The Test (2)
The main straight.
The silver race car opened its DRS and surged. 270. 290. 310.
The Red Bull Ring is short.
Ten corners, a lap a little over a minute. Of every Grand Prix on the calendar, you could fairly call it the shortest circuit of all. That did not, however, mean it was easy.
It means there's nowhere to hide a mistake.
On a long circuit, time lost in one corner can be clawed back a little at a time somewhere else. Here, that hardly works. Waste time on an error, and getting it back is comparatively hard.
And right now the team is watching nothing but my lap.
He had to be good.
No.
Not merely good. Perfect.
In that instant the 100-meter board for Turn 1 swung into view. He stood on the brakes, and the speed fell from 320 to 140 in a single savage drop. His body pitched forward—
"……!"
A heartbeat later he wound the wheel to the right, exited the corner, and was running the straight. About 315 kilometers an hour. Turn 3 arrived in a blink, and he was on the brakes again, feathering them with exquisite care so the wheels would not lock. This one mattered even more: it was a hairpin that hooked hard to the side. He dropped the car into second and threaded the tight hairpin, and beyond it a long downhill straight opened up.
Which means exit speed is everything.
The moment he was clear of the hairpin, Kim Yihyun buried the accelerator. Full throttle. And then Bono's voice, the man watching the times from the pit wall, cut clean into his ear.
"Understood."
DRS alone was not enough. He spent the battery as well, and the silver car reached the highest speed the Red Bull Ring would give it: 330 kilometers an hour.
Turn 4 rushed up to the nose of the car. From here the circuit changed character. The rhythm of brake and accelerate was over. A chain of high-speed corners began. Right, left, and left again.
Yihyun did not snatch at the wheel.
Keep it as smooth as I can.
The exit from one corner became the entry to the next, and that attitude became the speed through the last of them. Attack any one of them on its own and you were certain to sacrifice something. So he worked the wheel and the pedals with extreme delicacy, and in a flash he was through Turns 5, 6, 7, and 8, kissing the kerbs on the way—
"Copy."
Just before Turn 9 he reached the short straight. 260. 290. 315. The instant the car touched 315 kilometers an hour he brushed the brakes and rolled the wheel gently to the right. The car stepped onto the kerb and shuddered.
And then—
Bono was right. Once Turn 10 was behind him, the main straight began again, and like every corner on the lap, Turn 10 lived or died on exit speed and the pull away from it. Braking had to be cut to the bone.
But—
Doesn't matter. The corner itself is basically the same as Turn 9.
All he had to do was what he had already done. Yihyun turned the wheel in that same smooth arc.
Vroooooom———!!!!!!
He hit the main straight and began to accelerate again. Sixth. Seventh. Eighth. The moment the speed climbed back to about 315 kilometers an hour—
The silver race car crossed the finish line.
"…Good work. Complete the lap and come back to the pits."
Yihyun's answer came back, and in the same moment Bono killed the radio and looked at the monitor. Toto, who had been listening in silence and watching the run unfold, turned to the same screen.
The display was crowded with information. What caught the eye was the time Kim Yihyun had just set on his first attack lap, straight off the out-lap.
"……."
For a moment the garage went quiet. Then the mechanics and engineers who had been watching in silence began, one by one, to speak.
"…A one-oh-three?"
"And Sector 1 and Sector 2 are the fastest this car has ever done at the Red Bull Ring…"
"…Hold on. Is that time even right?"
"All three sectors logged clean."
"The fuel?"
"Exactly a standard load."
Every answer stripped away another excuse they might have reached for. A fault in the rig. A light fuel load making the car artificially quick. Anything else they could name. Once the chance that the time itself was wrong had vanished, all that remained were the numbers on the screen.
"……This really is his first time in the car today, right?"
"That's what I'm saying. How does an F2 driver get into an F1 car and put up a time like that on the first go…"
"…Unreal."
Someone let out a hollow laugh, pulled off his headset, and hung it around his neck. Someone else leaned back in his chair, then dragged himself forward again to sit upright. The scale of the shock differed from man to man. The shock itself did not. Because the time Kim Yihyun had just set was exactly that extraordinary.
Toto, who had led Mercedes for a very long time, stared at that number and did not look away.
The car Yihyun had driven today was the W12. The 2021 Mercedes in which Lewis Hamilton had actually fought Red Bull for that year's championship. And in the years the W12 was a current car, the finest time it had produced at the Red Bull Ring was—
A record belonging to Max Verstappen of Red Bull, three-time World Champion and one of the finest drivers currently in Formula 1. Set beside the lap Yihyun had just produced, the gap was 0.244 seconds.
……One time in the car, and a lap like that.
Honestly, it was difficult to believe. Why? Because an F1 car is not an F2 car. The two categories may look similar from the outside, but pull them apart and the performance is an entirely different thing. A rookie in a Formula 1 car for the first time ordinarily loses close to a second on braking alone, on day one. That is normal.
And the boy who had come from Korea? On his second lap in a real F1 car — the first time he had ever sat in one — he had come within three tenths of that car's peak-era benchmark.
…Numbers don't lie.
Which meant that unless the machinery had failed, or the lap had fallen out of the sky by some absurd stroke of chance, Kim Yihyun's time was nothing but pure ability.
"……Incredible." Toto let out a short, disbelieving breath. "Incredible is the only word I've got."
Bono was no less impressed, but his attention had already gone back to the data. And then—
"I see why only Sector 3 was green on that lap."
"What is it?"
"He spent too much battery in the DRS zone after Turn 3. Past Turn 9 the battery was empty, so the reacceleration came up short."
"So he missed purple in every sector because of how the battery was deployed. Not because of the driving."
At Toto's words, Bono nodded.
"Yes. That's right. And that deployment is on me. I told him to use it right up to the braking point into Turn 4."
Turn that around, and it meant something else.
"If the battery had been used properly, purple in every sector was possible."
"Right. If I'd called it accurately… all three sectors purple. Unofficially, he'd have beaten the best time the Red Bull Ring saw in 2021."
In the next instant, Bono and Toto arrived at the same thought. He was already like this. What happened if he went out again? What about day two? And later, when he handled the car as if it were his own?
Assuming that lap had not been luck…
…Is this the second coming of Max Verstappen?
Or a talent greater than that, walking into Formula 1. If it was, Mercedes had no intention whatsoever of repeating the humiliation of once letting Verstappen slip through their fingers and watching a championship be taken from them. So Toto bent closer to the data, determined to know for certain whether Kim Yihyun was a driver with the talent to write a new piece of history.
What if I set him against someone other than Max?
He called up the times of the men who had driven for Mercedes in 2021: Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas.
On the numbers alone, the lap that seventeen-year-old had just set was, by a small margin, quicker than either veteran.
"……."
That was when it happened.
"Excuse me."
A careful voice came from behind them. Oscar and Louise, who had come along as Yihyun's agency and personal management.
"I want to be sure I've understood this correctly." Oscar indicated the screen. "Those two at the bottom. Those are the actual times the drivers set in 2021?"
"Yes. Same car, same fuel load, same soft tires."
"Then—"
The voice of Oscar, a man who was almost always silent, shook just slightly.
"You're saying Yihyun ran faster than both of them?"
Louise drew in a breath. Faster than an actual Formula 1 driver. Toto let the question sit for a moment, then nodded.
"I should set out the conditions first."
"……Yes."
"Those times came from qualifying. It was a competitive session, so the track was full of traffic, and they were taking dirty air because of it. Hamilton and Bottas were both held up, in fact. Today, he was alone out there. No dirty air off a car ahead. No traffic."
"So you're saying the conditions weren't exactly the same."
"Correct. They favored Kim. We'll need to look harder at the telemetry. There's a great deal still to analyze." Toto took his eyes off Oscar and Louise and looked back at the screen. "That said."
"……."
Louise's shoulders jerked. So did Oscar's.
"And," Toto added, "that was a driver in this car for the first time today, on his second lap."
"……."
"If we assume that lap was not a fluke, Kim can take more time out of it. That much I'll guarantee."
Louise clapped both hands over her mouth.
"Then… could Yihyun become an F1 driver?"
Toto was quiet for a moment, weighing it.
And then—
He answered plainly.