Formula 1: The GOAT

[[[[Made it super long for late uploading]]]]

“That is impossible,” is what Emanuel would have said if it had been someone else narrating what he was seeing in front of him.

It had been thirty minutes since Fatih had started his official simulation training, and he was sure it was Fatih’s first time training in a simulator, and even more so in anything related to Formula cars. So what he was seeing was the purest measure of a driver’s initial adaptability to learning new things.

Five minutes was all it took before Fatih adjusted to the semi-automatic gearbox, as he now started making changes without even looking at the LED lights on the steering wheel to see if the optimum RPM had been reached. The thing about his eyes was not just a guess, as that was a result of the eye-tracker that was inside the cockpit to trace the direction his eyes were focused on, and after the initial three minutes, he had stopped looking at the steering wheel at all.

The same was true for downshifting too, as Fatih applied everything he had learned in the theory class by always braking with maximum pressure before he started downshifting through the gears until he reached first gear, before he once again started the journey of shifting to the sixth gear, which for the F4 cars he was going to be driving, was the maximum gear, before repeating it all again.

“Move to the next level,” was what he had said by the tenth minute.

“Already?” the technician asked, quite surprised by how fast they were moving to the next stage, as it usually took newcomers a minimum of an hour, and half an hour if they were talented, to get through the initial up- and downshifting.

“Yes, any longer and we would be needlessly wasting simulator time for something he is already good at,” he had said as his argument, but the truth was that he had another reason as well, which was him wanting to see if there was more that Fatih could surprise him with and if the arrogance Fatih had shown in the room, when he had ignored him when he was introduced as his teacher only for Fatih to ask why he was not being taught by Markus himself, was justified.

And as if to assert his superiority and back his arrogance, the moment the next stage was activated, Fatih adjusted to it so seamlessly that it made everyone wonder if he had done this before behind their backs.

The new stage was simple: all that was needed of Fatih was for him to now stop going down to the lowest gear then back to the highest, but instead go to the demanded gear within a certain duration, which was longer if it required upshifting and shorter if it required downshifting to match the time it would take to accomplish the task perfectly, as determined by a computer simulation, then adding an additional buffer time starting at five seconds and slowly reducing the buffer time until it nearly matched the perfect computer shifting.

But Fatih from the start was already as close to the perfect computer simulations as possible, only being behind it by a few tenths and sometimes matching the perfect shifting, with the number of perfect shifts getting increasingly higher with each new shift.

“Move to the next level,” in a fit to not accept the possibility that Fatih was right in his arrogance and in looking down at him, he had said for them to immediately move to the next stage.

“But, sir, it had only been five minutes. Aren’t we rushing him?” and once again the technician asked, reminding him that only a short time had passed since they had already broken the initial record of moving to the next stage in the first place.

“Just do it. If he fails, we can just go back to the previous one. I’m trying to see what his limit is,” he had used those words as an argument and reason, but he knew deep down that he was not going to be satisfied until he got something, though even he didn’t know what he was even expecting at the end of his pushing for things.

With Emanuel giving his explanation, one that he could use as a means to point to as the cause if anything went wrong, the technician finally moved to the next stage of training.

The new stage was like moving from beginner practice to intermediate and semi-advanced training, as now, instead of being told to downshift to a certain gear within a certain period, a line was drawn on the track with two numbers on it. One of them was in meters to give Fatih real-time distance between his car and the line, and the other was for the gear he needed to be in by the time he crossed that line.

It would seem easy at the start, since he could just get into the gear ahead of time and keep it there until he crossed the line, but the task required him to cross that line within the shortest amount of time possible, so that required him to downshift as late as possible, acting as a practice for how he would actually do it in the real world if the line that was drawn was a corner.

Fatih, having already grasped the exact time it would take for him to get from one gear to another, just applied it in the current situation, and by the third line he crossed, he had already finished adjusting to the new level. By the tenth line he crossed, he could already shift scarily accurately, and the longer the time passed, the closer he was getting to the perfect time, as if he were a self-learning machine that adjusted its parameters with each new line.

“…” Upon seeing this development, Emanuel had found himself speechless for a moment. It had only been twenty minutes since the simulation practice had started, and it would have usually been a period where they were slowly working with the driver to adjust their shifting style and solve all of the small problems as the driver learned to shift using paddles. It would have taken at least forty more minutes or more before they could even consider moving to the next step, but with Fatih, by that time, they had already moved up by three levels.

He had found himself at a crossroads of whether to agree with Fatih’s evaluation of him that contradicted his evaluation of Fatih, or push for one final action and see if he would survive and adapt to that, too or not. To him, the decision was very obvious, as he said, “Move to the next level,” without much hesitation.

The technician, already tired of arguing, knowing he was going to be overruled anyway, didn’t bother arguing back and just went through with it as he applied the fourth level.

It was the final level before they could consider the current stage complete: adverse weather driving.

The infinitely extending track that Fatih was driving on slowly started being bombarded by drops of rain that increased in intensity.

This was supposed to have been the final level for the first day if the driver was exceptional and completed the previous ones within a few hours, but for Fatih, it had been brought forward twenty minutes into the simulation training.

Now everyone inside the simulation control room was focused on both their respective screens, which showed both their part of the data but also the video of Fatih’s controlled car, watching how Fatih was going to do in the current situation. It was a level that required the driver to receive pointers in order to clear it well, but Emanuel didn’t say anything and just watched with intense focus, as he wanted to see if he was going to come out of this as well.

For the first two minutes, he had seen the same scene that he expected to see from a driver experiencing it for the first time. Fatih was sliding, downshifting way too early to be safe, and sometimes missing the gear target line entirely before reaching the specified gear, as he had to either counter-steer to prevent the car from going off track or save the car from the rear wheels spinning.

This caused the corners of his mouth to rise slightly without his knowledge, but a momentary movement of his eyes led to his rising corners immediately dropping as his eyes had caught something on one of the screens of the observing technicians.

He didn’t waste any time as he immediately rushed to the screen, sliding the technician aside in his chair as his eyes locked onto it.

That specific screen was showing data regarding the simulated car’s gearbox, and the data was showing that Fatih was struggling in the early minutes because he was trying a few things, as traces of cadence shifting, block shifting, and short shifting could be seen clearly, showing that he already knew all of these.

As if something clicked in his mind, he immediately moved to another screen under the supervision of another technician. This one showed the brake data, and it showed that Fatih was slowly increasing the brake bias, leaning it more to the front than usual, having already reached a 58% front bias while at the same time showing that Fatih was already applying cadence braking. He moved to the next one, showing suspension information, which showed the setup information before he moved to the next screen.

As he moved from one screen to another, the image of the car Fatih was slowly building in his head, and he couldn’t help but start feeling goosebumps as he could see what exactly Fatih was targeting.

Considering that this was the driver’s first time, it made it a scary situation, as it had taken him only a few minutes of constantly tuning the car, and he was slowly finding himself in a situation where he was setting up the car to perfectly handle the challenging conditions he was placed in, without receiving any sort of technical feedback from the team at all, all on his own.

The increasing of brake bias to the front was to ensure that the front wheels did more of the stopping work, preventing the rear wheels from locking when combined with engine braking forces. Cadence braking, by braking heavily then releasing the brakes before the tires locked, effectively resets the grip between the tires and the track, avoiding locking up, sliding, and losing control of the car.

As for the different shifting ways, they were all because he was trying to find the perfect shifting style for the conditions he was in.

Cadence shifting, which is done by the driver shifting with a slower, more deliberate cadence instead of the usual rapid-fire downshifting, allowed the car to shed more speed before selecting a lower gear to keep RPMs within a safe, stable range.

Block shifting, which is done by the driver skipping intermediate gears, was done by staying in a high gear while braking and then rapidly shifting all the way to the intended gear to reduce the number of jolts from engine braking that would have happened by allowing each downshifted gear to fully engage, which might cause the rear end to snap loose in wet conditions.

Fatih was going between those two downshifting styles to find which one worked the best. But on upshifting, he also moved to trying a new method to fit the conditions, which was short shifting. Short shifting was done by the driver shifting up gears earlier than the optimal point in order to keep the engine in a lower torque range, which prevents the rear tires from spinning as they apply power, which is very important for accelerating in wet conditions.

That is where he had found himself saying, “That is impossible,” as it was almost actually an impossibility for a rookie to do that, when even experienced drivers needed a long time to learn all of these things, and even more so to retroactively apply them without any prior pointers from anyone else.