Formula 1: The GOAT

Rümeysa leaned back lazily on the sofa, her eyes locked to the ceiling, as she went through the conversation she had with her son.

She could say with confidence that she was the first person to have had this conversation with a fourteen-year-old since capitalism started, as there wouldn’t have been many opportunities for a fourteen-year-old and entirely self-made billionaire to exist before her son.

She was confident that none of this was the result of her raising him, but just being blessed with a very competent and capable child. Even she, a former child, didn’t remember thinking like that when she was the same age as her son.

As she went through the memory lane of things her son did, she came to the obvious realization that her son hadn’t faced that many obstacles since childhood, and those that he had faced were trivial things that he overcame quite easily. Other than the first-year sponsor debacle with Selçuk’s father that required her direct involvement, all of the other minor problems were things her son dealt with without her needing to intervene.

The same could be said when it came to doing the things he loved. He loved motorsports and had his dream already figured out when he was still a child. Unlike many whose dreams remain just that, dreams, he, on the other hand, was already walking the path of achieving it. With minimal investment from her side, everything else fell into place very easily, all due to her son’s talent.

As a parent, that was something she should, and she actually did, feel very grateful to God for. But at the same time, she was also worried, as she knew that the longer her son continued his streak of success, the more difficult it would be for him to recover when he faced a problem that neither he nor she could easily solve, unlike how things had previously happened.

With her son being in motorsports, she had already taken a deep dive into the area before she had even bought him his first kart and continued to keep a very close eye on it. Having also run the news company that her son had founded before it was sold, she knew with confidence just how complicated the motorsports field was, and it was exactly where the unsolvable problems her son might face were going to come from, as sometimes even talent is not enough for things to go as easily as they did in his karting years.

“But having more money should be helpful enough to circumvent as many of those possible problems as possible,” she said as her eyes, which were out of focus looking at the ceiling, finally regained focus and clarity.

If her son’s words were true and things ended up happening the way he theorized they would, then he would have already handed her one of the keys to solving those problems.

“Looks like there is no sleep for me today,” she said as she dragged herself off the sofa, heading to her room to start her research. At the moment, she was the one who was still controlling all of the investments, as they hadn’t yet reached the level where it required them to hire someone else to be responsible for handling them. But if things went well, then they would make the leap from her being responsible for his investments to a full-fledged family office that billionaires had, in one fell swoop.

Knowing that she only had a weekend to bring herself up to speed on everything before she found a way to directly take action or find someone who would do it in their stead, she didn’t want to waste even a single second, so she immediately got to work. Thankfully for her, Fatih had already come up with the plan, so the only thing she needed was just to deepen her knowledge of the field.

……….

“You are overcomplicating it again by trying to have the perfect input from the start,” Apollo said, throwing a five-kilo dumbbell at Fatih that instantly turned into a cloud the moment Fatih’s eyes locked on it and tracked it.

“I mean, you told me to apply seventy kilograms of force, so what is the problem with me trying to put exactly that amount of force?” Fatih asked, completely ignoring that a dumbbell had just been shot at him as if it were something normal, which it actually was. It was a way for Apollo to simulate the risk of debris coming in Fatih’s direction during races, so he was making sure that his instinct wasn’t to close his eyes but to track the object coming at him and decide what to do in order to reduce the damage received to a minimum if it was inevitable. In open-wheel racing, it was something he definitely needed.

“Yes, I did, but we both know that your senses at their full range are as accurate as a blind person reading lips. So don’t try feeling it for a long time and just press the brake with the force that you think is within the ballpark. With enough repetitions, you should now be able to calibrate your senses and fine-tune them more and more,” Apollo said as he slowly walked towards Fatih, who was seated in a survival cell.

He stopped when he was right next to him, and as he looked at the system screen in front of him showing the telemetry of the amount of force he had inputted, he said, “But overshooting it by two hundred grams even after taking your time… you really are out of calibration, aren’t you?” with a look of someone feeling extremely sorry for something someone had to experience going through.

Fatih didn’t argue back, as he knew it had taken him two entire seconds to get the force close to that, and that was time he wasn’t going to get when a corner was coming at him at hundreds of miles per hour. No matter how perfect your input is, if it takes time to get it perfect, then in motorsports, it is no different than not having the perfect input in the first place.

“It might look like a small difference, but it is the difference between taking a corner at the maximum possible speed or having to slightly hold back in fear of overshooting it, and I’m sure you know how much time there is within that difference of force,” Apollo said when he saw Fatih’s reaction.

“Now back at it, but this time I will put a timer, and if it exceeds a tenth of a second, we are repeating it again and again until you get it right,” Apollo said, and the moment Fatih nodded to acknowledge his words, he followed it up by saying, “Now give me 65 kilograms of force.”

Without thinking much, Fatih immediately pressed the brake pedal that simulated everything, even the G-forces, to ensure that what he did in it could be replicated in real life without any problems.

[67.451]

“Faster, 43 kg of force.”

[42.231]

“125”

[123.089]

“125”

[124.139]

“125”

[124.909]

“126”

[126.389]

Input after input, he was slowly reducing both the time it took for him to apply the force while at the same time fine-tuning his feel for the force he was applying. But unfortunately, it wasn’t something that was going to end in one day.

When Saturday came, he got up early in the morning to go for his morning run, and after having breakfast, he spent some time with his grandmother until noon arrived. Brunhilde, Seraphina’s mother, then dropped Seraphina off with her gear before they went to the karting track and spent four hours driving, where Fatih finally filled his driving hunger after going for nearly a month without driving anything, which, for someone who was used to driving every day, was no different than an addict experiencing withdrawals.

Seraphina, on the other hand, found herself being lapped as if she were driving an underpowered kart, losing every defensive and offensive driving attempt she had against Fatih as if he could read her every move.

However, it didn’t discourage her at all, as she enjoyed the challenge. She had also had the opportunity to compete against other people in the local karting tournament held on the same track, and there she finally saw the results of the training that Fatih had imparted to her, as she finished fifth, beating even some adults.

Additionally, knowing the number of trophies Fatih held, she knew deep down that hoping to beat him within a few months of starting to drive karts, when Fatih had started doing so at the age of five and lived it, was nothing but getting ahead of herself. But she still gave her best every time in the hope of one day capitalizing on a mistake Fatih might make.

Unfortunately for her, these two days she had with him were not those destined days, as in the more than a hundred one-on-one positional battles they faced during the two days, she had lost all of them and had not even once been close to even fighting for a position. But it was enjoyable for both of them nonetheless.

After having spent the weekend with his family, he finally left for Milton Keynes on Sunday evening with Alex, who had come to pick him up, now fully refreshed and ready to once again put his focus back on his final week of theory training.