Chapter Text
Abu Dhabi, UAE. December 2024
“There it is! Keith Kogane is your new World Champion!”
Cameras flash, leaving white spots in Keith’s eyes. The mass of people in front of him, clad in violet and black, roar as he raises the glimmering silver trophy above his head. His dark hair still sticks to the back of his neck with desert air-dried sweat from the final race of the season, and his adrenaline is still high from scraping through the final laps of the race to clinch the championship. He forces a smile, lowers the heavy trophy to press his lips to it.
They’re chanting his name. He can feel the eyes of spectators from around the world through the unblinking lenses of the broadcast cameras, all pointed in his direction. Gold confetti rains down, fireworks explode in purple and red along the perimeter of Yas Marina Circuit.
This is everything he’s ever wanted.
He’s never felt more empty.
bbc.com/sport/formula1/26318
Abu Dhabi Grand Prix: Keith Kogane crowned champion after his teammate and rival’s horrible crash the race prior
🕓 01 December 2024 - 💬 3,478 comments
[Image of Keith on the podium, kissing his trophy, his face mostly hidden]
The fate of the championship seemed decided only a week ago - Takashi Shirogane has been leading the championship over the course of the season, with his teammate and close friend, Keith Kogane breathing down his neck. However, it all came apart in a single second, when an uncharacteristic error made Shirogane lose control of his car, and careen into the barriers at a breakneck speed.
Our sources have revealed that Shirogane is recovering relatively well from the crash, however a shrapnel from the barrier lodged in his right arm caused complications. We do not yet know whether the shrapnel will have complications in his recovery, and whether Shirogane can return to racing next season, if at all.
Kogane has been one to watch out for since his debut 7 years ago, at the young age of 17 - the youngest driver this sport has ever seen. He’s unquestionably talented and daring, however he’s been known to be rash and too optimistic during overtakes, borderline in his moves.
He was trailing Shirogane by 50 points at the start of last week’s race, and after the red flag following the crash, went on to win the race. With winning the final race of the season, the two teammates tied on points, but the countback fell in favour of Kogane, crowning him champion of the world for the first time.
When asked to comment on his championship, Kogane simply said “I had a dream come true”, however he didn’t elaborate, even when prompted. Blade team principal, Kolivan, stated that he is happy for Kogane, although he wishes the circumstances were different for [Kogane’s] own sake.
The season finale was not without excitement - in the absence of Shirogane, reserve driver Regris filled in, and Altea’s golden boy, McClain, claimed the second spot on the first row during qualifying. McClain put up a valiant fight, chasing Kogane until the first pit stops, however a slow pit stop saw his race undone, dropping to 4th before climbing his way past Galra’s Sendak and [Lotor] Zarkon, claiming the second step of the podium in the end.
The prize giving gala will be held in Paris on the 13th of December, marking the end of the 2024 season before the winter break. Formula 1 will return on the 14th of March, in Melbourne, Australia, for the 2025 season opener.
See comments
skysports.uk.co/f1/article/70260
BREAKING NEWS: Altea’s Katie Holt to replace Takashi Shirogane at Blade!
🕓 18 December 2024 - 💬 872 comments
In shocking news, it was announced today that Katie Holt will be driving alongside reigning champion Keith Kogane for the 2025 season.
Following the accident of 5-time champion Takashi Shirogane, the constructor champion team found themselves with an open seat. It was heavily debated in the past weeks since the accident, whether Shirogane can return to racing, however it was announced a few days after the season finale that he will be retiring from racing altogether. Sources have claimed that it has to do with his arm injury sustained in the crash, but we do not know the severity of the injury.
Blade team principal, Kolivan answered the following when asked who will fill the seat of Shirogane:
“We have our options, both inside our driver pool and outside it.”
It seems we now have our answer: Katie Holt, 2-time race winner will pair alongside Kogane for at least the 2025 season.
[Image of Katie Holt on the top step of the podium in Monza, in the 2023 season]
Holt stepped up to Formula 1 after an impressive climb through the junior ranks in 2022, debuting with Garrison Racing. She made the jump to the main team the following year, partnering with Lance McClain for the past two seasons. It has not yet been announced who will fill the seat next to McClain for 2025.
Altea Racing @AlteaRacing
[A blue image with the following white text:
We are pleased to announce that Lotor Zarkon will be racing alongside Lance McClain for the 2025 season. We believe that this will be a partnership that will be harmonious and fruitful.]
10:00 AM - Jan 3, 2025
Altea Racing @AlteaRacing
Welcome to the team, Lotor! 💙
Hear from our team principal and drivers here → altearacing.com/videos/3ns8aaj9
11:00 AM - Jan 3, 2025
r/formula1 - 2 hr. ago
tracktales82
Lotor Zarkon to be teammates with Lance McClain. thoughts?
honestly, I don’t think this will work. why would they put two top-tier drivers in the same team? sure their car might be good, and they might have good drivers, but it doesn’t mean shit if the pitwall is asleep.
⬆️ 1.4k ⬇️ 💬 459
fastlanelance
I never liked Lotor personally, I really don’t get what Allura was thinking with that one. I don’t have a good feeling about this.
BloodHound26
me either, why the hell would he go from daddy’s team to another??
MotorMania6391
well they’re either gonna obliterate the grid or each other
chronodrummer
u/MotorMania6391 that shit goes to r/fanf1ction
RatBastard96
good for them, finally a decent driver, mcclain cant drive for shit. i have no idea how hes still driving
PidgeonCall5
you have no idea how a 6-time winner is still in the sport? im sad for you, truly
Notes:
welcome to our super specific hyperfixation crossover! this thing has been in the works since march, and we finally felt like we're ready enough to start posting it.
we have some helmet, suit and logo references here because when we say this au has us in a chokehold, we mean it.
we also already have art by the awesome sleepycheesecakeowo here that had both of us on the floor because helloooo??
you can find us here and here, we're always happy to talk about klance, f1, or klance in f1!ps: kudos and comments are much appreciated, and thank you for indulging us in this au!!!
Chapter 2: Melbourne
Summary:
The season gets off to a chaotic start.
Chapter Text
Melbourne, Australia
Formula 1 @f1
It’s Race Day in Melbourne, Australia! After an exciting quali here in Albert Park, we can’t wait to kick off an incredible 2025 season 🏁#f1 #AusGP
🔁 Sophie 53 @babemcclain
omg this is going to be total chaos, lance looked like he wanted to take keith out by the kneecaps
🔁 they see me roloing @formulabeezer
Blade is looking FAST this year, no wonder kogane’s on pole
🔁 ally @altea-tea
altea’s gonna set the record straight, y’all just wait #ShiroWouldveWon
Lance is all about routine on race day.
It’s soothing. No matter where he is in the world, he does the exact same thing on the morning of a race.
He wakes up. He takes a long shower, exfoliator and conditioner and everything. He does his skin care routine, because he’ll be damned if he’s not absolutely glowing for the cameras. One bad zit and it’s all over the internet for weeks – and he knows from experience.
He eats the same breakfast: toast, eggs, coffee. If he’s feeling daring, he might have some fruit. All above board with his nutritionist, even if what he really craves is a fat cinnamon roll.
At the paddock, and he soaks in the energy. Taking selfies with the fans screaming his name, the reporters clamoring around him, shoving microphones in his face, the team’s social media team and photographer following him around. The cameras, the driver parade, the anticipation, he thrives in the chaos, and even once the buzz tips over into race nerves, there’s an addictive quality to it. Lance has grown up converting this into focus, taking every measure to warm up his body, his mind, his senses until it’s time to get in the car. In the off season, he finds himself itching for the adrenaline of race day, no matter how much he swears the season prior to close friends that he’s too tired from the flights and the media and constantly, constantly thinking about escaping Keith Kogane’s shadow.
This year, though, it feels different. It’s a feeling settled deep into his bones, seeping into his normally well-protected headspace. He’s unsettled as he goes through the motions, and there’s an anxiety rolling deep in the pit of his stomach that he hasn’t felt since his junior formula days.
Once he’s at the paddock, the arms of his blue and white Altea racing suit tied haphazardly around his waist to reveal his blue fireproofs beneath, the feeling swells undeniably, demanding to be seen. He faces the garages along the bustling pit lane with the mechanics running around and preparing the cars for the race, frowning, arms folded as he takes it in.
Above Altea’s garage, second from the entry to the pit lane, in the regal blue with the fighting blue lion: Lance McClain, 53. To the right of him is Katie Holt, 5, which he’s used to – but it should be on the other side and matching his. It’s not; and it’s weird to see. Her name is in a futuristic white font set against black, with the sharp, violet Blade racing insignia, sitting left of Keith fucking Kogane’s name that’s haunted him since he was nine years old.
It feels wrong. He wants to march into the Blade garage and insist upon a trade, drag Pidge back to her rightful place in the Altea garage beside him. Instead, Lotor Zarkon’s name looms beside his with a matching lion, taunting him. They were getting along publicly for the sake of the press, but behind closed doors, Lotor gave him a bad feeling. Always had even when he was far away with his nepo-baby spot at Galra.
Or maybe he just missed Pidge’s sharp wit and positive attitude more starkly when presented with cold, cutthroat indifference on the other half of the Altea garage. He’s pretty sure it’s mostly that he hates Lotor, and yet…
He stares at Pidge’s name in purple, unable to help the rising resentment in his throat. He knew the game, everyone had to play it, it was always about making the next best move for yourself and keeping your seat. An endless, desperate musical chairs that made even the top talent sweat when a contract end date loomed.
But why’d it have to be Blade? Why’d she have to go be teammates with his sworn nemesis?
“Lance!”
He’s shaken from his thoughts, and in the flesh, Pidge comes running out in her black race suit. There’s a green helmet decorated in an elaborate design tucked under her arm– if he’s not mistaken, it looks a bit like a techno-circuit board, and though he can’t see it, he knows her signature cartoon-self has to be etched into the back. Back in the karting days, she used to draw it on her helmets herself in Sharpie. Every single one.
The bitterness evaporates temporarily. Pidge is hard to be mad at, especially when she was beaming directly up at him. It makes the weird morning feel a little more normal. Seeing Pidge used to be part of the routine. Maybe that doesn’t have to change.
He sweeps her up into a quick hug, then dramatizes a disgusted scowl. “Ugh, purple? I’m sorry but you looked better in blue. Altea blue.”
“It’s mostly black, and I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot of it in front of you when I kick your ass today, so get used to it.”
“In your dreams, hobbit.”
She looks over her shoulder to make sure no cameras were particularly interested in them, no Netflix boom mic over them, then flips him the middle finger with a shit-eating grin. Something settles in Lance’s chest at the normalcy of it all.
There’s some commotion on Keith Kogane’s side of the garage and some camera crews hurriedly shuffle in that direction, signaling that, most likely, His Royal Highness had emerged from his driver room. He barely suppresses the eye roll at the way the media seems to eat it up, flocking like buzzards, even though Keith always barely concealed his contempt for them.
“I don’t know how you’re surviving with him as your teammate,” Lance says, nose wrinkling. “Don’t you get sick of it being the Kogane show all the time?”
Pidge gives a sheepish half-shrug. “I don’t know. I was worried he might be hard to be teammates with when I first signed, but… he hasn’t been so bad, actually. Keeps to himself for the most part.”
Lance snorts in disbelief. “Keith. This Keith? Nearly killed me on-track about three dozen times Keith?”
“You’ve nearly killed me, like, twice as many times being an absolute numbnuts out there,” Pidge points out, “and it’s not personal. We’re buds.”
“This is different,” Lance insists, and Pidge only shrugs again.
“What about Lotor?” Pidge asks. “Are you surviving your new teammate?”
Lance wants to be careful about what he says. When it comes to Keith, he’s more careless about his words, it’s not like their rivalry isn’t front and fucking center of every other race weekend. But Lotor and he are building a driving rapport for the same team, however tenuous it may be and, frankly, undesired by both parties. The right thing being overheard by a reporter, or, god forbid, Netflix, could take his career into a new circle of hell.
“I guess I’m going to have to trust Allura’s vision on this one,” he opts for, which feels safe enough. “She says that he has what it takes to finally bring Altea the Constructors again. So I’m going to be a team player, God help me.”
He doesn’t get to hear Pidge’s thoughts on that, because Matt sticks his head out of the Blade garage, jerking his chin toward the inside. “C’mon Pidge, stop fraternizing with the competition. We gotta get you in the car. You too, Lance. Before Allura shoves you into it herself.”
“Oh my God, I forgot you betrayed me too, you asshole!” Lance moans, annoyed to see Matt in the Blade mechanic coveralls instead of the Altea ones.
He can’t really blame him – Matt and Pidge had been inseparable, and he’d always managed to find his way into being a mechanic on her team as she climbed through the formulas, against all odds. Honestly, while he certainly had the talent to go wherever he wanted, he did wonder if Pidge had something in the contracts she was so tight-lipped about that kept him at her side.
“I’m sorry, didn’t quite catch that!” Matt calls back good-naturedly, already retreating to return to his work.
“See you out there,” he tells Pidge, clapping her on the shoulder as she leaves. “Remember, the left pedal is stop, the right one is go.”
“Duly noted. See you in my mirrors.”
* * *
The soothing interaction helps keep his heart tucked neatly behind his ribs until he’s finishing the formation lap, and pulls up to third position. Pidge out-qualified him yesterday – barely – which puts him staring directly at the tail of Kogane’s car. That’s when the nerves really kick into high gear again, his heart in his throat and pulse roaring in his ears.
He exhales, longer than his inhale. Like he practiced, like he always did. He tests the grip of his gloves on the hard plastic of the steering wheel and settles one more time into his restraints.
He knows what he needs to do. Everything in the blue and white car is attuned to him, responds to his slightest touch and gentlest suggestion, so much so he thinks of it as a psychic bond. His body knows how to handle the pressures, physical and mental. He can do this.
Unless he cracks. Unless he really can’t. Unless he’s not cut out for this–
“Last car in position,” he hears through his radio. It’s Hunk’s voice, and a comforting sound. Hunk was a kickass race engineer and his best friend, they could read one another so quickly he’d seen internet rumors they talked in actual code. “Let’s make it a good year, buddy.”
He’d respond, but he’s not even sure he can speak. First chance of 2025 to finally, finally get ahead of Keith. He feels something base rise in him, zipping along his nerve endings, an instinctive, competitive need to obliterate Keith Kogane.
Pressing down the doubt, he resolves right there, as the green flag waves and the first red light illuminates: this stops here.
Keith Kogane had always been ahead of him.
Another light.
Lance had spent fourteen years of his life in his shadow. As a boy, a teen, now a man.
Another light.
He bares his teeth inside his helmet, builds the revs, eyes already locked into where he knew he could wiggle his way between Pidge, possibly get his nose in front of Keith’s.
Another light.
This year, he was going to ruthlessly tear down Keith’s kingdom piece by piece, race by race, win by win.
The final light.
It ends now.
The lights go out and he drops the clutch from its bite point, getting a good jump out of the box.
The first moments of any race are complete chaos, pure instinct, and sensory overwhelm. Squealing tyres raise in a cacophony around him from all sides, there’s the noxious moment where the smell of burning rubber, fuel, and his own sweat might choke him. It’s addicting.
Lance’s body takes over here, expert after growing up living and breathing his sport. He deftly veers into the spot Pidge will be gunning for, and of course, does nearly make contact with her, but he knows Pidge – she’s on her own strategy, and she’s not in that space for longer than a split second. He takes advantage of the swerve, gets aggressive on the throttle, and pulls ahead of her. Places are never a guarantee, not this early in the race, so he wastes no time getting as close as he dares to Keith’s rear wing in the first corner and to cut Pidge off. And the second. And the third.
Within a couple of laps, the field is in something of an orderly line rather than a bunched up mass of cars, and Lance is able to fall into the rhythm of the track. He eases up on Keith just a little, and though annoyed to be starting the season looking at the back of him all over again, there’s strategy to mind. His tyres aren’t about to go tearing Keith off his podium if he’s ground them down so hard the race becomes a Lance On Ice production.
“You’ve got Kogane ahead, Holt behind, then Rizavi close to her. All feel good out there, bud?”
Lance completes the next couple of corners easily. This is good, he can find his rhythm as he always does, but he also needs to be on guard to strike when Keith makes a mistake.
If Keith makes a mistake.
“All good. Car feels great. Lotor?” Sue him, he can't help but satisfy his curiosity.
“He’s, uh P10, currently.” Hunk’s tone remains diplomatic, but Lance knows there’s a dark part of him that will be secretly pleased with that too. Just for now, enough to humble his arrogance, because he then better get his ass into gear to haul Altea into the constructors.
“Keep me posted on strategy. And Kogane. I can take him, I think I really can this time. I’ve got the pace.”
Hunk’s probably heard that a thousand times through his headset over the years. He’s gracious enough to not mention it and leave Lance to it.
March in Melbourne is tricky. The laps pass, ten, twenty, twenty-five, and there’s a dark cloud that seems heavy with the promise of rain looming a little too close for comfort.
“Rain?” Lance asks through the radio, then pulls it tight through the apex of the next corner.
“Could be. Might miss us. Don’t worry about it for now, keep it going.”
Rain could make things interesting – dangerous, yes, and interesting. This presented a gamble: they’d probably be stopping for tyres soon, and if things stayed dry then everything would, more or less, go back to the usual order.
The other option: if Lance pushes now, tyres be damned, and gets ahead of Keith, and he manages to rough it out here long enough they get a safety car and a free pit stop out of it? It might be a tooth and nail battle, but he’d have the clean air, several free laps ticked off the lap counter, and all he needed to do was not fucking choke in keeping Keith behind.
A few raindrops land on his visor, and the smell of petrichor washes over the track.
A race strategist is probably going to have his head for this, but maybe she’ll at least be able to serve it up on the trophy – he’d always thought this one looked a bit like a glorified dinner plate.
Lance stands on the throttle as much as he dares, brakes as late as his reflexes will allow him. He does it again and again, and swears Keith grows closer to the nose of his white and blue car with each move. More raindrops begin to fall, gliding across his visor. The air rushing past him cools a few degrees.
“Uhh, hey there, we want to manage those tyres, right?” Hunk’s voice is concerned, probably rightfully. This isn’t exactly standard procedure. “Plan A still. They’re saying the rain will probably hit but it’s a matter of when, just– hang on.”
“Plan D,” Lance says back. There is no plan D, but he knows neither Allura nor Hunk are about to go broadcasting that over team radio.
The rain will hit. He’s sure of it. He needs to get ahead of Keith.
He holds. And holds, and holds, and holds.
Then at turn 9, he jerks the wheel to stick his nose in aggressively into Keith’s space, forcing the cars wheel to wheel. More rain is falling now, he can hear it against his helmet in a steady drumbeat, see the small rivulets race down his visor and surely within a few precious seconds the track would be unusable and slippery. Now or never.
He doesn’t back out of the turn, sure now that he’s got the upper hand, that it’s undeniably him with the wheel ahead as the turn winds back to ten, he gets the inside line and guns it–
There’s a horrific jerk, the sound of metal on metal, and he has to roughly yank the wheel sideways to correct it. The impact reverberates through his body, but it’s not his body he’s worried about right now – it’s the car’s, and Allura waiting for him back at the garage to skin him alive for being reckless.
The car, miraculously, keeps moving. Keith is ahead again, now slipping from his grasp. Lance’s teeth grind in his helmet; it’s a sight he sees all too often.
“Idiot tried to force me off!” he complains to Hunk, checking his mirrors and– yep, Pidge is right there, surely chomping at the bit to make a good debut at her new team.
More raindrops begin to fall, splattering over his visor and seeping into his race suit. If this kept picking up at this pace, he’d be racing a bathtub. This was going to be a long one.
“Yeah, saw that,” Hunk replies, in the voice that very much means, and the race stewards saw that too, dumbass. Perfect.
“Damage?” Lance asks, taking another turn, trying to refocus.
“There, but it looks okay for now. Monitor for issues. Be careful, Lance, we want to drive a smart race.”
So does he. He just also wants to crush Keith Kogane under his tyres while he does it.
And so it goes. Lance locks himself into the rhythm of the track, just behind Keith, waiting. But the fucker is perfect, he never makes a single fucking mistake. Even when Lance gets close, even when the rain increases to a pour then it dries back up again, when they’re forced through the rotations of pit stops from slicks to inters and back to slicks. Lance makes several dives at him to pass when Hunk confirms he’s in striking distance; Keith flawlessly covers them all off. Once he even makes it through – just for Keith to take it back at the next corner when Lance locks up, washing wide in a horrible twist of luck, giving Pidge and Sendak the opportunity to whiz by.
This year is starting off the same as the last (and the last, and the last, and the last…), and Lance is seething by the time he’s across the finish line.
It was always this way. Always this goddamn way. He feels stupid for having hoped that maybe he could kick this season off by finally stepping out of Keith’s shadow.
“That’s uh, P4, bud. Could be worse!” Hunk chirps in his ear, so in opposition to his sour mood he wants to scream.
He shakes his head in frustration before pushing the radio button. “Yeah, good job guys, we’ll come back stronger next race. A decent start to the year.”
Lance isn’t ungrateful, he knows how many people would do anything to sit where he was. He knows because he did do those things, he didn’t have rich, Formula 1 legacy parents. He clawed his way to be here through blood, sweat and tears, gave up so much, and he will be damned if he doesn’t see that Championship trophy and all the good that came with it brought to his family.
But it stings, God, it stings to watch the crowd rise to their feet for Keith, for Keith to slot his car neatly into the P1 spot in Parc Ferme, for Keith to get all of the celebration and always look more or less indifferent to the attention. Today, he can’t even soothe the sting with a P2 biting at Keith’s heels, and he knows that there’s going to be a media circus publicly wondering if he’s lost his touch.
He hates it. He hates Keith. His hate is an inferno roiling in his chest, the acrid smoke rising up his throat like a chimney to suffocate him from the inside out.
He hates the way Keith completes an interview with a small smile and diplomatic platitudes about winning. He hates the way Keith stands up on the podium, accepts that stupid plate trophy, and is handed an oversized champagne bottle. He hates his stupid hair, he hates the quiet look of self-satisfaction on his face, hates the gold star on the back of his black and red helmet that he didn’t even deserve.
Lance hangs back and watches it all from afar, arms folded, hat slapped on backward over his sweaty hair. He is not on the podium, so in these celebratory moments he is forgotten, left to look on and stew in envy.
As he hauls himself through the remainder of the day, all the fans, the media, even teammates in Altea’s garage want to talk about is his rivalry with Keith, Keith, Keith.
“Do you think Keith is going to have the upper hand for the rest of the year?”
“What happened when you two went wheel-to-wheel?”
“Why do you think it wasn’t enough to catch up to Keith today?”
Lance flashes his winning smile, conjures up some boiler-plate nothings about how the team did their best today, he’ll get him next time, he’s still itching to race, blah blah blah. All he can think about is getting far, far away from here.
* * *
When he’s back at the hotel, finally alone, he finally lets his face fall, drops his bag with too much force, and makes an angry sound in the back of his throat. This was supposed to be his year. (Again. It never is.)
The post-race debrief didn’t help his mood. Allura admonished him for being too optimistic on the overtake, but praised Lotor for driving perfectly, following the strategy to the T. The strategy that got him to a P6 in the end, so there’s still a small bit of satisfaction from finishing ahead of him, despite all the noise on social media that Lotor is miles better than him. Not that Lance pays much attention to the criticism these days.
But Lance knows that no risk, no reward. He could’ve gotten the win if Kogane didn’t push him off the track - a patented move of his, always borderline and rarely a penalty. He didn’t get one today either, and the frustration bubbles up to the surface again with a renewed intensity. He feels like he wants to break something, everything, anything, but he takes a few deep breaths instead.
His phone buzzes with an incoming call. Despite everything, as he catches a glimpse at the screen, his face relaxes into a smile.
“Hi, Mama,” he says into the phone as soon as he accepts the call, slipping into Spanish as easily as he breathes.
“You did so well today, Lancito!”
Her words wash over him, calming the raging fire at his center, and he feels choked up. He imagines her sitting in front of the TV at midnight, eyes glued to the screen as she clutches her grandmother’s rosary, his father pensively watching next to her with hands folded in front of his mouth. He wishes they could be here, but he can’t fly them all the way to the other end of the world weekend after weekend, not when they have the farm to take care of.
Their support always meant the world to him, letting him go at the age of nine to the other side of the world so he could chase his dreams. He intends to pay them back.
“I could’ve done better.”
His mother clicks her tongue at him. “None of that talk. That Kogane boy shouldn’t have pushed you off, and he should’ve gotten a penalty.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying for years!” He starts pacing, gesticulating wildly even though she can’t see. “But nobody ever listens to me and the stewards are blind!”
Or biased, perhaps corrupt, but he’s not going to say that.
“He will get what’s coming to him eventually,” she promises. “And your time will come.”
The saint that she is, his Mama’s been saying this for years. It’s nice to hear, but there’s still doubt rooting into his stomach, no longer the little seed it used to be. Plenty of drivers wash out after a few years. Most of those who don’t may get close, but still never stand on the top step.
“I know,” he mumbles instead. She never needs to hear about any of that, not after everything his family sacrificed. He paces to the window, overlooking the central business district of Melbourne. “It would just be really nice if that time could come already. Preferably before next week.”
There’s a familiar, bright tinkle of laughter on the other end of the phone. A pang of longing to hear it in person sticks painfully in his throat. “Well, we don’t always get what we want when we want it, do we?”
“S’pose not.”
“How is Katie? Is she doing okay?”
Ah, Mama. Sighing, he launches into reassurances that Pidge is well, Pidge is liking Blade just fine, and yes, Matt moved there too. No, he doesn’t know if she’s sleeping well or eating enough, but as long as she and Hunk remain pals, he’s not concerned with the latter.
He’d introduced her to his old teammate when they first were at Altea together. Immediately, his mother had become taken by the young driver and deeply invested in her well being. Lance thinks that at first it might have been out of a sort of protective, mama bear instinct – Pidge was five foot one, maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet, and though strides had been made in recent years toward balance, she was still competing in a male-dominated sport. Whip-smart, tenacious Pidge quickly won his mother over with her personality and became like another daughter to her, just as Hunk had years ago. Birthday presents, invitations to their home during breaks, crushing hugs when they saw one another, the works. Pidge’s change in team affiliation did nothing to abate his mother’s care for her– if anything, it only increased her concern since she’d be further apart from Lance. She claimed it was because Lance would have a harder time looking out for her, but he had a distinct feeling her concern was actually the other way around.
They ground you, his mother had once commented to Lance about Hunk and Pidge. Good friends like that are rare. Don’t let that go.
They speak for a while, rotating through the usual topics and updates with one another. He ends up laying back against the bed with his eyes closed, pretending he’s instead on his sofa at home on a warm spring night, surrounded by his family, rather than in a cookie cutter, over-air conditioned hotel room on the other side of the world. Lance doesn’t even care that she goes on too long about the citrus trees, he’s just happy to receive a little piece of home, even if it’s through a speaker and unreliable international connection.
When they finally say their goodbyes, Lance knows that the sun in Cuba must be just peeking over the horizon, even though his mom is wishing him goodnight.
He’s still wired from the day, though, when the call ends with three monotone beeps. For a moment, he continues to lay on the bed, weighing his options.
He could go out, get some dinner. See if Hunk or Pidge was up for it. Issue is, he’s not feeling very chatty. As much as he adores them both, Hunk will want to talk shop and Pidge’s P2 with her new team still stung.
Allura crosses his mind as someone to reach out to, which he dismisses immediately. His Team Principal was one of the most intense people he’d ever met, in both her dedication to the job and her care for Lance as a personal friend. Intensity, however, was not what he was looking for, plus he could already hear the lecture in his head about how he should be spending this time bonding with his new teammate.
Lotor, of course, was unthinkable for company. The dude gave him the creeps.
No, he needed to relax.
It may be because home is fresh on his mind, but ocean swim sounds perfect right about now– except it’s well after dark, and a Melbourne autumn isn’t exactly the sort of warm evening dip he’s fantasizing about.
Hotel pool would have to suffice.
Lance digs around in his suitcase and produces a pair of swim trunks, then a white t-shirt with the light blue Altea Racing lion poised in a fighting stance emblazoned on the front. He undresses and pulls both on with haste, swipes a towel from the bathroom, and pushes his feet into a pair of slides as he goes for the door.
He’s a man possessed as he treads toward the elevator. The call of soothing water lapping at his skin suddenly feels like a certain cure to all his troubles. If he’s lucky, he might even have the place to himself at this hour.
The elevator doors slide open, and he pushes through the steamed-over glass doors eagerly, already poised to pitch everything onto a pool chair and dive right in.
He quickly finds his luck has not improved since the track.
In fact, he’s the exact opposite of lucky - unlucky, cursed, doomed, take a pick. There’s someone sitting at the edge of the pool, their silhouette haloed by the lights, and Lance immediately recognizes him. There is no mistaking that horrible mullet and that smug set of shoulders. Great.
“Well, isn’t it the great Keith Kogane?” Lance strides toward him, making no effort to hide his irritation with Keith’s presence. Maybe, just maybe, he’s itching for a fight he can win today. “What could the current champion do here all alone, instead of celebrating his win?”
Keith blinks up at him, expression coldly neutral. “I just didn’t feel like it.”
Lance scowls, because the sheer indifference of this man is infuriating. Here he is, once again leading the championship, and he’s not even celebrating? If not for himself, then at least for all the mechanics and strategists and engineers back at the factory that made it happen – but no.
“Ah, so you’re above all of us plebs,” he tuts, venom dripping from his tongue. “God forbid you get down to our level, oh great Kogane.”
Keith frowns. “That’s not what–”
“Whatever, save it,” Lance waves, throwing his towel on a sunbed. “I don’t wanna hear your excuses.”
Keith stands up, and walks towards him, expression drawn and stony. He stops right in front of Lance, and from this close he can make out all the colors in his eyes – the light and dark greys, the small specks of dark blue that seem almost purple. It threatens to waver his focus on chewing Keith out.
“At least my excuses aren’t for my results.”
Lance purses his lips tight, and he kind of wishes looks could kill right now. There’s a lot he wants to say, but all that he can reliably find right now is, “Fuck you, Kogane.”
“No, thank you.” Keith steps away, and turns around to leave. Small mercies.
There goes the relaxing swim Lance longed for; now he’s just burning with rage. After watching Keith snatch his own items up and disappear through the entry door, he stands alone in the silence, heaving in heavy lungfuls of humid, chlorine-tinged air and heart pounding in his ears.
Fuck him. Fuck him.
He shucks off his t-shirt, throws it next to the towel with excessive force, and dives into the pool.
He swims a couple of slow laps as warm up, but by the end of it he itches for the burn in his muscles, the way the water sloshes over him at higher speeds. He loses himself in the rhythm of it, the blood and water roaring in his ears. Whenever he wants to slow down, he pictures the back of a particular Blade car emblazoned with a 6 just in front of him, taunting him, and he digs into the water with renewed vigor.
He doesn’t know how long he swims, but eventually he feels the day catch up with him. He pulls himself out of the pool, and sits at the pool’s edge for a few moments to catch his breath, watching the evening sky through a large glass window filling one of the walls, the few dim stars dotted over the city.
Once he’s sure he’s worn himself down enough to get some rest, he stands and returns to his pool chair of items. He dries himself as best as he can with the hotel towel (why were they always so damn small?), and pulls on his shirt. It sticks to his still damp skin uncomfortably, but this is a nice hotel, and he gets the feeling in these places that walking around shirtless is probably bad form.
Once he’s back to the room door, he pats his pockets for his keycard, and with a sinking feeling, he realizes there’s nothing there. With growing dread, he turns it inside out, and slumps in defeat when it is, in fact, completely and utterly empty. Come to think of it, he doesn’t remember grabbing it, and can perfectly picture where it sits atop the TV stand in his room, carefully placed with every intention of being seen on the way out to avoid this exact issue.
He can’t think of anyone who might have a spare. With a sigh he resigns himself to his walk of shame to the front desk.
He drips water all the way to the lobby, and as he works his charms on the receptionist, he can feel it pooling around him on the stone tile floor. His feet squeak in his rubber slides every time he shifts. The girl luckily doesn’t even bat an eye at him and issues him another one without a problem, and in no time he’s back in his room.
After a shower to wash off the chlorine and about twenty minutes dedicated lovingly to his nightly skincare routine, he lays in bed scrolling on his phone when he notices something on his feed. It’s a tweet with a picture of him in the lobby of the hotel and the caption ‘he looks like a drowned puppy’. That wouldn’t be a problem, normally he’s fine with fans taking less than stellar pictures of him and posting them. He gets a laugh out of it, and usually even saves the weirdest ones for his own collection.
No, the problem is that there’s a little ‘Keith Kogane retweeted’ at the top of it. It’s personal, has to be, after their little spat at the pool. Fine then.
Game fucking on, Keith Kogane.
Chapter Text
formula1.com/en/latest/article/driver-of-the-day-a-magnificent-drive-from-kogane-earns-him-your-votes.jkwie237AGLmcXW91
DRIVER OF THE DAY: A magnificent drive from Kogane earns him your votes
What a start of the season! Despite the chaotic race due to the weather’s unpredictability in Melbourne, polesitter and reigning world champion Kogane showed why he is the favorite to win the championship again this year – he kept a cool head and cruised to an easy victory after keeping a charging McClain at bay.
Here’s how the voting broke down:
Keith Kogane - 21.6%
Katie Holt - 18.3%
Lotor Zarkon - 14.2%
Lance McClain - 12.9%
Nadia Rizavi - 10.4%
* * *
mabs @lanceylance
why can’t kogane ever get penalized for shit like this? if it were any other driver it’d have been a slamdunk penalty
Ke1th ⭐ @koganes replying to @lanceylance
my god someone’s salty their driver didn’t win🫢
mabs @lanceylance replying to @koganes
at least my driver can defend without running others off the track😌
Ke1th ⭐ @koganes replying to @lanceylance
at least my driver has a wdc. does yours? yeah that’s what i thought😘
Lance McClain Updates @lancem_updates
Lance has arrived at his hotel in Singapore!
[A blurry picture of Lance walking into a hotel, surrounded by team personnel keeping fans at bay]
lily @MCCK0G replying to @lancem_updates
can we please stop mobbing drivers *at their hotels*?????? they go there to rest, please stop trying to meet them there🤦♀️
Agnes 🔜 Cuba!!! @alteanprince replying to @lancem_updates
Poor man looks dead on his feetlance win incoming @fiftythrees replying to @lancem_updates
i’m having a serious case of fomo rn😭😭😭😭
klancing in the club tonight @lm53kk6
okay but is nobody going to talk about how keith rted that lance pic in the hotel when he’s dripping wet???? what was that??? why did he rt it???? does keith have a crush on him???? or does he have a priv acc and messed up?????
Nadia mfing *Rizz*avi @rizzavi replying to @lm53kk6
NO BUT LIKE. for real. i would love to see into his mind at that moment
* * *
katieholt-supremacy
reblogged loverboylanceylance
bluelion-x 5h
[Screenshots of Lance’s instagram post pictures
Photo 1: Car number 53 rushing past the photographer
Photo 2: Lance in team kit walking on the track next to Hunk, talking to each other, picture taken from behind
Photo 3: A group of fans waving homemade signs and Cuban flags, one fan has a blue lion plushie on their cap
Photo 4: A shot of Lance smiling at someone in front of the Altea garage
Photo 5: Lance pulling up to the number 3 board on Saturday
Photo 6: Car number 53 taking turn 11 in the rain
Photo 7: Pidge and Lance next to each other in the press conference on Thursday, Lance gesticulating wildly and grinning at Pidge
Photo 8: Lance on a beach in a full wetsuit, with a surfboard in hand, grinning ear to ear]
| lance_mcclain Not the start to the season we hoped, but it’s only the beginning. We work hard and bounce back, and come back stronger next week. Thanks for all the support, see you all in Singapore💙
I love how he included Pidge in the photodump😭😭 teammates for life, i miss them so much together, they were so fun
loverboylanceylance 4h
honestly I feel like it’s so telling how much Lance doesn’t actually like Lotor that he included his old teammate but not the new one… like even in that pre-season video the vibes were so… off. I know a fake Lance smile when I see it
#the vibes in that video were so awkward… you could feel lance was only putting up a front #it was kinda painful to watch #with pidge they were so sibling coded i bet the media team was either having a field day or an aneurysm during filming days #lm53 #kh5 #f1
672 notes
* * *
Singapore, Singapore.
Keith doesn’t mind the heat. He loathes the humidity, though.
Here, the air is claustrophobic and soupy. Moisture clings to his skin the moment he steps outside, he can feel sweat dripping down his back within minutes. Though he’s permitted the luxury of shorts and his team kit polo for now, the knowledge that he’ll have to trade it for his race suit tomorrow fills stomach with dread. In a way, though, he almost wishes for it; t’s a Thursday, so today he’s doomed to the worst day of the race weekend. Thursdays are filled with cameras, lights, stupid questions, and worst of all: being asked to talk. He’d much rather let his driving do the talking.
On top of that, he’s on informal, silent notice with Kolivan for a recent “indiscretion” on social media. Keith had deleted it the next morning, once he’d awoken with a clearer head and realized just how much attention it was getting, on top of several unread texts from Shiro asking if he’d lost his mind. Frankly, it was completely worth it– Keith would post that photo of Lance again and again and again– but the fallout is not exactly improving Keith’s mood when he arrives at the paddock.
After dodging the photographers circling like vultures, he slides into a seat across from Shiro in the hospitality suite. His scowl must be more apparent than usual, because Shiro quirks an eyebrow.
“Good morning, sunshine,” he says, then pushes a mug of coffee across the table toward him with his left arm. “This is for you. Your breakfast is on its way, too.”
Keith forces a smile. He does that a lot with Shiro, lately, which is an issue because now that he’s Keith’s personal trainer and assistant, they’re around each other a lot. At the time it had seemed like a good idea– and Keith isn’t sure he’d have told Shiro no to anything in the fallout from last year. Now, though, it means he has a front row seat to Shiro’s struggle to recover from the accident and constant reminders of what Keith’s fuck up had done to him.
Trying to avert his gaze from where he knows Shiro’s prosthetic sits under his team jacket, he swallows down the guilt that rises like bile in his throat with a mouthful of bitter coffee. He then grimaces– Blade’s hospitality coffee sucked ass. So much so, he had a backdoor deal with one of the staff at Altea, Romelle, to get his hands on some of their espresso when the going got real tough around here. He’d consider it today, if relations weren’t so, ah, delicate with the Blue Lions this morning.
Shiro’s still watching him. Keith sighs. He knows from the lack of further commentary on Keith’s grumpiness that he’s buttering him up for something. “Spit it out. What are they making me do today?”
“Some promo filming. Track walk. And… you’re in the press conference. But you should know that if you would’ve read the e-mail I sent you yesterday when the schedule was posted.”
Keith frowns. He absolutely had not done more than glance at his email– he was tired, and the general expectations of him rarely changed week to week, okay? “That all sounds normal, what’s the catch?”
“Lance is also on for the press conference.” Shiro pauses, and continues when Keith is blinking blankly back at him. “Keith, they’re going to ask about the post. Dirty deleting only made things worse.”
With a groan, he drops his head into his arms. “So I tell them I don’t want to talk about it.”
Shiro exhales slowly through his nose, the way he does when Keith’s being particularly obstinate. It’s sad Keith can identify the Keith-is-testing-me breathing on sound alone. “That’s your right. But I don’t think Lance is going to be as diplomatic. You need to prepare for that.”
“ McClain can stick his diplomacy directly up his ass!” Keith snaps, lifting his head again to glare at Shiro.
Some poor waitress has arrived at the table in time to catch his outburst. She maintains a thin smile as Keith realizes she’s there. “Uh. Toast and eggs?” she squeaks out.
Keith nods, and thanks her apologetically. It’s enough to bring him back to earth, and his tone drops to a hushed tone when she scampers away to leave Keith and Shiro to their meal.
“You can’t get me out of it?” he begs, leaning in over his plate. He already knows the answer, but God , he’s in a terrible mood this morning, and Lance is the absolute last person he wants to see.
“That would make everything much worse, and you’d also get fined. You know that. Just keep a level head, and remember this isn’t a big deal if you don’t make it any more of one. Okay? You’ll do great. Chin up, world champ.”
The nickname strikes him like a knife between the ribs. It always does. Shiro will never, ever know this, though, so he nods and attempts to seem placated. Keith picks up a fork and spears his eggs with far more force than necessary.
Whatever. One press conference. One miserable, awful, crappy press conference. He can shut this whole thing down today and vow to never, ever interact with McClain on the internet ever again.
“Anything else I should know about?” he asks despondently.
“You get to actually do some driving tomorrow?”
That actually does lift Keith’s spirits, if only a little.
* * *
Lance swaggers into the press conference late with a thousand watt smile. As soon as he’s through the door, he’s firing off rapid, flirty quips to anyone that so much as breathes in his direction. Of course he does– Keith can’t remember a time he wasn’t this way: arrogant and obnoxious. He has memories of Lance trying to impress any girls hanging around the karting tracks when they were still losing baby teeth.
Keith sulks on the center of the couch, arms crossed over his chest. Nyma from Beezer Racing and James from Garrison are there too, waiting to be put through the paces of questions about tyres, teammates, engineering, or whatever dumb contracts rumor had been concocted that week. He’s pulled his hat as far down his forehead as he dares, using the brim as a shield to avoid cameras catching the detail of his sour expressions, of which, the internet loved to point out, he made many. There’s an entire Twitter account that Shiro had showed him about a year ago with sheer, unbridled joy that was dedicated to his bitchfaces (bitchface_koganes, which Keith did not check with frightening regularity, thank you very much).
It’s not Keith’s fault Lance gives him plenty to scowl about.
They’ve saved the seat next to him on a black, low-backed sectional for Lance, who plops down into it and casually casts an arm over the back. He does not miss a wink that he throws in the direction of one blonde reporter. Keith’s teeth grind.
The questions begin to rattle off, only prefaced by a brief welcoming preamble. Everyone in the room knew the drill, Keith knows a few of the recurring reporters and photographers that chase the races across the globe on a first name basis. The familiarity with press members is not often something he thought of fondly. It’s not personal, not really, most seem nice enough, he just hates this part of the job, and they’re irritatingly enthusiastic about doing theirs.
Press conferences are all about manufacturing drama, in Keith’s opinion. Reporters fling convoluted, leading questions at the drivers in an attempt to get them to say something that could be transmuted into clickbait; the drivers then perform a diplomatic verbal ballet in which they must also appear humble, confident, and likable without also seeming like a doormat, arrogant, or fake. It’s a near impossible acrobatic feat, one that still sometimes makes Keith as nervous as some race days do. He’s confident he can drive his way into any team’s seat. He also knows damn well that an ounce of bad PR can throw him out of it even faster.
He wishes Shiro was still going to be sat beside him for some of these, his presence always helped ground Keith enough to not say something stupid. Not that he usually said much at all. Shiro, on the other hand, had mastered the press conference, he’d coached Keith in his earliest seasons on how to not fuck it up after he’d really put his foot in his mouth during one and accidentally caused rumors that he hated his Team Principal and was trying to get him fired.
The presser drones on and on, with most questions directed towards Nyma about her team’s improvement from last year, and James after his impressive drive from 16th to 8th last week. Keith is snapped out of his thoughts when a reporter says his name right after Lance’s, nearly missing the question.
“--tell us more about the picture of Lance that went viral after Keith reposted it?”
He knew it was coming, but it still catches him off-guard. Before he can even reach for his mic, Lance is already speaking.
“What’s more to say about it? Keith here couldn’t resist my devilishly good looks and had to let the world know that he thinks I look good dripping wet.”
Objectively speaking, Lance is a handsome man, nice to look at, but with all their animosity and Lance’s horrid personality, Keith would rather die than be caught saying any of this out loud. Lance shoots a cocky smile at the reporter, the blonde one from earlier, and to Keith’s horror she blushes a deep shade of red. Lance turns to look at him then and his smile turns mocking, the challenge clear in his eyes.
Keith resists the urge to punch him in his smug face and doesn’t take the bait, willing himself to keep his expression blank. “It was an accident, my finger slipped while scrolling.”
Lance scoffs next to him, clearly not believing a word he says. “Of course you’d say it was an accident. Clearly that’s your specialty,” he mutters under his breath.
The comment hits him sharply in the chest, and he’s momentarily thrown back in the car, watching helplessly as Shiro careens towards the tyrewall. He doesn’t know what Lance’s problem is, but he takes a few deep breaths to ground himself, clutching the mic in his hand like a lifeline. He can’t fight him here, right in front of all the vultures. God, he really, really wants to, though.
“Keith, you said it was an accident, but you have to click twice to retweet it. Was it really–”
He lifts the mic to his lips before she can finish the question, snapping at her. “Like I said, it was an accident.”
He knows he’s going to get shit for this from his press officer, but he doesn’t care. He just wants to be done, and get back to preparing for tomorrow’s free practices. He really wishes that the media wasn’t a part of any of this circus.
When the press conference concludes, Keith bolts out of the room.
* * *
Keith spends the next couple of days giving Lance (and really, the entirety of the Altea team) a wide berth. As anticipated, Keith and Lance’s little volley on Thursday had caused a buzz, but fortunately not anything he doesn’t know how to deal with. Keith answers for it by putting his head down and piecing together laps for testing programs so perfect, they won’t dare say a damn thing to him.
And this works, up until qualifying. The evening is oppressively hot, a likely preview of the wringer they’d all be put through the next day. Keith easily gets by the first two rounds as usual without much fanfare. Q3 hits, though, and he’s sweating buckets in his seat, white-knuckling his wheel both out of necessity and to force himself to stay focused. Even on an out lap like this, the streaking color of Singapore’s streets on either side of him can quickly spell disaster with one lapse in judgement.
“You’re going to really need to push on this next flyer,” Thace comes in through his earpiece. “McClain only a few tenths behind your last lap, and track is getting faster.”
He’d found himself hoping karma had bitten Lance in the ass after that press conference. Unfortunately, Keith has no such luck, which he supposes he should have expected– Lance was insanely good on a street circuit, the racing gods seemed to always bless him at these tracks.
“How many tenths?” Keith demands, pulling a hard turn.
There’s a pause before the answer filters through. So they’re trying to manage his mood. Great.
“ A few. Just push, we are confident in your pace.”
Keith is going to interpret that as meaning they’re a hair’s breadth apart.
The lack of information motivates him, which he will only admit in the privacy of his mind. He finds himself taking every single turn like his life depends on it, trying to squeeze every extra ounce of speed out of the final lap after the clock runs down. Lance is a few cars back, he tries to picture himself proving his point directly to him with every expertly placed move.
He crosses the line and jumps out of the racing line. Out of the corner of his eye, he’s able to catch a KOG jumping into pole position– fuck yes. He continues the cool down, trying to catch glimpses of what was going on around the circuit, but it’s difficult.
“That’s P2 for tomorrow,” Thace finally says in his ear.
No. No, no way, come the fuck on. Frustrated, he slams the heel of his palm against his steering wheel. “Who?” he demands.
“McClain.” He can feel the wince in Thace’s normally measured voice.
“Fuuuuck.” He regrets it immediately. That is so getting broadcasted. At least they’ll censor it by the time it goes to air, and the full scope of his disdain would be masked.
He’s boiling in his suit– literally and figuratively– as he’s corralled toward the media from the second place position, forced to watch Lance hop out of the white and blue car, stand on top of it with a fist in the air in celebration, and preen for the spectators as soon as he’s out of his helmet.
His face is flushed, his chestnut hair sticks up wildly as it’s pulled free from the confines of his helmet and balaclava. From here, he can see that at the back of his tanned neck, it’s starting to curl a little from the sweat and humidity. Lance casts a dazzling beam to the faces crowded around the barriers, and for some reason, all Keith can look at is the curve at the back of his neck, up to the shell of his ear, the sharp cut of his jaw, and think about how much he fucking hates him.
The crowd cheers every time Lance moves. And not just the people immediately around them, but in the grandstands, too, as the cameras chase him, thunderous and adoring under the blinding streetlights of the city.
Keith does not consider himself vain. Follower counts were never something he checked, he paid little attention to the media, and he did not need to be constantly told that he was good at what he did. The leaderboard told him he was good at what he did. Rarely did it even occur to him to be envious of the attention another driver received anywhere but on track, he loathed the social aspects of his job, with the exception of sometimes meeting some kind fans that didn’t get too offended when he was awkward.
It would stand to reason that seeing Lance at the center of all of this chaos would perhaps irk him, but otherwise he’d be unaffected. Instead he is seething, poisonous envy burning a hole through his sternum and clawing up his throat so forcefully he thinks he could spit acid. He’s so goddamn perfect at the public performance piece of all of this, beautiful and suave and warm, that the one thing Keith had managed to have on him until lately was being able to wrestle wins away from Lance when it counted. Keith is an asshole, but a points-scoring asshole.
What if that era was ending? What if today marks the turning tide? Keith would be left with nothing. He no longer has allies on the track, with the exception of maybe Pidge, but she’s a teammate, a coworker, not a friend. He has no real family off the track. Shiro, injured or not, was addicted to the sport; if Keith left, he wouldn’t– and shouldn’t– follow. This is the only life he’s ever known, and he knows he should be grateful for a championship, but it wasn’t deserved. This was supposed to be the year he would prove he could do it on his own, no exceptional circumstances, all on his own merit.
Maybe he really isn’t good enough.
Keith turns away from the scene, throat suddenly tight. Prolonging his privacy as long as possible, he keeps his helmet on as long as he thinks he can get away with and not be suspicious, attempting to focus on evening his rattling breaths. By the time he peels the helmet off, he’s restored his expression to the cool, collected mask he’s grown so comfortable in.
He’s quickly ushered to the scale by an FIA official, and by the time he gets the little slip of paper, the interviews are already underway, Zethrid speaking to the pundit. In no time it’s his turn, and he’s being asked the questions he’s answered a thousand times before. Yes, he thought it was a good lap, but ultimately not enough. No, he doesn’t know the final gap to pole. He’s told it’s half a tenth. Yes, of course he’ll go for the win tomorrow.
Then he’s switching places with Lance, and the petty part of him wants to shove him with his shoulder. In the end, he doesn’t, but it makes for a nice momentary fantasy.
He watches as Lance answers the questions with a wide grin, waving at the fans screaming his name. They’re made to stand next to each other for the pictures when he’s done, he on Lance’s right and Zethrid on his left. Lance puts his arms around his waist, and he’s all too aware of the weight of it.
Keith leans slightly closer to him. “I’m going to kick your ass tomorrow,” he whispers, overtaken after all that self control to permit himself one petulant, momentary lapse that vents the steam off the raging pressure building inside of him.
Lance doesn’t even look at him as he smiles, a little sharp at the edges. “We’ll see.”
Then Lance goes onto the media pen with them, and works the media like a puppet master. Keith can’t even focus, because he can hear the Spanish rolling off Lance’s tongue easily, like poetry, and he suddenly hates how his own voice is so gravelly and brusque in comparison. When he switches back to English, a reporter is asking Lance about the lap he put together, and Lance answers with a rich laugh and says he’s not called the Tailor for nothing
Keith hates the nickname, even if it’s fitting, because the way Lance navigates the narrow twists and turns of a street circuit is mesmerizing to watch.
Keith is forced to stop staring at Lance’s schmoozing, because he’s punished with a presser, again.
“David Hunter, SkySports UK, a question for Keith: do you think you can take the win tomorrow?”
What a stupid question. “Yes, definitely. Lance did a good job getting pole, but points are scored on Sunday. One good lap is very different from race conditions. I’ll take the fight to him.” It’s harsher than he’d intended, but the reporter is already thanking him and moving on.
They move over to the written media part of the conference after that, and after an eternity, they’re finally leaving the room.
He catches Lance just before they go their separate ways.
“You better watch your mirrors.”
Lance sneers at him, his gaze cold. “Don’t worry, you’ll stay there the whole time.”
* * *
Keith is scrolling on his Insta feed mindlessly when a suggested post from Lance pops up. It’s a carousel of six pictures posted three minutes ago, and before Keith can catch himself, he swipes through them.
They’re all from today, the first two from quali - one as he stands on his car in front of the number one board, the other as he jumps into the arms of his team. There’s three of him in the ice bath they all take after a sweltering session, the tub filled to the brim and he can faintly see Lance’s bare chest through the water. There’s inexplicably three colorful toy sharks in there with him. In one of the pictures he’s submerged until only his bright blue eyes can be seen, and they’re reflected in the water. Keith feels like he’s seeing right through the screen into Keith’s soul.
The last picture is taken from the back, and Keith swallows. Lance is just getting out of the bath, the water droplets rolling down his broad and muscular back, the muscles in his arms straining as he lifts himself out. His hair is flattened against the back of his neck, and his head turns just enough that there’s a suggestive curve of his lips in silhouette, dripping water.
He can't breathe. Can’t seem to keep scrolling, either. His eyes catch on the caption.
“Off to a great start, looking forward to tomorrow!!!
Come and get it, Kogane😘”
He closes the app and chucks his phone to the other side of the bed. Keith flips over, burying his face into his pillow, ignoring the unbidden heat mounting in his stomach. Fuck him. Fuck him.
Tomorrow, there will be hell to pay.
* * *
“Keith, stop it. You’re obsessing.”
“I’m not obsessing.”
“You’re supposed to be visualizing.”
Keith cracks one eye open to glare at Shiro. Even sideways, from where he’s laying down, he recognizes Shiro’s stressed face. “I am visualizing. I’m visualizing running Lance over with my car. Again and again.”
“Can we try visualizing something that doesn’t end in penalties or manslaughter charges?”
“You can force me to lay here and do these stupid mental exercises, you can’t force what I think about while I do it.”
Shiro’s face is rapidly backsliding into total exasperation. Keith takes that as his cue to close his eyes again.
“I’m not obsessing,” Keith insists more seriously this time. “I’m just focused.”
“Is this because of his Instagram post?”
Keith’s face betrays him as it contorts into a tight scowl. “No. What Instagram post?”
“Are you seriously trying to lie to me right now? I know when you’re lying, Keith. You’re terrible at it.”
Keith abandons the pretense of the visualization exercise and pushes himself upright, jaw tight. “Look, it’s not my fault that he is the single most arrogant, annoying, self-centered prick I have ever had the misfortune of knowing. Then he’s got to go and make public taunts on– on a thirst trap of all things?! Come on!”
Shiro’s brow furrows, and his eyes narrow slightly at Keith, like he’s trying to puzzle something out. “You did start it,” he then points out unhelpfully.
“I retweeted an existing image without comment!” He knows Shiro’s right, he’s guilty of kicking this off, but this feels so fucking directed from Lance. At least Keith had the decency to not sic his own fan base on Lance.
Which was the other part of this. The comments were unbearable. Keith should know better by now than to read the comments section on anything (or to revisit a post that bothers him once or twice or five times), and yet it’s been impossible to resist after Lance declared a nonstop party in his mentions.
There are the comments that tell him he’s going to flop, Keith’s washed, a fake champion, et cetera, et cetera. He was used to that, and while they suck to read, they’re not the ones that he can’t get out of his head. No, it’s the comments that praise Lance like he’s ending fucking world hunger for posting himself shirtless. It’s the ones that get specific about what they’d do to him. The wars about what Lance should do to Keith and vice versa– most of these racing related, and a notable few not.
It’s the fact that he seems like the only person in the goddamn world who sees Lance McClain for what he is - irritating, competitive, and stubborn to a fault that he masks with a smoke screen of wide smiles and pretty blue eyes. It’s infuriating.
“Keith.” Shiro’s voice is softer now. “Take a deep breath. Please. It does you no good to go out there hotheaded.”
He knows Shiro doesn’t mean to say this to guilt him. However, it slams into him anyway in full force, and he’s momentarily spinning out– hitting the wall– feels the heat off the flames engulfing Shiro’s car ahead and he can’t get out, can’t go to him–
Keith squeezes his eyes closed, forces a deep, shaky breath, and nods. It helps, a little, but it’s like he can still smell the burnt rubber, and he takes another one, a bit more steady. He holds it in for five counts, and exhales for another five. He does it two more times, until the hammering in his chest settles, but the pit in his stomach is still there.
At least now he can imagine the track – the long run down to turn 1, the decelerating before the sharp left-right-left of turns 7, 8 and 9, the kink of turn 16 and 17 after the last DRS zone. The heavy feeling doesn’t fully go away, though.
It follows him through the Drivers’ Parade, the lap to the grid where he watches the lights on the back of Lance’s car, the national anthem, all the way until it’s time to get into the car.
He’s already sweating buckets, the cooling vest doing little to help, and his hair is already plastered to the back of his head. He pulls the black balaclava on, tucking in the stray strands of his bangs before he pulls on his helmet, securing it with the strap. Shiro hands him his gloves before he climbs inside the cockpit, and claps him on the shoulder.
“Don’t overthink it.” Easier said than done.
With that, Shiro steps aside, and Keith is inside the cockpit in no time, getting strapped in by one of the mechanics, connecting all the wires and the drink system in his suit to the car. Thace leans inside, as he usually does, for some last minute debrief.
“So remember, Plan B, but we’ll keep you updated. Don’t take any unnecessary risks, the season is long.”
He nods as he takes the gloves from the steering wheel, pulling them on. He knows that the season is long, but he’s competitive and a maximalist – if the win is within his reach, he’s going for it, and starting from the front row, it very much is. Thace taps his helmet twice, as he always does, a little ritual they’ve done since Keith was promoted to the main team mid-season in 2018, just after a year and a bit spent in the junior team.
With two minutes until the formation lap, Thace does a radio check.
With one minute until the formation lap, the engine at his back roars to life.
With twenty seconds until the formation lap, his mechanics run to the side of the track.
Then it’s green lights, and he follows Lance around the track, the dizzying neon lights of the city and the ads over the track blurry at the speeds they go at. He stays close to Lance, weaving behind him to warm the tyres, and his radio crackles to life again as he nears the grid.
“ Two long and one short burnout on the grid, please.”
He does as instructed, and he stops in his grid box, to the left of Lance, waiting for the last car to take its place. He flexes his fingers on the wheel, and takes a deep breath. He can win this. He will win this.
“ Last car approaching the back of the grid.”
With a last glance to his right, he focuses on the lights, his hands on the clutch. The red lights come on shortly, and he revs the engine, and it’s one, two, three, four, five lights. The moment the lights go out, he releases the clutch and lurches forward.
He gets a good launch off the line, but Lance is faster and already cutting him off as they head into turn 1. Zethrid is right next to him as they turn, inches apart. It’s fine, he can get Lance later. He always does.
Except Lance keeps pulling away as they hurtle down the narrow streets, the back of his car getting farther and farther away as the number of remaining laps tick down. He’s out of the DRS range by lap 6, and every single cell in his body is telling him to push it to the limit, but this is a one stop race, and it makes no sense to use up the tyres early.
So he puts his head down and does the best he can. Zethrid has fallen back a few laps ago, so now he’s running a lonely race with Lance over 10 seconds up the road, punching out near identical lap times per Thace’s reports. As the pit stop lap they agreed on prior to the race nears, he starts pushing a bit more, despite the grip falling away from him, the rear of the car sliding slightly, but it’s nothing he can’t handle.
“Box and pit confirm, Keith, box and pit confirm.”
His pit stop goes without a hitch, and he slots back in the order in 4th on fresh hard tyres, right in front of Pidge in her identical car. The next lap, the three cars in front of him peel into the pitlane for their own pit stop, Thace tells him that Lance is pitting, but by the time he gets to the end of the pit straight, Lance is disappearing in turn 3.
Fucking. Hell. The undercut here is pretty strong, but Lance is more slippery than an eel in a bucket of soapy water tonight. There’s still half the race to go and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t at least try to wrestle the win away from him, though.
The hards work a little better than the mediums did, and Lance doesn’t get too far away from him at the start of this stint, but he’s not close enough to attack yet. He starts pushing again, brushing against the walls, throwing the car around on the narrow streets like a man possessed.
“Mind the tyres, Keith. That was a close one.”
In short, the team doesn’t want him to push, but he wants to chase Lance all the way to the checkered flag, and he’s getting closer. He’s going to take away that win from him if it shreds his tires down to the axels.
“What’s the gap?”
“3.4 seconds, but again, mind the tyres.”
Keith grits his teeth. “I can get him, I’m not going to sit back like a grandma!”
There’s a pause, and he knows that they’re discussing it. He can practically see Kolivan pinch the bridge of his nose. “Be sensible. ”
He takes it as permission. “Keep me updated.”
Thace does, each lap before each DRS zone, and he brushes the walls more than once but Lance remains elusive, just outside of his DRS range as the number of laps go down, down, down.
He takes the checkered flag 1.1 seconds behind Lance, in the end.
“ And that’s P2, Keith. It was a tough one, but you did very well, great management throughout. Unlucky with Lance, but the season is long. ”
He wants to scream until his lungs burn. Instead, he pushes out a diplomatic, “Yeah, well done with the pitstops. I’ll do better next week.”
He’s checked out through the post-race formalities: the weigh in; the brief interview where, as usual, he knows he’s too short with his words; waving and sending pinched smiles to his team on the other side of the barriers.
The cameras are still on him, as they perpetually are, in the cooldown room, so he keeps his expression carefully schooled as he sinks into his chair. Lance, of course, is making no efforts to mask his joy. Keith knows he shouldn’t have to, but it still grates at him.
Lance is beaming ear to ear, his hat is slung backward over his sweaty, wild hair, and his race suit’s arms are tied low around his waist, revealing his skin-tight shirt beneath. From a distance, Lance seems twiggy, so every time Keith gets this close he can’t help but let his eyes linger on the muscles rippling under the stark white fabric plastered in sponsors, broad and lean and toned.
It’s not like it should be a surprise. Formula 1 drivers are strong; they all have to be. It irritates Keith that Lance is the only person on the grid he finds his eyes lingering on, but he’s pretty sure it’s got more to do with everything about Lance bothering him in general. Like everything else about him, it does get on his nerves that Lance is the model-worthy playboy of the circuit, that every fan seems to trip over themselves to worship him. He’s all flawless tan skin, perfectly tousled chestnut hair, and stark blue eyes that pop in Altea’s colors. Keith wouldn’t be shocked if their design team made decisions on team kit aesthetics just to cater to Lance’s “look.”
Lance sits in the chair next to him, fidgety and eyes bright as he watches the replays on the screen. Zethrid is on his other side, intimidating as all hell, tall and built like a pro-wrestler. She looks pleased, as Galra Racing should be with a P3, though something about the way she smiles always makes his skin prickle uncomfortably. Keith feels tiny sandwiched between them, even though he’s not much smaller than Lance.
They show the race start. Watching it back, Keith notices all the little things he could have done better, mentally kicking himself with each one. Shiro would probably say he’s being too hard on himself, but so long as he’s sitting here, second to Lance McClain? He doesn’t fucking care.
They show Lance’s white and blue car pulling away from Keith’s sleek, black one. They then put up a goddamn graphic of Lance dominating most of the track in a cerulean blue, only little pockets of Blade’s bright purple indicating where Keith was faster. Keith’s nails dig into his thigh, keeping his face tightly reined in.
Until Lance has the audacity to glance back to him and give him a smug I-told-you-so smirk that has Keith’s blood pressure skyrocketing. For a second, everything narrows to the two of them, the animosity he can feel crackling through the open air between their bodies. Before he can stop himself, he feels his own snarl pulling at his lips, anger boiling in his belly that Lance would taunt him so openly, and–
A door opens, snapping Keith back into the moment. He drops back into his neutral expression and turns away, scolding himself. You are on camera, you are at work, you are better than rising to his bullshit.
It does very little to soothe the heat coursing through his veins.
* * *
It’s torture, the rest of the proceedings. Keith gets through it, just like he’s been getting through rough days like these for years now, and still he just knows that bitchface Kogane account is receiving enough content to last the rest of the season no matter how hard he tries.
Normally, he doesn’t consider himself a sore loser. Keith’s competitive, of course, all of the drivers are. Something about Lance, though, brings out the absolute worst in his inner competitor– and inner saboteur.
He continues to ruminate so intensely through his ice bath that Pidge flicks some water at his face, laughs, and teases, “You think if you fume hard enough, you’ll turn it into a hot tub?”
Once he’s finally in the safety of his hotel room, he lets out a garbled, frustrated yell, kicking the side of his suitcase. It slumps back against the wall and falls closed with an unsatisfying, limp thump.
He knows that there are other drivers that would kill for the opportunities he had– hell, most of the grid would be out partying themselves stupid over second place. And yet it doesn’t matter, because it’s not good enough. He’s not good enough.
The inadequacy creeps up his throat and threatens to choke him; he is nine years old, at the group home, singled out again and again and again for not meeting expected benchmarks or for “undesirable” behaviors. He has to be the best at this, always, because if he isn’t the best, what does he have? He’s not good with people, with school, with sitting still.
What if he loses all of this? What if he really is a cheat, if this is just the beginning of a long downward trajectory? He’d hadn’t earned his first championship, that should’ve been Shiro’s. Maybe he’d never had what it took at all.
He digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. A tightness starts to wind around his chest, and he’s beginning to tilt toward lightheaded, like he can’t get enough oxygen with each breath. The intensity of it tightens like an aperture into one burning, infuriating source point: Lance.
Keith has been “troubled” long enough to recognize the beginnings of a panic attack, probably not helped by the grueling conditions he’d wrenched his body through all day.
He rips off his clothes with painfully tingling hands as he heads toward the bathroom, leaving a trail behind him, and twists the shower on. He steps under it immediately, not caring that it’s ice cold. If anything, it helps to ground him, the freezing water shocking his skin into goosebumps. With one hand, he braces himself against the tile and bears it, letting the water slide through his hair and down his back.
As the water slowly warms, the cadence of his breath slows with it. The air feels more nourishing, and the tingle in his fingertips has faded into a numb prickle. Keith rests his forehead against the cool tile wall and squeezes his eyes shut, swallowing back the tightness in his throat, borne more of frustration with his own body’s betrayal than anything.
He did not cry.
His imagination seizes the vulnerability in his defenses to insert images of Lance throughout the day, because it seems that his own subconscious is dead set on cruel and unusual torment. Lance holding the glimmering trophy above his head, confetti raining down around them, smile rivalrous in its luminosity to the bright fireworks crackling overhead. Lance from behind as he jumped out of his car, sweeping his helmet off so his hair stuck out in every single direction, the way it curled into tiny, soft looking ringlets with the humidity at the nape of his neck. Lance and that fucking shit-eating smirk he’d given him, not more than two feet from Keith, bratty and self-satisfied in a way that Keith wanted to do something about–
Now it’s not just the water at his back that’s warm, he realizes in horror, there’s an electric heat building low in his stomach now, unwelcomed, but not unpleasant. No. No, no fucking way, no. It had been a long day, he lived a lonely lifestyle, and desperation did not equal attraction. And even if it did, it certainly did not spell out “good idea.” He’d rather eat an entire tyre with a rusty fork and knife than debase himself as much as to consider doing anything like that with McClain.
He seizes his soap so hard it slips out of his grip and clatters noisily to the shower floor. Once retrieved, he scrubs away at his skin– the sweat, the grime, the fucking dirty, out of place desire he’d just been cursed with. He spends more time washing up than he normally would, doubling everything. For the sake of his inner monologue, he assures himself it’s because he got so sweaty. Deeper down, he knows it’s much worse than that. If he doesn’t keep his hands busy until this passes, he can’t be trusted with what he might do.
The danger passes, fortunately, and by the time Keith is toweling off, he feels the weight of the day closing in. All he manages to pull on are a pair of boxers before he’s crawling under the plush, white comforter, rolling on his side to scroll through his phone a little before bed.
Pidge’s name pops up in his notifications, indicating she’s sent some photos she liked from the day. She’s trying to be his friend, to bond or whatever, he knows, he just never knows what to say back, especially because her closeness to Lance is no secret. He pulls at the notifications, recognizes a few from before the race, their ice bath, a couple action shots. Normal, bland. He doesn’t have the mental capacity to think up a genuine response, so he closes out the notification for now.
Twitter he avoids completely. He doesn’t usually care what nasty shit people cooked up in there, but he has a feeling that today’s fare will be particularly odious.
His finger hovers over Instagram– that could be dangerous too, of course. He should really just play some stupid phone game on airplane mode so he doesn’t work himself back up again before he sleeps. That’s what responsible, upstanding citizen Shiro would tell him to do.
Keith is neither responsible nor upstanding, so he clicks the Instagram button anyway. It’s pretty much what he expected: Lance, Lance, and more Lance.
There are a couple of him, too, sprinkled in among the other drivers and teams. Fuck, it was worse than he’d thought. He really had given bitchface_koganes a gold mine. This is a known issue with him, much to the distress of his press team. Keith trying to wrestle his expression into “neutral” and “gracious” tended to end in “stony” at best and “serial killer” at worst.
He sighs. That was a problem to answer for back at HQ, not tonight. After scrolling through a couple more posts, his thumb pauses over a newer one.
It’s a series of photos, the typical batch from a race winner. The cover picture is Lance celebrating with that thousand-watt smile after getting out of the car, and he just knows that this photo was picked because it captures off his jawline just-so. Bastard. There’s the trophy, podium, team photo with the leaderboard reading P1, and his name flanked in Cuban flags. It gives Keith a little satisfaction to see Lotor at the periphery of that one, looking salty.
Then, at the end, there’s one that catches him off guard. Lance with the trophy in his lap, beaming at his phone propped up on a chair. On the screen there’s an older woman, a few other adults that look around Lance’s age, give or take some years, and two children squishing their pudgy faces into the frame to get a look.
His family, Keith realizes, with a pang of envy.
He quickly skips to the caption.
lance_mcclain I don’t have words. Thank you to everyone, my team, my friends, and most importantly, mia familia. I dare say P1 looks damn good on me, I think I’ll be wearing it the rest of the season. 💙
The softness he’d felt at the photo of his family evaporates at the presumptuousness of that last sentence. Like he thinks it won’t even be a fight.
It’s outsized, Keith’s irritation. He’s aware. It doesn’t stop him from flicking back to his messages, and taking a second look at those photos Pidge sent over.
He stops at the ice bath one. Keith does, indeed, look as broody as always, but it’s just tempered enough that he’d have plausible deniability. Most importantly, he looks pretty good in the photo, and he knows it. He downloads the rest, and sends Pidge a brisk “thanks.”
He makes his own post, ensuring that his own shirtless photo, hair wet from the ice bath, dark eyes locked on the camera, goes first. If Lance can post a thirst trap when he lost and be endlessly irritating about it, so could he. Turnabout's fair play.
The rest of the photos follow, just to say this post was reasonably motivated by talking about the race, and he pauses at the caption, finger tapping the side of his phone case thoughtfully. It needed to match Lance’s call to war, be enough to cause buzz, but not outright mean.
Finally, he begins to type.
k.kogane Congrats, 53. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Even Keith has to admit, the wave of comments that pours in is immediately satisfying.
Notes:
This chapter got... so long. We are not doing every single race and they all certainly won't be 8k 😅 However, this one is, so cope.
Thanks already for all the comments and kudos on the first chapter, this AU is so so fun to write and share! And as always thank you to kashuumitsus as the social media wizard, resident f1 expert, and beta reader/cowriter extraordinaire.
Also if anyone knows an f1 driver I can ask some hyperspecific questions to and they're super chill about it being for a fucking voltron legendary defender fanfiction in the year of our lord 2025 lmk... (joking) (or am I?) - alteanmouse
Chapter Text
Sophie53 @babemcclain
OHMYGOD???? LANCE’S POST-QUALI INSTA POST!?!?????? WHAT THE FUCK?!????
lena @mcclainwdc replying to @babemcclain
ITS NOT EVEN THE PICTURES BUT THE CAPTION THAT TOOK ME OUT LIKE??? WHY MENTION KOGANE WHAT HAPPENED
Sophie53 @babemcclain replying to @mcclainwdc
NO FR I WANNA KNOW THE TEA
🙏lance wdc 2025🙏 @hotstuff53 replying to @babemcclain
that last one… hooo mama. he’s a whole snack. and the smirk… he’s hotter than the qatar race in 2023
keith’s ponytail @bladesectors
🚨this is NOT a drill we got ice bath Keith from the man himself🚨 (i’m fucking dying the stare????? forgive me father for i have sinned)
[a screenshot of the ice bath picture Keith posted on instagram]
dani🏎 @6loyal replying to @bladesectors
i think it says a lot that i’m a lesbian and i would climb that man like a tree
greek god keith @sculptedgod replying to @bladesectors
[an edit of a SpongeBob screencap of a headstone, reading “here lies me lmao bye]
inchident @klanceisms
did these two start a socmed war for whatever reason and i’m just finding out about it???
[three screenshots:
1: the tweet with the picture of Lance dripping wet in the hotel lobby in Australia, screenshotted from Keith’s profile
2: Lance’s insta post with the “come and get it, Kogane😘” caption
3: Keith’s insta post with the “congrats, 53. enjoy it while it lasts.” caption]
R♡ keith kogane defender @koganekore replying to @klanceism
or they’re flirting. both are a possibility and honestly i can’t even decide
katie holt world domination @pigeonletter replying to @klanceism
i dont even go here but something is up with these two i know it
brynn @fastertimes replying to @klanceism
I’m sensing a pattern here, why are they’re wet in *all* the pictures?? Sirs do you have an explanation???
inchident @klanceism replying to @fastertimes
help you’re right😭😭 im sobbing these two are not subtle
r/formula1 - 7 hr. ago
WronglyVisible
Pole conversion rates - is McClain only good at qualifying?
McClain has 23 poles, and only 7 wins, of which only 4 of them have been from pole, making his pole-to-win ratio 17.39%, meanwhile Kogane has slightly more poles at 26 and 22 wins, of which 17 was from pole, making his pole-to-win ratio 65.38%. So to me, this suggests that while McClain is fast for one lap, he chokes when it comes to converting it to a win. Is this really the case?
⬆️4.9k⬇️ 💬 291
sharpblades
Keith has more wins from Lance poles than Lance does
CrystalClear93
twist the knife deeper why dont you
wrappeditsalt
Now that’s a fun fact
HaggardDruid61
depending on who you ask, sure. ask any lance fan about it and they will start crying or ranting about all the times the team fucked up and lost him the win or both
SaltyPretzels
new depressing mcclain stat just dropped
TurnipCookieCity
Tbh I don’t see it as depressing when it’s about 85% McClain putting that car where it doesn’t belong and falling back because of the race pace of the Altea and 15% Altea “strategy” shenanigans or just straight up bottle jobs, I ain’t criticizing a guy for being fast
LittleLionLance
Why is McClain catching strays on a Wednesday?
firetailscorpion_1839
Because it’s funny
Shanghai, China
Lance has not been obsessing over The Photo. He has not screenshotted it for posterity, he has not returned to it in the dark hours of the night when he can’t sleep, and it certainly doesn’t occupy so much of his thoughts back at team HQ that he’s been admonished multiple times for zoning out– often by Hunk. And it takes a lot for Hunk to be disappointed in him.
It’s just the way Keith’s dark gray eyes locked onto the camera, like he’s looking directly at Lance. Challenging him. Like he wants to crawl through the photo and put him in his place and–
Lance digs his nails into his palm and focuses on the pain blossoming there instead of the heat once again winding down his spine. At least he’s away from the media at the moment, all penned up in the back in his driver’s room, trying to pull himself together before the media circus inevitably asks about all of this.
The door opens, and at first his heart leaps into his throat as he first notices the signature black blade suit with violet accents– then he realizes this person is far too small to be Keith, and is wearing a cheeky grin like she’d just pulled off an Ocean’s 11 style heist.
“Heya, fifty-three,” Pidge greets, plopping down next to him without invitation.
“Wow, they’ll let your ilk into the Altea garage these days?” Lance asks.
“Yeah, that’ll happen when you were the better teammate and the crew members all miss you.”
Lance snorts. Frankly, there was probably some truth to that, the team still adores her. He’s sure Allura would have an aneurysm if she knew Pidge was freely wandering Altea’s garage, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Genius as she was, Pidge already was fully aware of any tech specs on the Altea car that might be special.
“So what, you just here to insult me?”
“Nah. I have to get to a debrief. I’m here to ask if you want to go to dinner with me and Hunk tonight. There’s this noodle place he went to alone last time and hasn’t shut up about all year, time to see what it’s all about, I think.”
“The one in Huangpu District? Yeah, I think he might have mentioned it one or a hundred times.” Lance rolls his eyes affectionately. Hunk has been talking his ears off about that restaurant since they’ve left Singapore, when they’re not talking about set-ups and possible strategies.
“Good, so you’re familiar. You’re in, then?”
Lance nods. “Of course. Just don’t know why you had to risk being drawn and quartered by Allura to ask me now.”
Pidge does have the decency to look a little guilty. “You’ve been off all day. I know you, I could see it in how things went on track. And you’ve been a little… reserved. Do you know how disconcerting it is to see you being reserved?”
“Just jet lagged.” Lance shrugs, avoiding Pidge’s gaze.
Pidge’s eyes narrow. “Mmm, okay, so it has nothing to do with Keith-gate?”
He keeps his expression schooled, but just knows his cheeks flush, betraying him. “Nothing at all. Doesn’t bother me one bit. He’s just mad I was faster.”
“So you’re not bothered? Not even a little bit?” Pidge needles.
Lance crosses his heart. “Swear it. Pinky promise. On my car. Not at all.”
The way her expression folds into a barely-contained smirk tells him he’s going to regret this immensely.
“Alright then. See you tonight!”
* * *
Food is probably the real reason Hunk is still in this job full of breakneck international travel (apart from getting to hang out with Lance, of course) and whenever Lance tags along, he knows what he might get out of Hunk’s food recommendations could range from noisy, crowded street markets up to fancy Michelin starred restaurants with portion sizes better suited to Allura’s pet mice.
He didn’t know what to expect, exactly, for Hunk’s Shanghai crown jewel, but he’s still surprised when they arrive at a humble little spot tucked away on a bustling street corner, nondescript among the storefronts surrounding. It seems plenty popular with the locals, though; they’re all ushered toward a too-small table to crowd around near the back past a sea of happy diners.
Lance doesn’t mind– in fact, he vastly prefers this to an uppity restaurant that he feels like he has to play dress up to enter, and in here, he’s pretty sure they’re not going to be all too noticeable. He needs a fun night with his friends, no cameras, no pressure, just good conversation and a big ass bowl of noodles.
They get their bowls in record time, much to his relief. He’s starving after their hard work today, and as Lance winds some perfectly seared round noodles and pork around his chopsticks, he’s already sure that Hunk is a hundred percent right about this place. His first bite confirms it: just the right amount of spicy and savory, a little kick of something herby he can’t quite place. His eyes slide shut momentarily, wondering how in the hell Hunk always manages to find these places.
“Told you!” Hunk nudges him, taking a bite of his own.
“This is– oh my God, Hunk, this is orgasmic,” he gushes, shoveling in another bite.
Pidge snickers around her own chopsticks.
“Grow up,” he scolds lightheartedly, though it does nothing to wipe the devilish smile off her face. “What?” he then prompts further.
“Nothing. Just– reminded me of something.”
“What?”
“I said it’s nothing!”
“Spill it!”
It was the sort of secret Pidge wants to tell, the kind that she revels in the game of having it teased out of her. “Okay,” she says coyly, “but only because you, what was it, ‘pinky promised’ the Keith thing isn’t bothering you.”
“It isn’t!” Lance interjects quickly, though there’s a sinking feeling in his stomach.
Usually, this expression on Pidge’s face meant one of two things: she’d devised a race plan so clever she ought to be promoted to team principal, or she’d found a meme so unhinged, so heinous, Lance wondered if her internet access should be cut off for her own safety and the welfare of those around her.
“Pidge,” Hunk says warningly, seeming to have caught on to what’s happening himself.
“Hunk,” Pidge mirrors innocently, fishing her phone out from her pocket.
“Pidge,” Lance says too, this time pleading.
“I just found some really interesting content on the forums after your little social media back and forth with Keith.”
“It’s– it’s a rivalry! We’re rivals! I wasn’t going to take what he said about me laying down!”
For some reason, this only seems to fuel Pidge’s delight. She holds up her hand. “Yes, yes, I’m sure you’re both very secure in your manhood. But speaking of ‘taking it lying down,’ I found is that there’s a circle of fans who think you’re secretly hooking up, and they really think they’ve sleuthed something from your last few posts.” Pidge adjusts her round glasses. “Ahem. Lightning_Lance69 –”
“Nice,” Hunk and Lance both say at the same time, despite themselves.
“--on March 29th claims that, in addition to the popular theory that the matching ice bath photos are a purposeful parallel, believes that they have spotted Keith’s clothes in the background of a photo of you from 2023 playing video games–”
“Give me that!” Lance makes a grab for Pidge’s phone, which she deftly dodges without missing a beat.
“--to which bea_utiful53 replies that the clothes in your recent posts may be clues too, because you are wearing the same swim trunks he’s wearing in a different photo–”
“They’re fucking swim trunks, they all look the same?!” Lance’s hands are spread wide in exasperation.
“I don’t know, Lance, it seems like pretty damning evidence to me.” Pidge, at least, relents here and sets the phone face down on the table in an olive branch.
Humiliation burns hot and sickly in his stomach– and in his cheeks, too, he's sure. He buries his face in his hands.
“Lance?” It’s Hunk’s voice now, concerned.
Lance peeks between his fingers to see his best friend glancing back and forth between him and Pidge, bewildered. Pidge is still smiling, but it begins the wilt the longer he stays quiet.
“Lance– dude, come on, I’m just playing. You normally love this stuff!” Pidge finally says, and it’s true. Normally Lance eats up the stupid conspiracy theories about himself, tabloid-crazy rumors about him hooking up with movie stars he’s probably never even been in the same city as or that he’s had a Brazilian Butt Lift. Sometimes, he indulges and looks up the details of the wildest gossip himself, passes them along to Pidge and Hunk and will jokingly insist it’s all true. It’s a great way to remember to not take the media seriously. It makes him feel a little more sane to have someone to laugh with about these types of claims. It’s fun.
Why is this not fun?
The only difference, this time, is that Keith is involved. Stupid Keith with his stupid stare and his stupid mullet. It has to be the only reason. He’s just so confused and needs to think, but that is literally the last thing he has time to do right now – he needs to focus on this weekend.
“It’s– it’s that it’s Keith!” he bursts out, spreading his hands wide, then slapping them down onto the table. He stares at the wood grain, picks at a bubble in the shellac. “It’s different.”
“How is it different? And so what even if it is, you talk about him all the time!”
“Pidge, enough,” Hunk interrupts, his tone leaving no room for argument. “I need him to not have a breakdown so I don’t have a breakdown.”
Pidge shows a visible effort in restraining herself from saying more about what she’d uncovered, and quietly slides her phone off the table. “I just thought it would be funny, okay? I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it’d touch such a nerve. I wanted to have a nice laugh together. You know, how we used to?”
An uncomfortable silence falls between them all for a moment. She’s right– things aren’t how they used to be. Three races in and that much was clear; they were on different teams now, and their trajectories in the sport had shifted. Everyone did their best to separate work from their personal relationships off track, sure. But when most of their time was now dedicated to besting each other with no consideration to each other’s race, rather than working for the same team, seeing each other almost every day… well. It did feel a little different, a little lonelier, a little more complicated, no matter how good the three of them became at compartmentalizing.
“I don’t see why we can’t all be tight, just like we used to be,” Hunk finally says, worrying at the ends of his headband.
Lance deflates back into his chair, everything falling heavily into perspective with a healthy dose of guilt. “We can. We are. I’m sorry, Pidge. The pressure’s just so on now, you know? I thought a win would help me relax a little, but it only made it worse.”
“No, you’re right and I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how much he aff–” Stopping herself, she thinks better of this phrasing. “I didn’t realize it would stress you out. This,” she gestures in a circle to all of them around the table, “is supposed to be fun. Are non-Kogane related conspiracies still okay to share with the class?”
Lance snorts, and with the tension resolved, he starts to twist more noodles up with his chopsticks. “Keep them coming. I just don’t want to think about him any more than I fucking have to.”
Pidge brightens, and the phone makes a reappearance. “Okay good, because I found this one alleging you’re actually dead and a lookalike manufactured by the New World Order has taken your place, and…”
* * *
As it turns out, and now that he’s paying attention to it, Lance spends the vast majority of his time thinking about Keith more than he professionally has to.
He thinks about him when he brushes his teeth in the morning. He thinks about him while he’s supposed to be focused on practice. He thinks about him when he tries to fall asleep every night leading into race day.
It isn’t his fault, he tells himself. Keith is antagonizing him, clearly, far more than Lance had ever done, and besides, he was the one that started this whole mess. It’s only natural that Keith moving an on-track rivalry into his real-life spaces on a global stage would be under his skin, right?
What’s most distressing is that he hates him– one hundred percent, there’s no doubt about it– but not every thought necessarily centers around that. Sometimes the image from the ice bath sneaks its way in behind some of the animosity, popping up at inopportune times in his brain with picture-perfect clarity.
Like while on track during quali. The image bursts forth intrusively as he wonders about Keith’s top speed, and he misses an apex so widely that he has to roughly grind through a gravel trap and torque the wheel sharply to rejoin.
“Lance! Focus!” That’s definitely Allura’s voice– and for Allura to decide to get her royal highness onto the radio, it means Lance needs to get his head on straight and step his ass up.
He’s lucky it wasn’t worse. There are a few things going for him: he’s still warming up the tyres on an out lap, he has one more shot at this before they run down the quali clock, and the conditions are good. Yet those slim advantages don’t guarantee anything. Never do. He shakes himself, takes a deep breath.
The thought of Keith surfaces again, as it always does. This time, he opts to cling to the competitive urge he feels when he thinks about him, the feeling of constantly chasing his shadow, and he channels it.
It feels like the lap of his life. Something clicks into place and he’s able to string it all together, corner after corner, balancing carefully at the edge of what he knows the car is capable of.
“If that wasn’t a good lap, I don’t know what is!” he radioes to Hunk as he crosses the line, veering his car out of the way of anyone who might still come flying through behind. He’s grinning inside his helmet, exhilarated by the feeling of going that fast and his body taking that level of force, commanding perfection from something so dangerous. It’s one of those moments he remembers why he loves doing this in the first place. It makes him feel like a kid again.
Hunk doesn’t respond right away, and he doesn’t expect it– he’s sure as the final cars cross the line behind him, they’re all anxiously watching the places shuffle and shift until they land on the final order.
“Pole!” Hunk cheers through his helmet, so loud and sudden it makes him jump.
“What? Seriously?!” Lance slaps the steering wheel and cheers, so light with elation and vindication he swears he might fly right out of the driver’s seat if he wasn’t strapped down so tight.
“Well done, Lance,” comes Allura through the radio again. It’s high praise; it’s rare he hears from her out on track. He must glow from it, a beam of golden light circling Shanghai International Circuit.
Maybe he wasn’t completely washed up just yet.
* * *
The good mood continues into Sunday; he can’t help himself– he knows there’s a smug air about him whenever he’s forced into proximity with Keith, but how often had it been the other way around? Too damn much, that’s for sure. He’s karmically owed a little pettiness.
So sure, maybe he pours it on a little thick to the media when he knows Keith’s nearby, especially if he feels his gray eyes lock on him. And maybe he flashes him a wide, friendly grin when they pass one another in the paddock, Shiro close in Keith’s wake as he always was. The glare he gets back is delicious.
Lance feels a little bad that someone like Shiro is caught up in Keith’s drama, probably because it stung that one of his personal heroes must match his rival’s disdain for him. However much Lance may admire him, he’d cast his lot in with Keith. Besides, if he liked someone like Keith, Lance figured he would never stand a chance of gaining his favor, that it was probably telling about his judgement of character anyway. So he never tried.
As he goes through race day’s usual motions, he does everything he can to replicate yesterday’s success. Maybe a social media war with Keith was his secret ingredient all along, maybe he’d never been properly motivated before this.
And, dare he think it: what if this was the season? What if, for real this time, he was actually going to do it and take a championship title? What if he could finally go home and be able to properly thank the Mama that never let him give up on his dreams and make every sacrifice at the altar of his childhood worth it?
In equal part to his sudden burst of motivation follow the nerves. If this truly was his turning point, what if the pressure got to him and he fucked it up? What if today was the day his chances finally slipped out from his grasp forever?
The last thought follows him like a specter through the formation lap, all the way to his spot at the front of the grid.
When the lights go out, he gets a good start– good enough that his heart leaps into his throat, because it’s happening. He holds the lead, as he hugs the corners as tight as he dares, picking up speed.
Keith is all over the back of him. The mean looking black car fully occupies his mirrors, too close for comfort. It has Lance on edge, pushing the car much earlier than he should, he knows, but the alternative is letting Keith by. That’s not going to happen.
They chase one another like this for a few laps, and to Keith’s credit, he’s being fucking ballsy. There are a couple of lunges that Lance doesn’t expect, he even gets his nose out once into his space. It’s only luck and timing that allows Lance to reassert the lead.
“Mind the car, Lance. Long way to go.”
Lance grits his teeth in irritation and jerks the wheel, cutting off Keith from taking advantage of an opening.
“Can’t you tell I’m a little busy?!” he snaps back, and oh, he just knows they’ll be broadcasting that.
“We know. But the tyre temperatures–”
“Let me drive, Hunk!” If he’s any more distracted, Keith will take the spot from him, he already feels sick to his stomach with nerves about keeping Keith behind without Hunk’s worried messages.
Another lap goes on this way; Keith nearly gets it again, Lance having to swing into his space in a way that was legal (at least, he’s pretty sure it was). That said, he had a lurking suspicion that because it was against the golden–boy Kogane, he’d probably be noted.
He hits the brakes late again when the smell hits him: burning rubber and acrid, metallic smoke.
There’s the smell of hot rubber on tracks all of the time, but the smell of a burning car? It’s specific. Traumatic. Just the whiff of it sliding under his helmet is enough to make him start to panic.
He tries to brake for a corner and feels it– or the lack of it. There’s no response. The smell flares in intensity. He attempts to make the turn, standing on the pedal, but it’s no use.
“The brakes–” he starts to radio, then the back of the car whips out from behind him, and his surroundings blur for what feels like an eternity as he’s pushed and pulled in every direction in his harness. The air is knocked from his lungs as it all comes to a sudden, jarring stop, and he’s slammed into the back of his seat, teeth rattling in his skull.
He’s now staring at the torn, yellow advertising peeling away to reveal the abused tyre barrier, stunned and gasping for breath. The smell is worse– and he realizes, belatedly, there’s thick, black smoke pouring from his right wheel well (or… the crumpled remains of where it used to be) and bright, hot…
Fire. Fire.
Lance is immediately fumbling at his harness, racing to disentangle himself from its grips and get the fuck out. Brake fires weren’t that uncommon, but strapped into the crushed remains of a race car and staring down flames? Experience does nothing to still the fear that clamps down over him with such force he can’t think straight.
Mercifully, the straps give way, and he is able to quickly detach the steering wheel, then heaves himself out over the halo and jumps out. After backing up a few generous steps with shaking knees, Lance has to collapse backward to lean against the barrier to catch his breath. He will not pass out on international television.
Marshals clad in luminescent orange are already closing in from the perimeters at a sprint. Lance feels as though he watches it in slow motion as they douse his car with thick foam pouring from the spouts of fire extinguishers. Someone from the medical team approaches him, and Lance has to insist that he’s fine, he’s fine, he can get off the track without help.
The rest of the cars circle by, following the safety car like a trail of turbo-charged ducklings. Keith is at the lead. The purple accents on the sleek black car seem to glow and burn in his vision as he streaks past.
It’s then that tears spring into his eyes, and he’s grateful his helmet is still on with the visor locked firmly down. His fists ball at his sides, and it takes every ounce of his self control to not scream, not kick the wall, not fall to his knees into the gravel. Every single stream will be watching him, waiting for a newsworthy reaction– and even if they weren’t he can see the sea of cell phones raised to capture every second, every angle of his crash in the stands towering above him. It’s not often that all of the attention gets to him, but right now, he wants to be swallowed whole by the earth.
He should’ve known better than to have any hope. Last week was never a sign of anything at all, just a stroke of good luck. It would always be like this, wouldn’t it? Chasing Keith Kogane so hard he didn’t even notice if he caught fire doing it.
Head down, he keeps his helmet tightly locked over his head, and trains his attention on his feet as he’s ushered off the track. It doesn’t come off until he’s safely in the privacy of Altea’s team doctor, Coran. The fresh air cools the tears and sweat mingling on his cheeks, and though he stubbornly sets his jaw and insists he’s fine, he knows that the redness around his eyes must give him away.
Coran does not mention it. He’s an exuberant, talkative man, sporting a trademark bushy red mustache recognizable from clear across the paddock and thick Kiwi accent. Though he may not seem the obvious choice in bedside manner for a doctor, he’s shockingly reassuring when presented with a patient. Lance actually prefers that he’s a talker– it’s significantly more pleasant to have a shoulder relocated or a burn salved when he’s got Coran passionately reminiscing about that time he adopted an opossum at Woodstock to distract him.
“This doesn’t hurt?” Coran asks, manipulating Lance’s arms around in a variety of directions.
“No,” Lance answers miserably.
“Push back on my hand, now. And this?”
“What were you gonna do if I screamed?” Lance asks dryly, reaching for his usual humor, but it falls flat.
“Tell you not to move your arm like that,” Coran quips back brightly, letting his arms fall.
That, at least, draws a snort out of Lance.
“You’re clear to return to the garage,” Coran reports, scribbling something down on a piece of paper. “Just a few bruises. Ice and ibuprofen as needed. Let me know if your head starts hurting, neck pain, blurred vision. The usual.” He pauses, lifts his eyes to Lance sympathetically. “I know how hard it is to want something this badly, I was once young and desperate to win too. But please be careful. We love you heaps here. Nobody wants to see you get hurt.”
Lance wants to scream that he doesn’t care if he gets hurt, that it’s a price he’s willing to pay if the risk takes him to the top.
Instead, Lance nods, averting his gaze and swallowing back the painful lump rising again in his throat. He feels like a child asking, but even so, he murmurs, “Can I stay here another few minutes?”
The corners of Coran’s eyes crinkle. “Take all the time that you need.”
When the door is closed, he permits himself a few moments to feel the weight of everything that had just happened. He knows he should be grateful he’s safe– and he is, really– except it’s all drowned out by a hot, viscous mire of frustration and anger.
He should’ve been smarter. More attentive. Faster. Better.
Lance squeezes his eyes shut and digs his blunt fingernails into his forearm where a fresh bruise blooms beneath his tan skin, trying to center his attention on the pain and force focus. A couple of tears trickle out of the corners of his eyes as he grits his teeth, tries to shove it all back down.
It will look bad if he doesn’t get back out there soon; Lance has an image to maintain. If he hides or appears too withdrawn, then he’s a sulking, petulant child. If he shows anger toward Keith, then he’s a hothead with little self awareness. If he’s too unbothered, then he’s ungrateful for everything the team does.
No, he must do his measured, well-rehearsed penitence with the media, reporter after reporter like Ave Marias down the rosary. He will put on a pair of headphones and stand alongside Altea’s crew, visit the pit wall, maintain a mild-mannered smile and be a team player. With disdain, he realizes that he’s probably even going to have to look happy if Lotor places somewhere respectable.
Lance hops down off the exam table, wipes at the remaining tears with the backs of his wrists, and takes a deep breath.
He puts on a smile.
* * *
Search: mcclain shanghai
Kogane clinches second win, third podium of the season after dramatic McClain brake failure
The Chinese GP was not without action and excitement: an early brake failure saw Lance McClain (Altea) having to retire from the race after clinching pole position, thus granting the lead and the win to rival and current world champion, Keith Kogane (Blade). Read more
Formula 1: McClain’s shocking retirement and Kogane’s victory in Shanghai
A nail-bitingly close qualifying saw Altea’s McClain claim pole position on Saturday, however his efforts came undone after just a few laps around the Shanghai Circuit: his brakes overheated and caught fire, sending McClain into the barriers and causing him to retire. After the safety car restart, Kogane kept the lead for the remainder of… See more
McClain crashes out, Kogane wins his second race and extends championship lead
Kogane cruises to a win after main rival, McClain crashes out due to brake failure. The reigning champion kept a cool head at the safety car restart, keeping his lead and holding back a charging Lotor Zarkon. The Blade driver kept pulling away, however, and by the time the checkered flag, his gap to second place was over 20s. Click here to read more
Kogane siegt nach Kollision von McClain in Shanghai
Der Grand Prix von China erlebte ein dramatisch Moment, als die Bremse von McClain enflammt. Weiter lesen
Kogane győzelmet arat Shanghai-ban, míg McClain kiesik a futamból
Nem múlt el izgalmak nélkül a Kínai Nagydíj, ugyanis a pole pozícióból rajtoló McClain fékje pár kör után lángra kapott. Kogane, kihasználva a lehetőséget, hogy ellenfele a világbajnoki címért kiesett a versenyből, a biztonsági autós szakaszt követően magabiztosan nyerte a futamot. Tovább
Lance throws his phone to the other side of his drivers’ room with a frustrated groan. He can’t stare at the headlines anymore, doesn’t even know why he did it in the first place. It’s always been counterproductive. Despite the mainly positive sentiments of those articles, they have always compared him to Keith, or managed to work him in one way or another– how Keith managed his tyres so well to catch up to Lance in the end, how daring his overtakes were, how Keith’s style juxtaposed Lance’s. Even when Lance has won. Especially when Lance has won. It’s sickening.
Outside the room, team members are bustling around, packing up tools and equipment with ease. The seemingly chaotic flurry of motions is a well-practiced choreography that has been perfected over decades of races. He really needs to start packing up as well, they’re leaving the track soon.
Miserable now that his short reprieve is over, he groans and stands. Unceremoniously, he throws his things into a bag, not caring if anything wrinkles or gets cr and slings it over his shoulder, longing already to be back at the hotel, showered, and snug in bed. His muscles ache and his brain is saturated in irritating thoughts about Keith– sleep will be a welcome escape.
He opens the door and, so entrenched in his wallowing, nearly smacks directly into Lotor. It seems he’s just exited his room too. His second place podium hat is prominently attached over the top of his own bag– and Lance can’t help but notice this with disdain. He probably won’t even wear the damn thing lest he fuck up his “look.” God forbid anyone see a shiny platinum hair out of place.
“Struggling to pay attention today, are we?” Lotor asks evenly, his cruelty steeped in a falsely flippant air, shifting as he slips something into his pocket.
That’s the thing that gets to him about Lotor. He fucking irks him, makes his skin crawl, gives him the heebie jeebies, the whole nine. But he manages to package himself in such an even-keeled politeness that everyone else seems to think he’s fantastic . The cult following he’s gathered over the years is as puzzling as it is insufferable, and he’s annoyingly controlled around the media, never slipping up. He’d certainly charmed Allura: whenever the three of them are in the same room back at HQ, it feels like Lance has ceased to exist to her in an effort to bend over backwards for the new talent.
Maybe she’s paranoid after Pidge left unexpectedly. Maybe she believes he’s genuinely as nice as he acts. Maybe Altea was really that desperate to fill the second seat with experienced hands. He doesn’t know. All Lance knows is that he fucking sees through it.
“Congratulations,” Lance says stiffly.
“Thank you. I do intend to enjoy the podiums more frequently.” There’s a false brightness there behind his pruned English accent, but his eyes remain ice cold as they fix on Lance. ”I believe that puts me at…” He briefly pretends to count to himself on his fingers. “Thirty-eight points. Isn’t that the same number of points you have?”
Lance wonders how much trouble he’d get in if he started swinging. Usually he’s above rising to such easy bait, he’d laugh and brush it off. He was Lance McClain, Altea’s lead driver, in his sixth year now. But today? After the last three races? From the creep who replaced his best friend and teammate on the track?
“It is,” he grits out, grip tightening on the strap of his bag and skin pulling taut over his knuckles.
“Hmm. Interesting. I would have thought you’d be in the lead, but I suppose everyone is replaceable." He casts him a smile full of straight, white teeth. A set of fangs wouldn’t be out of place where he had canines.
Another door opens nearby and a light, cheery voice fills the space, jolting them both out of their staredown.
“-- may be good to take a closer look at the floors, perhaps an alteration for higher downforce would– oh, hello Lotor and Lance!” Allura beams at the two of them, and the engineer she’s speaking with also offers them a polite smile.
Lotor casts his arm over Lance’s shoulder. It feels wrong and heavy there. All the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
“I was just telling Lance that it was tough luck today, and I am sure he’ll be right back in it next time,” Lotor says, louder now and reflecting Allura’s easy smile back at her.
“Oh,” she says, clearly pleasantly surprised. “Is that so, Lance?”
It’s somewhat rhetorical, he knows. And maybe if the circumstances were different he might actually consider pushing back, calling Lotor out.
However, Lotor’s right. He’s replaceable, and he stands on the precipice of losing his status as lead driver, should Lotor pull ahead. There was a saying that circled in the sport: You’re only as good as your last race. And, well. A DNF hardly put him in any positions to be bargaining with fate.
So he forces his jaw to unclench, and he smiles. “Sure is.” His throat is tight, he threatens to choke on the words.
Allura glows. “That’s what being a team is all about! I’m so glad that you two are bonding, it only makes us stronger.”
She gestures for all of them to walk out together and launches into talking about her plans for the two weeks between now and Japan. It means he’s able to escape Lotor’s smarmy touch, at least, and he does his best to nod, smile, and hum agreeably at the right intervals to Allura’s monologue, despite the fact the heavy, sick feeling that’s settled like a stone in his gut.
* * *
Half curled around a fluffy hotel pillow, Lance scrolls through Instagram as he lays in the dark. He’s exhausted, but his mind is still reeling from the day and fights sleep, replaying the race, the crash, the run-in with Lotor over and over and over again. Doomscrolling may be a nasty habit, but it’s far preferable to his own thoughts.
He adjusts his arm around the pillow and pauses when the victory post from Keith inevitably appears only a few posts down.
Standard fare: podium photo, action shot, celebration with the team, varied stills from the media taken throughout the day. Something about it feels off, though, and it draws Lance in, thumb hovering over the images as he scrolls forward and backward through them for closer examination.
Keith doesn’t look happy.
He’s smiling in most of them. He’s got his arms raised in celebration in the one where he stands on the nose of his car. The confetti raining down around him on the podium while he’s sprayed with champagne should be the epitome of joy.
It’s not. Lance can’t work out why, exactly, and as he stares at the pictures, pinches to zoom in and out on his cryptic expression, he decides it has something to do with his eyes. Lance knows fake smiles when he sees them, he was their master. And Keith’s strength isn’t exactly subtlety.
It grates on him like sandpaper. He won. He fucking won , and he’s not even happy? What was his goddamn problem?
He scrolls to the caption. It’s short and to the point, as most of his are:
k.kogane Great day. Onto the next one.
Suppressing an eyeroll, he clicks on the comments.
hannah_b95 what, no lance mention this time?! 😫😫😫
shiro4everr hold on I fixed it: Come and get it McClain 😘
beezer_bro hell yeah 🙌🏆fr that fight with mcclain at the beginning was craaaazy i couldnt look away
They go on and on like this. Even when someone has something negative to say about Lance, it’s still about him. And while it’s far from a cure for his bad mood, he sleeps a little bit better that night knowing that must drive Keith insane: to get an earful about Lance when he wins something. It's all Lance ever got when he went toe to toe with Keith, he's not sure anyone thought he could really challenge Keith's dominance. Until now.
Karma’s a bitch.
Notes:
I'm getting the feeling our self control with chapter length will be a struggle. Accept yet another monster, know there are more monsters to come.
Also how about that Nico Hulkenberg podium last week?!?!? - altean-mouse
us: we’re not going to write too detailed races it’s going to get repetitive
also us, 3 detailed races later: …here’s some translation for the german and hungarian article blurbs so you don’t have google translate it
German: kogane wins after mcclain's collision in shanghai
the grand prix of china lived through a dramatic moment, as the brakes of mcclain caught on fire. read more
Hungarian: Kogane reaps victory in Shanghai, as McClain is out of the race
The Chinese Grand Prix did not pass without excitement, as after a few laps, the brakes of McClain - who started from pole position - caught fire. Kogane, capitalizing on the opportunity that his world championship title rival was out of the race, won the race confidently after the safety car. More
also. what do we think of the state of red bull and the chances of maxcedes? - kashuumitsus
Chapter Text
Agnes 🔜 Cuba!!! @alteanprince
i’m so heartbroken for lance😭😭 he could be so much closer to keith in the standings if not for his brakes giving up on life
P. @drivebi replying to @alteanprince
i knowww don’t even tell me ;;;;;
Lotor Zarkon Defense Attorney @zarkonist replying to @alteanprince
maybe if he didn’t lose his head and cook his brakes he wouldn’t have dnfed
Agnes 🔜 Cuba!!! @alteanprince replying to @zarkonist
i don’t wanna hear it from a nepobaby fan, my driver actually got here through hard work and not bc his daddy is a former champion who bought a team
lily @MCCK0G
*fans myself* that drive from keith was so hot wdym he was up by over 20s at the end??
Ke1th⭐ @koganes replying to @MCCK0G
it really was so sexy of him, imagine if he dominated a whole season like that🥵
lily @MCCK0G replying to @koganes
girl stopppppp i would be so unbearable
ally @altea-tea
im going to kms
[a picture of Lance with his head down and hands in a fist, walking towards the barrier with marshals following him as the other cars speed by behind]
mabs @lanceylance replying to @altea-tea
did you at least kiss the brick before you threw it at me?
* * *
fiftythree-and-six
3 hr ago
here’s what we’re not going to do. this:
[a screenshot of Keith’s latest Instagram post, most of the comments mentioning Lance in one way or another, some in a shipping manner]
look, i get it. they started a weird ass social media rivalry or whatever on top of the borderline mating rituals on track, but for the love of god, this is real life and actual people and not a damn fanfiction. there’s a place and time for that, and the comments under one of the drivers’ post is not that. do we really need to revisit the ‘don’t put fandom stuff where drivers can see it and keep it contained to fandom spaces like tumblr and ao3’ rule AGAIN???
#i’m going to start hunting people for sport istfg #f1 #keith kogane #lance mcclain
freakogane
reblogged bladebaddie - 23m
bladebaddie
okay are we going to talk about how keith is leading the wdc by 27 points?
freakogane
no. we move in silence.
#we do not curse the championship by talking about it this soon #we enjoy the wins and move on #or not bc the way he dunked 20s on the field was pure perfection #f1 #keith kogane
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.kogane-clinches-pole-in-a-stunning-lap-ahead-of-alteas-mcclain-and-zarkon.74hGsk3bkaUsb71jsbOpWh72.html
Kogane clinches pole in a stunning lap ahead of Altea’s McClain and Zarkon in Japanese GP Qualifying
19 April 2025
Blade driver Keith Kogane clinched his 27th pole position for the Japanese Grand Prix as the conditions worsened between sessions, displacing the Altea duo of Lance McClain and Lotor Zarkon in the final moments before a third red flag cut qualifying short due to extreme weather.
In the treacherous conditions, Kogane clocked a time of 1m 41.389s, leaving him a full 0.541s clear of the rest of the grid, led by McClain, who claimed pole position during last race’s qualifying.
The top three was completed by McClain’s teammate, Zarkon, followed by Kogane’s teammate, Holt. Galra drivers Zethrid and Sendak claimed the third row, starting tomorrow’s race in P5 and P6 respectively. Both Garrison drivers made it into the final shootout – Ryan Kinkade claimed P7 and Nadia Rizavi claimed P9, with Beezer Racing’s Nyma making a surprise appearance in Q3 and splitting the teammates. Rounding out the top 10 is Balmera’s Shay.
Lubos claimed 11th place, ahead of the MFE Ares duo of Leifsdottir and Griffin, ahead of Montow and Laisa. Rax claimed P16, but will drop back due to a 3-place penalty for impeding, promoting Axca, Ezor and Klaiza. Beezer’s Rolo will be starting from the pitlane due to changes made to his car following his accident in Q1.
[ Image: Kogane’s car zipping past the photographer ]
AS IT HAPPENED
Q1 - McClain and Zarkon set the benchmark as rain clouds gather and Rolo brings out a red flag
Race Control has confirmed well ahead of qualifying that the risk of rain was 100% – the only question was the matter of when. Therefore it was critical for everyone to set a benchmark lap on slick tyres before the rain arrived. “Plan is to get a time on the board early in case of red or yellow flags,” Hunk Garrett, McClain’s engineer, radioed to his driver.
In the scramble to make it out of the first part of qualifying, Rolo made contact with the wall, bringing out the first red flag of qualifying. After the session resumed, McClain charged ahead of the pack, edging out his teammate and Kogane by 0.228s and 0.253s, respectively.
In the final minutes, the top three refrained from another run, confident in their initial efforts. As the checkered flag dropped, Holt held P4, with Rizavi rounding out the top 5 with an impressive lap.
Shay’s lap was good enough for 6th, ahead of the Galra duo of Sendak and Zethrid, Lubos, Laisa, Kinkade, as Montow jumped to P13 out of the drop zone to split the MFE Ares teammates, knocking Rax to the drop zone.
With traffic being heavy, Rax did not jump out of the way of Axca in time, costing her the chance to advance to Q2, prompting the stewards to look at the incident. Ezor and Klaiza rounded out the knocked out drivers in Q1, the latter losing his final lap due to track limits.
Knocked out: Rax, Axca, Ezor, Klaiza, Rolo
Q2 - The rain arrives, McClain still leading the session
As the rain threatens to arrive any minute, the Altea, Blade and Galra drivers head out first on slicks to get in those early banker laps, followed by the rest of the field.
It seemed to be the right choice – one of the last ones to peel out from the pit lane was Laisa, who, upon starting his timed lap, lost control of his car in Turn 2 as the track became slippery and got beached in the gravel, bringing out the second red flag.
As the car was cleared from the track and drivers waited for the green light, the rain picked up, forcing the teams to switch to intermediate tyres.
With lap times being slower, the top 6 remained as it was during the second runs, none of the drivers improving their times in the rainy conditions.
The remaining four spots to Q3 were claimed by Shay, the Garrison duo of Rizavi and Kinkade, and Nyma. The latter put in a magnificent lap to reach Q3 for the first time this season for the American team, knocking out Lubos.
The MFE Ares drivers put in a great effort, however it was only enough for P12 and P13 in the end. Montow’s best lap around the circuit earned him P14.
Knocked out: Lubos, Leifsdottir, Griffin, Montow, Laisa
Q3 - Conditions worsen but Kogane takes a stunning pole
The rain that arrived during Q2 only worsened during the last part of qualifying, making it a fair fight for pole.
Kogane was the first one on track, followed closely by McClain, ahead of the rest of the field attempting to put a time next to their names.
Kogane set the first time, a stunning 1m 42.078s, a benchmark for the rest of the drivers and putting the pressure on the others to deliver a good enough lap time in the pouring rain. McClain claimed provisional pole with a lap time of 1m 41.930, lowering the time further.
“Rain getting heavier in about 4 minutes,” was the message to Zarkon, who shot up to P3 after the first runs were completed.
The threat of rain urged all teams to try and complete a second run as soon as possible, and McClain led the drivers out of the pitlane with 5 minutes remaining on the clock. The only ones who could complete a lap were McClain and Kogane before Race Direction declared the track too wet and dangerous for qualifying to continue, effectively ending qualifying with 2 minutes remaining.
Kogane’s attempt was almost 7 tenths faster than his previous, and with the session red flagged, his pole position was locked in, with McClain completing the first row for tomorrow’s race.
Zarkon and Holt will line up on the second row, while Galra teammates Zethrid and Sendak put their machines on the third row, followed by Kinkade, Nyma, Rizavi and Shay, rounding the Q3 runners.
KEY QUOTE
“We made a few changes on the car since yesterday,” said pole-sitter Kogane. “It was slippery out there, but we made the right calls so I’m happy with pole. Hopefully tomorrow will be dry and we can show our true pace.”
WHAT’S NEXT
The 2025 Japanese Grand Prix is set to begin at 1400 local time on Sunday. Head to the RACE HUB to find out how you can watch the action on the Suzuka Circuit.
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/live-coverage-formula-1-japanese-grand-prix-2025.woi81mIQN87xjso174kihZN.
As it happened: follow the action in Japan as Kogane is chased down for the victory
April 20, 2025
Overview
- Round 4 of 20 comes from Suzuka, Japan
- Polesitter Keith Kogane wins from a battling Lance McClain and Lotor Zarkon
- McClain jumps Katie Holt in standings, who finished fourth
- Sendak rounds out the top five
- Klaiza retires with a gearbox issue
The Formation Lap
Kogane leads the field away for a lap around the Suzuka Circuit to warm their tyres. He has started on pole before, however he knows just how fast the two Blue Lions behind him are.
The field slowly trickles back to their starting positions, and the front two cars are pointing at each other. There’s clear intentions there…
And we’re just moments away from the five red lights illuminating…
Lights out and away they go!
Kogane nails the start and is hurtling down towards Turn 1, despite the rear of his car smoking a little.
He’s gone down to Turn 1, McClain cuts across to get onto the clean racing line, chopping off his teammate in the process. The top three hold position, with Holt right on their tails.
There is no movement in the top 10, in fact, the only change is Leifsdottir moving up to P11 after overtaking Lubos.
Kogane leads in Japan
Lap 2/53
Kogane has already broken away from McClain, around a second ahead as DRS is about to be enabled. Zarkon, Holt and Sendak will all have DRS.
Montow has gotten Griffin, so he is up to P13 and only four tenths behind Lubos.
A DRS train is forming
Lap 3/53
Lots of cars are tucked right up behind each other, so the gaps are very, very tight. Nyma is doing well to hang on to Kinkade, despite the fact that the Beezer driver started on the hard compound tyres. Zethrid cuts across the chicane but holds position, with teammate Sendak looking feisty in P5.
Kogane’s lead is over a second
Lap 4/53
Kogane remains in the lead, over a second up the road from McClain – running in the clear air helping him maintain the pace. The lead, however, remains stable despite McClain having to hold off his charging teammate behind.
Kogane’s lead grows
Lap 6/53
In the clean air, Kogane can look after his tyres and his lead grows slowly as a result. It’s up to 1.8s now, as McClain has to start worrying about his tyres’ life.
Zarkon is still running in DRS range of his teammate, but his tyres surely won’t last too many more laps of this.
Undercut may be powerful
Lap 9/53
The undercut is expected to be powerful on this track, so it will be worthwhile to look out for the front three.
Kogane leads by two seconds, as Zarkon drops back out of DRS range of McClain.
And McClain is told that there is a possibility of a light shower around lap 20…
Team radio - Nadia Rizavi
▶ 00:00 🔴————————
[Transcription:
“Okay Nadia, you need to push now please, push now.”
“I am pushing, what are you talking about?!”]
Zarkon drops further behind
Lap 11/53
Kogane and McClain are lapping within a tenth or two of each other – but Zarkon suddenly drops back. He is 1.6s behind his teammate in third, possibly being in the dirty air for too long has hurt his tyres.
It is possible to follow closely, Sendak remains in the DRS range of Holt, the Galra doing well on their tyres by the looks of it.
Zarkon closes back up
Lap 13/53
Zarkon starts to catch up to his teammate after cooling his tyres for a few laps, the gap decreasing from 1.6s to 1.3s.
He needs to stay as close as possible, but with his teammate ahead, it will be McClain who gets the undercut, not Zarkon.
Sendak drops back
Lap 15/53
Despite the heroic effort from Sendak to stay in Holt’s DRS so long, the Galra driver is forced to drop back to preserve his tyres. That finally gives Holt a little break in fourth.
Ezor is the only driver with DRS right now, as Rolo starts to struggle on his soft tyres ahead, in the fight for P18.
Laisa runs over the chicane
Lap 17/53
Replay shows a small lock-up for Laisa, which sends him over the chicane. He backs off so he doesn’t get noted for taking advantage off-track, and drops out of Griffin’s DRS range.
They are fighting over P14 at the moment.
Klaiza out of the race
Lap 19/53
“Box box, we have to retire the car,” came the instruction from the Arusian pitwall to Klaiza. A gearbox issue saw the driver starting in P18 retire from the race, the second DNF in the four rounds.
Meanwhile McClain has a strong pace and is told to keep it up, only 1.3s behind Kogane.
Drama as the two leaders pit
Lap 22/53
Kogane pits, and McClain follows him in, and now it’s all in the hands of the pit crews.
McClain senses his chance as a slightly slow pitstop puts Kogane side by side with him. Kogane does not yield, however, and forces McClain onto the grass at pit lane exit.
“What the **** was that?!” comes the complaint from McClain, while Kogane maintains that he was the first in the fast lane and therefore had the right of way.
A flurry of action in the pit lane
Lap 24/53
A slightly slow stop for Shay, and the remaining Arusian, Montow pits as well. The undercut is interestingly not proving to be as powerful as expected.
Kogane is two seconds up the road from McClain, as the Cuban had to clean up his tyres after his trip over the grass.
Kinkade pits
Lap 26/53
Kinkade comes into the pit lane to switch his mediums for hards.
The stewards determine that no further investigation is needed regarding the incident involving Kogane and McClain at the pit exit. The pair is up to third and fourth as the field starts peeling into the pits.
Griffin loses out from the pit stop
Lap 28/53
A gaggle of cars have yet to stop, but the ones that have, most have held position. The big loser is Griffin, who had a slow pit stop due to a stuck wheel nut. He was running behind his teammate in P13, now he has slid down to P17.
Zethrid pits from the lead
Lap 32/53
Zethrid finally comes in to get rid of her medium tyres. It is not the best stop at 3.1s, and with the hard compound tyres on, returns on track to her previous sixth place.
Sendak is right on her tail due to that slow stop, a mere second between the two.
Kogane back in the lead
Lap 33/53
Kogane reclaims the lead of the race after the majority of the field makes their pit stops. He has a 1.4s lead over McClain, with Zarkon another 2.1s back.
McClain trying to push
Lap 38/53
McClain confirms his tyres are fine, as he sets about closing the gap to Kogane. It stands at 1.4s, and he cannot hope that his opponent’s tyres will go off a cliff today.
He is going to have to overtake on track, but it does not look like Kogane is making mistakes out there.
Holt not impressed
Lap 40/53
Holt’s race engineer makes a suggestion on settings.
“Yes, you already told me, I don’t do it for a reason,” comes the reply.
She’s sitting in fourth place, but not in the hunt for a podium today, the gap to Zarkon over nine seconds.
Team radio - Lotor Zarkon
▶ 00:00 🔴————————
[Transcription:
“Come on, guys, I have the pace.”
“Copy, we’ll get back to you.” ]
The gap goes to half a second
Lap 44/53
Zarkon is half a second behind his teammate. Is McClain backing him up on purpose to make him use up his tyres? Building a gap for a late attack? Or struggling?
McClain steps on the gas
Lap 45/53
Well, that answers that. McClain goes and breaks the DRS of Zarkon in just a lap. The gap between the Altea drivers is now over a second, as McClain thinks about closing up to Kogane.
The Texan leads by 1.3s as he chases the win.
Zarkon gets back to half a second behind
Lap 49/53
The Englishman is throwing everything he has at this. The gap to McClain is 0.583s. He can see his rival, so, so close down the main straight but not close enough to think about making a move.
Is McClain going to be pressured into a mistake? Kogane is 1.2s up the road from the squabbling pair, and barring a late disaster will keep his position.
Zarkon finally drops back
Lap 52/53
Zarkon’s tyres are crying out again. He has dropped out of DRS range of his teammate now, with McClain 1.1s away from Kogane. They’re running out of laps to make the decisive move…
Kogane starts the final lap
Lap 53/53
Here comes Kogane, headed for his second win in a row.
That stunning pole position yesterday set him up for success in today’s race, and Altea is likely to need a big debrief after the race.
🏁 Kogane wins in Japan!
Kogane gets his third victory and fourth consecutive podium of the 2025 season. Is this the year where we see him dominate the field?
The top 10
A double Altea podium behind the Blade of Kogane, with Holt, Sendak and Zethrid rounding out the top six.
Then comes Nyma, Kinkade, Rizavi and Shay. More points for Garrison and Beezer, still none for Arusian.
Team radio - Keith Kogane
▶ 00:00 🔴————————
[Transcription: “Wow, what a race. Thank you guys, great job all weekend. Let’s get the next one, too.”]
Lotor Zarkon, Altea:
“The pace today was good, I felt like there was even more in it, but track position here is rather important. I need to get a little more comfortable in the car to achieve a better qualifying result, but I believe the next race will be better.”
Lance McClain, Altea:
“It is what it is, I guess I lost out yesterday, but I gave it my all today. It was a tough and flat out race from the start to finish. Keith just made no mistakes, so there was nothing we as a team could’ve done to catch him.
“[The pit lane incident] was hard racing, ultimately. Keith is not one to give space to anyone, least of all me, so I expected this outcome.
“They’ve been on it this weekend so it’s deserved, but we’re going to come back next race even stronger. I especially hope so because it’ll be my home race!”
Keith Kogane, Blade:
“It was tough. The two Lions were pushing me very hard, but I’m happy. I think it’s important to maximize your performance, and we did that this weekend.”
Kogane leads the Championship by 40 points
The drivers’ Championship is firmly led by the Blade’s driver with 96 points to his name, however there are still 16 races left to decide the fate of the largest trophy. McClain sits on 56 points, jumping former teammate Holt in the standings by a point. McClain’s current teammate, Zarkon is nipping on the heels of the two, with 51 points.
With two drivers on the podium, Altea made a leap to pull away from Galra, however Blade keeps its healthy lead with 151 points scored across the first four rounds.
Grid slots prove crucial
In the end, it was yesterday’s qualifying that decided today’s results - and you’d be hard pressed to argue against Kogane deserving it after a brilliant lap in a rainy Qualifying.
“Cool”down room living up to its name
The atmosphere was quite chilly as replays show the dicey pit lane exit that saw McClain on the grass, Kogane commenting “Quite an expensive lawnmower” to a displeased McClain.
Kinkade impresses for Garrison
Kinkade might have lost out to Nyma, but he didn’t really put a foot wrong and came home to pick up his first points today, made even more impressive when you consider the drinking system issues he’s been contending with.
Join us again for Cuba
You get a weekend off now, but make sure you are back with us for Cuba. Not only is it a picturesque race track next to the shores of Havana, but it is also the home race of Altea’s Lance McClain.
Will we see Lance McClain finally win his home race after years of heartbreak around this street circuit, or will it be another disappointing race for the home hero? Tune in from Thursday for live coverage of the fifth race weekend of the season to find out.
lance_mcclain
[A carousel of five pictures:
Picture 1: Car 53 taking turn 7
Picture 2: Car 53 on the main straight, in the distance car 6 is visible
Picture 3: Lance on the podium, spraying the team as confetti rains down, Keith in the background
Picture 4: A celebration picture with the team, the pit board saying “JPN GP 2025 LANCE P2 LOTOR P3”, Lotor cut off on the other side of the board
Picture 5: Hunk lifting Lance in the air, Hunk laughing while Lance smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes]
Good results this week, next we’re aiming for the top step again💙
angelina.montez good luck in Cuba next week💙💙
georgie_benett56 hell yeah we are winning next week!!! the cuba curse will not get you this year
blu_lionn this race had me STRESSED but i’m so proud of you!💙
* * *
k.kogane
[A carousel of three pictures:
Picture 1: Keith on the top step of the podium, his hair messy, a tiny smile on his face as he looks at someone below the podium
Picture 2: Keith and Shiro photographed from behind, the trophy in Keith’s hand as Shiro has an arm slung around his shoulder
Picture 3: an empty street in what’s clearly a rural town]
What a weekend. ありがとう、日本.
louise.barnes congrats on the win, it was so amazing!
broganes_4_life broganes content🙏
lesleyyyy we’re kicking mcclain’s ass next race, can’t wait to see his face when you win
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/formulaone/article-14892303/The-true-story-behind-the-rivalry-of-Keith-Kogane-and-Lance-McClain.html
Revealed: The true story behind the rivalry of Keith Kogane and Lance McClain
[Image of Keith and Lance sitting next to each other at a press conference]
16:35 BST 21 Apr 2025, updated 09:18 BST 22 Apr 2025
By JOHN TUCKER
- The two men have clashed over the past years while sharing the same track
- Keith Kogane is leading the Drivers’ Championship, defending his title
- Lance McClain is chasing him down to win his first
It has been known in the past years that Keith Kogane and Lance McClain are rivals on the track. People who frequent the Formula One paddock also know that these two drivers barely interact with each other, unless forced to, but is this truly the truth?
Fans and professionals alike have wondered whether there’s more to the story behind this rivalry. This year, the pair has been exchanging little back-and-forth banter on social media (mainly Instagram), which seems to suggest that they’re at least on friendly terms. This is proven by the way McClain leans in to whisper something into Kogane’s ear during official photos.
But this begs the question: why now? Did something happen that made them closer? Was it the late-night meeting at the pool ? Either way, the posts continue on: the latest one from McClain stating that ‘Good results this week, next we’re aiming for the top step again💙’.
Sources in the paddock, who wish to remain anonymous, say that there’s more to their relationship than what it seems like. They elaborate that the ‘air turns electric when they’re next to each other’.
It will be interesting to see where this rivalry will go.
Comments (46)
crabpatty Worcestershire, United Kingdom • 3 days ago
“sources” but they pulled this out of their arse
LOXOL my room • 3 days ago
where’s the story? we all knew this before, clickbait title as always
polly836 • 3 days ago
dailymail stop writing nothingburgers challenge failed
* * *
nypost.com/2025/04/23/sport/is-there-tension-between-the-altea-teammates/
Is there tension between the Altea teammates?
By Oliver Parker
Published April 23, 2025, 2:30 p.m. ET
SUZUKA, Jp. – Last weekend’s race saw Altea teammates Lance McClain and Lotor Zarkon scrapping for the second step on the podium. At first it seems like healthy competition between teammates, but is it only that?
The post-race cooldown room had a frosty atmosphere: both McClain and Zarkon refused to acknowledge each other, and Kogane’s presence certainly hasn’t helped. So what could it be that spurred on this reaction? Was it the on-track battles, or are there tensions off-track as well?
Sources inside the paddock have indicated that the relationship between these two is not as rosy as social media would lead us to believe. On-track battles aside, it looks as if the two drivers would like the car to take a different direction: McClain prefers a more pointy front, while Zarkon prefers a more stable front-end. In addition, several fans have pointed out that McClain used to post his previous teammate, Holt, on his social media, however there hasn’t been a post or a story with Zarkon as of yet.
What do you think? Post a comment.
Conversation 26 Comments
johnnyboy83
2 hours ago
or. you know. they need time to get to know each other.
Purple_Gerberas
1 day ago
water is wet and teammates are competitive. shocker.
* * *
tmz.com/2025/04/24/lance-mcclain-with-a-new-girlfriend/
Breaking: Lance McClain with a new girlfriend?
💬
By TMZ STAFF
Published April 23, 2025 10:20 AM PDT
[A blurry image of Lance and Romelle outside a coffee shop in Havana]
Could the heartthrob of Formula One, Lance McClain be off the dating market? He was spotted by fans outside a coffee shop in Havana ahead of the Cuban GP.
There’s been guesses online about who the blonde beauty could be, but there’s been no confirmation about a new relationship as of yet. One of the guesses has been Romelle, an Altea employee. The extensive and tight travel schedule that comes with being a driver in the most prestigious series, there is little time left to be able to meet new people, let alone date.
It seems like McClain found the answer to that: date someone working in Formula One as well! McClain’s previous relationship ended just a few months ago, when his ex-girlfriend, French model Émile Nicollier, announced on her Instagram stories that they’ve decided to end their relationship. Sources have claimed at the time that it was a mutual decision, but there’s been no confirmation.
Did McClain take his potential girlfriend to meet the family? If yes, how long have they been dating?
21 Comment
hollypolly
a day ago
omg nooooo i don’t want him to have a girlfriend💔💔
baroking
a day ago
this counts as breaking news? really?
Notes:
you'd think that a chapter that's only socmed posts would be shorter but here we are. also, even with like 10 years worth of race and quali reports available, it's surprisingly hard to come up with a fictional one. think we managed decently tho.
if you have any questions about the racing terms, don't hesitate to ask, we'll gladly yap about it, in my case you'll probably have to tell me to shut up because i can get rambly and way too into it.
thank you guys so so much for all the kudos and comments and love for this fic so far, it means a ton <3 i hope you enjoyed this slightly different format than usual, we'll be back with a likely monster chapter next time <333 - kashuumitsus
Chapter 6: Havana
Notes:
Sorry this took so long. I (Kaye) was struck with fanfic author curse and after a fairly routine medical procedure, ended up with some less-than-routine complications, an absolutely miserable few weeks, and a couple ER trips-- all in time for me to return to the busiest week of work out of the whole year. It also meant my brain was absolutely fried and the first time I wrote this race, I was floating in exhaustion and medications and Anna had to help me make it make any sort of sense. Major shoutout to Anna, especially because she did math for this. She mapped out an actual track, measured it, calculated lap numbers, everything.
Another Lance POV but I think it'll make sense why! Keith next, promise.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Havana, Cuba
Out loud, Lance will insist that he does not believe in curses.
However, deep down? He absolutely does. And he believes in one in particular: the Cuba Curse.
The first time he drove the Cuban Grand Prix, he chalked it up to nerves. Havana had been added as a new race in his second year in Formula One, and while it is unspoken, it’s known that it’s because Lance had attracted a significant following in the region throughout his daring rookie year, scrapping fearlessly with the more-established Keith race after race. It was an honor– to race in his hometown, to be the driver on TV for all the kids that looked like him and had big dreams, just like he had? To be able to represent his country in such an exclusive and elusive sport at the top and be able to bring it back home? The thought still gets him choked up.
Plus, Keith got COTA in Texas. It helped balm the sting of the obsession Texans had with him when that race came around. On God, he’d actually seen Keith’s face engraved on a rodeo belt buckle once.
However, with a home race came intensified pressure that he hadn’t fully anticipated. The media and fans pressed in from all corners wherever he went, calling his name and holding out a sea of merch for him to sign. Shouldering the weight of the entire country’s expectations and hopes on his shoulders, he knew that he had to perform perfectly he was back home. Even Lance, who usually thrived in the spotlight, became quickly overwhelmed and ended up hyperventilating in his driver’s room. His entire body shook life a leaf all Sunday morning– so it was no wonder he spun out and hit a wall.
Lance takes note of the very spot in the barriers as they walk past it, now pristine, though he can still picture the crumpled front end of his car and the surface of the marred barrier wall with perfect clarity. But Lance had been young, twenty-one years old, desperately inexperienced. It was pressure like he’d never felt before. Everyone told him, ‘You’ll be better prepared next year’, when he retreated shamefully to the garage.
So indeed, he better anticipated the intensity of the experience when he was twenty-two. Going into the weekend, he’d even allowed himself to feel confident, because by then, in year three in F1, surely he had everything under control.
Altea, however, did not. Despite a stellar performance in the first two qualifying sessions, someone, somewhere made a mistake and he didn’t have enough fuel to put in a competitive lap in Q3. It dropped him into the tenth grid spot, and then he lost four more places during the race, completely thrown off his game and in his head. P14. Miserable. They walk through the open stretch of a DRS zone by the water, where Lance found himself trapped behind the backmarkers excruciating lap after lap after lap. An agonizing procession to the finish line, stuck in the DRS train with no way out.
The third year, he crashed near the capitol building after an unexpected and violent cloudburst. Despite snagging pole, the crash had been so catastrophic and complete that they couldn’t get the car in working shape for race day. He never even got a chance.
The year after, he at least started and made it around the track the whole way, but a stuck wheel nut during his mid-race pit stop cost him a full thirty seconds– the kiss of death.
And here he was in the fifth year of the Havana Street Circuit, his sixth in Formula One, and he still feels cursed as he does his track walk under overcast skies. A host of sports psychiatrists have told him he needs to opt for positivity, that he will only invite mistakes with this defeatist attitude. However, it seems he hasn’t grown up entirely immune to his mother’s superstitious tendencies, and the psychiatrists don’t fully understand the scope of what malicious, cosmic forces he’s up against.
He and Hunk walk past the corner he crashed at two years ago, and he knows now with far more precision where the brake point should be: right at the corner of the small store owned by his childhood friend’s family. As they move along, fans scream his name. He beams and waves when he can, but he’s technically working, he can’t stop now.
Plus, Keith’s trailing just behind him, Shiro in lock-step. It makes Lance hyper-aware of his behavior– do his shoulders look tense? Can Keith tell he fixed his hair three more times than usual this morning? Does he think it’s gross he’s starting to sweat?
Is he carefully cataloguing a map of Lance’s failures across his home track too? Trying to suss out his weak points where he can dig in his talons and pry Lance apart on race day?
Hunk snaps his fingers in front of Lance’s face. “Hey! No brooding. We agreed!”
“No, you and Mama agreed,” Lance counters, flashing a tight smile and a wave to a particularly loud thicket of onlookers to dispel suspicion. “Which is rich, it’s her own damn fault I don’t fuck with this sort of thing.”
Hunk sighs. “Well your Mama is a smart lady, and I think if she says you need to relax, you probably need to relax.”
“Easy for you two to say. You’re not cursed.”
“You’re not cursed.”
Lance’s toe catches in an uneven notch in the pavement. Before he can register anything, there’s a sickening freefall swoop in his stomach, the heels of his palms are digging painfully into asphalt, and he’s staring at the ground. The side of his leg is hot and numb, and when he glances down– yep, his skin on his calf is torn up and turning pink. Little pinpricks of crimson begin to bud and sting all along the length of the scrape.
There’s the unmistakable rapid-fire click of camera shutters underscored by a roll of murmurs from the crowd. By the time he gets home, there’ll be at least three hundred clever TikTok remixing this mortifying moment.
Lance glares up at Hunk, squinting at his outline against the cloudy sky. “Are you sure?”
Hunk’s lips press together in sympathy, quickly offering his hand to help pull Lance back to his feet. While he’s heaving himself back upright, he catches Keith looking on with interest from his respectable distance behind them, and swears he sees unbridled delight dancing in his eyes.
* * *
“Tio Lance, did you fall off your bike?” Silvio points to the scabs forming on Lance’s legs from epically eating shit at the track walk earlier that day, then gestures excitedly to his own skinned knees. “I fell off my bike too!”
Nadia pushes Silvio aside, asserting her God-given firstborn right over the conversation. “I lost a tooth!” she declares, apropos of nothing, then grins widely to display a prominent gap at the center of her smile. She even pushes her tongue through it for emphasis. “Daddy said I could keep it and show you! It was sooo gross. Do you want to see?”
From the couch, where his wife Lisa is sat beside him, Luis gives him an apologetic look and shrugs. He’s not fooled– there’s no way his older brother doesn’t take a little sick pleasure in Nadia purposefully grossing him out the way Lance used to do to him.
“Wow, very cool, uh,” Lance chuckles nervously, “maybe later?”
“Lancito!”
Thankfully, he’s rescued by his Mama entering the foyer and wrapping her arms tight around him. Despite Lance being nearly a foot taller than her, she still hugs like a goddamn quarterback. He melts completely into the warm touch, the instinctive comfort.
He never realizes just how lonely he is until he’s back home.
When they finally pull apart, she plants a massive kiss on his forehead (“Mama!”) and permits his dad, who has appeared at some point in between, to greet him and give him a big hug too.
“So glad you’re home, cariño. Veronica and Rachel will be home soon, they’re out getting the drinks. Marco went for a swim. Hunk and Katie are still coming?” Her smile is toothy and vibrant, the same as it has been for as long as he can remember. Lance counts it among one of the most lovely things in this world.
Lance snorts and toes off his shoes. “Yes, my infinitely more interesting friends are coming.” At least she’s being kind enough to not bring up him getting intimately acquainted with the track’s asphalt today.
“Oh no, it’s not that, not at all. It’s actually that Katie’s my favorite Formula One driver,” Papa rumbles dryly, with a playful glint in his eyes. He doesn’t talk much, but when he does, it’s unmistakable where Lance got his sense of humor. “I’m a big fan.”
“Maybe she’ll sign your mustache if you ask nicely.”
“And there’s… nobody else that will be joining us?” His mother then prompts.
Lance groans and pushes past the two of them toward the kitchen. Silvio and Nadia bounce after him like two overcaffeinated ferrets. “Mama, I told you, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. You need to stop looking at that stuff.”
“Romelle is a very pretty girl and seems so sweet, that’s all!” she defends quickly, following him in. “I don’t believe it all, but I’m so far away, and I have news notifications turned on just– just in case. It means I see some things and I want to ask about them!”
“We’re just friends.” Lance busies himself with lifting a lid off of something simmering on the stove– and his Mama quickly materializes at his side to swat him away, then shoos Nadia and Silvio away from playing underfoot.
“Don’t touch dinner,” she scolds, leaning over and trying to catch his eye.
Lance drops the lid back on, his eyes darting to the cheerful yellow floor tile. She better think the flush in his cheeks is from the heat radiating off of the pot.
“I’m not suggesting anything,” she then says more gently, taking Lance’s hand. “I’m just saying– if you ever wanted to bring a girl home, you’re not a teenager anymore. I hope you don’t think you’d need to keep something like that from us and that’s why you never say anything. You’re so far away all of the time, I feel like we hardly know you. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was someone and you didn’t know how to say something.”
There’s a small twinge in his throat at the choice of word ‘girl’. Not that Lance didn’t like girls– he very, very much did, but he also knew there was a perfectly equal chance he might want to bring someone home one day of any gender. But how did he address that with his parents now? It was something he’d figured out away from home, since he’d left so young, and now he has no idea how they might respond, or even how to broach the subject. Part of him thinks he might just die with the secret and hopes it never actually comes up. The kind of attention he wanted was about his skill on the track, not who he quietly took home at the end of the night.
“Racing is all I have time to think about, Mama.” He finally manages to meet his mom’s warm, brown eyes. Forced to look at her this close, he realizes there’s more gray streaking the front of her dark, chestnut hair than he remembers, and the smile lines crinkling her soft skin are more prominent. “I can’t afford any distractions. Romelle is just a friend, you make friends when you’re on the road so much, and we were just talking about… you know. Stuff.” Well, crushes, but hers, not his. He was confident she was very much not interested in Lance.
She nods in that way that he knows means she understands, though there’s the small crease of worry between her eyebrows that tells him she’s still holding something back. “Just remember that there’s a lot of life to live between your races too. Don’t let good things pass you by.”
“I won’t, Mama.”
There’s a flash of doubt in her expression, but it passes just as quickly as it appears. She squeezes his hand and relents. “Stir the rice, will you?”
“Oh, so now I’m allowed to touch the cooking?”
“Just until Hunk gets here.”
“I can stir!” Silvio volunteers quickly.
“No! I want to stir!” Nadia is already dragging over a chair.
* * *
inchident @klancisms
okay please refresh my memory, when was the last time when keith didn’t have a pokerface on the podium after a win???
☀ @noncha_Lance
why are we getting new gf allegations?? also so what if he does, it’s really not our business
lance win incoming @fiftythrees
idgaf if lance has a new gf or not, I WANT HIM TO WIN HIS HOME GP
lena @mcclainwdc
lance cropping lotor out of the photos but not keith, i know what you are 🏳🌈👀⁉
nichole🌊 @girlsjustwannaf1
guys i think i found her instagram at rom_elle and she and lance are totally covering up a relationship 🧵(1/?)
***
Lance feels oddly settled on the morning of qualifying.
Maybe it’s sleeping in his own room. Maybe it’s spending his mornings going for a real, proper swim in the ocean at sunrise and the hint of saltwater still clinging to his hair. Maybe it’s a few nights of his Mama’s cooking and endless teasing from his siblings.
Whatever it is, he hardly feels any nerves as he waits for quali prep to really get rolling– and has pulled some strings (read: pathetically begged Allura) to allow Silvio and Nadia some highly supervised time sitting in the cockpit of the Altea car.
Nadia is big enough to sit in it alone, even if she can only barely reach the steering wheel itself and her knobbly eight-year-old frame is adorably tiny beside the adult-sized machinery. It doesn’t amuse her for long; Lance is old news after eight years, and these days she’s much more interested in what the rest of the team is up to. Lisa has to quickly dart after her as she launches into a long thread of questions with one of the very patient mechanics that pretty much all boil down to “what’s that do?”, leaving Lance alone to supervise his nephew– Veronica’s in a meeting, Marco and Rachel opted to sleep in a bit, and his parents disappeared with Luis to go get a cup of coffee at the hospitality.
Silvio is still small and doesn’t know Nadia’s disillusionment with his uncle’s boring job just yet, so he enthusiastically sits propped up in Lance’s lap in the driver’s seat. Leaning forward to grab the sides of the wheel, he pretends to drive, giggling as Lance tilts him from side to side in his lap to play along, complete with (track-accurate) sound effects.
It’s still early, and while Lance barely notices the cameras most races, today he’s particularly hounded by them. It’s his home race, he’s got a cute kid in his lap, and he’s woefully been stricken with the Cuba Curse for several years? Yeah, they’re going to be eating this up, it’s unavoidable. Even Lance can admit it’s good TV. Luis and Lisa are cool with a little air time as far as his niece and nephew go (he’s checked multiple times), but he keeps one of his eyes warily on the garage opening, taking mental notes of who’s there and pointing cameras where. Lance isn’t afraid to lose some professionalism points if anyone gets too invasive around his family.
Of course, there are various people milling about from different teams outside, too, which he’s automatically tuning out. Nothing unusual or threatening there, until–
“KEITH KOGANE!” Silvio shrieks so loud that one of Lance’s ears starts to ring.
He winces as Silvio scrambles up his body, balancing in both an awkward and impressive way on Lance’s thighs to grip at the edge of the halo and lean forward, neck craning for a clearer view of the garage entrance.
The Keith Kogane in question stands frozen, eyes wide, staring in bewilderment in the direction of the source of the chaos. He’s holding a to-go cup of something, and the top half of his black Blade race suit is tied around his waist, so Lance can see every single one of the muscles in his torso tense up under today’s deep purple fireproofs.
“Lance! That’s Keith! Keith! Can I meet Keith?!” Silvio begs breathlessly. Already, he’s unsteadily trying to lift a leg up to wiggle his way out onto the chassis, nearly kicking Lance in the chin in the process. It’s a bloody nose waiting to happen.
Jesus tapdancing Christ.
Lance snags Silvio and rights him before he can hurt himself, then casts one more glance at Keith, who has unfortunately not dissolved into a pile of dust Avengers-style like he’d hoped.
Clearing his throat, he tries to speak up enough that Keith can hear. To let him off the hook because, holy shit, an interaction with Keith Kogane is the last fucking thing he needs before his home quali. “Silvito, Keith is very busy, I don’t think he–”
“No! Please? Please?! Keith goes so fast!” Silvio whines.
Lance internally works very hard to not let a five year old’s words wound him.
“Silvio–”
“It’s fine.” Keith’s voice, from the front of the garage, just loud enough to carry over all of the chaos.
It’s Lance’s turn to freeze up now, eyes darting over to his rival to assess his sincerity. Keith still looks tense – no doubt – but he also doesn’t seem to not mean it, either. Nor does he seem to be rigging any cartoon villain style traps for Lance. With his luck around this track, he needs to rule everything out.
Silvio turns the widest, saddest brown eyes on him and sticks out his lower lip in an adorable little pout.
Damn it.
With a sigh, Lance first helps Silvio out of the white and blue car. Once his light-up shoes have safely settled on the concrete, he lifts himself out of the cockpit too.
Silvio is grinning from ear to ear, though as they approach Keith, his confidence slightly wanes. He grabs Lance’s hand anxiously and tucks himself behind Lance’s arm by the time they step into the bright sun, now only a few feet from Keith. Every last one of the cameras are definitely on them now, and he thinks he sees a few more sprinting over to catch this. Just perfect.
“Hi,” Keith greets. It’s about as awkward as he always is, yet he still finds a smile– and it doesn’t even seem as pinched as normal. Seriously, what was his deal this morning? Did aliens come during the night and switch Keith with a clone?
Lance shakes Silvio’s hand a little, hoping to loosen him up– and end this interaction as efficiently as possible without sacrificing being the coolest Uncle ever. For good measure, he forces a grin from ear to ear too, because he’ll die before it’s evident that he’s salty that his nephew’s favorite Formula One driver appears to now be Keith-fucking-Kogane, of all people. He’d almost prefer Lotor. Almost.
“Go on, Silvito. Say hello,” Lance encourages. He can feel the cameras zooming in on his face. In his heart, he knows with somber certainty that one of them will be with Netflix. They’re gonna twist this into the weirdest drama ever, he can picture it now. With dread, he’s already imagining the pointed questions that are coming in his confessional interview about this later
“Hello,” Silvio says with a small wave, staring up at Keith in wonder, like he’d hung the moon itself.
To his complete and utter shock, Keith crouches down to get on Silvio’s eye level. Momentarily, Lance forgets himself, and his mouth falls open before he can wrangle it back into his press-perfect smile.
“It’s okay, I feel shy sometimes too. You’re Silvio, right? I’m Keith.” Keith puts out his hand like he’s conducting a business meeting, not coaxing a kindergartener into conversation.
Silvio nods, leaning out a few inches from the protection of Lance’s arm, then grabs Keith’s hand. Keith shakes it, but Silvio doesn’t quite understand the exchange just yet– he simply holds on. Keith lets him.
“It’s nice to meet you. You were doing a great job driving the car back there. Although I think you could’ve stood to brake a little earlier on turn four.” Keith’s eyes flicker up to Lance’s as he references the corner Lance had crashed at two years ago. Asshole.
“I can’t brake yet,” Silvio giggles. “My feet don’t reach the pedals. Tío Lance does it for me.”
“Hmm. Maybe I should be the one who teaches you how to do that instead.”
Lance’s teeth grind so loud, the boom mics hovering above them like fluffy, gray hawks must be picking it up.
Silvio, however, vibrates with excitement at Lance’s side, emerging from behind him now to bounce on his toes, his little shoes light up in flashing blue with the movement. “Really? You’d really do that?”
“Sure.” Keith is still smiling– and the thing is, it’s a really, really good one. It’s soft, it reaches the corners of his eyes. He hasn’t withdrawn his hand from Silvio’s yet, either, who is still clinging to him like a lifeline.
When the fuck did Keith get so good at faking in front of the cameras? His clone theory is starting to get a bit more plausible by the second.
“Can we go right now?” Silvio asks excitedly.
“I think you need to get a little taller first, to reach the pedals, right?” Keith says, and there’s a lilt of amusement blunting his usually brusque tone. “So maybe later. How about this–” Keith pulls his black Blade cap off of his head, with the purple logo in vibrant purple at its center and printed in a faded repeat pattern across the bill. He places the hat on top of Silvio’s head, where it falls sideways, awkward and nearly twice the appropriate size for him. “How about when this fits, you have your uncle call me and I’ll give you some driving lessons, okay?”
Silvio does finally let go of Keith’s hand to adjust the cap on his head, clinging to it in vibrant elation. Every single one of his tiny, white baby teeth show in his smile as he squeals with uncontained excitement. “I’m gonna grow so fast!” he promises.
Keith straightens, letting out a soft, breathy laugh. “Okay, you do that.”
“What do you say for the hat, Silvito?” Lance prompts. His cheeks hurt from forcing his smile.
“Thank you!” Silvio squeaks, then springs forward to wrap his arms around Keith’s middle in a tight, enthusiastic hug.
Keith’s eyes widen and he goes stock still, like he’s been threatened.
It doesn’t last, because just as quickly, Silvio has noticed Lisa and Nadia have returned to the front of the garage, now with Luis, who is holding a cup of coffee. He goes bounding off toward them, holding the Blade hat tight to his head. In Lance’s opinion, it clashes horribly with his white and blue Altea t-shirt with the lion emblem on the front.
“Mama! Daddy! Look what Keith gave me! He said he’s gonna teach me how to drive!”
Keith and Lance are left standing next to one another, in front of the cameras, their teams, and the entire goddamn world, to play off the interaction.
“Good luck today,” Lance says stiffly.
Keith is already backing away. “Yeah. You too.”
Lance has to focus to make his walk back to the garage seem casual, and out of the corner of his eye, Keith’s gait is so tense, he’s completely sure he’s struggling to do the same.
His brother and sister-in-law are now nodding along as Silvio fills them in on the entire conversation in a blow by blow (where Silvio comes off far more dashing and brave), and Veronica has appeared too at the back of the garage, holding a clipboard and thick, light blue headphones.
“Ohhh, Lance, what was that all about?” she asks, and he pretends he doesn’t hear the double entendre in her voice.
“Silvio just got excited. Guess Keith can use all the good press he can get,” he scowls, folding his arms.
“You know, is it maybe that hard to believe that Keith isn’t the devil incarnate?” An eyebrow arches over the rim of her wire-framed glasses.
“Absolutely.” Lance points to the hat on top of Silvio’s head. “Banish that damn thing. Maybe Luis can sell it for a killing on eBay for Silvio’s college fund. And if he won’t sell it, burn it, then burn the ashes.”
“I thought you had secretly set up accounts for their college fund.”
“Not anymore, now that he’s a Keith fan,” he deadpans, as if he was anywhere near capable of doing such a thing to his nephew.
“There really is no accounting for taste,” Veronica snorts, managing to coax a smile out of Lance.
They both watch Silvio for a moment, who is still babbling on to his mother with round, glittering eyes. He’s now since snatched the hat off of his head to instead hug it to his chest like a security blanket, and Lance just knows that he and that hat are going to be bonded for life. Despite it all, it’s heartwarming to see him so happy, even if it is because the universe is very, very cruel for this particular turn of Silvio’s favoritism.
Just beyond that, another poor Altea mechanic has fallen victim to Nadia’s relentless questions, this time about what’s in the drawers along the wall. Luis has noticed and is moving in for the rescue, but Nadia is fast, the mechanic is obliging, and there are a lot of drawers…
“Well,” Veronica says, all business again. She’s been released from her desk at Altea HQ back in England, where the other Altea strategists normally work. For a race or two each year– one always being Cuba– they let her be on-site with the team. Veronica calls it nepotism that she begrudgingly accepts, but Lance is pretty sure it’s more the fact she’s an excellent strategist. He wouldn’t be shocked to see her on the pit wall in a couple short years’ time. She’d always had the brains for this, even bossed Lance around quite a bit trackside back in his karting days. Well, and these days, he supposes, just now sometimes on official letterhead. “We have some new data I want to go over with you, and I think we might have an idea of how to pick up the few tenths in sector three that the Beezer cars found by surprise yesterday…”
Lance can’t help himself, he zones out. Keith’s soft, patient smile for Silvio is too rooted in his brain, and he reexamines it in minds eye, over and over and over again for the crack, the flaw that he could peer through to reveal his true intentions, surely nefarious.
He can’t find one. In over a decade of knowing one another, racing each other week in and week out, it was a smile he’d never seen on Keith before.
It freaks him out.
* * *
P2 isn’t bad for qualifying. But it’s not first.
He has his headphones on, full blast, with his favorite pump-up mix as he paces the back of the garage in anticipation of the signal it’s time to enter the car to take it around to the grid. Though he could be in his room, his time in there today lasted a scant few minutes. The walls felt too close, the air too thick, and the distance from everything suffocating. He prefers it back here in the garage today, in the middle of the action, where he can look around and see familiar faces: Hunk, Veronica, his parents. Rachel, Marco, Luis, Lisa, and the kids are up on the hospitality balcony, one of the thousands of voices that reach a feverish roar somewhere above his head, and though he can’t see them, their general presence soothes him too.
From the other side of the garage, Hunk catches his gaze and gives him a small wave. Lance returns it with a smile.
They’d been friends since they were both middle school aged, chasing the dream of Formula One in testy, cantankerous little go karts. Even back then, they’d learned quickly to read one another’s pre-race body language, when the other needed to be left alone and when they needed support.
Lance’s body must be screaming for moral support, because Hunk makes a beeline for him.
“You’re interrupting Toxic for this,” Lance criticizes, pulling off his headphones.
“Ah, sorry, I know how much Britney means to you,” Hunk snorts. “How do you feel?”
How does he feel?
Lance takes a second to evaluate himself. Nervous, of course. Still bemused by Keith’s little show for Silvio yesterday. Definitely not looking forward to seeing him in front of him on the grid, rather than in his mirrors, like he’d hoped.
However, there’s something else, too. He feels oddly… present. Most of the time, on race day Lance’ brain felt like a shaken snow globe, thoughts flying in every direction, impossible to pinpoint or reign in. Today, it was like the racing gods forgot to shake him or something.
“Okay,” he answers honestly. “I mean, like, as okay as anyone can get about to get in a car and drive at 200kph for 2 hours at my home circuit starting behind Keith.”
Taken aback, a soft huh escapes Hunk. “Maybe the Cuba Curse is lifted?” he suggests hopefully.
“Hunk!” Lance hisses. “Don’t talk about the you-know-what in here! You’ll jinx it!”
“Can you jinx a curse?” Hunk asks thoughtfully, twirling the end of his headband.
“Yes!”
Hunk smirks, amused that he’s gotten a rise out of his best friend. “You’ll do fine, buddy. First of all, you’ve got this. And second of all, no matter how it plays out, you’ll always have Britney.” He flicks the side of Lance’s earphones affectionately. “And we’re all still going to get drunk tonight on the beach together, as is tradition.”
“Of course,” Lance says. Most years it had been more of a drowning his sorrows sort of seaside soiree, but he can’t help but hope that tonight’s celebration actually involves a trophy for once.
“Exactly.” Hunk gives him a crushing hug, then pats his shoulder. “Kick their asses.”
* * *
Thirty-two laps in, and it’s like all of the pressure that he’d mysteriously been missing that morning had snapped back around his ribs like elastic all at once. He can’t help but think of those YouTube videos of dumb kids who put rubber bands around watermelons until they explode– and he’s the melon. The pressure’s been mounting, rubber band by rubber band, ever since he’d gotten a good launch and squeezed past Keith at the race start.
Lance holds the front, but Keith is biting at his heels. He’s nothing if not persistent, shoving his front wing into Lance’s space at every opportunity. Although Havana is a street circuit, it’s still got some good, strategically placed opportunities for overtakes, ones that he’s feeling particularly irritated about at the moment. Frankly, considering the amount of aggression he’s relentlessly piling on, he’s shocked Keith hasn’t completely eaten through his tyres yet and dropped back.
“Hasn’t Keith heard of personal space?” Lance complains over the radio.
“Negative, McClain,” Hunk answers evenly, but Lance knows his friend better than that. He can hear the barely contained contempt even through his earpiece.
“Time to third?” Lance asks then, pulling a hard left. The glittering, teal sea opens up in front of him as he speeds down the oceanfront straight. It’s a gorgeous, sunny, spring day, boats bob in the water at his right, and in a streaky blur, people cheer and dangle a bright collection of flags from balconies at his left, sandwiched between massive grandstands filled with thousands of spectators lining the street.
“Four point two seconds,” reports Hunk. “To Zarkon. He passed Pidge a few laps ago.”
Great. Just what he needed.
He banks steeply around a corner that’s not too far from one of his favorite childhood playgrounds, and Keith uses the opportunity to try to get next to him. Lance has to quickly react to close the space off, and he just knows Keith’s games are giving hell to Lance’s tyres as well.
“Fuck off!” he shouts in Keith’s direction, careful he is not pressing the radio button, as much as he’d love for Keith to hear it in the replays.
They round another two turns– and without warning, Keith is unexpectedly at his left, a move as psychotic on this particular part of the track as it is unconventional. It dumps icy adrenaline into Lance’s veins, and on instinct he jolts, taking the wheel with him.
It’s barely a millimeter of movement, yet the front of the car twitches loyally in response. He knows what’s going to happen before it does. There isn’t enough space, Keith is trying to get ahead from an impossible angle as they go side by side. There’s only centimeters between them, Lance can’t correct in time and he is not giving up any ground to Keith’s stupid, reckless choice anyway–
There’s the awful feeling of something snapping and grating that vibrates up through the steering wheel, into the seat, and reverberates through his bones. Little bits of blue and white carbon fiber dance over the asphalt in his mirrors, and there’s the unmistakable, slippery feeling beneath him that means he’s lost precious downforce.
Tyres screech over the chaos like a banshee, and just behind him Keith ricochets into a full 180 spin. He’s quick to correct it while Lance swerves to get traction beneath himself again too, but not before two other cars identical to his and Keith’s flash past them.
“He’s a fucking maniac!” Lance screams down the radio. “What the hell was he thinking? That’s causing a collision!”
“We saw,” Hunk affirms, and there’s an upward tilt to his voice that Lance knows all too well– it’s a tell that his own anxiety is starting to creep in. It means that things are looking bad. “Box.”
Yellow flags dart out to wave between the chainlink fence, cheerful and fluttering in the breeze as he dives into the pit lane.
“Full safety car,” Hunk reports a few seconds later, and he’s not terribly surprised. Because of Keith’s unorthodox choice of overtake location, no doubt there’s Altea-branded carbon fiber in awkward enough places that the race directors need to be particularly cautious about sending out people to snatch it back up and clear the track of dangerous debris.
Behind him, he knows that the top cars will be plunging in after him too– it’s a cheap pit stop and an excuse to strap on the extra-fast tyres for the last quarter of the race. The podium is suddenly within reach. A lot of the backmarkers will probably stay out, hoping to snatch up a higher placement in the chaos, then attempt to scrabble and defend against faster cars behind to cling to the points. The line will bunch up as they wait for the green flag again, which hopefully won’t be longer than a lap or two, but it’s enough for anyone to completely rewrite their race.
In short: shit just got interesting, and in the way that screams Cuba Curse.
Lotor pits ahead of him, and he has to wait a grueling few, costly seconds until he’s able to take his place for his own tyres and repairs. When he finally pulls into position, the blue and white uniformed mechanics swarm the car like bees. Time slows to a crawl; he can feel every heartbeat in his ears, his fingers, his toes. His breathing is too loud in his helmet. His eyes are locked on Keith’s sleek, black car just ahead as it screeches into place once Pidge is released, the blinking red lights at the tail of his car taunting him.
Another car zips past his periphery before he feels the familiar drop under him, the team backs away, and the signal for his release is mirrored with Blade’s ahead of him. Keith and Lance tear back onto the asphalt in sync– meaning Keith takes the lead over him, despite having come into the pits behind him.
Lance can taste sharp, tangy blood in his mouth as he crawls back to the pit exit.
Once he’s finally back on the track, he assesses the damage he needs to fix. Behind the safety car, he can see his twin Altea car leading the line, meaning Lotor indeed made the cut to the front. He easily recognizes Pidge’s iconic green helmet behind, then Keith.
Just like that, after leading his home Grand Prix for two-thirds of the race, he’s lost it.
Despite the expertly harnessed adrenaline coursing through his veins, his lifetime of experience with the sport, and his usual focus behind the wheel, the edges of his vision blur. His breaths come tight and ragged, and his chest aches.
Why hadn’t his instincts made him twitch the other way to evade? Why couldn’t he have used his head and let Keith by? He could’ve fought back exactly the same at a future corner, his pace was good. Maybe he could’ve advocated for a penalty while keeping his own nose clean. Or at the very fucking least, been able to bring something home to his family and his home country, even if it was only second place.
Now he’s back in fourth, Lotor, Pidge, and Keith ahead. It’s fucking humiliating.
He nearly misses a simple turn as he blinks tears away, and swerves a couple of times to cover for it, pretending it’s to keep heat in the tyres. But Hunk will know. Allura will know. He’s pretty sure his parents will know, too, which is possibly the worst of all.
Lance screams inside his helmet and hits the edge of the wheel with the heel of his palm.
Hunk does not hear him, and continues. “There’s still fifteen laps. It’s not over until it’s over.”
At this slower pace, he can better make out the crowds as they approach the start line. There’s always so much pride and support for him here, the cheers follow like an endless wave in a way it never really does for him at other venues. He knows his parents, siblings, and most importantly, his niece and nephew are out there cheering too, above the garage. He can clearly picture his mother clutching her rosary with one hand and his father’s hand with the other.
Hunk is right. If the Curse insists on showing its ugly face for yet another year, he can at least go down swinging and head held high if wants to reap him once more.
“It’s not over,” Lance repeats back to himself, gripping the wheel tighter.
As soon as they’re at green flag and Lotor makes the jump to restart the race, he’s funneling every last ounce of his energy into finishing this with as much cunning and grit as he can muster.
Keith has the same idea. In a fucked up way, he’s sort of grateful to him. They’re all matched on pace, but Keith, again, goes aggressive on his teammate.
Lance feels a little bad when Pidge ultimately does slip up– he’s not sure if Keith has identified one of her weak points or if it’s luck, but when she locks up in a turn, Keith’s right there, sliding past her.
This is racing; they’ve raced on the track and been friends off it for over a decade now. Lance manages to go around the outside of his friend a few turns later, now that she’s lost momentum and has a flat spot on her right tyre slowing her down, although she tries to defend valiantly.
Lance tucks in tightly behind Keith’s car, trying to reduce as much drag as possible. Keith will be doing the same with the Lotor ahead of him, but if Lance stays close and they pull back into first and second for long enough, he might be able to squeeze just a little more out of his car than Keith. Issue is, if, and big if, the opportunity presents itself, he’ll probably only have one move to get it right.
The bands of pressure around his chest feel near bursting at this point. Lotor proves a little trickier for Keith to best, covering him off more expertly. Lance has to admit, Lotor’s impeding is helpful, because every time they scrap Lance can inch just a little closer to the title fight and Keith burns down precious rubber. The laps tick down. Nine, eight, seven. Keith tries move after move, no prevail. Six, five, four…
On the same corner where Keith and Lance made contact, Lance’s jaw drops when Keith makes the exact same move on Lotor. From back here, it looks even more tremendously ballsy than it felt up close. It goes against Lance’s every instinct to not slam on the brakes to avoid a certain crash as Keith gets past Lotor with what looks like only a hair’s breadth between them to avoid contact.
Insane. Keith Kogane was insane.
Now only Lotor stood between him and Keith; three laps remained. If insane was what it took Keith to get past Lotor… then maybe insane is what it would take for him to do it too.
Lance prepares to turn on a similar aggression, accelerates–
“Don’t fight,” Hunk orders in his ear.
“What?” Lance hisses. He ignores the directive, and tries to veer to go down the inside of the next corner, but has to snap himself back into line at the last second. Not close enough. Yet.
It’s quiet for a moment on the other side of the radio. Lance tries another move, but Lotor closes off the space easily.
“Stop it! Do you want to crash now?!”
“I want to race!”
“Team orders, Lance,” Hunk gasps, exasperated. “We’re giving him team orders!”
That shuts him up. Lotor is not going to enjoy the directive to give up his spot to the team’s lead driver, and even though it benefits Lance and is the logical move for the team if Lance is proving faster on the telemetry they see back on the pit wall, this feels like a point of pride. He wants to be better on merit.
“Let us go racing!” he complains again.
“Would you rather go racing with Lotor for second, or Keith for first?”
Lance doesn’t answer. They both know.
“That’s what I thought. You’re faster than him in two out of three sectors. At turn 12, Lotor is letting you through. Keith’s already starting to pull ahead. You’ll be just close enough to maybe get him in the final lap, but you have to go full push now.”
Just as promised, Lotor slows slightly and Lance is able to squeeze by. He doesn’t miss that he’s left the space a little tighter than necessary to do so. Dick.
Whatever. He can see Keith ahead, maybe a second and a half away, and they’re down to two full laps remaining.
Everything else melts away, and it’s just him, Keith, and the track. He spends the second to last lap giving everything he has, brushing the walls of the track at each corner as he squeezes every inch out of the space to go faster, and his body trembles in time with it from its own exertion. As he crosses the line marking the final lap, his nerves sing and vibrate with the tension like a plucked guitar string.
Finally, in one of the first turns, he pounces. He and Keith go side by side, so close that Lance can feel the heat spilling off of Keith’s car. They weave through an S of turns, Keith ahead– then Lance ahead– then Keith again. Lance is forced to tuck in behind him at a particularly harrowing stretch of track, but he’s right back in Keith’s mirrors and braking so late into corners now, it’s nearing reckless.
Keith narrowly gets an inch out in front of him at the last possible overtaking turn, and Lance knows he only has one more chance.
As soon as they hit the final straight that leads to the waving checkered flag, Lance flips the DRS open as soon as it’s available and goes full fucking send, pulling side by side with Keith and demanding more, more, more, inch after inch, out of the car and himself. His legs are shaking as he presses on the pedal, his hold around the steering wheel ironclad. Around him, the crowd is roaring like thunder, yet all he can sense is Keith is right there beside him pushing his own car to its maximum speed, the minute space in front of them determining first from second indecipherable from this angle.
They flash across the line, and Lance can smell burning rubber and the chemical stink from the gearbox that means he’s probably fried something. Importantly, though, he’s now ahead of Keith.
“Well?!” Lance prompts through the radio.
It’s not Hunk, but Allura’s warm, bright voice. “That’s first place, Lance. Very well done today, that was brilliant.”
For the second time today, Lance screams in his helmet, Hunk screaming with him on the radio. This time, he lets everyone hear the whoop of joy through his own microphone. He always told himself that he was a cool, confident winner– but within seconds he’s a choked up monologue of thank yous to the team, to Cuba, to his family. Later, he can’t even remember if he did it in English or Spanish. By the time he’s done, all he knows is that he’s pretty sure if this were an Oscars speech, he’d be getting played off the stage.
And so what if he cries a little? When a man exorcises something as nasty as the Cuba Curse, he deserves to shed a few tears.
* * *
“And here they come to start the last lap, and McClain lunges down the inside, but he can’t get ahead as they go side by side down the next turns! There’s one more chance to pass on this circuit, and Lance McClain will do everything to take the lead from Kogane, but can he do it? Will it be redemption day or yet another heartbreak for the Cuban home hero? Can he finally beat the curse plaguing him around this circuit? They’re at the last overtaking possibility and he can’t pass Kogane! He can’t pass him for the lead! They turn onto the main straight AND LOOK AT THAT, McCLAIN PULLS OUT OF THE SLIPSTREAM OF KOGANE WITH HIS DRS OPEN! THEY’RE SIDE BY SIDE AS THEY RACE TOWARDS THE CHEQUERED FLAG AND IT’S MILLISECONDS SEPARATING THE TWO BUT IT IS McCLAIN AHEAD! WHAT A FINISH! Well done Lance, you’ve done it! Ladies and gentlemen, your winner of the 2025 Cuban Grand Prix is none other than Lance McClain!
* * *
All of the festivities are a blur of champagne, confetti, and more hugs than Lance can count. His cheeks ache from smiling, and more than once, he feels himself get misty eyed with disbelief. It peaks at the award ceremony, as he’s holding the trophy, looking out at the vibrant streets of his hometown. In the front row, Silvio and Nadia are perched on Luis and Lisa’s shoulders, surrounded by his family members. And at least Lance isn’t the only one crying– he can tell from here his parents are too.
Eventually, the awards ceremony ends. There’s a quiet moment where he, Keith, and Lotor are behind the stage, Lance blinking as his eyes adjust to the cooler, darker setting. Lotor is strutting well ahead of him, his blonde hair glowing like a fucking nightlight despite Lance’s eyesight needing a moment, and Keith–
Lance nearly jumps out of his skin. Keith is right next to him, matching his pace (like he hadn’t already had enough of that today), and seems to be doing so on purpose.
Bristling, he prepares for an insult– or maybe a fist– from his rival.
“What?” Lance demands, hackles raised.
Keith blinks at him like a goddamn bewildered owl.
“Congratulations,” he says finally. It’s stiff, but Lance hears it again– there’s the same softness that caught Lance so off guard with Silvio. What fucking good was it back here, no cameras, no microphones, no onlookers? “That was…” Keith’s eyes flicker up and down, like he’s sizing him up. Something dark flashes behind his eyes, something new from him that Lance can’t name. “...badass.”
Heat floods his cheeks, and he’s pretty sure something short circuits in his brain, because one second Keith is beside him, and he’s striding away and several paces ahead, like he can’t leave Lance’s proximity quickly enough.
Already, he’s floating on the effervescent high of his win and the sun-soaked joy of being home, but this launches him into the stratosphere of out-of-body experiences.
Keith, his rival, his enemy, his biggest competition, congratulated him, called him badass. And not for show, not through his teeth. In his chest, every time it replays through his head, his heart flutters like a trapped moth beating against glass to get to a deadly light.
As he finishes his day, he can’t pay attention, because he replays it a lot. He spaces out for most of the debrief, packs his things and changes to go home in a haze, nearly even misses that Zethrid is leaving the Altea garage arm-in-arm with Lotor and whispering like schoolchildren (not his business, but gross).
He buoys on the fuzzy elation through a party back home with his family and friends on the beach, lets the celebratory tides take him all the way to three in the morning, where he washes up on his childhood bed, alcohol-warm and spent.
Lance stretches out in only his boxers under a thin sheet and breathes in the deep, humid air. On the exhale, he allows himself to replay Keith’s words again, this time in silent privacy.
“Congratulations. That was… badass.”
The flutter returns to his chest, a little more urgently.
He closes his eyes, tries to conjure up the details. The low rumble of Keith’s voice. The softness in the sentiment, in sharp contrast with that dark edge that had flashed in his eyes.
“Congratulations.” The flutter is insistent, and spreading now into his stomach, generating friction. “That was badass.” There’s a breathless quality to Keith’s tone there and he’s now sure that he’d leaned in a little, he’d almost missed it. Or was he now imagining that?
The flutter is throwing sparks now, catching and spreading an eager heat through his lower stomach.
Icy realization jolts him back to his senses. His eyes snap open, the room spinning around him. This, this is not actually a new feeling at all. In denial, the heel of his palm digs against his half-hard cock through the fabric, willing it away. It doesn’t help. Maybe he doesn’t want it to. And maybe he’s a little too drunk to reason himself out of this, and that’ll be an explanation he can live with come morning…
Fuck.
“Congratulations.” In his mind, Keith is now cornering him like a prey animal, a hungry look in his eyes. “That was badass.”
Lance’s hand dips under the waistband of his boxers.
Notes:
I'm totally gonna make Lance's pump up playlist and add it to this footnote eventually.
(Also, we've chosen to go with British English spellings of on-track objects and things (tyre, kerb, etc.) since that's what F1 uses... but I am tragically American so if you see inconsistencies, no you don't.)