Formula 1: The GOAT

[[[[Another big One]]]]

“He is a monster,” he said when he finally managed to recollect himself and look at the screen showing the simulated car in a chasing camera point of view. It showed that with each line Fatih passed, he was narrowing down the perfect parameters to adapt to the situation.

His statement wasn’t wrong at all. With each line he was crossing, he was going through more than three different actions: the braking style, gearing style, brake bias, suspension loading, and more, at the same time, before repeating it again in different ways. Even amidst that, he was already isolating which of the many things he had tried on the previous part before crossing the line had worked and what hadn’t, before discarding what didn’t and looking for what else did. This made it even more impressive that it was being done in a simulation.

He knew there were drivers who had a blessed feel, and the moment they got into a car, they could become one with it. If it were those people, they might have adapted the same way Fatih was. But that assumption was limited to real-world practice, since in the simulator, the only sense that worked fully was visual.

Although the simulator had motors to replicate how the car reacted, it was very limited, since the rig could only move so much before reaching its maximum possible movement, so the actual movement sensation ended abruptly, limiting the amount of useful feedback you could get from it. The same was true for the sound, since it wasn’t fully one-to-one with the real world. So it showed that Fatih was now mostly relying on his visual and all other limited feedback to make these adjustments.

It was with that thought that an unimaginable possibility came to his mind: “Does that mean he is struggling for these few minutes because of that, and he would have reacted faster if this were in the real world?” came to his mind before he shook his head to remove the thought, as he didn’t want to accept it in any form, as even what he was seeing was absurd.

As he silently continued watching Fatih, he saw in real-time how he was adjusting, discarding anything that he didn’t see real-time results from and reinforcing the parts that worked. He could see the results compounding with each line that Fatih passed. By the tenth minute, he seemed to have found the perfect blend of everything as he did his first fully complete shift.

As if to prove that it was not a fluke, he did the same again and again as he downshifted as late as possible without forcing the car. The same happened on his upshifts as he reached the target gear in the shortest possible time while avoiding any unsettling of the car or wheelspins on the extremely wet track.

When for the next ten minutes, Fatih didn’t make any obvious mistakes, Emanuel pinched the bridge of his nose as he could feel that this was going to be a very long day for him, despite only forty minutes having passed since the training had started. It couldn’t even be called training, as Fatih was doing everything on his own without receiving any feedback from anyone since they had started.

“Let’s add corners,” he said after thinking about it for a few minutes. This time, he wasn’t doing it out of any ulterior motive, just following the next step that he saw as appropriate in the current situation, as Fatih had already shown his adaptability to the present track.

“But sir, that was planned for after he finished learning the standing start,” the technician, who was now used to just doing without asking or rebutting, found himself reminding Emanuel that they would be breaking from the initial plan they had set.

“He is on a momentum, so we’d better see how far he can go with it before we distinguish what we need to teach him and what he is already proficient in,” he said as he tapped his right leg lightly on the ground, a habit he had formed when he was in a complicated situation.

“Understood, sir,” the technician said before loading the next task.

While it was still being loaded, Emanuel pressed his radio before he started speaking to Fatih for the first time since his simulation practice had started. “We are going to move to the next task, which is cornering. Before arriving at a corner, you are going to be shown a picture of the corner that is coming up in the same way we showed the distance last time. To allow you to learn from the corners and perfect your entry, the same corner will appear three times, one after another.

Treat the first time as you learning the corner, the second time as you practicing your idea of how it could be taken, and the third time as you actually taking it with everything on the line to lose as little time as possible before getting out of the corner. The types of corners will be random, and this is what the first level of this stage is going to be. We will slowly increase the number of corners needed to be taken at once until we reach a whole track’s amount of corners that will test your memory and ability to come up with a racing line and more.”

“Understood,” was the only response that came from Fatih’s radio as the task was now loaded and the first corner was already coming at him.

……

“Isn’t the test way too comprehensive if they are going to be teaching me everything again?” Fatih, who was completely unaware that he was in a back-and-forth fight for pride over a misunderstanding, found himself in a misunderstanding as well, as he thought this was all a test and not the actual start of his simulation training.

In his mind, this was the same as what he had had to do when he joined RFM in his first year, in order for them to gauge the level of his ability and come up with a training plan based on it.

Apollo, who found some discrepancy in the way Fatih was thinking when compared to the abruptness of the next levels coming along with no warning being given for the new level beforehand, didn’t bother to say anything to Fatih, as he found no need to even bring it up since it really made no difference.

He enjoyed seeing Fatih applying in real time everything that he had learned in the simulation and adjusting everything to apply to the real-world situation, and not limiting himself to the theory-driven set of actions.

Despite being aware of Fatih’s abilities, he still enjoyed watching them in action, even more so in a senses-limited aspect where he was put in a situation where he had to push a single sense to its limit as he logged real-time rapid adjustments to his visual side of his senses, leaving behind the adjustments on his other senses, which he expected would undergo similar rapid developments when he sat in the real car.

Fatih, on the other hand, was fully focused on the track as his first corner, a right-hander ninety-degree turn, was approaching at sixth gear.

He immediately moved to the leftmost side of the track before braking heavily as he went down the gears to first, before turning while still trail-braking. But things didn’t go as smoothly as he expected, as the engine braking in first gear was very violent, which had started from the moment he downshifted from second to first while braking, as the RPM spiked towards the limiter, creating a massive drag on the rear wheels.

The high engine braking also caused rear-axle locking, and in the mid-engine F4 car, it caused the rear to snap around before he reached the apex, causing Fatih to immediately counter-steer to avoid spinning.

The problems didn’t stop there, as he found the car bouncing off the rev limiter before even finishing the turn, disrupting the car’s balance. The problems followed him on the corner exit as well, as the rear wheels spun due to the torque multiplication in first gear being too high for the narrow F4 rear tires just as he applied the throttle, forcing Fatih to shift to second while still having steering lock, which still unsettled the car’s traction.

But he didn’t look unsettled at all as he adjusted the car on the following straight, knowing that the same corner was coming. This time, as he reached the braking zone, he followed the same braking process but instead of going to first, he stopped at third gear before turning the car for the corner, wanting to use the momentum approach this time, which once again backfired due to the power delivery of the F4 turbo engine, finding himself with different problems across the entire cornering process.

On corner entry, because of the engine’s low RPM in third gear, there was little engine braking, which led to the nose tucking into the corner, lacking, and the car feeling lazy, which induced understeer, pushing the car wide. Fatih himself felt like he was floating through the corner rather than being in total control of the car’s pitch and yaw.

In the mid-corner, the engine experienced turbo lag as it dropped below the power band for the turbo to be fully pressurized, as the 1.6L engines needed to stay at high RPMs to maintain boost.

On the corner exit, he found himself with the engine bogging down, as it sounded flat and accelerated slowly when he hit the throttle, taking several seconds for the turbo to spool up and the car to begin accelerating properly.

Once back on the long straight, he once again restarted the process of moving up the gears to the max as the same corner approached him for the third time. He once again moved to the leftmost part of the track, braked heavily, before downshifting to second gear before taking the corner while still trail-braking.

This time, unlike the previous two, the car remained tucked in as it accepted his inputs gracefully, following his directions. He aimed for a late apex to allow him to straighten the car earlier, and the moment the car pointed toward the corner exit, he started applying the throttle smoothly. Because he had aimed for a late apex, he reached full throttle earlier, allowing him to have a high exit speed, taking the corner perfectly.

“Good use of resources,” Apollo said to himself as he watched Fatih deliberately choosing a non-optimal gear when his instinct already knew what the most optimal one was.

He was doing this deliberately so that he understood why that was the most optimal gear to go with, while also knowing how the car would act if taken through the corner in those other gears. He had previously repeatedly been told that he would learn more from mistakes than from doing everything right the first time, since he would understand why the right option is right, along with knowing why the wrong ones are wrong too.

And his actions and the reasons behind them didn’t skip those watching from the other side of the screen. Although at first, they thought he was just learning things, by the fifth corner, when the process remained the same, they realized what his intentions most likely were, and their guess wasn’t far from the actual truth. With this discovery, the one who was hit the most was Emanuel, as he felt goosebumps across his entire body as he repeated the same line he had previously said: “He is a monster.”