alvarez cannot be discounted either. The Spaniard has willed himself back into championship contention and now sits ahead of Max Renner in the standings, so winning a race now could really set his title charge in motion. Winning both the Italian Grand Prix and the Singapore Grand Prix - two totally different tracks with different racing styles - would certainly also serve to show how far the Ferrari F10 has come since its post-Bahrain slump earlier in the year. The German will be wanting to win too, as Maximilian Renner won't be happy with his retirement today and will be doing everything he can to get back on track here. Then there is the matter of Henrique de Matteo, perhaps I was premature with saying that he's not exactly a championship contender, because his form as of late has been fantastic and he currently sits just thirteen points behind Renner, only nineteen behind his teammate. That's right, despite some of the utter disaster races that Henrique has had to put up with, he's now within a win of his teammate.
To put into perspective how crazy Matteo's resurgence has been, not too long ago, he was locked in a battle with Piotr Kaminski and Tommy Koskinen for sixth place in the drivers' standings. Well, after today's race, Kaminski now sits on 128 points while Koskinen sits on 110, so even if Henrique fails to score a single point at Singapore, neither would be able to surmount his advantage. Matteo has well and truly cleared the midfield and he's done so while Kaminski, Koskinen, and their teammates are actually doing quite well too. I mean, both Lotus and both Mercedes cars scored points today, so they're not just letting him get away either, Henrique is gapping them on merit. If the Brazilian could keep this up, maybe he'll prove me wrong and muster up the comeback of a lifetime.
So, since I've started talking about the constructors' championship, the top six over there look like this:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 447 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 415 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 373 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 185 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 151 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 59 points.
Two points may not sound like a lot, but Williams is now on 51 points as Force India once again fails to score, meaning that the battle for sixth place in the constructors could not be tighter. Things are tight at the top too, with the constructors' championship now pretty clearly between McLaren and Red Bull - though this could be another place where Henrique de Matteo surprises me, albeit this time he'd likely need a lot of help from Felipe Alvarez as well - with just thirty-two points separating the top two, less than a one-two finish worth of points. McLaren has led for most of the year, but I still think we have to be considered the underdog here, given that the Red Bull is so fast that, in the entire season up until this point, they've only failed to win pole position four times. The Red Bull is a monster of a car and, by the books, really should be the clear and away leader of the championship, but they're also the youngest, least experienced team among the contenders. McLaren and Ferrari have dozens of title fights in our history, wins and losses - often enough to the other - so we know how to do this. That is why we capitalize on every one of Red Bull's errors, including today, where a problem with the Renault engine forced Max Renner to retire, potentially putting an end to his championship hopes. I have no doubt that Red Bull has a stronger car on the balance of the season, but they don't have the team we do, that is why we are leading, and that is why Anthony and I might just be able to lead this team to their first constructors' championship since 1998.
The constructors' championship is wide open, the drivers' championship is wide open; we are experiencing a season where you can see the tight driver vs. driver races, where you can see the high drama and heroism of a come-from-nowhere victory, and where you can see all the stars align and watch a driver dominate. So often in Formula One, you only get one of those things, and more often than not, it seems to be the dominance on display week after week. This year though, you get to see it all, and it's not just one team doing the domination, because we've seen one-two finishes from all three of the teams in contention. After the Atlantic Grand Prix, we've now seen the sixth different winner this season, meaning everyone in the top six - each of the drivers from the top three teams - has won a race this year. I know that isn't a record, but there is something special about it nonetheless, to see three teams and six drivers pushing each other this hard week after week after week. Going into the Asian leg of the season, three races in a row before the penultimate race in Brazil and the day-to-night finale at Abu Dhabi, we still have the top six covered by just fifty-two points. I don't think anyone could've predicted that when this year started.
Some people will complain that the cars are ugly, others will complain that old venues like Imola and Magny-Cours are gone while new places like Russia and South Korea get added to the calendar, and some, undoubtedly, will complain about a woman winning races, but for all their complaints, when was the last time we saw a season this good? I'm in the championship fight and I couldn't predict who will win it in the end.
Notes:
The people who complain that the 2009-2013 cars are ugly are my friends and they're wrong. Seriously though, I don't understand how people can look at the McLaren MP4/25 - of LatSoF1 fame :P - the 2012 and 2013 Lotuses - Loti? - and the Ferrari F138 and call them ugly. Maybe it's just nostalgia but like...come on.
Anyway, if you're reading this today, it's the Monaco GP in the morning, the Indianapolis 500 in the middle of the day, and the Coke 600 in the evening, so enjoy motorsports Christmas!
Ciao everyone!
Chapter 39: Mathematical Contention
Notes:
Hello everyone! Welcome to the penultimate chapter of Part I.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XXXIX.
Mathematical Contention.
"So, with the return of an official licensed video game with F1 2010, Codemasters has given us a copy at the Singapore Grand Prix paddock. Let's see what the drivers think, shall we?" Addison Jensen, an English TV presenter, introduced the segment before cutting to Anthony and I, sat on a pair of chairs, facing a TV screen, each of us holding a Playstation controller. Addison came over to the two of us and asked, "Starting with McLaren's Anthony Harrison and Tamara Shchegolyayeva, what are your first impressions from the new game?"
"It looks pretty good from what I've seen so far. I think Tamara can speak for this too, but we're the first generation of drivers that grew up with video games and saw ourselves in these old PS2 games when we were just kids working our way up. So yeah, seeing a Formula One game out there again, it's huge. Especially for the younger generation and for places like America where the sport is just now beginning to grow." Anthony answered first, giving a pretty good summation of my thoughts. Video games are bigger than they've ever been, with the big releases of the past few years - your Halo 3, your Grand Theft Auto IV, your Modern Warfare 2 - making more money than the biggest movies are making. The entertainment industry is changing, video games are more important than ever, and with F1 having such a tight championship battle right now, it's the perfect time for a game to launch. Fans across the world can decide that they want to take on the role of Felipe Alvarez and lead Ferrari to glory, or be Anthony Harrison representing both McLaren and the United States, some will instead decide to play Maximilian Renner in the Red Bull, toppling the McLaren/Ferrari duopoly. A few, I hope, will even decide to play as Tamara Shchegolyayeva, which brings me to my comment.
"For me it's sort of a sign that I've really made it, because Anthony is right, I grew up playing these games. I have so many memories of Natasha and I at the karting track, waiting for the next session, racing each other on the old Liverpool games. Then when I made it to F1 in 2007, there wasn't a game anymore, not for the current season anyway, so this is the first time I get to play myself in a video game. I don't know if the fans watching can relate but it's very meaningful for me, to be able to engage with the sport I love in a way I always have and see myself as one of its stars." I tried to convey my thoughts, the idea that, as ridiculous as it may seem to some, seeing myself, with the Kazakh flag as a backdrop and the McLaren MP4/25 next to me in the selection screen, is a sign that I've made it.
"There was that game for the Wii last year." Anthony pointed out.
"I was a replacement driver last year, Henrique does the full season in that game, I think." I answered, saving the part about F1 2009, the game for the Wii and PSP, not being a real game on the same scale as F1 2010. The fact that Codemasters is treating it as their big debut is proof enough of that, but still, they're sponsoring this interview segment, so I don't want to say anything to offend them.
"Ah, right." Anthony accepted with a nod.
"So, you both think that this game can inspire the next generation of drivers?" Jensen asked.
"It definitely helps to get people interested in the sport and the more people that are interested, the bigger potential talent pool we have." I answered, again biting my tongue at the fact that there is a big difference between being able to afford a video game and being able to afford a successful karting career. This game was going to help, it was going to get people interested and hopefully boost viewership and engagement for our TV partners, but it wasn't going to lead to the next generation of drivers. Yes, I know you can play this game with a wheel and pedals, but it can't make you feel a 5G force on your neck as you throw the car through a flat-out corner in the pressured environment of a real race. Still though, as long as people are aware that playing a video game doesn't instantly make you a race car driver, I firmly believe that this is a good thing, because like Anthony and I have been saying, we both engaged with the games while growing up, and we turned out pretty alright.
"How about a quick race then? Here at Singapore perhaps?" Jensen proposed.
"Alright," I said, leaning in and picking myself as my driver.
"Hey, she won here last year, she deserves a handicap." Anthony joked with a smirk.
"I won chasing you down!" I countered, pointing out that he wasn't a slouch at this track either "Besides, didn't you win in 2008?"
"No," he shook his head.
"Well, you won about fifty races that year, so it was worth a shot. Who did?" I asked.
"Alvarez..." Anthony trailed off with a smirk.
"Oh right...that. Sorry, I forgot all about that." I blushed, realizing I managed to forget the crashgate scandal here, where Renault instructed Filipe Yannick to crash, bringing out the safety car that put Felipe Alvarez on the winning strategy. That scandal, once unearthed a year later, led directly to Renault pulling out of the sport as a team, leaving their Enstone based competitor in the hands of Lotus Cars.
"So," Addison began again, drinking a sense of order to this nonsense again "The Singapore Grand Prix, five laps, on F1 2010."
A loading screen and a few clicks later, we were lined up on the virtual grid ready for F1's night race. The game decided to put the Red Bulls on the front row - probably a good call - with Anthony in third and myself in fifth, Alvarez splitting us - again, a fair call, though another reminder that I needed to improve my reputation in qualifying this second half of the season. My race pace has been good enough to give me four wins and keep me in the championship battle - currently leading it, no less - but imagine what I could be doing if I kept that race pace but consistently qualified a couple of places further up the grid. I have five career wins but only one pole position, that is far from the most flattering stat. I mean, I guess since all the points are on Sunday, it's a lot better to have the 5 to 1 ration this way rather than five poles and only one win, but it still doesn't speak too highly of my qualifying form. In any case, I stopped thinking about what my virtual self did in the lead-up to this quick race and instead focused on what I could do with this controller. It may just be a game, but us F1 drivers are competitive, and I'll gladly take the chance to beat Anthony.
The five virtual red lights - thankfully replicated in the upper middle of the screen in addition to the light gantry above the line - went out and I shot off the line, gripping the PS3 controller as I shot ahead of Alvarez off the line, slotting in just behind Anthony as the two of us hit the brakes for turn one, turning to the left and accelerating as we hit the exit kerbs, riding out to the right through turn two, swinging up from turn one and into another braking zone for the left-hand hairpin of turn three. Considering this was one: a five-lap race, and two: a video game, I decided I was going to be more aggressive with my teammate. Unfortunately, my teammate had the same idea, because as I came out of the hairpin and onto the straight that followed, Anthony squeezed me to the inside. It would have been a ridiculous swerve in a race situation but when I glanced at him, I saw him grinning cheekily at it. Alright, so we're going to play it like that then...
I swerved back coming through the kink of turn four, forcing Anthony to back out actually as I cut across him. Up to third now, I gave Anthony a smirk of my own before heading down the rest of the straight.
"You bitch," Anthony mocked with faux outrage.
"You started it," I responded back in a mature manner before turning back to the screen just in time to brake for turn five to the right and come onto Raffles Boulevard. The Red Bulls were disappearing into the distance at this point and the two of us weren't exactly making it easier on each other, with Anthony reaching across the gap between the chairs with his left hand, trying to block my vision. Coming through the right-hand kink of turn six halfway down the boulevard - and the longest straight on this track, I think - I got him back by lightly kicking him in the shin, genuinely surprising him and making him lose focus for a moment. This gave me a reprieve to break away, making it through the ninety-degree left-hander of turn seven onto Nicoll Highway, speeding down it for only a moment before another boxy corner, turn eight, took me to the right onto Stamford Road...for just a moment before yet another square turn, this time turn nine to the left, onto St. Andrews Road.
"Oh, hell no!" Anthony exclaimed as I arrived on the straight, lunging for my controller to mess me up, but with a yelp, I managed to lean out of his grasp, somehow managing to keep the car going straight as Addison stifled a laugh. I hope we were at least making an entertaining product, because at this point, I'm third place with the Red Bulls already disappearing into the distance, while Anthony is fourth, having picked up front wing damage at some point, and holding a train of cars behind him, the Ferraris chief among them. In any case, I hit the brakes for the Singapore sling, bouncing on the pair of kerbs as I threw the car to the left, trying to straight-line the artificial chicane as much as possible, and then pulling in the right trigger to accelerate out of the corner. Anthony focused more on keeping the AI Ferraris behind, giving me the chance to focus in on the game and toss the car right and left through the fast chicane and onto the Anderson Bridge. I came off the bridge only to immediately enter the braking zone for the hairpin of turn thirteen, to the left, and onto a medium length straight with Esplanade Drive.
I wasn't quite sure how this game modeled things like the F-duct, and the gaps either side of me weren't exactly giving me a lot of references to work with, but the McLaren did seem strong in a straight line, so that was at least an accurate thing for F1 2010. Unfortunately for the virtual McLarens - and, I fear, the real McLarens this weekend - the Singapore Grand Prix was about the least straight-line dependent track on the calendar. That much began apparent when I slammed the brakes for turn fourteen, an acute-angle corner which was almost a hairpin thanks to the speeds involved, and accelerated out of the right-hander, getting only a brief reprieve down Raffles Avenue - different from Raffles Boulevard...apparently - before a relentless series of corners. First there was turn fifteen, a brief kink to the left, but that deposited me directly into the braking zone of turn sixteen to the right - the game's racing line flipping from green to red to emphasize the speed difference - with led immediately into turn seventeen to the left. The straight that followed seemed like it was over, but before I knew it, I was on the brakes again.
"Ah!" I cried out when I got bumped in the back going into the corner, just barely keeping it out of the wall while Anthony laughed. Right, I almost forgot I was racing him for this thing, and he seemed to notice that, because he took the opportunity to crash into the back of me just to startle me. Well, I think I ended up being the winner there, before I still managed to get through turn seventeen and didn't even lose a position thanks to the admittedly boneheaded AI just kind of getting stuck in line behind us, the Ferraris practically patiently waiting for us to take these one-line corners. I managed to, taking seventeen to the left, along with the following eighteen to the right, nineteen to the right, and twenty to the left, but Anthony was crawling through these slow corners without his front wing...and he still had four laps to do after all this too. Once again free of my troublemaker teammate, I charged under the underpasses - in addition to this being the closest weekend to the release, another reason why I think they're doing a promotional event here is to show off their modeling work for the urban Singapore circuit, which I think looks pretty good actually, especially at night - and down the brief straight before the final two corners. Turns twenty-two and twenty-three to the left, formed a fast pair of final corners to bring me back onto the start-finish straight, finishing my first virtual lap of Singapore a distant third, but well ahead of my struggling teammate.
"Alright, enough messing around, let's do a real race now." Anthony said after the first lap.
"We are doing a real race!" I laughed back at him.
"I don't have a front wing!" he complained.
"And whose fault is that?" I sassed him.
"Alvarez is passing me, what am I supposed to do?" he complained as his holding up the Ferraris finally came to an end.
"Pit!" I laughed.
"Oh, that's right, you can show off the pit strategy for us!" Addison piled on as Anthony groaned, suddenly dissatisfied with his choices. In any case, he did pit and was fast after that, even setting the fastest lap of the race...but he still finished last given that his remaining three laps around the Singapore circuit wasn't enough to overcome a twenty second deficit to even the HRTs at the back of the field. I was a bit better off in third, but with the Red Bulls so far in the distance, and the fact that I'm not sure if I would have been able to challenge him even if we hadn't spent so much time messing with each other, it didn't bode well for the Grand Prix ahead. The game looks pretty good - Addison was even telling me they have features like a modeled trailer and press conferences for the career mode - but with the race looming ahead on Sunday and the title battle heating up, both Anthony and I will be hoping the game isn't too accurate a simulation.
As it turned out, the game was pretty accurate about our real-world qualifying performance, but there is one critical difference: they appear to have overestimated Red Bull and underestimated Ferrari. Now that is an understandable mistake, for the majority of the season, Ferrari has been a rather distant third, but in the second half of the season - and especially since the summer break - Ferrari has been back with a vengeance. Felipe Alvarez won the Italian Grand Prix and Henrique de Matteo won the Atlantic Grand Prix, now Felipe Alvarez has taken pole position for the Singapore Grand Prix. Maximilian Renner was his closest challenger in second, but we were at least able to split the Red Bulls, with Anthony Harrison lining up third and myself in fourth - see, while the game was right about Anthony outqualifying me here, they still underestimated my grid position by one, so I'll take that as a sign of my improvement even if it is yet another point in Anthony's column - while Weaver was down in fifth. The Ferraris surrounded the top six as Henrique de Matteo was in sixth, while his countryman Rudolfo Goncalves tried his best to perform well for Williams, only to instantly face problems and fail to set a time in qualifying at all. Tommy Koskinen finished second in this race for Williams a mere two years ago, but today, a Williams starts twenty-fourth and last at the Singapore Grand Prix...it hurts to see, as a former Williams driver, honestly.
I didn't drive for Williams at their peak - neither did Koskinen, only joining the team a year prior to me - but both of us knew what the team was and the history that it had. Sir Frank Williams earned that name and earned that honor, because in the 1980s and 1990s, his team was the place to be, with drivers like Johannes Koskinen, Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill, and Jacques Villeneuve all winning titles for the time. Even in the 2000s, as much as everyone says that decade was dominated by Ferrari, Roland Ziegler and Juan Pablo Montoya weren't in all that dissimilar state to Anthony and I this year - having a car that is a straight-line powerhouse and having some magnificent talent at the team, but still struggling against Ferrari on one hand and the engineering mastermind that is Adrian Newey on the other. The only difference being, back then, Newey was at McLaren, now he's at Red Bull. It's a pity, because had Newey gone back to Williams where he really made his name in the 1990s, maybe that holy trinity of McLaren, Ferrari, and Williams would be competing yet again at the top. Or maybe I'm just a sentimental fool, because for all I consider them my holy trinity, maybe someone in the 1950s had Alfa Romeo, Maserati, and Mercedes-Benz as their trinity, or someone in the late 1960s had Lotus, Brabham, and Tyrrell. From the 1970s through? McLaren and Ferrari enter the picture, and by 1980, Williams begins to eclipse Lotus as the third member of the trio. Mercedes and Lotus are back now though - and as a bonus, the current Mercedes team is actually somewhat descended from the Tyrrell team, who became BAR and then Honda, before adopting their current name - so perhaps this trinity will change again during my career.
For now though, it's Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren, and the Singapore Grand Prix under the lights is the prize. The grid order may be different from the video game, but the track is the same, and the game, for better or worse, gave us both a clear understanding of what could happen if we didn't treat this race with respect. With that in mind - and with Renner directly ahead, my teammate alongside, and Henrique de Matteo lining up behind - I watched those five red lights come up, shining bright in the contrast of the Singapore night sky. Five red lights went out and twenty-four Formula One cars took off, all trying to gain crucial track position in what was expected to be a one-stop street race. Alvarez got a good start on the racing line and forced Renner to concede from the inside line, while behind, I got a rocket of a start. I glanced in my right-side mirrors as I took to the middle of the track, trying to avoid getting caught behind the front-line battle, but things got tight when Anthony on my right must have thought I was trying to swerve across him, so he rebuked me by squeezing me towards the left. All the while, on my left-hand side, Henrique de Matteo got a brilliant start and overtook the lot of us - third place Anthony who was defending, fourth place me who was stuck in the middle, and fifth placed Weaver who was getting held up by the both of us. Seeing that the winds were turning against me, I lifted and slotted in behind Anthony, continuing on in fifth place.
"Sorry, sorry, let Anthony know I wasn't trying to fight him there, I was just making sure I didn't get stuck behind Max." I sighed into the radio "That got uglier than it needed to be."
"Copy that Tamara, focus on the race, lots left to decide." Nicky Morrison gently reminded me, so I turned my attention back to the task at hand, completing the first lap of the race as Alvarez led from Renner, Matteo, Harrison, Shchegolyayeva, and Weaver. At least, that was the order until lap three, when the safety car came out thanks to the stricken Force India of Giuseppino Leone. The Italian had already suffered contact with Victor Hartmann on the opening lap - Hartmann actually made contact with both Force Indias, losing his front wing after he slammed into the back of Barbaro - much like Anthony on the video game the other day, come to think of it - and then clobbered the front of Leone's car as he checked up afterwards - and followed it up by smashing his suspension against the wall. So, with the battle-scarred Force India needed to get removed from the track and the barriers not exactly having many car-sized gaps, it was going to take the marshals some time to clear the car. Any time that people are on track, a safety car is a good call in my opinion, but, because of the regulations for this year, this also meant some people could use Leone's misfortune for their own gain. This became apparent when, while cruising down the front straight under SC, Morrison radioed in with "Be aware, Weaver has pit for prime tyres."
"Can he do the race distance?" I asked, worried.
"Unclear at this time." was the best and most honest answer that Nicky could give, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear. So, now there was a primed and ready Red Bull glued to the back of the grid with fresh tyres while the rest of us still needed to stop. When the race restarted on lap five, I could only hope that Weaver got held up in traffic enough to negate his advantage - but even that seemed unlikely as a lot of opportunistic backmarkers joined him in the pits, hoping to cheat their one pitstop under safety car, ride out their Bridgestones for basically the entire race distance, and maybe snatch a few points. So, the good news is that I no longer have a Red Bull breathing down my throat, the bad news is that, with every passing lap, Martin gets through more and more cars while my pitstop only gets closer. I'm waiting for him to take the newness out of his fresh primes and slow his pace down, but the primes on that Red Bull are holding up a hell of a lot better than the options on my McLaren. So, as we settled into the first stint of the race, Alvarez and Renner had disappeared into the distance, sitting eleven seconds ahead of Matteo, Harrison, and I, while the three of us were all about a second apart from each other. We were all just trying to keep track position and stay close enough to each other to gain an advantage in the pits, but the reality is that the front two were slipping away, Weaver was edging closer, and our tyres were wearing in the dirty air of the cars ahead.
"Tell Harrison to up his pace, my tyres are suffering behind him!" I knew that the prohibition on team orders meant that I couldn't ask the team to reorder the cars - that privilege is reserved for Ferrari, evidently - but I could tell that my race was falling apart while stuck behind him, so I needed something to happen. With over twenty corners, relatively short straights, and no speed advantage over my teammate, there wasn't much I could do in an attempt to overtake him, the team couldn't order him to let me by, and I couldn't stay here if I wanted to stay ahead of my championship rivals, so quite frankly, I seemed to be in an impossible situation.
"We have told Harrison to up his pace." I suppressed a growl when Nicky responded with that dry, serious English voice of his. It wasn't his fault that the race wasn't going our way, none of us were happy. The fact is that McLaren was super competitive at this race last year and Anthony only narrowly missed out on the victory - to me no less, so that was another positive for us - but our car just didn't suit the circuit as well this year. Believe me, Anthony isn't happy about being in fourth and I'm not happy about being in fifth. In any case, Anthony finally got out of my way on lap twenty-nine when he made his pitstop. This didn't do much for me given that this just meant I was stuck behind Matteo instead, but at least I was somewhat closer to freedom and maybe Henrique would pit before me and give me some clean laps to try and stay ahead of the charging Australian. Anthony wasn't so fortunate, falling behind Weaver, so it wasn't looking bright, and it especially didn't look bright when Henrique made his stop at the exact same time as I did. I death gripped the wheel as my car went up on the jacks, hoping desperately that they could get me out faster than my former Ferrari crew could get Henrique out, and maybe we were marginally faster, but not fast enough to gain position. Nor were either of us fast enough to get stay ahead of Weaver...in fact, we fell behind both drivers that undercut us, so Harrison was ahead as well.
"Argh!" I exclaimed as I came out in sixth place. Alvarez led from Renner, Weaver, Harrison, Matteo, and myself. Just in time for...
"Safety car!" Morrison called out as the race was neutralized yet again. I fumed in my helmet as we came across the destroyed cars of Yoshikazu Higashiyama and Ayrton Senna II. The 2008 GP2 Asia champion had been battling Wilhelm Ziegler - who also picked up damage but continued - and made contact while trying to pass him around the outside, losing the rear end and slamming into the barrier. The HRT of Senna, who had just been lapped by the duo, arrived on scene too quickly and swerved to avoid the stricken Sauber, burying his nose in the barrier in the process. This wasn't exactly the kind of performance his namesake would accomplish on a street circuit, but I can't fault Senna too badly when he has to put up with an HRT. Natasha complains enough about having to drive a Marussia, but the HRT drivers have to put up with the immense disappointment of having to drive the only car that's worse than that.
The race would restart on lap thirty-four and, coming onto Raffles Boulevard, I was slipstreaming behind the Ferrari of Henrique de Matteo while Harrison got a run on Weaver ahead. I watched my teammate pull alongside the Red Bull going into the braking zone of turn seven and then just barely pull ahead...pulling ahead just enough that his rear left tyre hit Weaver's front right in just such a way Weaver was relatively unscathed, but Harrison's rear suspension collapsed. I moved up to fifth place as I saw my American teammate barely able to turn the car as he slowly limped into a runoff area to retire his car. A bad day for McLaren just got worse.
Later on in the race, Renner would close in on Alvarez a bit and challenge for the lead but wouldn't be able to accomplish anything. My team would try and motivate me to move forward by saying that Weaver seemed to get off worse from that crash than we first expected and seemed to have some steering issues through left-hand corners, but not enough for it to matter. In the end, Weaver would hold onto third ahead of Henrique de Matteo and I. This race was a bit of a chaotic mess, and I hope that the various crashes and Renner's charge up towards Alvarez was enough to entertain people, because for us here at McLaren? This matched some of our worst races of the season. With one car retiring and the other only managing fifth place, I felt like I was transported back to the Spanish Grand Prix. This wasn't exactly how I wanted to follow up my dominant performance at Russia last time out, nor my maiden win here in 2009. The one good thing I could take from this race - and this doesn't really help my current situation anyway - is that last year, I won the race while Hamalainen failed to score points, so with a pole, a first and a fourth this year, perhaps Ferrari learned something from my performance last year and put it to good use.
In any case, enough beating around the bush: the points-paying results of the 2010 Singapore Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 25 points.
2: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 18 points.
3: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 15 points.
4: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 12 points.
5: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
6: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 8 points.
7: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 6 points.
8: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 4 points.
9: Lorenzo Barbaro - Uruguay - Force India-Mercedes - 2 points.
10: James Buxton - Great Britain - Williams-Cosworth - 1 point.
An impressive recovery drive from Rudolfo Goncalves, coming from the back of the grid to eighth place, even overtaking his teammate in the process. Needless to say, James Buxton won't be retaining the #1 going into 2011, but as for who might? Well, things are getting tight in the championship top six, which read as follows:
1: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 240 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 239 points.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 221 points.
4: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 218 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 208 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 189 points.
Two races in a row now, Weaver got caught up in traffic on a street course but used an alternate strategy to get around it and make it work. I guess my crew must have gotten complacent about it thanks to my dominant pace in Russia, but we didn't have dominant pace in Singapore this year, so Weaver is able to squeak into the championship lead despite not managing better than third in the last two races. Furthermore, Ferrari was really coming alive now with Felipe Alvarez up to third in the championship and Henrique de Matteo narrowing what once seemed like an unassailable gap to the rest of the top six. Renner's strong performance today leaves him just ten points behind my teammate, as anything we gained over Renner thanks to his oil pressure issue in Saint Petersburg was lost thanks to Anthony crashing out of the Singapore Grand Prix. The good news is that we're able to retain the constructors' championship lead, but how long will that last now that Red Bull and Ferrari both seem to be firing on all cylinders while we seem to be stumbling after a strong midseason moment? As good as my performance at Russia was, after today, I'm beginning to fear that might just be a bandaid over McLaren's late season decline.
In any case, the raw numbers don't lie, and the top six of the constructors' championship reads as follows:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 457 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 448 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 410 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 193 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 157 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 61 points.
Williams-Cosworth sits just behind Force India, my former team sitting on fifty-six points following a double-points finish. It wasn't what Tommy and I were able to accomplish together in 2008, but it was a good race for the Grove based team and things are heating up between the two midfield squads. Just as things are heating up at the top, with just forty-seven points encompassing McLaren, Red Bull, and Ferrari. I've said some harsh things about Ferrari in the past, especially in regards to what happened at the German Grand Prix this year, but I've always respected them deeply, long before they offered me a fill-in drive in 2009. This is why, because Ferrari is a team that cannot be counted out, and here in 2010, they've come from absolutely nowhere to now have both cars challenging for the title. Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Abu Dhabi: bring it on, bring it all on, because there's just one point in it between Weaver and I in the drivers' championship, and there are just nine points in it between McLaren and Red Bull in the constructors' championship. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: this season might be one of the all-time classic F1 seasons.
It's crazy to say after sixty years of history, but what the six of us are doing this year, with how competitive we are despite this being the longest calendar F1 has ever put together? I think that's something pretty damn special. I don't know how the next four races are going to go and nobody knows for sure who is going to win this year, but I can say this with certainty: I'm honored to be a part of this. The fact that I'm upset at finishing fifth shows how tight this is, how every race matters, and how historic we are making this. Will Red Bull finally get a championship? Will McLaren return to the top, potentially with the first ever female world champion? Will Alvarez bring title glory to Maranello and win his third championship? Will Harrison win two championships in three years? Will Henrique de Matteo pull off the comeback of all comebacks and actually win this thing, proving all the doubters wrong? There are so many potential storylines here and I can't wait to see what is going to happen next. At Suzuka no less, practically the cauldron of F1 history and F1 controversy. Lord knows that McLaren has history there, with Prost and Senna crashing into each other in 1989, and then Ferrari getting involved in 1990 as the duo did it again. Even Red Bull, young as they are, have a page in that history book, with Renner taking the pole and the win there last year as he charged in the late season, doing anything he could to prevent a Buxton-Honda championship.
So in 2010, the question becomes: can anyone stop Renner at Japan?
"I literally just collapsed in a Japanese hotel room." I complained into the cell phone.
"Well, hello to you too." Ysabella Villarreal sarcastically responded, already bringing a smile to my face. These Asian rounds being back-to-back-to-back means I'm far away from home - whether that home is my new home in Miami or my traditional apartment and in-season base at Monaco - so whenever I have a moment to seize comforts like this, and I consider Ysabella to be one of those home comforts, I'm going to take it.
"I don't even know what time it is over there," I sighed.
"It's the afternoon. I just ate a late lunch, and later I got a meeting about maybe getting a bit of a ride upgrade for 2010." she shared.
"Ooh, care to share?" I asked. Maybe that's another part of the reason why she's seemed to let up at the complaints, having found something better than a mere Ferrari Challenge North America ride is easing her bitterness over the situation. It's not going to be a Formula One drive, that's a long-gone dream by now, but there are plenty of opportunities for her elsewhere.
"Nope," she said and I could practically hear her smirk.
"Oh, come on!" I complained.
"I'll tell you once I have something to announce, till then it's a surprise." she responded.
"Not fair, I'm bored!" I said as if it was going to make a difference.
"And I don't want to be miserable if this doesn't work out, so let's not do anything to jinx it, alright?" Ysabella asked, the tone in her voice making it clear that, yes, this really is what has made her lighten up with the career difference stuff, but if this doesn't work out? It might be back with a vengeance. She's really hoping to be doing something better for 2011, she's made real progress towards doing it, and it would absolutely destroy her to trip over the final hurdle. I have to say I pretty much experienced just that in 2008, with me doing everything on a performance level to get that Williams seat, only for my sponsorship to fall apart at the eleventh hour after the tabloids outed me. If it had been any other time for any other team, I could've survived, but it just so happened that I was at a cash-strapped, declining Williams team at the height of the recession, so they needed drivers who brought money. Hideki Kitagawa didn't score a single point for Williams in 2009 but he brought money and free Toyota engines, so that was an awful lot better than what I could offer without Kazakhoil. Even now, with Williams fighting for sixth with a respectable car, the rumbling in the paddock is that one of Buxton or Goncalves will have to go so Williams can bring in a paydriver for 2011. To add a double dose of irony to all this, one of the candidates for the Williams seat is a Venezuelan paydriver with backing from PDVSA, the state-owned oil company.
"Okay, okay, I understand that. I hope you get it though." I relented.
"Me too," she sighed before continuing "So, Japan this weekend?"
"Yup," I popped the p for emphasis "I'd really like to win at Suzuka, it's a special track...but it's going to be hard to beat the Red Bulls this weekend. The whole first sector might as well be made for them."
"Just don't crash into your teammate, that wouldn't look good for McLaren." Ysabella joked.
"Helpful," I snorted.
"My advice is the best advice." she boasted.
"I wouldn't be where I am today without it." I responded dryly.
"I'm gonna choose to believe you were being romantic rather than sarcastic." she joked.
"That's a brave choice." I shot back.
"The bravest." she responded as I smiled unashamedly and rolled my eyes at the same time. A comfortable silence came over us before I said:
"You know, I could actually win this thing." I spoke those words into existence for the first time.
"The championship?" she asked.
"Don't jinx it, but yes." I replied quickly, wanting to smother the words as soon as I heard them because I didn't want it to not happen now that I've said it "I'm closer than I ever imagined I would get, not in real life anyway. There are pipe dreams and ambitions, sure, but to actually be four races from maybe experiencing it? That's a crazy place to be right now. I'm not sure if anyone expected that awkward girl driving a Williams at that Jerez test to get this far."
"You did though, you got to F1, you won Le Mans, you won an Indycar race, and now you're winning F1 races all the time. You're at one of the best teams, you have kickass people around you - especially your girlfriend, I hear she's great - and now you just have to finish the job." she hyped me up - and herself a little bit, but I decided to play dumb about it even if I really did find her words both touching and heartwarming.
"I'll have to tell her that." I joked.
"Fuck you." I could practically hear her roll her eyes, and I decided to give her another taste of her own medicine.
"I will as soon as I'm back in America." I smirked at my own dirty joke.
"Y-you better!" was her somewhat flustered, not entirely sensical response...I got her good then.
"Seriously though, thank you, it helps to hear that." I did drop the humor for a second "Whatever happens these next few weeks, win, lose, whatever, I did something really cool this year, I proved that I could be a part of this title battle, and that's already amazing."
"It is...but you're too good to just settle for amazing." I blushed as Villarreal upped me up yet again. Yeah...this wasn't going to be the best weekend for McLaren, but Ysabella is showing how much she believes in me and, God, does that give me something to fight for. The win is out of reach, even getting a podium could be difficult with how Alvarez and Matteo have been driving for Ferrari lately, but I'm not going to let any of that stop me, because if Ysabella says I'm better than amazing, then I gotta do everything in my power to prove her right.
It was a dry day on Sunday. A bit of a miracle, honestly, given how the rest of the weekend had gone. Saturday was so damn rainy that qualifying had to be postponed until Monday morning, and after that rushed, slightly haphazard procedure dropped right in the middle of our race day morning, I was qualified in sixth but would be starting fifth. The Red Bulls of Maximilian Renner and Martin Weaver, predictably, locked out the front row, Piotr Kaminski would be promoted up into third, lining up alongside Felipe Alvarez, and then I was in fifth, lined up with the Mercedes of Tommy Koskinen. Rudolfo Goncalves was seventh in his Williams, and finally Anthony was in eighth, having qualified third but having also committed an unscheduled gearbox change in FP3, meaning my teammate picked up a five-place grid penalty, sending him to the ass end of the top ten for this race. So, Anthony outqualified me again, which was bothersome, but I was starting ahead of him, so I suppose that at least took away the tangible damage as my qualifying record continued to suffer. I really ought to be doing better in the race than him though.
That was exactly my goal as we took off for the formation lap, rolling off the grid one last time before we had to do it for real. I slotted in single file behind Alvarez, the Ferrari, the Lotus, and the two Red Bulls filling my line of sight as we finished off the start-finish straight and arrived in the first two corners. Turn one was a fast downhill sweeper to the right that evened out and even started going back up hill as it tightened into the slow, almost ninety-degree corner to the right that was turn two. In practice, on a fast lap, we treat them as one corner, lifting as we throw the car into turn one and then getting on the brakes as soon as we've made the turn. For now though, on this warm-up lap, it was a low-key affair. The same could be said about the following esses: the left of turn three, the right of turn four, the snap back to the left for turn five, and back to the right for turn six before the left-hander of turn seven finally unwinds us out of the section. All of that makes for an immense experience at pace, juggling the steering, the brakes, and the throttle all at once as you fight to go as fast as possible through the whole complex, but on the formation lap? It's just the field single file snaking back and forth through the corners.
Turn seven, the Dunlop curve, begins a long, uphill sweeper to the left, with the track straightening out just as it crests the hill and begins the plunge back down. The culmination of that is turn eight, Degner - named for an East German motorcycle rider who defected from his native MZ factory to Suzuki, taking their trade secrets with him, and beginning the Japanese brand's first period of success in Grand Prix motorcycle racing - is a fast flick to the right, taken as fast as your car could manage and punished harshly with a gravel trap just beyond the exit kerb. The first Degner leads directly into the hard, ninety-degree right braking zone of second Degner - turn nine - which pointed us up towards the hairpin. Passing first beneath the bridge - which, thanks to the unique figure-eight layout of Suzuka, is actually the back straight of the track - then running up hill, kinking the car to the right through turn ten and getting on the brakes for the hairpin of turn eleven. One-hundred eighty degrees to the left, this climb, hard braking, and then immediately acceleration out of it makes for a rollercoaster at race speed.
Much of that is down to the fact that coming out of the hairpin, we came onto the fastest part of the track. We'll be going flat-out in the race as we sweep to the right through turn twelve, the corner straightening up just a bit before a second flick to the right just in time for the braking zone of turn thirteen. Trending to the right with the track, the Spoon curve makes us hit the brakes and throw the car to the left as the elevation undulates beneath us, keeping as much speed as possible until the exit of turn fourteen spits us out on the back straight, just about parallel to the entry to the corner. Here, all of us drivers started swerving and doing small burnouts just to put one last bit of heat into our Bridgestones before we took our place on the grid and had to begin the excruciating wait for the race to begin. Before we could get to the grid though, we still had a couple more corners to negotiate.
Passing over the bridge - which I still think is cool despite driving this track a number of times by now, and also driving Fiorano which has a similar feature - we then arrived into 130R. Named for its radius, the fast, flat corner is still a challenge these days, but perhaps for different reasons. In the old days, it was a treacherous, fast corner that pushed the cars to the limits, but these days, the cars are pushing the track limits, taking so much speed through the left-hand sweeper that keeping it on the track and not the paved runoff - which can be difficult to differentiate given the flatness - can be a challenge. Especially because a good run through 130R makes so much difference in terms of laptime. It may not feel like it though, because 130R immediately leads into the briefest of straights before the braking zone for the Casio Triangle. Bleeding off speed, turning to the right for turn sixteen and snapping back left for turn seventeen, speeding out of it and into the downhill sweeper to the right that is the final corner. At least that's what we'll be doing in the race, because on the formation lap, it was more fo a crawl.
The Red Bulls slowed way up through the final corner, for a number of reasons. First was to give them time to take their final burnouts and get their tyres into race temperature. The second was to give the rest of the grid time to catch up - twenty-four cars was the most we've had in a very long time, so the race procedures often seem to be thought-out for a smaller grid than this - so that the Red Bulls wouldn't just immediately lose that temperature sitting on the grid and waiting. Ultimately though, they would lose a bit of that, we all did, so eventually, Renner and Weaver had to simply take their slots at the front of the grid and begin the wait. The rest of the grid formed up behind them, but the wait wasn't over yet, because now we needed to wait for the flag man at the back to give the green flag as the medical car parked up behind him. Once race control got the flag signal, the five red lights began coming on one by one, but still we waited. It wasn't until those lights went blank that we were finally, finally released, firing off the grid to begin the Japanese Grand Prix...only to almost immediately get halted by a safety car.
"Fuck!" I cried in a mixture of anger, passion, tiredness, and childish whining. I just wanted to get this race going and see what happens.
"They'll bleep that," Nicky Morrison responded dryly - I'd have laugh at his quip at any other moment, but in the heat of the race, I wasn't in the mindset to hear it - before explaining exactly what happened "We had two separate incidents. Alexandrov crashed into the slow-starting Buxton off the line, then Koskinen also had a slow start. Matteo tried to get around it, put a wheel in the grass, and lost control. Leone crashed into him. Four cars out of the race. Oh, and before the SC came out, Kaminski got ahead of Weaver on the start, so at least there's some good news on that front."
"Let's pit this lap, switch onto the hards and get a free stop." I proposed, seeing the opportunity to take advantage of a safety car, just like Henrique de Matteo and Wilhelm Ziegler were able to do in the Atlantic Grand Prix. I would imagine that Renner fucks off into the distance when this thing gets restarted, but he's lost a lot of ground in the title fight anyway, so he's not the main problem. Weaver and Alvarez are the problems right now - the Australian with his consistency, the Spaniard with his late season surge in performance - and if Kaminski is ahead of them? They might be stuck for long enough for me to make my way through the field. Even if they do get past Kaminski, they'll lose some time doing it, while I'll already have done my mandatory pitstop and should jump them on strategy. It'll be a long time on the Bridgestone tyres, but Japan is their home race, so their tyres will be hard as a rock here. Bridgestone will be bringing people and guests to the race this weekend, and they will not be tolerating the shame of a puncture under any circumstances. Speed wise, taking a free pitstop should work out, and tyre wise, the tyres this year have been durable, and I can't see Bridgestone changing their MO at their home race. The only question left will be traffic. So I waited, making my way around the track under SC speed as I waited for my team to crunch the numbers and find out whether or not the time lost in traffic will outweigh the benefits of this strategy.
"Copy that, we'll box." Morrison decided, accepting the strategy. Thus, I pit, and a couple other cars came in with me - making my job a couple cars easier - all of us switching onto the harder prime tyres and making the gamble. Suzuka wasn't the worst place to give up track position - that would always been the tight, twisty streets of Monaco - but it wasn't the best place either, so this could be bad, but that could also place to my advantage. For every bit of trouble, I would have passing cars would also be on Weaver and Alvarez, and Kaminski is a hard guy to pass to begin with. All I needed to do then, was carve my way through the field and hope that I could at least match the pace of a Lotus...and then Kaminski's tyre fell off. I was sure my mouth was gaping as I passed the Lotus of Piotr Kaminski, sitting stricken just off the exit of hairpin without a right rear tyre. Unbelievable.
My strategic gamble had basically fallen apart by the time the race restarted, but I still gave it everything I could. I scythed my way through the field - even passing Natasha at one point, offering her a sympathetic wave before my McLaren sailed past her down the back straight and into 130R, and soon enough, my hard tyres were actually faster than the used softs ahead of me. Unfortunately, that gamble played both ways, and soon enough, the cars ahead pit, switched onto fresher hards, and still managed to stay ahead of me because I lost too much time in the field while everyone else was free in clean air. I had worked my way back up to sixth place in the closing stages of the race when, six laps to the end, Tommy Koskinen ahead also lost a right rear tyre. The Finn lost control at turn five and slammed into the barrier at one-hundred thirty miles per hour. Koskinen was alright, thankfully, but very weird to see two separate incidents like this on two different cars. This is especially the case because these weren't tyre issues - Bridgestone was innocent in both cases - instead, it appeared to be a wheel nut failure for Kaminski and the whole wheel hub gave out for Koskinen. That only raised more questions as far as I was concerned, but it wasn't my place to investigate. I was just the car that threw the dice, failed, but still managed to finish just about where I was going to finish anyway, give or take a place.
So, with all that being said, the points-paying results of the 2010 Japanese Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 25 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 18 points.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 15 points.
4: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 12 points.
5: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
6: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 8 points.
7: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Sauber-Ferrari - 6 points.
8: Victor Hartmann - Germany - Sauber-Ferrari - 4 points.
9: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 2 points.
10: Maximilien Longpre - Luxembourg - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 1 point.
One Marussia didn't even start the race, six cars took themselves out at the very beginning of the race, and a couple pit at the same time as I did, and I only ended up in sixth before a freak incident for Koskinen elevated me to fifth. All of that was to say this wasn't exactly Hamalainen's comeback drive from 2005, but I think it was a pretty good performance on my end. I overtook the HRTs, Natasha in her Marussia, the Caterhams, a Toro Rosso, a Williams, both Saubers, and even managed to go side-by-side with Ziegler through 130R before outbraking him into the Casio triangle. That's definitely a move for the memory scrapbook I'd say, getting to pull off a move like that on one of your heroes, even if he's not the man he used to be...in more ways than one. Still though, as impressive as it was, all but one of my championship rivals finished ahead of me in Suzuka, and that didn't play well for me in the top six of the standings:
1: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 258 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 249 points.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 236 points.
4: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 233 points.
5: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 230 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 189 points.
I was screwed over when Kaminski retired, but one thing that held true was that Renner was the fastest car on track and that was probably the best-case scenario for us. Max Renner winning just meant that he went from fifth to fourth in the standings, while Weaver's second to my fifth only scored him eight points over me, bringing the gap up to eighth. My gamble didn't pay off, but I did have the pace to make up for it, for the most part anyway, and the gap was still very much manageable with seventy-five points left across the three remaining races. Those seventy-five points were now the only thing keeping Henrique de Matteo in contention. I have to feel bad for the Brazilian, his form as of late took him from behind Kaminski and Koskinen to a clear sixth, to being impressive, but ultimately too little too late, to potentially putting himself back into contention, all the way to nipping at the heels of Renner, only for them to have complete opposite days. Today, Matteo was immediately left with the option of either crashing into the back of Koskinen or taking to the grass and hoping no one hit him if he lost control, but unfortunately, he did lose control and Leone did hit him. As for Renner, he and Weaver had a perfect day for Red Bull, and that has had ramifications in the constructors' championship top six:
1: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 491 points.
2: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 479 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 425 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 201 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 157 points.
6: Force India-Mercedes - India - Silverstone, Great Britain - 61 points.
Williams sits on fifty-eight points, despite Buxton's DNF today, meaning just three points separate them now. Mercedes and Lotus will both be asking questions thanks to their respective right rear situations, but ultimately, Mercedes wins out on that end as Wilhelm Ziegler, once again, proves to be a more dependable second driver than Vladimir Alexandrov. Now, being more dependable than a car that DNF'ed off the line is hardly what the German seven-time world champion was hoping for when he returned to Formula One with the return of its most famous German team, but it's the contribution he can be proudest of this season. At the very front of the grid, however, it's the heroics of another German - Maximilian Renner - and his Australian teammate and championship leader, Martin Weaver, who have put Red Bull ahead of McLaren once again. I am now further off the championship, we've lost the constructors' lead, and my failed gamble mean that, this weekend, I've been both outqualified and outraced by my teammate...hardly the ideal weekend for me. I drove so impressively today, coming back to split the Mercedes and then being there to capitalize on their issues, but what good is a heroic drive if it just puts me back directly behind my teammate?
If I simply wanted to finish fifth today, there would have been much easier ways to do it. I made the gamble in hopes of doing something to snatch an advantage and maybe just win at a highly historic circuit, and now it didn't work out. There's three races to go and anything could happen, but needless to say, I was hoping for a better Japanese Grand Prix. In a sport where momentum matters, I was now going into the deciding rounds on the back foot. That being said, I'm still in championship contention and it's not over until it's over, so I guess I just have to grit my teeth and persevere as we go into the first ever Korean Grand Prix.
"...time difference meant she had the record the race." I was telling Natasha during our track walk, referring to the fact that last race - as well as this one - were the hardest for Ysabella to watch live, being in the middle of the night for the Americas.
"I think she'll enjoy the watch - it wasn't the best result, but at least you'll be giving her something to watch." Nat shrugged. Just as things were seeming to fall into place for Villarreal for 2010, the opposite was happening for Natasha. Force India seems to want to promote Richard DiPaolo - an old racing rival of mine, having been part of that all-star 2005 grid in the Formula 3 Euro series - their test driver instead. Mercedes-Benz is fine with this as well, as in 2007, he became a DTM driver for them and even did some testing for McLaren in 2009, before becoming Force India's reserve for 2010. He knows the team, Mercedes has an affinity for him, and he's even scheduled to be in the car in FP1 here, so it unfortunately makes too much sense to go with the Scotsman. I know Natasha is a good driver, she won two championships in 2009 after all, but she's not proven in F1. As far as Force India is concerned, she's only proven herself against Casemiro, the HRTs, and, from time to time, a Caterham. That wasn't exactly motivating Force India to sign her, especially when DiPaolo seemed to please Mercedes-Benz just as much. Nothing has been confirmed yet, but the pieces are falling into place for Natasha to be trapped in Marussia for another year, all while the gap to the rest of the field only seems to be growing. The rumor is that Caterham is going to acquire a supply of customer Renault engines for 2011, while HRT and Marussia will be stuck with the Cosworth units. I kept pointing out that Williams was doing good work with the Cosworth unit, but she wasn't in a receptive mood for it.
"She'll see you." I pointed out. The highlight of Natasha's Japanese Grand Prix I suppose, given that, otherwise, Jyri Kaasalainen took advantage of the attrition to finish in twelfth, and a twelfth place this late in the season pretty much guarantees that Caterham is out of reach for Marussia and HRT. Thus, the lucrative tenth place finish in the constructors' championship is gone.
"Getting overtaken by you." she shot back.
"Well, I apologize for doing my job." I quipped.
"Oh, I'll make you apo - hello?" Natasha was beginning to retort when some media people came up to us.
"Hi Tamara, could we grab you for a moment for a picture?" they asked.
"Sure..." I trailed off, letting them lead me away. I realized what they wanted when they had me lean against an armco barrier, along with my teammate Anthony Harrison, the Red Bull drivers of Martin Weaver and Maximilian Renner, and the Ferraris of Felipe Alvarez and Henrique de Matteo. It would become one of the most iconic pictures of the 2010 season, captioned as "The Special Six" it showed the magnificent group of drivers still in contention with three races remaining, those who might still win with seventy-five points remaining. Yet another reminder of this great season, this great battle, and this great accomplishment for me. A year and a half ago, I was out of F1, I was desperately going from series to series trying to find a way back into Formula One, and then I made it. I made it with Ferrari no less, winning the 2009 Singapore Grand Prix, and then I went to McLaren, now sitting here with another four wins, still in championship contention, waiting to see what I can grab from these last three seasons. I'll be giving it my all, obviously, but whatever happens...I've done more than anyone would've ever predicted of me in 2007.
"Starting my lap now," I radioed in as I began my first push lap of the track in FP1, swinging out of the final corner and onto the main straight, ready to learn the track properly. Thundering down the relatively short start-finish straight, I then hit the brakes for turn one, stopping hard, turning to the left through the acute corner, and then accelerating out of it as I kinked to the left for turn two. The two turns almost formed a widened-out hairpin between the two straights, the second straight being the longer of the pair. Mercedes power and McLaren F-duct came together to power me down the straight. The Korea International Circuit was meant to be this ambitious project, to build a city around a race track, but with the recession, that pretty much fell apart entirely. Right now, it's just a race track in the middle of nowhere in South Korea with a couple of construction cranes dotted around the flat landscape, and even this barely got finished, with the track only getting final FIA approval mere weeks ago. Nevertheless, it was approved, it's on the calendar, and I'm driving it in anger.
Turn three then, hard on the brakes for a proper hairpin this time, the triangular turn three taking me to the right and onto another brief straight, just about the same length as the start-finish straight and ending in yet another hairpin. Turn four was a bit rounder and to the left though, and it left me accelerating for just a second before tapping the brakes for turn five to the right, snapping back to the left immediately afterwards with turn six. A short straight followed, trending to the left a bit before bottoming out and snapping to the right as fast as I dared with turn seven, then lifting with the closest bit of elevation that this track got through the fast left-hander of turn eight. Shooting out of eight I tapped the brakes and shifted down a gear as I threw the car to the left through turn nine, holding the speed before finally surrendering it as I got on the brakes for the ninety-degree right-hander of turn ten. The briefest of straights followed before I arrived in turn eleven. Throwing the car to the left and then grinding down as the turn continued in a wide, 180-degree arc, finally accelerating as I left it only to have to brake again for the ninety-degree right-hander of turn twelve.
Accelerating out of turn twelve, I raced down the short shoot before a lift, a graving of the brakes, and two downshifts through the left-hander of turn thirteen, just barely an obtuse corner and a fairly fast one because of that. Shifting back up as I came out of it on a short straight only to bleed off that speed as I arrived into the final, technical sequence of corners. It opened up with a hard braking zone for turn fourteen, to the right, and almost immediately afterwards into turn fifteen to the left, then left again with turn sixteen, almost parallel to the entry of turn fifteen but sweeping away from it in the long, fast right-hander of turn seventeen. The corner almost made a U-shape before the final corner, turn eighteen, snapped me out of it to the left, coming fast onto the start-finish straight. To complete the lap, I passed beneath the start-finish bridge stylized with Korean architecture, a small addition, but one of the few bits of character this track had given its location. Perhaps that is harsh, because there are plenty of European tracks that are out in the middle of nowhere, but those tracks tend to either use the natural elevation of the region, or in the case of Silverstone, are fast and historic circuits shaped by a less technical era.
In the old days, the challenge of F1 came from lasting the distance. Cars were delicate and hazards were abundant, with the drivers lucky every time they had a crash and came out of it unscathed. Reliability was nowhere near as strong as today and the old circuits would test it with long straights, hard braking zones that were torture for the primitive drum brakes of those days, and bumpy surfaces that would eat a modern suspension alive. Hell, well into the 1980s, there were tracks where F1 cars could legitimately see airtime during the course of a lap, something that's unthinkable in the modern era. So the circuits of the day were simple, often just an interesting collection of public roads closed off for a weekend. These days though? Circuits are planned out with calculators, data, and architectural firms. It often doesn't matter what the natural topography is because, these days, it can all be changed with a few excavators. So the tracks have lost some of that natural charm and replaced it with technical circuits that were meant to make the cars work and meant to produce overtakes, yet at the same time, do these tracks actually produce better overtaking than the classic venues? Dirty air and the difficulty in following through technical corners means that, often enough, it's easier to just overtake at an old, simple layout with some good, long straights for slipstreaming and some hard corners to outbrake an opponent into.
Still though, none of that is Korea's fault, and I won't judge the circuit until I find out how it races.
Will we race at all became the question on race day, however. I had a masterful qualifying performance to split the Red Bulls and put my car on the front row, only to immediately lose that thanks to a gearbox change - which I suppose I should have expected, Anthony and I have the same equipment and his gearbox died out last race, so it was bound that mine was on its last legs, I just hoped the crew might change mine with just three races remaining...but perhaps we've hit our allowance already and would've gotten a penalty regardless - so seventh place it is. I was looking forward to moving forward on the first lap of the race, but we started under safety car due to the torrentially wet conditions on track. A few laps under safety car later, it was red flagged, and we were back in the pitlane. That was over half an hour ago now, as I sit here waiting, seeing the track still soaked, the clouds still gray as ever overhead, and the hours of daylight ticking away...not looking good right now.
"We've changed the setup for full wet conditions." Nicky came over and reported.
"And if it dries out?" I asked.
"Unlikely, the way this track is made it's not soaking in water, that's the whole issue right now. They're clearing the worst of it with the trucks but it's going to be wet all day." he explained.
"Wonderful," I sighed before asking "What are the others doing?"
"Same as we are, switching onto wet setups, waiting for the restart. A few want to go back out under safety car, saying twenty-four cars can move the water better and faster than the cars can. Problem is that the race has started, any running at this point is going to be race laps." Nicky explained the issue. Right, all our TV viewers were watching absolutely nothing happen for damn near forty-five minutes now, and the last thing they want to see is a safety car parade get labeled a race. That being said, we're running out of time and, unlike oval series like NASCAR or Indycar, F1 doesn't have standing rain out procedures. We race in the wet so moving the race to Monday just isn't an option, especially since, while no racing has taken place, we are technically three laps into the Korean Grand Prix. Quite a mess all the way around, I think.
"Ten-minute warning: race resumes in ten minutes under safety car. Drivers to the cars please." and then that announcement came over the intercom. Nicky and I just looked at each other and shrugged before I got my helmet and gloves on and got strapped into the car. Ten minutes later, I was the seventh car in line as we circulated around behind the safety car, doing what we could to dry the place out, but kicking up spray in the process...far too much spray to race with. The spray was the reason why these cars could dry the track out better, since F1 cars displaced ridiculous amount of water thanks to wet compounds and downforce, but that same displacement meant the car behind was blinded by the spray coming off the car ahead. Needless to say, that didn't make for good racing. So, we had to keep going and going until the spray died down all while it continued to drizzle. Fourteen laps it took for the race to get back into shape, and I'm sure this will go down like a sack of wet bricks with the fans, but hopefully we could give them a show worth waiting for in these final thirty-odd laps under green.
We got underway on the start-finish straight. Through the first two corners and onto the second straight, those of us in the lead anyway took it slow and cautiously, trying to figure out exactly how the track felt, but even that began to fall apart once we arrived into the heavy braking zone of turn three. Here I stayed behind Henrique de Matteo ahead but watched as Tommy Koskinen jumped ahead of my teammate to take fourth place, while behind him, Wilhelm Ziegler overtook Kaminski to end up right behind me. The Mercedes seemed confident and were moving forward, while the Red Bull duo was in control up front. Renner led from Weaver, Alvarez, Koskinen, Harrison, Matteo, Shchegolyayeva, Ziegler, Kaminski, Rudolfo Goncalves formed the top ten as we came out of turn four and thus the last real overtaking opportunity of the lap. No one was going to push too hard on these first laps, especially when we didn't have precedent for which corners you could and couldn't overtake in. On the next lap, things got interesting though, and one of the decisive moments of the race - and indeed the season - happened.
Martin Weaver tried a move on his teammate for the lead in turn three, but was harshly rebuked, facing a tank slapper on the soaking wet kerbs and needing to back out of it, letting his teammate disappear into the distance. Weaver rejoined the track, still in second, but it was clear as day that the Australian was not happy with his teammate and working hard to get back up to him to put the German upstart back in his place. Not only that, but his Red Bull seems to have lost something with that off, whether it being that he got his tyres too cold and wet or that he damaged something while coming over the kerbs, I couldn't be sure. In fact, I could be wrong and maybe the change in attitude from his car was just down to the angry Weaver driving more aggressively. In any case, the result was the same: the Red Bull was pushing hard and did not look as stable as it had earlier, nor as stable as his teammate. Thus, I wasn't too surprised when Weaver lost it over another wet curve and spun out, but I think all the cars behind were caught out when his out-of-control car swung back onto track.
Alvarez, through dumb luck, balls of steel, or pinpoint precision - more than likely a combination of all three - perfectly thread the needle and got through unscathed, while Tommy Koskinen wasn't so lucky, the Mercedes smashing into the rudderless Red Bull and nearly hitting Harrison as well. Anthony just barely cleared him while I had to throw my car off track and onto the paved runoff to avoid both the wreck and the braking Henrique de Matteo ahead. It seems that both of us came onto the scene of the accident blind, but I came off the worse for it, throwing my wheel to the right into the spin as I nearly lost the car. I just barely caught the spin, dabbed the brakes to bleed off speed, and crept back onto track as Wilhelm Ziegler steamed ahead of me, taking the position. As the situation calmed down and I slotted in behind the German, I finally took stock of the flashing yellow lights on my steering wheel and the double-waved yellow flags around the track.
"Did Ziegler overtake illegally?" I asked. I wasn't proud of potentially taking this to the steward's office, but I was in a championship fight, these conditions were treacherous, and both Mercedes looked quick before Koskinen crashed, so I wasn't going to take this chance. Especially as the flashing lights on my steering wheel turned solid yellow to signify that the safety car was called out to deal with the wreck. Right, the good news is that Weaver is out of the race and I can start clawing into that nine-point deficit, the bad news is that we're in a rain and safety car shortened race and I'm at the ass end of the points. I'm what, eighth right now? That would only get me four points, not enough to retake the championship lead, so yes, of course I'm going to try and politic my way ahead of Ziegler. Six points won't do the trick either, but it will get me closer to where I need to be, and that's a start. Unfortunately, I didn't get the answer I was hoping for.
"Negative Tamara. The yellow flags came out, but the race feed shows him transponder going ahead of yours while you were still off-track. He was allowed to overtake." Nicky Morrison reported. Great. More work to do when this thing gets restarted. Some cars would gamble, hoping for a long safety car, and pit for intermediate tyres during this third safety car, but none were the drivers ahead of me. That meant I didn't gain any positions in the short-term, and in the long-term, they may actually end up gaining track position if their gamble works out, so not a single benefit to me but the emergence of a new threat. There is one good piece of news though, my feeble racing driver brain didn't account for the two drivers that crashed out in front of me, so when the field formed up behind the safety car, I was actually in sixth place. Eight points still won't put me ahead of Weaver but just a point behind is tantalizingly close and I will be able to attack the cars ahead.
Unfortunately, things didn't quite work out that way, because while I was focusing on trying to draft up to the cars ahead on the second straight, Piotr Kaminski in his Lotus simply drafted up to me and shot it up my inside going into turn three. I groaned but had to leave the Pole space because Weaver and Koskinen just showed how dangerous these conditions could be. Dropping back to seventh place was a setback, but it was still better than crashing out in a pointless fight with a Lotus. Another setback came when the safety car came out for a fourth time - first the attempted start, then the real start, then the Weaver-Koskinen crash, now this - thanks to an utterly pointless crash between Longpre and Tsirinskaya. The Toro Rosso driver had been trying to overtake Natasha, lost control, and smashed into the side of the Marussia. Longpre was out on the spot whilst Natasha limped into the pits, hoping to continue in case the attrition was enough for her to get a twelfth or eleventh and maybe, just maybe, put the team ahead of Caterham on a Hail Mary, but ultimately her car was too damaged. Still though, this safety car did give us the chance to pit for fresh tyres, neutralizing the advantage of those who gambled on the intermediates.
Restarting for the umpteenth time, Renner retained the lead but Harrison jumped into second ahead of Alvarez...only to immediately lose it by running wide in turn one. A reminder of how treacherous these conditions were. So, the order remained pretty much exactly the same, except it became clear who the protagonists of the race were when Renner and Alvarez broke away from the field. The German was running high after his Japanese Grand Prix win, and if he wins this one, he may go from out of it to back in the championship hunt real quick. As for Alvarez, he was sticking with Renner, reeling him in even. The winner of the Singapore Grand Prix, these two both already struck once on Asian soil and were competing to see who would come out on top at the end of this eastern triple-header. To add some more drama to the mix, around this point we got the confirmation that, thanks to the many safety cars, the rain delay, and the decreasing daylight, this would default to a timed race. Twenty-five minutes on the clock to really pile on the pressure.
Weaver was sitting on the sidelines, in no control of his destiny, just waiting to see whether or not he would still have a championship lead at the end of all this. I wasn't doing much better, still stuck in seventh place wondering where my wet weather pace from Australia and Malaysia was now. Anthony Harrison was somewhat better off, sitting in a distant third, but in position to finally take a good result after a run of races that seemed to have him either running at the front or retiring, at a time when he was in desperate need of consistency. Alvarez was coming back alive though, having won the opening race of the season at Bahrain but floundered all the way until Germany when he needed controversial assistance to win, but ever since the summer break? It's been all Felipe. And what can I say about Renner at the front other than - my God he has smoke coming out of the back of his car! The teams, the drivers, and the fans back home all seemed stunned when, mere laps from the end of the race, Renner slowed dramatically before finally pulling off track as his engine gave way. Sure, Weaver had attempted a move and Alvarez was gaining on him, but Renner had led every lap of the race to this point, and now seeing him retiring with a mechanical issue this late in the game? A heartbreaking loss for Renner. Both Red Bulls out of the race and their championship aspirations evaporating around them.
Thus, after hours and hours of waiting for a result, in the rainy South Korea evening, the points-paying results of the 2010 Korean Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 25 points.
2: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 18 points.
3: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 15 points.
4: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 12 points.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 10 points.
6: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 8 points.
7: Rudolfo Goncalves - Brazil - Williams-Cosworth - 6 points.
8: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Sauber-Ferrari - 4 points.
9: Victor Hartmann - Germany - Sauber-Ferrari - 2 points.
10: James Buxton - Great Britain - Williams-Cosworth - 1 point.
An exhausting race for me and just about the worst time to only finish in sixth, but nobody was going to match Renner and Alvarez today. The two of them were the class of the field today - they've been the class of the field this second half of the season, really - and Felipe Alvarez was the one with the better reliability. Both cars going out today is not a good result to Red Bull and this may go down as the day that they lost the drivers' championship. Speaking of, at the end of a chaotic East Asian swing, the top six in the drivers' championship now read as follows:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 261 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 258 points.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 257 points.
4: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 248 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 233 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 204 points.
Henrique de Matteo had a good race today. He's had a good second half of the season, really, but not good enough to make up for a miserable first part of the season. To add insult to injury, it is his teammate who has made it impossible for Henrique to win the championship, because with just Brazil and Abu Dhabi remaining, Alvarez's fifty-seven-point lead over his teammate is insurmountable. The same could not be said of Maximilian Renner, who, despite the disaster of those final laps, is just twenty-eight points off the championship lead. Anthony Harrison is only thirteen points off the championship lead. I am a mere four points behind just my underwhelming performance today, and Martin Weaver? Despite his retirement, the Australian is just three points off the championship lead. Nevertheless, there are only fifty points up for grabs and, for the first time since Australia, Felipe Alvarez is the championship leader. I have to give Alvarez credit where credit is due, he has crawled back from the abyss, and it would take a performance just as magnificent as Alvarez's performances as of late to overtake him now. The gaps may be small, but Felipe's win here in the first ever Korean Grand Prix has given him momentum going into the last two races. No matter what happens between now and the finale in Abu Dhabi, Alvarez has won a minimum of two of the final five races, and no one else can claim that right now.
The top six in the constructors' championship, meanwhile, read like this:
1: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 505 points.
2: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 491 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 465 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 213 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 167 points.
6: Williams-Cosworth - Great Britain - Grove, Great Britain - 65 points.
Force India sits on 61 points after failing to score today, whilst Sauber sits on forty-four after having the strongest late season form of any of the midfield teams, it seems. A one-two finish results in forty-three points for a team, so the constructors' championship will take a lot longer to settle. Case in point, say in Brazil neither McLaren nor Red Bull score any points while Ferrari gets a one-two? That alone is enough to put them back on top of the championship. Considering that Ferrari were miles off at times this year, that's another testament to the hard work they've been doing in the last half of this season. Red Bull, meanwhile, has demonstrated exactly how quick a lead can disappear, with them losing control of both championships today. Most importantly though, McLaren is back on top. We have not had the best car this year, especially not as of late, but Anthony and I have been working miracles with the tools available to us, and of that, we can be justly proud.
Likewise, I can be proud that, in my first year with McLaren, I'm in mathematical contention for the title going into the last two rounds. The Korean Grand Prix opened with us celebrating the Special Six, but now? Now there are five.
Problem is, at the end, there can only be one.
Notes:
Woo! Chapter done. I think that'll be the last three race chapter though, that one took a lot out of me. Honestly, a lot of these chapters have been taking a lot out of me. I like writing this a lot and I love it whenever I get kudos or comments or anything, but 10,000+ words every other week is a lot. Now, I did say I planned to continue Part II immediately afterwards, and that was true at the time, but right now? I'm feeling pretty burnt out. I think leaving it at the end of part one for now, giving y'all a satisfying ending, would be a lot better than if I like got five chapters into part two and then just got so burnt out and couldn't continue. So, what do you say? One more chapter in two weeks' time, a natural ending to both the 2010 season and part one, and, eventually, when I'm good and ready, I'll come back with the next three years of Tamara's story.
Ciao everyone and thank you!
Chapter 40: There Can Only Be One
Notes:
Hello everyone.
I did it again, I wrote yet another story with forty chapters. This wasn't even planned, it just happened this way. That's a bit of a misnomer though, because, while the chapter number may be the same, this story is the longest thing I've ever written. Over half a million words and there's still a part two to go. Of course, like I've said, the part two won't be coming right away. I'm feeling burned out and my passions are going in different directions right now, but I am still immensely proud of this story. It started out as a little bit of experimentation with a girl in the 2007 season and it's warped into this giant love letter to this era of motorsports. It's been surprisingly successful too, more than I would've guessed, and it currently sits as my second most viewed work on AO3. I write niche things, I've always written niche things - the idea being that I write what I would want to read because no one else is doing it - and it's always when other people want to read it too. So, thank you to everyone reading, thank you to all the friends who helped me along the way - Enzo, Gisele, Andy, William, Dan, Blaze...everyone - and here we go, the final chapter of LatSoF1!
I hope you enjoy.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Act II.
The Fall and the Rise of a Racing Driver.
Chapter XL.
There Can Only Be One.
I leaned against the edge of the table looking out the glass doors. It was early in the morning in Miami, the sun was just coming up somewhere on the left, I could still see stars off to the right, but my eyes were focused firmly ahead. I knew I couldn't see it, sheer distance and the curvature of the earth made that impossible, but all I could think of this morning was that Interlagos was somewhere there ahead of me, far to the south, but still in the same hemisphere. After three relentless races in the east, I was back home, but instead of comforting me, that feeling just set me even more on edge. Being back in America for this break meant that the Brazilian Grand Prix was next, the penultimate round of the championship was the very next race. What do I have to show from the triple-header? Just twenty-eight points. I scored twenty-five points in a single race at Russia but since then, it's been two fifths and a sixth. I'm supposed to be fighting for a championship, but right now, I'm running at the ass end of the championship group and the only thing keeping me in contention is the strength of my previous results.
Those previous results? I won Australia and Malaysia, sure, but both of those were wet weather flukes. My team judged the strategy well and made the correct tyre calls, all I did was drive just fast enough that the lack of an extra pitstop gave me an easy lead. Then Turkey, Canada, and Miami, three races in a row where the McLaren was either the strongest car or, in the case of Turkey, in position to pounce when the Red Bulls took each other out. In those three races, those three one-two finishes for McLaren, I only managed to finish ahead of Anthony once. Great Britain, Germany, Hungary, Spa? Four of the best circuits, the most historic rounds in the championship, and I didn't even manage to score a podium in any of them. The fact that I missed most of those races in 2009 doesn't work as an excuse when I also missed Australia and Malaysia, so yeah, those losses are entirely on me. Monza, I fought for the win but couldn't beat Ferrari, Atlantic I was behind the Red Bulls all day and then got doubly screwed over when Matteo and Ziegler profited from the safety car, and that leaves Russia as the one championship worthy performance of my season.
One race that I can be proud of so far, one race that lives up to the level that's required of me. Not only am I failing to live up to the opportunity presented to me, but I don't even have a real feather in my cap from this season. No Monaco, no Silverstone, no Spa, no Monza...just Australia, Malaysia, Miami, and Russia. Combine that with my Singapore last year and what, you get the most random collection of Grand Prix ever? Not exactly the consistent dominance across the circuits that everyone loves, not exactly what you'd expect from a championship contender. It almost makes me feel like an imposter, like I'm sitting in a seat that doesn't belong to me. James Buxton won the championship last year, why does he have to scrounge for points in a Williams while I get to drive around with one of the fastest cars and collect a bunch of fifth-place finishes.
And that whole second half of the season resurgence that I wanted? Well so far, it's amounted to a single podium and a win. I had three wins and three podiums in the first half of the season, now in what's supposed to be my big resurgence, I literally cannot match those results anymore. There are just two races left in the season, just two chances to prove that I deserve to still be in the championship hunt. Because right now, I just feel like the girl who didn't have the pace at Korea and let Felipe Alvarez come from nowhere to take the championship lead. The guy who threw a tantrum and left McLaren because they wouldn't give him preferential treatment over a rookie, the guy who stubbornly refused to give me an inch in Canada in 2008 and lead to both of us crashing out on a crazy day where the championship contenders were struggling and the path to a win was wide open, the guy who, just this season, needed team orders to win the German Grand Prix. Am I really going to let that guy win the championship over me? Perhaps I'm being harsh, I don't hate Felipe Alvarez, I respect his talent - you'd have to be blind not to - it's just that I no how cluelessly lost he and Ferrari were for so much of the early half of the season, now that same team is kicking our asses, and I can't allow that.
"There you are," a sleepy Ysabella wandered into the dining room behind me, leaning against the wall as she settled into the room "Couldn't sleep?"
"No," I admitted "Sorry if I woke you, I didn't mean to."
"Nah, nah, it's okay." she brushed it off "You're about to have the most important two races of your life, I'd be kinda bummed out if you were calm about it. Seeing you all stressed out and nervous makes me feel better about myself."
"Gee, thanks," I quipped.
"Not like that," Villarreal giggled, her words probably not coming out the way she intended thanks to her own morning grogginess "I just mean that you're not an alien. All those headlines, those rumors, those possibilities...you feel all of it. You're human, and that means it's okay for me to be human too. If the most successful driver I know can be like this...then there's hope for me yet."
"Don't be so hard on yourself, you have that super-secret job offer from...?" I turned to her, smirking as I tried to coax an answer out of her, both to satiate my own curiosity and, more importantly, to provide a distraction from all this waiting and thinking.
"Nice try, but no," she stood up from the wall, shaking her head authoritatively...an impressive which was kinda broken up by her goofy smile and the fact that her eyes were still half shut with sleep.
"Come on...I deserve to know." I coaxed further, taking a few steps forward and running my fingers across her bare arm. She was dressed in her sleep clothes - a tank top and some shorts, same as I was - and I could see the brief chill go through her before she responded.
"It's too early for that!" she complained.
"Too early for what?" I played ignorant.
"Ugh, I'll give you a hint if you'll come back to bed and sleep." she offered.
"Sleep with you?" I played.
"Fuck off with that, I'm tired!" she complained again, louder this time.
"Okay, okay." I grabbed her hand, leading us off to the bedroom as she spoke.
"Dani and I will be doing the Rolex 24 again together, and after that...I get an Indy Lights test with Schmidt." she shared.
"You're going back to open wheelers?" I asked, excited. Villarreal made no secret of the fact that Formula One had been the dream, and that America had merely been the logical first step for a Venezuelan to take on that route. As it turned out though, she didn't quite have the pace or the funding to make it all the way towards F1 - PDVSA backed her in those days, but it backed a lot of Venezuelan drivers, and the company clearly played favorites - so she had to try and make a living as a race car driver in America. That forced her towards sports cars, culminating in her becoming a full-time Ferrari Challenge North America driver with an annual participation in the 24 Hours of Daytona endurance race. The curtain raiser of American motorsports, the Rolex 24 at Daytona brings together a great variety of drivers across multiple classes, and it seems that has finally led to her getting her big break.
"Yup, Dani connected me to some people on the Indy Lights side and they want to see what I can do in the car. If I perform well...I could get an Indy Lights seat, if I do well in Indy Lights...I might just make it to Indycar." she confirmed "Indycar is already so much better than what I've been able to hope for these past few years so...if I can make it work, I'll be more than satisfied."
"You will," I decided "Because you're better than you give yourself credit for."
"And you'll do just fine in Brazil," she shot back the affirmation "Because you're also better than you give yourself credit for."
"Well," I began.
"Nope! Not hearing it, too tired!" she responded "Now you lay your ass down on this bed and go to sleep because you gotta be well-rested for the race.
"Yes ma'am." I responded like a soldier saluting their superior officer. My girlfriend gave me my orders, so I crawled back into bed and got an hour or two of the best sleep I've gotten all night. I don't know what will happen at Brazil, but worse comes the worst, I've still done amazing things: I made it to F1 as a woman to begin with, I scored podiums in my debut season, I outperformed Tommy Koskinen in my second season, then when I was out of F1 I managed to help Peugeot win at Le Mans and won an Indycar race for Andretti, and I managed to not only work my way back to F1, but I did it with Ferrari. I then managed to win a race with Ferrari while only racing for them for half a season, a feat so outrageous it managed to get me a seat at McLaren when the reigning world champion was also on the job market. That shouldn't make me feel like an imposter, that should be a credit to all the amazing things I managed to accomplish in 2009, and not just the racing achievements, because off track, I became close to Dani Pieri, setting off a chain of events which, for better or worse, leaves me tucked into bed with Ysabella Villarreal, my current girlfriend, and maybe, just maybe, a future Indycar driver. Brazil, Abu Dhabi...I could retire from both races, score zero points, and miss out on the championship by fifty points or whatever, that still wouldn't change a thing about my personal life. The people around me aren't here for my success.
Still though, if I could close out the season on a high, if I could just, against all odds, go from third in the standings to first in these last two races...that would be something truly fantastic. If I lose, I still have my fantastic life, my McLaren contract, and the chance to try it all again next year, but if I win? Then the sky really is the limit. Why stress then? My situation could only possibly improve from here. So, I'm going to go out there in Interlagos and in Yas Marina, I'm going to give it everything, I'm going to have fun, and I'm going to do it all because a beautiful Venezuelan woman back home believed in me. So enough stressing, enough thinking about what might be, time to just concentrate on what I can do and see what happens at the end of it.
Interlagos then, the penultimate race of the 2010 Formula One season. Both Red Bull drivers seemed rather rattled after their Korean GP retirements and there was plenty of drama to be had in the media. The pundits seem to think that, after Alvarez took control of the championship, Red Bull needs to focus on one of their drivers or the other. The media suggested Weaver, as he was ahead in the standings, but the Australian fired back hinting that Red Bull would favor Renner, alluding to some of the previous drama within the team, such as the Turkey crash or the "Not bad for a number two" driver situation with the front wings in Silverstone. That did a little bit to pull the attention away from me, but I was still very much being talked about, and rightly so I would say, given I was currently McLaren's best bet for the championship. Alvarez led on 261 points after his win last time out, Weaver was second on 258 points, I was just one behind on 257, Harrison a bit behind me on 248, and Renner was currently sweating bullets on 233 points. Weaver may be paranoid about the team backing Renner, but the backing may not be enough at this point. There are fifty points left for grabs and Renner is twenty-eight points behind. Obviously, the gap is surmountable, but twenty-eight is a much bigger gap than Weaver's three. To put things into perspective, even if all the rest of us retire in some freak accident at the front of the grid, Renner would still need to finish eighth or higher to remain in the championship hunt. If all of us finish? He's going to have to do a lot to win this thing.
The same applies to Anthony Harrison, albeit to a lesser extent. Thirteen points off the lead means he should remain in championship contention unless he has an utter disaster of a race, but again, thirteen points is more than four. I, personally, don't have the confidence - I mean, this is my first season with the team while he's been affiliated with McLaren since the 1990s and has been their F1 star since 2007 - to suggest that the team puts their focus on me, but some people at the team have to be thinking it. Forget team dynamics, forget who is the unofficial one and unofficial two, forget who the team has historically invested in, just do what needs to be done to win a championship. The championship doesn't care about contractual status at the end of the day, it just cares who has more points at the end of the year. Again, I don't like to encourage this type of thinking, but it's necessary at this stage of the season. We've all fought so hard, all our teams have thrown tens of millions of dollars at this, and hundreds of people across every level of the teams, from mechanics to marketing people to the janitors at Woking, everyone has worked so hard to get here, and now it's a case of desperation, doing anything and everything to get a result.
Ferrari has already demonstrated that they don't care, that they'll make Henrique de Matteo help Felipe Alvarez if that's what it takes to increase their chances of a championship. If Ferrari was doing that at Germany, you can bet your ass that they'll do it in these final two races if they have to. Likewise, Red Bull is so transparently considering backing a single driver that Weaver and Renner are arguing about it in front of the media. In motorsports, where there's smoke there's fire, and that means that Renner has reason to believe that Red Bull will back Weaver for the title if they have to, while Weaver doesn't trust them because the team has, historically, always picked Renner over him. Both drivers are pushing for more help both inside and outside the team, so that must mean there's conversations going on at Red Bull about what to do next. All I want is for those conversations to be going on at McLaren as well, for us to figure out what we have to do to win both the drivers' championship and the constructors' championship.
We're better off in the latter regard, having capitalized on Red Bull's Korea misfortune to go fourteen points ahead in the standings. That's down to consistency though, because we simply haven't had the pace of Red Bull and Ferrari as of late. Faced with that, we can't rest on fourteen points either, we need to do everything in our power to grow that gap going into Abu Dhabi. In that respect, maybe that's why the conversations aren't going on, right now, McLaren just wants both of us to finish as high as possible to maintain the constructors' championship lead. From the cynical perspective, I could say that McLaren gets the money for winning the constructors' championship and then doesn't have to pay substantial bonuses to either Anthony or I for winning the drivers' championship, but in reality, I know that McLaren just wants trophies. No, the real reason why McLaren would rather not commit to one or the other right now is that they have two top drivers so close in the standings, both Harrison and I could win this, and they don't want to upset either of us.
Right now, both of us have a fairly realistic chance of winning, Harrison is McLaren's developmental driver, the one who was practically forged to be a champion for them, while I'm Michael Coronet's first big contribution to the team. Harrison's success is Ron Dennis' success, but my success? That would be Michael's, because he knew me from Williams, he picked me, and that counts for something as well. So, both of us can win, both of us mean a hell of a lot to this team, why rock the boat now? There's still one race to go after this, so why not let this race go and hope that one of us falls out of mathematical contention naturally? That way, McLaren could focus all their energy on one driver in Abu Dhabi without the flak of screwing over a driver in the championship hunt. Keeping in mind how many of these people must have been working here three years ago at the peak of the Harrison/Alvarez drama, I think I might be onto something here.
"Tamara - you ready?" Nicky Morrison called over, snapping me out of my thoughts. Right, let's go along with the team's thinking and just get a move on with this weekend, make sure that I come out of Brazil in championship contention for the finale in Abu Dhabi, and worry about whatever comes after that when the time comes. For now, I need to refresh myself on Interlagos, the track where James Buxton won the 2009 championship for Honda...and now the track where he has announced his retirement. Yup, after racing in F1 since 2000, Buxton has decided to retire while he's still the reigning champion rather than continue on with Williams and potentially tarnish his own legacy. Back in 2000, Brazil was the second race of the season, where Buxton scored his first F1 points for BMW Williams, now in 2010, it's the penultimate race of the season, and reunited with Williams, perhaps Buxton will bookend his career by scoring his last F1 points here.
Enough history though, onto my first practice lap of the legendary Brazilian circuit.
"Starting my lap now," I radioed into the pits as I crested the hill and began the run down to turn one. The surface of the straight evened out and then even began to drop, extending the braking zone as we not only needed to fight our own momentum, but the forces of gravity as well. In any case, I managed to get the car slowed down and flicked it to the left, falling with the circuit as it snapped back to the right for turn two, completing the Senna-S. On the power now, I swept through the fast, flat-out sweeper of Curva do Sol, swinging me out to the left and onto the Reta Oposta at high speed. All eight cylinders and 2.4 liters of my Mercedes-Benz engine were firing away behind me as I thundered over the sector line to complete sector one, rolling my leg off the F-duct as I did so as a prelude to braking. Turn four then, the first corner of sector two, was a ninety-degree left-hander on paper, but in practice, it could be a surprisingly fast corner as I rolled off of the brakes and rode the exit kerbing, just in time to tap the brakes again, downshift twice, and throw the car to the left again for turn five.
Almost as soon as I hit the apex I was back on the throttle and shifting back up the gears, for the ground leveled out beneath me as the exit swung me onto another straight. This was pretty much the bottom of the depression here, and the retaining wall holding up the start-finish straight loomed over me as I arrived on the scene of turn six. Chopping it to the right for Ferradura, climbing up the hill, still to the right for Laranjinha, turn six bled directly into turn seven which bled directly into the uphill braking zone for turn eight. It was a hairpin, but thanks to being uphill, the slow part was remarkably short, and I was tapping the throttle again as I crested the little hill...only to immediately lift again as the track fell away for the left-hand half-circle of Pinheiro, firing me back up the hill.
Throttling up of turn nine, I sped through a slight kink to the right before getting on the brakes for the latter of the two hairpins, that being turn ten - Bico do Pato. Braking, getting the car turned around, and accelerating downhill out of it, I finally felt like I was unleashed from the infield section as I took turn eleven - Mergulho - to the left as fast as I dared, swinging around at the base of the hill and then beginning a slight ascent on the brief straight that followed, crossing the sector line to begin the final third of the lap in the process. Then there was the last real corner on the lap, Juncao: just about ninety-degrees to the left, it was a fairly slow corner, but that was by design, because the corner led to the fastest section of the track. Indeed, as soon as I was out of Juncao, I was on the throttle, I was working my way up the gears, and I was blocking the F-duct to get that little bit of extra acceleration as I powered my way up the hill. Kinking left with turns thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen all while I ascended the hill, rising up and up and up before finally crossing the line and reaching salvation, completing a lap of the Autodromo0 Jose Carlos Pace.
"Phew...how was that?" I panted, almost after breath after a fast lap like that. Interlagos is one of those old-school, natural terrain tracks that really is a rollercoaster, just constantly rising or falling and doing whichever in the fastest way you could.
"It's a good start to the session, and well done for that, but we think the Red Bulls are going to trend quicker." Nicky Morrison reported, giving the blunt and true answer which was, quite frankly, what I wanted - sugarcoating wasn't going to do me any good at this point in a title fight. In any case, my race engineer then continued "For now, I want you to do a series of race pace laps on those tyres, build us a baseline before the tests."
"Copy," I reported, using the rest of this lap to recompose before beginning to impromptu stint simulation. There was a reason for this, and a very good one at that, and that was McLaren was still bringing us little parts and aerodynamic bits to try out. Granted, at this point it's more about fine-tuning elements that we plan to put on our 2011 car, but every little bit of development helps when you're in a title battle. Most other teams, especially the ones without the budget of the top, factory-backed teams at the sharp end of the grid, would've given up on their 2010 cars by now and shifted focus to 2011. McLaren, however, has the resources and world class personnel to consider both, and find ways to improve our 2010 challenger while still gathering data and insights for next year. We weren't being wasteful, because while some things were changing - banning sharkfin engine covers and the shift to Pirelli tyres, along with the return of KERS and a new, standardized system to replace the F-ducts being chief among them - the regulations between 2010 and 2011 were consistent enough that work here could realistically have an effect on not just these last two rounds of the championship, but on the level of our car for next year.
The relentless march of progress, I suppose.
Qualifying tenth on the grid had hardly been my ambition going into this weekend, but this time, I had a good excuse ready. That was the fact that conditions were all over the place in qualifying, particularly Q3. Rain had fallen over night Friday to Saturday to begin with, but FP3 was run more or less in the dry, only for the rain to return as we started qualifying. To add insult to injury, the rain was as inconsistent as my qualifying performances, staying light most of the time but having moments of heaviness and then, for just barely a perfect minute and a half at the very end of the session, damn near dry conditions. My crew and I were just barely out of the time window, setting our banker lap on the intermediates and then switching to the softs just a bit too early, meaning my lap was set when the track was just a bit too slick to work with, and then I slid wide at turn four on my next lap just to ensure I wouldn't make it around again for another attempt. In short, I had the worst luck possible when it came to the conditions, but the exact opposite was true of James Buxton. Yup, the pride of Great Britain, the reigning world champion for just two more races, and the already-announced-his-retirement James Buxton. He was on the dry compound Bridgestones at just the right time in just the right conditions that he was able to put it into pole position. It was going to be a dry race today, so he was going to have a hell of a hard time keeping it, but the point remains: on the very weekend where Buxton confirmed his retirement, he added one final feather to his cap and won Williams' first pole position in God knows how long. They certainly weren't setting pole positions when Koskinen and I were there, I can tell you that much.
Heroics or not, to focus on the drivers I actually need to focus on, the Red Bulls were just behind him. Maximilian Renner kept Red Bull on the front row of the grid, while Martin Weaver, their championship favorite at this point, slotted in third, lining up just behind the Williams ahead. Anthony Harrison outqualified me yet again, which was unfortunate, but the Ferraris? well championship leader Felipe Alvarez was in fifth, but Henrique de Matteo was only ninth in his home race, so I could totally fight him right off the line. Indeed, both Harrison and I are well-placed to fight the Ferraris...which concerns me that it'll give Red Bull the opportunity to slip ahead of Buxton and build a gap on us while we're preoccupied with battling each other. It wouldn't be the first time in recent memory that McLaren lost out on the championship in Interlagos because they were too busy focusing on their grudges rather than on the championship. I wasn't going to let that happen to me though, so right now, my only goal was to work my way forward in the race and hope to God that things work out around me, because I cannot be caught in a prolonged battle with Henrique. In fact, I would be quite content if the Brazilian and I could work together to at least get through the midfield cars, given Henrique has nothing else to play for at this point. That being said, if Henrique has nothing to play for personally, why would he work with me when I'm one of the main threats to Alvarez winning the championship? No, Henrique is a nice guy, but Ferrari is a ruthless organization, so I won't be able to depend on his assistance in the race, good relations or not.
Thus, when the race started, the story at the front of the grid was the contrast between the wheelspin of Buxton off of pole and the stable, rapid launch of Maximilian Renner in second. Buxton's 2009 season is all the proof that he knows how to start from pole, but perhaps the last year in a midfield car has made him a bit rusty - starting from the middle of the field is a much more reactive process than matching the lights at the front of the grid, where a driver needs to be proactive to fire off the grid like a missile as soon as those lights fade away - or maybe just this car, in these conditions, at this track, picked up a bit more wheelspin than the Red Bull. Whether or not there was a deeper story to this, the end result was the same: Renner took the lead from Buxton right away. Further back, Weaver defended his position from Harrison whilst I started strong, trying to make sure that Henrique possibly helping Alvarez wasn't going to be a problem at all. Given that Henrique essentially let Hamalainen pass for the lead at this very race in 2007, it was hardly an unimaginable scenario.
I was a former Ferrari driver though, I knew all the tricks, and I knew how far Ferrari would go. So, as soon as I pulled ahead of Henrique de Matteo going into turn one, I knew I was fine: Ferrari will have its drivers defend like lions for a position, but taking out a car ahead? That was unacceptable, and no amount of it helping a teammate would make up for the bad press and the brand damage it would do for Ferrari. So then, I settled into ninth as, coming out of turn three and onto the Reta Oposta, Weaver followed his teammate through, overtaking Buxton and making it a Red Bull 1-2 for the umpteenth time this season. This also caused an accordion effect behind, as Harrison hadn't been expecting this, so my teammate had to take to the outside and go wide to avoid hitting Buxton ahead, a move that nearly allowed Alvarez to slip through on both of them before Harrison managed to block him off and contain the threat.
Shortly afterwards, I would arrive on scene and gain another position, moving up to eighth as Wilhelm Ziegler went wide, put wheels on the grass, and needed to lift. Another position gained for me and another step closer to limiting the damage, but championship leader Felipe Alvarez was certainly trying to make it difficult for me. Alvarez sniffed the inside of Harrison at Juncao and then battled him up the hill and down the straight. The Ferrari narrowly had a nose ahead, but Harrison clung to his tight outside line which turned into the inside for the Senna S, regaining fourth...only to immediately lose it again when Alvarez counterattacked with a brilliant run down the Reta Oposta, firmly knocking my teammate out of the top four. I was moving forward, which was good, but so was Alvarez, which was bad.
Alvarez started reeling in James Buxton to drop the British Williams driver even further down the podium, while my race started to settle into a calm rhythm. I was quicker than the likes of Goncalves, Koskinen, and Kaminski ahead, but not by much, and the tight, twisty nature of much of the track was making it difficult for me to work out a way to pass, so I felt like I was at the mercy of pit strategy at this point.
"Do what you can to et me ahead of these midfielders, please." I asked into the radio, not trying to sound too demanding this early into the race, but I hope that my down was enough to convey the message that I really would like it if a good strategy call could throw me ahead of the three ahead. Koskinen and Kaminski sure as hell weren't going to give way easily, not with their own battle for the best of the midfield raging on, while Rudolfo Goncalves was trying to give Williams its best Brazilian Grand Prix in years with one car at the front and one also well inside the points.
"Copy that," Nicky Morrison responded eloquently, giving me all the information that I needed and could possibly want. Sarcasm aside, I was getting worried, because I was stuck with this battling band of cars while the Red Bulls were disappearing into the distance, Felipe Alvarez, meanwhile, was now just behind them in third, getting past Buxton and now playing his own game of damage limitation in any attempt to keep the championship lead going into the final round. Harrison was trying his bestest to get back up to Alvarez and take some points off of him, but he wasn't having much luck, and quite frankly, I would much rather make my way through these cars myself and be the one taking points off of Alvarez, hence the increasingly anxious weight for a better pit strategy. Needless to say, I was downright relieved when Morrison got back to me "Alright then, pit this lap, we're going for a long second stint."
"Understood," I radioed in before peeling off the track and making an early pitstop. The idea was simple: get me out of the pack and into some clean air to make the car work properly, and then, once everyone has made their pitstops, see where everything shakes out thanks to the fact that I'll be eating them up on fresher tyres. Of course, the downside to that is that my tyres will be worn at the end of the race, but fortunately, Bridgestone has made a very stable, very consistent tyre for us to play with, so they can take a little bit of abuse. So, thus my charge up the field began. I was by far the fastest car on track, so my pitstop forced everyone else into the pits shortly afterwards - which negated the tyre wear problem because everyone else was going to have to pit just a few laps after me anyway - so I jumped my way all the way back up the field, culminating in a pass in turn one to move up to fifth place.
Yoshikazu Higashiyama, in the first of two races where he won't be a rookie this year, was on an alternate strategy, going very long on his first stint in an attempt to make track position, but that meant his tyres were worn out and the Sauber wasn't the fastest of cars to begin with. The powerful Mercedes engine combined with the best designed F-duct in the field meant that my pass on the Japanese wonderkid was an easy, textbook pass. So now, more or less at the conclusion of the pitstops, Renner led from Weaver, Alvarez, Harrison, and Shchegolyayeva. My situation had improved immensely, but I was the worst placed of the five remaining championship contenders. The bright side is that Renner is, once again, the best guy who could be winning because he's the furthest behind after his rotten luck...but in the last couple of races, it really does seem like, whenever he does finish, he wins, so is the buffer enough to hold him off? Likewise, Weaver and Alvarez were earning eight and five points on me, respectively. Considering Alvarez is a couple of points ahead, this means things are going to be really tight between the Australian and Spaniard in Abu Dhabi...it was going to be very hard to take the championship from either of them. Unless...
"Weaver has a problem, Red Bull is instructing him to slow his pace." Morrison reported. Martin had just been eating into Maximilian's lead, but now the Australian was dropping back...but would it be enough to fall into our clutches? The next few laps were tense between Red Bull, Ferrari, and McLaren as we all waited to see what Weaver's conservative pace was going to be - would Alvarez go through for second? Would it be so bad that Weaver fell behind the McLarens as well? Could he even finish the race? Well, in the end, the answer was perhaps a bit anticlimactic, as Martin Weaver was fast enough to remain in second, merely letting his teammate disappear into the distance. Considering all the drama in the media build-up to this event, it is perhaps a bit convenient that Weaver is having an issue, but...I honestly can't see how Red Bull would disadvantage their main championship threat to benefit the guy that is this far behind. I know that Weaver insists that Red Bull is biased in favor of Renner, but if this is some sort of manipulation, it might lose Red Bull the championship. No, mere logic had to mean this was a real issue for Weaver, and even if he was still in second, a real issue meant that he could still prove vulnerable. Thus, while the race settled down at the front, battles continued behind us as Koskinen worked his way forward and Goncalves fell right to the back with a puncture. There was, however, still plenty hanging in the balance at the sharp end.
And then, on lap fifty-one, we experienced a potentially career-ending crash for Giuseppino Leone. Now, perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration, as he wasn't seriously injured - it wasn't even as bad as Fabian Schmidt's leg breaking crash at Suzuka last year - rather it was career-ending because of the pressure building against him. The Italian Force India driver lost the rear on the exit kerbing of the Senna S, he overcorrected in response, causing the rear to spin around on him and spear the nose into the inside wall, the car coming to a rest just inside of the Reta Oposta with a shattered nose and front suspension. Needless to say, this brought out the safety car, and, like I was saying, it probably spelled the end for Leone's F1 career. He did well to get back to the sport to begin with after his Toro Rosso stint, but he ultimately just did not have the pace, especially not with Force India wanting to bring Richard DiPaolo in. Hell, while it seems that Natasha will probably have to stay at Marussia, I'd still wager she'd be Force India's second choice at this point, so I think keeping Leone is Option C at absolute best for Force India. While I recognize that he hasn't been anywhere near as impressive as Lorenzo Barbaro and Force India needs all the help it can get in the fight against Williams and Sauber, my time outside of the sport means that I can sympathize with Giuseppino. You spend all your life working to get into F1, you lose your seat, and then you come back and still flounder. Who knows if I'd be in F1 at all right now if my stint with Ferrari bombed?
"Pit this lap, pit this lap." Nicky Morrison radioed in. Thus, tyre strategy was neutralized as well when the top five all pit at once under safety car, switching onto the softer option compound for these final twenty laps of the Brazilian Grand Prix. We had hoped that fresh tyres combined with the safety car bunching up the field would enable us to get a speed advantage over the cars ahead, but with them pitting at the same time, it seemed like fourth and fifth was going to be the best we can do. Indeed, when the race restarted, the top three sped off into the distance, doing even faster lap times than they had been before. Anthony and I were left in a bit of a no man's land as, behind, Wilhelm Ziegler who hadn't pit was forced to let Tommy Koskinen by. The Finn had initially pit with us but some sort of miscommunication led to a blunder where Mercedes fitted the wrong tyres, causing Koskinen to have to pit again and thus lose out on track position. His world championship teammate tried to help by letting him by, but it came just late enough for us to gap him, and then once we were off the main straight, we had enough pace to gap the Mercedes. Alvarez gained just enough on the Red Bulls up front that they couldn't risk swapping Weaver and Renner around for the points, but not close enough to attack. Thus, Interlagos, usually one of the action-packed races on the calendar, was a bit of a whimper in 2010, at least at the sharp end of the field.
The top ten of the 2010 Brazilian Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 25 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 18 points.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 15 points.
4: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 12 points.
5: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 10 points.
6: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 8 points.
7: Wilhelm Ziegler - Germany - Mercedes GP Petronas - 6 points.
8: James Buxton - Great Britain - Williams-Cosworth - 4 points.
9: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 2 points.
10: Yoshikazu Higashiyama - Japan - Sauber-Ferrari 1 point.
So, a departing pole position only leads to an eighth place for James Buxton. He is, however, still the reigning champion, as the title race goes to Abu Dhabi to be decided, so no matter what, Buxton will go into his final race wearing the #1, a feat that not many drivers can boast of. Piotr Kaminski finished behind him after suffering with rev limiter issues late in the race - not being able to hit the top of the rev range going up the hill at Interlagos probably made it next to impossible for him to overtake anyone, ruining the Pole's race - while Yoshikazu's off-strategy gamble was only good enough for tenth at the end of the race. Still, this has been a very good season for Higashiyama, and the fact that he has embarrassed Victor Hartmann - one of the most highly rated midfielders of the 2000s - in the same car is a testament to the talent he has. The world economic situation likely means this wouldn't have changed anything, but I have to imagine someone at Toyota is kicking themselves knowing that they had this world class talent on their hands just as they were pulling out of F1.
Speaking of world class talent, let's take a look at the top six in the driver's standings:
1: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 276 points.
2: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 276 points.
3: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 267 points.
4: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 260 points.
5: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 258 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 204 points.
No points for Henrique de Matteo today and just twenty-five points remaining means that, in addition to being left out of championship contention, sixth place is the best that he'll be able to achieve, even Renner is out of reach. As for Renner, despite his fourth win of the season today, he'll only be able to win the championship with a win, as 258 plus the 18 from second place would only net him 276 points...meaning Felipe Alvarez would win on count back even if none of us scored points at Abu Dhabi. Sitting just two points ahead of him in the standings, things aren't much better for Anthony, while my seven points on Anthony and nine on Renner gives me a bit of breathing room, but not by much. No, the championship right now is shaping up to be between Felipe Alvarez and Martin Weaver, and I said it was going to be close between them at the end of this race, but I didn't realize it was going to be this close...they're tied. Felipe Alvarez currently sits on five wins - Bahrain, Germany, Italy, Singapore, and South Korea - to Weaver's four - Spain, Monaco, Great Britain, and Hungary - meaning Alvarez wins all tiebreakers.
Renner won Abu Dhabi last year, Weaver finished second, Alvarez failed to score. Take Alvarez out of Renault and compare him in his current Ferrari...Hamalainen failed to score, I finished sixth. So, perhaps history is leaning towards Martin Weaver, but if 2010 has taught me anything so far, it's that nothing can be taken for granted. This season has been so competitive; we've seen wins from everyone in the top six, we've seen massive improvement for Ferrari in the second half of the season, and we've seen Red Bull be so quick but also show so much vulnerability, last time out in Korea being the clearest example of that. So yeah, Alvarez and Weaver are tied, Weaver performed better in Abu Dhabi last time out, but Alvarez and Ferrari is a red-hot combination right now, so I couldn't even begin to predict who will come out on top. Hell, as unlikely as it may seem, I couldn't even rule out Renner winning, because the rest of us championship contenders could have another weekend like Belgium where everything goes wrong. I think it's a bit less likely to rain in Abu Dhabi though.
There is, however, another championship to consider, so we must also look at the top six of the constructors' championship:
1: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 534 points.
2: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 527 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 480 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 227 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 169 points.
6: Williams-Cosworth - Great Britain - Grove, Great Britain - 69 points.
Force India sits on 61 points after a late season collapse, while Sauber sits on 45, meaning Williams is trending well towards taking sixth. Otherwise, with a one-two finish resulting in a maximum of forty-three points for a team, Lotus, Mercedes, and Ferrari have all locked in their finishing position, so no changes between fifth and third. The actual constructors' championship though? That still hangs on a tightrope, as a mere seven points separates Red Bull and McLaren. So then, the stage is set. I'm nine points off the championship lead, Anthony is sixteen points off, but we're both still in contention, and we're fighting to win the constructors' crown for McLaren as well, so we're going to give it our all, even if we know we're not the favorites, even if we know that Red Bull was dominant at the inaugural Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last year. We'll do everything we can at F1's finale: the showdown in the desert under the lights of the Yas Marina circuit.
"This weekend on Speed Channel: the Formula One World Championship comes to its thrilling conclusion," George Tarantano began, dressed in a suit and standing in a studio for a special presentation for American TV - Ysabella sent me for Nat and I to watch on the plane to Abu Dhabi, saying it was very good - the American pitlane reporter continued "Five drivers will duke it out for one of the closest championship battles in history, so tonight, we're bring you a special feature: The Contenders."
"Contender Number One: Felipe Alvarez," Tarantano continued, raising a single finder as a picture of the Spaniard came up next to him "Born in the Asturias region of Spain, Alvarez is by far the most successful driver from his country. Alvarez made his debut at the very bottom of the ladder in F1 with the minnow Minardi team in 2001 and clawed his way up the grid from there, serving as a test and reserve driver for Renault in 2002 before making his breakthrough in 2003. Here, Alvarez would take pole position and the win at the Hungarian Grand Prix, becoming the then youngest winner in Grand Prix history. He would even go so far as to lap not just his teammate, but also Wilhelm Ziegler, who would go on to become champion that season - and they were both in the points! Alvarez and Renault's partnership would culminate in winning the 2005 and 2006 championships back-to-back, being the most recent champion to do so. He would nearly make it three in a row in a controversial season with McLaren but would return to Renault the following year. 2008 brought two wins, one in equally controversial fashion at Singapore, and one on merit in Japan. Now with Ferrari and having the most wins of everyone this season, it'll be hard to count Alvarez out from going three for three."
"Contender Number Two might have something to say about that though, and he is none other than Martin Weaver." Tarantano worked his way down to second "That's right, it's the man from the land down under! Weaver was a test driver for Jaguar in 2000 and 2001, and in 2002, they convinced Minardi to take Felipe Alvarez out of the seat for the first three races and put Weaver in. What did Martin do in his Formula One debut? He went from eighteenth to fifth in a car he barely fit inside of, doing enough to convince Minardi to keep him for the rest of the season. This would also net Weaver a seat at Jaguar for 2003 and 2004, and then Williams for 2005 and 2006, but Weaver joined his current team, Red Bull, in 2007. He's been with the team since nearly the beginning, he's won six races for them since his maiden victory at the 2009 German Grand Prix, and he is level on points with Alvarez going into the final race for the season. Can he do what he did in 2003 and once again come out on top over the decorated Spaniard?"
"That analogy is a bit of a stretch." Nat complained from the coach next to me.
"A little bit but hey, if I found out that was true, I'd want to share it too." I shrugged. It's a pretty wild fact that the guys tied for the championship lead right now were in this sort of quasi-competition at the beginning of their careers, and Weaver was able to take an opportunistic, fluke result at a carnage-filled race to keep the seat for the rest of the year, relegating Alvarez to testing duties.
"Contender Number Three: Tamara Shchegolyayeva." Tarantano now raised three fingers.
"Boring," Nat heckled.
"Shut up!" I shot back.
"Born in Almaty in what was then the Soviet Union, now Kazakhstan, Tamara came to Monaco in 1991 and fell in love with racing the following year. She would take the 2006 GP2 Asia title and make her F1 debut with Williams in 2007, replacing the departing Weaver. Scoring two podiums in her debut season and beating her highly rated teammate Tommy Koskinen in her second, Tamara would lose her funding and her seat for 2009, but she would turn that negative into a positive. In 2009, she would win an Indycar race, she would take a French team back to the top of the 24 Hours of Le Mans after nearly a decade of dominance by Audi, and she'd return to F1 with no less than Scuderia Ferrari. Tamara would become the first woman to ever win a Formula One race in the 2009 Singapore Grand Prix and, now with McLaren, she's followed that up with another four wins. Nine points behind Alvarez and Weaver, she'll have more work to do than either of them, but if she's proven anything in the last year, it's that she can never be counted out. Will she complete the ultimate comeback to go from fired to world champion in just two years?"
"That was pretty cool, I think," I decided, flushing slightly at the praise coming my way...no wonder Villarreal wanted me to see this.
"I mean...you've earned it," Natasha played it off with a shrug, but the way she accepted it as mere fact was just as touching. She really did believe in me.
"Contender Number Four: Anthony Harrison." the recording of Tarantano snapped me out of my sentimental moment and got me focused again "The only one on this list besides Alvarez to have won a championship, Anthony Harrison is one of America's very own. Hailing from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the mixed-race driver has faced adversity unlike any other, entering karting in the 1990s just as F1 was falling by the wayside in the United States and exiting the decade as a McLaren junior driver, Harrison crushed the obstacles in front of him. Even pairing him with the reigning two-time world champion Felipe Alvarez in his rookie season couldn't stop this kid as he tied Alvarez in his rookie season. Harrison would win the championship in the very next year, propelling himself to the top of the sport and etching his name in the history books. 2009 was more of a challenge for the American, as McLaren lost its footing and struggled under the new regulations, but McLaren is back now. Back and sporting wins in Turkey, Canada, and Belgium this season, Harrison is sixteen points behind the championship lead. A hurdle for sure, but between coming from a country that fell out of love with F1, coming from a working-class family that needed to work double and triple jobs just to keep him in karting, and doing all of it while the only black face in the paddock, Harrison knows all about hurdles, what's one more?"
"I wonder who he's rooting for," Natasha quipped.
"Come on, he's American, he has to support the local hero...plus Americans love an underdog." I defended my teammate.
"And finally, Contender Number Five: Maximilian Renner." Tarantano raised all five fingers and got to the final man in championship contention "Coming from Germany and calling Wilhelm Ziegler his hero, Maximilian Renner made his Grand Prix debut as a substitute, replacing the injured Piotr Kaminski at BMW Sauber for the United States Grand Prix in 2007. Finishing in the points on his debut was enough to convince Red Bull to bring him into their family, initially with the Toro Rosso team. Well, by winning the 2008 Italian Grand Prix and outscoring the senior team in his first full season in F1, Renner did better and left Red Bull with no choice but to convince Red Bull to promote him to the senior team. Renner won four races last year, including the 2009 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, unquestionably being Red Bull's top driver that season. This season tells a different story however, a story where Renner seems to retire from races as often as he wins. Perhaps then it's fitting that the points standing leaves him with just one option at Abu Dhabi: win it or crash out trying to."
"I swear I thought he was going to say "win it or die trying."" Natasha heckled.
"Well, you know the Americans, they love their dramatics." I shrugged, trying to suppress a smile myself.
"Oh, you're just saying that because you're half an American yourself!" she playfully retorted.
"Am not!" I maturely responded.
"House in Miami..." she pointed out.
"I have an apartment in Monaco too, you know." I argued before dropping it "I thought that was pretty good though, certainly sets up the people involved and creates storylines going into the race."
"You're just saying that because you got one." she teased.
"What happened to I earned it?" I smirked.
"You can un-earn it too." she smirked back. I sighed after that - not a complaint, rather a content one - this might be the most stressful race of my life and Natasha is here helping me feel human during all of it. I know that Marussia isn't a great seat, I know that she's not thrilled about getting snubbed at Force India, and I know that even Force India is a downgrade compared to the Mercedes seat she feels she deserves after winning two championships in 2009. I know all of that, yet still, I'm just glad that she's in F1 in some capacity this year, for my sake if nothing else.
"Well, I can give you a storyline too," I decided before doing my best impression of one of those exaggerated ESPN-style American sports pundit voices "Natasha Tsirinskaya must finish eleventh or higher at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix if she wants to overturn Caterham in the constructors' championship."
"Yeah...the race for tenth isn't quite as exciting as the race for first, is it?" she asked, referencing that I was not only in the mix for the drivers' championship, but McLaren could still win the constructors' championship.
"I'm sure if you could pull it off, it would feel just as monumental for the people at Marussia." I pointed out.
"I guess," she shrugged "I mean, if I can, I'll try, but who knows if my car is going to be any good around there, or what the passing is going to be like."
"Well, only one way to find out..." I noted as I looked out the window to see the track on Yas Island and the construction site for the Ferrari amusement park next to it, all getting larger and larger in my window as we began the landing in Abu Dhabi. That was a metaphor and a half too because all the build-up and the anticipation was over, the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix was here, and soon enough, we would know who would be the 2010 Formula One World Champion.
Twenty-two races across five continents. Twenty-four drivers whittled down to six and now, just five. The blood, sweat, and tyres of thousands of people working for every team in F1 on every level of those teams. All of that...and it all came down to this. The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix...here is the race so far. Renner qualified on pole, but Harrison denied a Red Bull one-two, in fact, Weaver was way down the field, as Alvarez was third, I was in fourth, and Weaver was the last of the remaining championship contenders in fifth. The other main contender in the form of Alvarez got a slow enough start that I passed him for third, but beyond that, the order up at the top of the field remained the same in the first six or so corners before the safety car was brought out by a downright frightening incident. Wilhelm Ziegler was battling with his Mercedes teammate Tommy Koskinen for sixth when he was forced wide, spun out, and looped his car back onto track...only for Giuseppino Leone in the Force India to crash into him and go over his car, coming to a rest mere inches from Wilhelm's helmeted head. A near miss to be sure. A few midfield cars, most prominently the Lotus of Vladimir Alexandrov, pit under safety car, but the top five stayed out.
That changed shortly after the restart when Weaver, wearing out his soft Option tyres, grazed the wall. The last thing he wanted to do was lose the championship because of worn tyres, so he pit, came back out at the tail end of the field on fresh primes, and started working his way forward. Given that Alvarez viewed the Australian as his main rival, he pit shortly afterwards to cover him off, coming out of the pits narrowly ahead of his championship rival. They weren't in the points yet, but Alvarez was ahead of Weaver, and as far as Ferrari were concerned, that might be enough. The rest of us three were right at the sharp end of the field, Renner running a stable lead, then the McLarens running line and stern on the podium, Harrison narrowly ahead of me. Lap twenty-three was one of the big flashpoints of the race, with Harrison pitting from second place as Alvarez nearly crashed into the back of Vladimir Alexandrov trying to get ahead of the Russian after being stuck behind him for five laps. Alexandrov stayed ahead though, and Alvarez's prime tyres were already beginning to show signs of wear from running hard and running in dirty air. He was still ahead of Weaver though, so surely, he'll clear the Lotus soon enough and that'll be enough for the championship, right?
Well, at the front, my teammate's pitstop forced Renner into the pits on the very next lap while I stayed out in clean air, taking the lead of the race though still needing to make a pitstop. The gap to Renner was a big one, but we had two McLarens at the front against one Red Bull, so we were hoping to do to Renner what Ferrari did to me at Monza. Unfortunately, however, two things hurt our strategy: Renner managed to come out ahead of Kaminski whilst Harrison was stuck behind the Pole and having just as hard a time with the Lotus ahead as was his former teammate further back. The second thing is that going long didn't do me any favors compared to Renner either, because when I came out on lap thirty-nine, I came out in fourth, behind Renner, Kaminski, and Harrison. Kaminski holding up my teammate, however, meant the three of us were now running practically under the same blanket. Still, none of us could pass, so what good was it doing?
Well, it was doing good for Kaminski, because on worn tyres or not, he was going faster than Alexandrov, and Alexandrov had everyone else held up behind him, so, when Kaminski made his stop with ten laps to go, he came out in sixth, ahead of Alexandrov, Alvarez, and Weaver. The Lotus team pulled off a strategic masterclass...by just about ruining everyone else's day on the championship deciding weekend. Now in free air, Anthony Harrison set the fastest lap of the race trying to pursue Renner, but the leading Red Bull was just fast enough and had just enough of a gap with few enough laps remaining that his pace wouldn't be enough. Anthony was going to finish no better than second no matter what at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. So Anthony lifted off the pace and started falling back to me in a controlled manner, seeing no reason to push when it wasn't going to get him the championship. And that brings us to the present: lap forty-nine on November 21st, 2010.
"What's the situation now?" I asked quickly into the radio down the short start-finish straight, not even getting on the F-duct so as to not harass my teammate ahead down the brief on throttle section before we tapped the brakes and threw the car to the left for turn one. Speeding out of turn one and rising through the slightest bit of elevation as I threw the car to the left again for turn two, cresting over the slight rise as I swept back to the right for turn three and then straightened out to the left in turn four as the track evened out to a brief straight. I barely got on the throttle before it was on the brakes and downshifting again for the left-right chicane of turns five and six, followed by just the briefest burst of throttle before braking again for the hairpin, working the car around to the left and accelerating onto the long, long back straight - the first of two anyway - as my race engineer finally got back to me - better now than in the corners anyway.
"Okay, Renner leads from Harrison, then you, Koskinen, Kaminski is now fifth, Alexandrov is sixth, Alvarez is seventh, Weaver is eighth. Renner is currently on 283 points, Alvarez a point behind, you will be tied with Alvarez as well on 282, and Weaver is on 280, Anthony will be on 278." Nicky Morrison answered as I sped down the straight. Jesus Christ, that really would be the perfect sign of how insane this season has been, if all five of us finish within five points and Renner of all people - the guy who was nowhere going into this race - wins it because Alvarez and Weaver were so busy watching each other that they both committed to a truly awful strategy and got stuck behind the Lotuses. Alvarez and I would both miss out by a single point, with Alvarez taking second by virtue of having more wins than me. Is that really how this is going to end? No, not when I can see another three points directly in front of me.
The braking zone for the chicane was next, a tight, almost Z-shaped chicane with a hairpin like entry for turn eight to the left and an acute exit for turn nine to the right, speeding onto another straight with a slight leftward curve to it that was number ten. Here I rolled my leg onto the F-duct to get that speed advantage and tried to overtake my teammate. Anthony quickly realized what I was doing, must have got on his F-duct as well, and forced me to take the long way around. We were braking side by side for turn eleven to the left and I had no choice but to let Anthony by. The best I could do was stick close to him through this technical sector three of the track, as turn eleven bled into the ninety-degree right hander of twelve and then spit us out with the ninety-degree left hander of thirteen. A short straight followed before yet another right-angle left-hander in the form of turn fourteen. The cars finally got to breathe again through here, accelerating out of the slow corner and keeping my foot planted as I turned left for turn fifteen, then left again for turn sixteen in a high-speed section reminiscent of Russia's sector one, but this one ended with a ninety-degree corner in the opposite direction. Right into turn seventeen, a short quirt of throttle, then left for turn eighteen, passing through the bisected hotel before going left again through turn nineteen, accelerating out against the wall on exit as I pursued my teammate.
I would later learn about this radio exchange between Anthony and his race engineer:
"Why is Tamara pressuring me?" Anthony asked, having assumed that, with neither of us having the speed to take on Renner and receiving no pressure from behind, we would just bring the cars home in second and third without another potential Turkey situation.
"Renner is currently beating her in the championship by a single point." Anthony's race engineer matter-of-factly informed him. Harrison took a second, likely doing the math in his head, before simply responding:
"Copy." and with that, back to the present, with the two of us on the brief straight alongside the hotel, going into the final two corners. A lift, a few downshifts, and a dab of the brakes before throwing the cars to the right through turn twenty, squirting the throttle before tapping the brakes again for turn twenty-one, bringing it to the right through the final corner and onto the start-finish straight. I hesitated for a moment, before realizing my teammate was sticking to the outside, not exactly lifting off the throttle and letting me by, more just keeping the door open for me, as if saying come and take it. Well, taking to the F-duct and accelerating hard, I went to the left, outbraked him into turn one, gave my teammate a thankful wave as he didn't fight me too hard, saw him respond with a curt nod, and then continued on with the lap. I was now up to second with less than five laps to go. Another three points should put me two ahead of Renner, now the question once again became: can Alvarez get past the Lotus of Alexandrov? if he could get past the Russian then his Polish teammate is right there, just a few car lengths ahead. Felipe Alvarez could potentially overtake them both and take the championship securely, but he was running out of time and still hadn't even passed Vladimir.
Lap fifty came and went with Alvarez still down in seventh, and then lap fifty-one passed, and fifty-two. Fifty-three...still no pass, nor on the penultimate lap, and then came the final lap. Renner crossed the line to take the win at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, having done everything he could, and the German was no doubt waiting with anticipation as his engineer read off the finishing order, but I came through the last two corners and onto the start-finish straight, crossing the line to take second place, followed shortly by Anthony in third. Tommy Koskinen took fourth place in the sole remaining Mercedes. Piotr Kaminski took fifth in the black and gold Lotus...followed by his teammate! Vladimir Alexandrov took sixth, denying Felipe Alvarez who was chasing him even through the final corners, even onto the start-finish straight, the Spaniard giving it everything and refusing to give up until the race was over. And Martin Weaver rolled across the line in eighth, already knowing from the Ferrari ahead of him that he lost the championship. It didn't really matter to him who he lost it to. In the #8 McLaren though...
"Guys...did we do it?" I asked nervously, not trying to betray anything as a flurry of emotions built up in my chest and tears built in my eyes. I don't have the words for it, I'm sorry, but the anticipation was killing me. I knew enough that it looked good, but I couldn't bring myself to celebrate until I had confirmation, I couldn't do that.
"Tamara Shchegolyayeva," my breath hitched as Michael Coronet came over the radio, this could only mean... "You are the 2010 World Champion!"
"Oh my God...guys I - guys - I don't - I - WOOOOOOOOOOO!" I stumbled out as the emotions washed over me and I was compelled to thank them, to cry, to scream, to celebrate, to do everything all at once and I guess it all came out all at once "WOOHOO! WOW! Wow guys...wow wow wow wow wow. I can't believe it...I can't - I - we did it! We did it! Thank you, thank you, thank you all so much. Thank you, Michael, thank you Nicky, thank Anthony for me please, thank everyone, Owen, Sean, Jonathan, Pawel, Ricardo, Stephen, everyone on my team, thank you all so, so much. I couldn't - I - guys I'm crying. I'm crying because I'm so hap - happy. Guys...ugh. I can't speak, I can't I'm too overwhelmed...my God."
"Understandable Tamara, you've earned it." Michael responded with a smile.
"Thank you too Tamara, we couldn't have done it without you." Nicky responded back, and I could swear I heard a cheer through the microphone as the news spread to my guys in the garage behind them. It's real. It's really real. As if to give another confirmation, as I rolled through the hairpin, I saw the fireworks firing over the start-finish straight signaling the end of the season. For all its faults - and there are many, this race demonstrated that with how impossible it was to overtake - there is a certain charm to ending the season with this day to night race, seeing the fireworks explode against the night sky over the Persian Gulf...it was an event, and I could see the merit in having a destination finale.
To sink in how real this championship was, as I slowly rolled down the back straight, Felipe Alvarez pulled alongside me and gave me a thumbs up. He had the lead going into this round and lost it on strategy, so I suppose this was him being gracious in defeat. Still though, it was a legitimate gesture from a great driver, a fierce rival...and a fellow champion. I've done it. Alvarez wasn't the only one to congratulate me on the cooldown lap, with Weaver following suit, along with Kaminski who dropped back. I went forward to to Renner, pulling alongside him as he slowed for the marshals, they were applauding their race winner, and as I pulled alongside, they applauded their champion too. Renner was my closest rival in the end, finishing just a few points behind me - well, they all finished within a couple of points of me, but he was particularly close - and the German could only offer a wave as he held his helmet down. I couldn't blame him for that, he could try his best to be happy for me, but at the end of the day, he won the race and gave it everything he could, only to be let down by the mistakes and retirements of the year. He had given everything, he had begun to hope in those final laps, and cruelly, 2010 would not be Maximilian Renner's year. Perhaps had things gone a bit differently, perhaps if Red Bull had been just a bit more reliable, or maybe all it would take is if it was James Buxton in this car and not me, it would be Renner's day.
Today though, was mine, so I let the German be and headed back to the pits to park up on the podium positions. In my mirror though, I saw tenth place Henrique de Matteo pull alongside Renner...having lost out on the 2008 title by just a single point, Henrique would understand what Renner is feeling right now better than anyone else.
As the gravity of the situation fell upon me, the points-paying results of the 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix read as follows:
1: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 25 points.
2: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 18 points.
3: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 15 points.
4: Tommy Koskinen - Finland - Mercedes GP Petronas - 12 points.
5: Piotr Kaminski - Poland - Lotus-Renault - 10 points.
6: Vladimir Alexandrov - Russia - Lotus-Renault - 8 points.
7: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 6 points.
8: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 4 points.
9: Ximen Goikoetxea - Spain - Toro Rosso-Ferrari - 2 points.
10: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 1 point.
So then, to give confirmation to this, as I pulled into the pits, I saw the championship standings on a TV screen, and the top six of them read as follows:
1: Tamara Shchegolyayeva - Kazakhstan - McLaren-Mercedes - 285 points.
2: Maximilian Renner - Germany - Red Bull-Renault - 283 points.
3: Felipe Alvarez - Spain - Scuderia Ferrari - 282 points.
4: Martin Weaver - Australia - Red Bull-Renault - 280 points.
5: Anthony Harrison - United States - McLaren-Mercedes - 275 points.
6: Henrique de Matteo - Brazil - Scuderia Ferrari - 205 points.
Which then means that the top six of the constructors' championship reads like this:
1: Red Bull-Renault - Austria - Milton Keynes, Great Britain - 563 points.
2: McLaren-Mercedes - Great Britain - Woking, Great Britain - 560 points.
3: Scuderia Ferrari - Italy - Maranello, Italy - 487 points.
4: Mercedes GP Petronas - Germany - Brackley, Great Britain - 239 points.
5: Lotus-Renault - Great Britain - Enstone, Great Britain - 187 points.
6: Williams-Cosworth - Great Britain - Grove, Great Britain - 69 points.
"WOO!" I shouted again as I climbed out of the cockpit and threw both arms into the sky, hearing the cheers all around me and seeing the flashes of dozens of cameras as the F1 world recognized it's newest champion...and the first ever woman to do it. Immediately afterwards, I left the car and ran over to Anthony who was already shaking hands with the mechanics "WE DID IT! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!"
I shouted as I hugged Anthony and threw the both of us against our mechanics thanking them, thanking him, feeling the whole team embrace us and scream out a cheer. Anthony Harrison had won the 2008 World Championship, I had won the 2010 World Championship, and with Buxton retiring, that meant that McLaren would be going into the 2011 season with the two most recent champions on the grid, McLaren is a mega, mega team and I'm so glad that I got to do right by them, in my first season with the team no less. I always dreamed of this day happening, but even as I won a race and then another and another, I couldn't believe it was ever going to actually happen, but as the season kept going, we kept getting results and everyone else kept throwing away points. Even when we were at our lowest, we stayed in the fight and with just two retirements and a lowest finishing position of eighth - done twice over - we were the most consistent. Now at Abu Dhabi, with a little bit of generosity from Anthony, we got it done and became champions of the world, wow.
"Seriously though," I said as I took my helmet off and wiped away some tears "I have to thank you for letting me by, you didn't have to do that."
"No, but...the team told me you would be champion if you could just score a few more points and I wasn't going to win anyway. I figured that if I couldn't be champion, I might as well make sure it goes to the team."
"Congratulations," Renner interjected, having already pulled up, spoken to his team, and removed his helmet. I don't know if it was something Henrique said or something from the team, but he looked more composed now, as if he's made his peace with what happened...at least externally.
"Thank you...congratulations to you too, I know you fought like hell." I congratulated him back as we shook hands.
"Of course," he smirked playfully "We won the constructor's championship after all."
"Oh, you bragging little bastard, you are not getting away with that!" Anthony playfully shot back "Pretending to be gracious just to brag at us - we'll get you back next year."\
"And I'll get you back!" Renner pointed at Anthony jokingly.
"How about next year we trade? You win the championship, we get the constructors?" I offered with a smirk. There was a serious sentiment behind it though, this year we got the individual honor, but we lost out on the team honor by just three points...Anthony and I will definitely be looking to win the constructors' championship next year to give back to McLaren. They haven't had one since 1998 and God knows this team deserves it for all the work they put in.
"Congratulations! You did it!" Natasha called out, squeezing her way up front through the crowd in her teamwear - she had retired with a mechanical failure earlier in the race so she was already back in street clothes - to congratulate me, pulling me into a hug. I had my first championship and five career wins, there was plenty left to fight for in 2010, but for now, Max, myself, and Anthony climbed up to the podium, the top three in the race. As I looked down over the team personnel gathered at the base of the podium and the grandstands of Abu Dhabi in front of me, I couldn't help but think that F1 was experiencing a changing of the guard. When I entered this sport, we weren't even racing at night, but now? Look at this, a giant, glamorous venue in the Middle East with all sorts of gaudy hotels and yachts and experience packages to cater to rich and famous tourists. Not only that, but the cars are different. Gone are the space age aerodynamics of 2007 and 2008, replaced with a cleaner, simpler look that, while divisive, has produced an immensely competitive season. Perhaps this race shows that the overtaking still needs a lot of work, and perhaps the double and even triple diffusers at the back of the cars this year sort of defeat the purpose of the new regulations, but the overall point remains, these cars have produced a great season. The top five all went into the season finale with a chance to win the championship and ended the race spread by just ten points. The points system has changed since 2007, but the series is just as competitive as those famous 2007 and 2008 finales...even more so because there's more drivers involved across multiple different teams. Red Bull, McLaren, and Ferrari all had a chance to crown a driver's champion today and, at the end, one team won the constructors', and another team won the drivers' championship. I could not think of greater parity than that where the best car loses the drivers' championship on merit.
And the drivers? Well starting with Maximilian, Anthony, and I...we all debuted in 2007. It was a different start for all of us, of course, Anthony Harrison was starting at the top with McLaren, I was starting at damn near the bottom as a paydriver for Williams, and as Tarantano's special alluded to, Renner didn't even really start in 2007, making his debut midseason as an injury replacement in BMW Sauber and impressing enough to get a Toro Rosso drive. Now look at us, in five years, from Formula 3 Euro to F1 to the top of the podium. The three of us can define the future of Formula One, 2010 means we're leaving the decade of Ziegler and Alvarez, and perhaps we're entering the decade of Shchegolyayeva, Renner, and Harrison. Of course, Alvarez will be fighting plenty hard to prove his day hasn't come quite yet and even Wilhelm Ziegler has, in his return with Mercedes, shown flashes of brilliance, including that Atlantic GP second place. A changing of the guard is occurring, but something tells me that the old guard isn't going to go down with a fight.
Let them fight though, because I've already done so much more than I ever imagined. I won the 2010 Formula One World Champion, and from here, the sky is the limit. I'll fight to defend my crown, I'll fight to win McLaren the constructors' champion, and I'll fight for a long time to come, because at just 22 years old, I'm the youngest world champion in history. I'm at the top...but I'm just getting started.
"And...there we go." I announced as I planted my replica of the world championship trophy on the upper central plinth in my trophy room. My various junior trophies were on the left, with three floating shelves - one for wins, including my GP2 Asia championship trophy in its center - one for second places, and one for third places - while on the right, you had my senior trophies, also across three shelves. On the top shelf for wins, there was the 2009 Honda Indy Toronto from my brief Indycar stint, the 2009 Singapore Grand Prix for Ferrari, then Australia, Malaysia, Miami, and Russia from my 2010 season for McLaren. For second places, there was Belgium 2009, Turkey and Canada 2010 from that string of three consecutive one-two finishes Anthony and I pulled off, Italy 2010, and, of course, the 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, where the extra three points for second place gave me the points I needed to win the championship. For third places, my first season successes in Canada 2007 and Europe 2007, followed by a yearlong drought before the Indycar Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, then Russia and Brazil 2009 for Ferrari, and, surprisingly enough, Europe 2010 was my only third place trophy of 2010. The biggest trophies were in the center though, the 2009 24 Hours of Le Mans with Peugeot on the bottom plinth, and floating just above it, was the 2010 Formula One World Championship with McLaren.
"It feels insane to even be in the same room as something like that." Ysabella pointed out, having been here as I moved my trophy collection from Monaco to Miami, but still struggling to take it all in, even as, alongside the left-hand wall between the videos, she built her own trophy display. For now, it featured her single podium from Mont Tremblant and two wins from Road Atlanta and then the road course at Homestead Miami Speedway. I hadn't been able to pay much attention to it thanks to traveling the world and focusing on my own title challenge, but Ysabella Villarreal really did improve towards the end of her season, surging up to take fourth place in the standings. I have to imagine the surge in results combined with her connections to me and Dani Pieri helped her get this Indy Lights test for 2011.
"It is...but here we are." I walked over to her, putting an arm around her waist and resting my head on her shoulder, just standing there in comfortable silence, looking at what we've built together and thinking about what 2011 could bring for both of us...at least until my phone went off.
"It's for you," Ysabella joked, feeling my phone vibrate against her side.
"Ugh, it better be impor - " my complaint trailed off as I read the text.
"Hey," wrote Roksana, "Congratulations, first of all. Second, I know it sounds weird, but...I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't ask to interview the first ever woman to win the championship."
"What is it?" Ysabella asked, the Venezuelan looking concerned at my expression.
"My ex-girlfriend just asked to interview me." I admitted.
"Well...that's awkward." Ysabella sighed.
"Yup," I popped the p. Obviously, winning the championship and being the first woman - and the first Kazakh driver to do it, for what that's for - came with a ton of attention and interview requests, but this...this was throwing a wrench in the works.
Notes:
Eww, a cliffhanger!
In all seriousness, thank you all for reading. I've been writing this story for a year and a half and I'm glad to have gotten to an ending. Obviously there will be a LatSoF1 Part II taking us to 2013, but I just can't right now, I'm a bit burned out and I want to do something different for a little while. Plus, I want to be at 100% with this when I'm writing for all of y'all again, so yeah, it's not a goodbye, it's just a see you later. Will I be writing something in the meantime? Most likely, but I don't quite know what yet. I have a lot of ideas bouncing around my head - many motorsports related, just in different eras and scenarios than this story - but some ideas in completely different areas as well. So, what will I write next? You'll find out once I find out.
So, once again, thank you all for reading, thank you to those of y'all who have left kudos and reviews,
and I will be back soon enough.
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 25 Sun 11 Dec 2022 04:16PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 28 Wed 11 Jan 2023 04:10PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 28 Wed 11 Jan 2023 04:22PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 29 Fri 27 Jan 2023 11:20AM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 29 Fri 27 Jan 2023 02:17PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 30 Sun 05 Feb 2023 04:05PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 30 Sun 05 Feb 2023 05:02PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 30 Sun 05 Feb 2023 05:55PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 30 Sun 05 Feb 2023 07:02PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 31 Sun 26 Feb 2023 06:50PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 31 Sun 26 Feb 2023 06:52PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 31 Sun 26 Feb 2023 08:04PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 31 Sun 26 Feb 2023 08:04PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 32 Tue 07 Mar 2023 08:45AM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 32 Tue 07 Mar 2023 01:07PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 32 Tue 07 Mar 2023 03:00PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 32 Tue 07 Mar 2023 03:16PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 32 Wed 08 Mar 2023 07:51AM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 32 Wed 08 Mar 2023 01:58PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 34 Sun 02 Apr 2023 06:10PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 34 Sun 02 Apr 2023 06:29PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 34 Sun 02 Apr 2023 07:35PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 34 Sun 02 Apr 2023 08:09PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 34 Sun 02 Apr 2023 06:12PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 34 Sun 02 Apr 2023 06:29PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 35 Sun 16 Apr 2023 02:53PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 35 Sun 16 Apr 2023 03:39PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 36 Thu 18 May 2023 07:14PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 36 Thu 18 May 2023 08:32PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 36 Thu 18 May 2023 08:36PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 37 Thu 18 May 2023 07:26PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 37 Thu 18 May 2023 08:34PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 38 Mon 29 May 2023 08:14AM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 38 Mon 29 May 2023 12:35PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 38 Tue 30 May 2023 11:47AM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 38 Wed 31 May 2023 01:10PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 39 Sun 11 Jun 2023 02:51PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 39 Sun 11 Jun 2023 02:52PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 39 Sun 11 Jun 2023 03:03PM UTC
Last Edited Sun 11 Jun 2023 03:04PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 39 Sun 11 Jun 2023 03:26PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 40 Sun 25 Jun 2023 06:42PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 40 Sun 25 Jun 2023 07:33PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 40 Sun 25 Jun 2023 07:59PM UTC
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Iona_Albuquerque on Chapter 40 Sun 25 Jun 2023 08:08PM UTC
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Burningblaze05 on Chapter 40 Mon 26 Jun 2023 06:27AM UTC
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