Just a Little More
If I meant to grow F1's slice of the pie, the American market had to be opened, and that Olivia would ride at the point of that charge was beyond any doubt. And yet, strangely, I couldn't make myself want it.
Asking her to appear in a documentary was fair enough. Signing her as an actual driver was another matter entirely.
I turned my eyes back to the track. Her car tore away in a rising howl, but once she was past lap forty the speed fell off so sharply no one could miss it, and the lap time swelled by a full two seconds. In motorsport, two seconds is the gulf between first and last. A collapse so absurd it barely deserved to be called a time at all.
Was she trying to claw it back? She forced the car for more speed than it wanted to give.
"...!"
The brake came late. The rear stepped out and spun, and she was lucky she had already countered the other way. A moment more and it would have been a crash. Had this been a race, had another car been running beside her, that one small mistake could have produced a result no one could take back. She held a top-tier time and still she sat in F3. There was a reason.
"Her stamina's dropping hard."
Dmitri, seated beside me, had come to much the same conclusion.
"Right at the end, in the moment that matters most, her concentration just slips. It's a little..."
Skill aside, this was safety. However much money hung on it, I couldn't watch a driver's focus fall off a cliff in the final laps and still tell her to go racing.
Right. There is such a thing as a line.
I nodded, and kept it to myself.
A little more. Just a little more.
In that instant the rear tires lost their grip. She countered the other way, but the car would not listen. Only the width of the track let her scrape past a crash.
Damn it.
She had worked herself raw for the stamina she lacked. She had driven herself far harder than anyone around her, and still she was supposed to come apart simply because she was a woman. The injustice of it was more than she could stand.
Misunderstanding and envy had hounded her until she had no choice but to flee to England. She had not chosen her parents when she was born, so why had the world looked at her with eyes that sharp? Those wounds had only just begun to close, and now this. She did not want to pretend the difference wasn't real. What she could not bear was that the difference felt too heavy for effort to lift.
Damn it!
A mistake bad enough to put her off the track. At that point she might as well have thrown the session away. Even so, the engine snarled, and she put her foot down again.
I'm finishing this.
The times could be a wreck. She would not leave looking like someone who had lost. As long as the wheels were turning, she would give the lap everything she had. The car howled on down the straight.
I hadn't trained enough.
Olivia forced the thought into place. Right. It wasn't only the body. Raise the sheer amount of work, and someday the gap would close.
A little later she was facing the same stretch where she had made the mistake. Thump. Thump. The near-crash still hadn't left her blood. Her heart was sprinting, and she had to get her foot to the brake at once. A chill ran the length of her spine. Miss it the way she had before, and she was finished. So brake early, then?
That's pathetic!
Was that racing? A real driver looked fear in the face and held the throttle to the very last instant. Wasn't that the whole point?
She moved her foot straight back to the accelerator. The car wound itself out to the limit, and the corner arrived all at once. Brake, her heart hammered at her. It was like being deep underwater, every instinct screaming to break the surface and breathe, and again she clenched her teeth and held. A little more. Just a little. To the very last of the last.
Now!
She went to full braking. The chassis shuddered. Would the tires let go again? Would the rear swing out?
No! She had run herself into the ground for this moment.
And then the car slipped out of the corner with a grace that startled her. Every breath she had been holding seemed to tear free at once. The relief lasted only a heartbeat. Too soon to celebrate, she told herself, and she kept her foot down. Another five minutes or so, and the flag began to wave. The session was over.
She rolled into the pits and checked the lap times before anything else. A personal best. What stood out was that the times which had wavered had climbed again in the latter half of the run.
"Hoo. Hooo."
She pulled off a helmet soaked through with sweat and sat quietly with it. The corner where she had made the mistake. The stretch that had set her chest trembling just to look at it. She had come through it clean. A corner that had been a thing to fear was a trophy now.
Sure enough, the transmitter in her helmet crackled to life.
"That was a fine race."
"..."
"See? Sweat doesn't betray you."
If she had not trained as if her life depended on it, could she have survived that corner? Could wanting it have been enough on its own?
No. Not a chance.
The thought ran through her like a current. If the difference between a man's body and a woman's meant the results of effort would differ too, then she would accept that difference gladly and sweat several times as hard. That was the conclusion Olivia reached today.
At that very moment the radio spoke again.
"Olivia, mind coming up for a minute?"
The coach, with something she had not expected.
"Someone's here who says they're a friend of yours."
Olivia walked into the cafe with a bare face and no makeup, her racing suit half off, as if she had shrugged out of a pair of overalls. She was drenched in sweat. Fanning herself with one hand, she came toward me.
"How did you even know I was here?"
"Good question."
"I look a mess. This is embarrassing."
"Not at all."
I ordered her something to drink before anything else. She must have been wrung out, because she asked for a sports drink, an iced coffee, and ice cream all at once.
"After I finish a run, I'm completely spent."
Of course she was. She had been out there for more than an hour, north of 120 miles an hour. Body and mind both pushed to the limit. Of course she needed to fill the tank back up. I waited until the ice cream was in front of her and she had started in on it. She had driven like something wild, and now she ate like a squirrel, nibbling away. Once a little ease had come back into her, she leaned into the chair and asked.
"Be honest. Why did you come all the way to the circuit?"
"Does there have to be a reason?"
"As if you'd show up for no reason."
She had me there.
"I've just gotten interested in F1 lately."
"F1?"
"Yeah. I'm thinking of buying a team. The American market's pretty small."
She let out a small sigh.
"You're right. America doesn't care about F1 at all."
"So I was thinking of starting an F1 boom..."
I gave her the short version of the documentary.
"So you want me in it? For the American box office?"
I nodded. That was as far as I had meant to go. Her curiosity would not allow it.
"Which team are you trying to buy?"
"If I can, well..."
"Ferrari?"
How did she know?
"It shows."
"...?"
"You've never been the type to settle for anything short of the best."
"Me?"
"You didn't know?"
Well. Anyway.
"Then you'll only hire the best drivers, too?"
"I suppose so."
"Got someone in mind?"
"I wouldn't say no one."
"A secret?"
"Of course."
"I knew it."
She smiled.
"I'm taking a shot at F2 starting this year."
"I hear once you're at F2, you have to bet your life on it."
"So I'll bet it. How great a life is it, anyway."
Good grief. Olivia was as brazen today as ever. The smile never left her face.
"This works out, actually."
"What does?"
"An F1 seat is like plucking a star out of the sky. Thousands of drivers, and only twenty chairs."
"...?"
"I'll work myself to death and take a little help from a friend. Same ability, you'll use me. Won't you?"
Her eyes were so bright that I said something I didn't mean.
"Maybe."
It wasn't a complete lie. An American passport, a glittering background, a glittering face on top of it. If the ability was close, who wouldn't pick Olivia? That assumed her talent actually held up. Even then, I was still certain I would only be filming a documentary with her. I simply had not yet understood how relentless she was.
We had come all the way to New York to see each other, so we decided on dinner. Olivia showered and came out in street clothes: a black T-shirt with the Metallica logo, leather pants, black boots.
"You could shoot a commercial."
"What commercial? Mad Bull?"
No. Gromhats. And it wasn't a bad thought. She was exactly the model that house wanted. Word was she was already quite popular in America these days. A print ad timed to Fashion Week, maybe?
"Ah, forget it."
"Hm?"
"Your father's running a fashion brand. His daughter modeling somewhere else is a little..."
"So what."
"...?"
"Besides, you're the majority shareholder, aren't you?"
I nodded.
"Then I won't worry about it."
"Why?"
"My dad likes you."
Wouldn't know about that. I only ever seem to be a sensation with somebody's parents. Anyway, the place we went was a famous steakhouse in New York. Maybe because it was America, they sold the beef by the kilogram. At those prices, it had better be good.
While we waited, we caught up. Dmitri was with us, so the talk ran mostly to cars, the one interest all three of us shared.
"Thanks to President Tennessee, I actually got to try a race car. Ten laps or so, and I can't begin to tell you how hard it was..."
"It's always like that at first. Train properly, though, and it gets much better."
"Mm. I'm a little old to go into training..."
Dmitri's joke made her laugh, and she turned to me.
"Have you driven?"
"No. I don't have a license yet."
"Finish the instruction and have a professional ride with you, and you can. Circuit only, of course."
A circuit. In my previous life I'd had a license. I hadn't owned a car, so I hadn't driven much, but I had liked it well enough, manuals especially, the ones other people avoided as a nuisance. The rental was cheap, and there was a pleasure in driving them. I loved cars that much, and still I wasn't of age. The Bugatti sitting in the garage had only made me drool.
What? Take the instruction, and I could actually drive?
"Not a race car. A normal car, too?"
"Of course."
"A sports car?"
She nodded.
"How much instruction do I need?"
"Depends on the instructor. Learn from me and we can finish inside two hours."
From her?
"What's with that look. I'm an F3 driver. Of course I've got an instructor's certificate."
"Then a professional riding along is also..."
"I'm enough on my own."
Well, well. I didn't have a car of my own here in America.
A guy out to buy Ferrari who doesn't even own a Ferrari. How does that look? Right. Buy one while I was at it.
Just then, Olivia made an offer I hadn't seen coming.
"My dad's garage is nearby. Want to go see it?"