Formula 1: The GOAT

“Ooooooh, so that’s why you were jabbing the brake for a moment here to load the front! It seems disadvantageous for the corner entry, but by the time you’re out of the corner, the gains exceed the initial losses. Wow.”

“When looking at your telemetry, I was wondering why you braked there. Hahahaha,” Dennis laughed when he realized how something trivial Fatih had done on a certain corner, almost missed by the telemetry sensors, had allowed him to gain less than a tenth. When compounded by other small things he did elsewhere on the track, it ended with Fatih taking pole position by more than a second from the second-closest driver.

After asking a few more questions, which Fatih answered in detail, Dennis finally bid him farewell and left the small room.

“I was looking for you everywhere. So this is where you have been,” Dennis heard his race engineer’s voice behind him just as he closed the door.

“Yeah, had a few questions I wanted answers to,” Dennis said while raising the tablet, which was enough for Calvin, his race engineer, to understand what it meant.

“And he answered them?” Calvin asked, curious about the outcome of Dennis’s attempt to get the other driver to divulge the secret to his absurd pace.

“Yes, and it was quite eye-opening.”

“Wait, he answered your questions?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t he worried that you are going to improve your pace and challenge him?”

Just as Dennis was about to answer, Fatih opened the door and came out carrying a backpack with a helmet in his hand. He waved and bid farewell as he passed between them, heading downstairs to where Alex was waiting for him.

“Does he look like someone who would be worried about that? Rather, I’m sure he would welcome the challenge. Plus, we share telemetry data anyway, so one way or another, I would be able to understand it. He might as well be helpful. At least, that’s how I would think if I were in his place.”

“Your thinking is wrong. He can afford to sour the relationship between him and the other drivers because any of the potential negative outcomes are trivial to him,” Calvin said while chuckling at how much power Fatih had in the current situation. Other drivers agreed to share telemetry between teammates either because it was team policy or because it allowed them to peek into their teammate’s insights and improve where they were lacking.

However, for Fatih, it was a one-way relationship where his data was being used and checked extensively by the other two drivers while he operated as if he were the only driver in the team, with no need to access anyone else’s data. This had been a trend since the training period, where the other drivers would try to gain insight into Fatih’s reasoning, while Fatih only parsed the other drivers’ data to understand their driving styles, which he had put to use to torment the other two during their training sessions.

“But the challenge part, that I can agree with,” Calvin added as they started heading to the parking lot to go back to the hotel. Unlike Fatih, they didn’t have any media shoots.

……..

“…Fatih is starting in P8. This is going to be his first time in F4 where he has to carve through the crowd if he wants to win this race like he did yesterday,” Brad said as the cars left the pit lane and headed onto the track to start the warm-up lap for Race II.

“If we use his karting history as a means of understanding how he is going to be on the track when battling, then we are in for a real treat, because in karting he was a menace in wheel-to-wheel battles,” Justin said as the feed changed to Fatih’s T-cam while he was swerving left and right to put as much heat into the tires as possible.

“I remember reading an anecdote from a few of the drivers who had the opportunity to go head-to-head with him, and what most of them said is that they felt like they were battling against themselves due to how he adapts his driving style to match theirs. If that is true, then we are going to see a very interesting race today.”

At the same time, Fatih was just exiting the final hairpin and entering the start-finish straight. He slowed down to create a small gap before aggressively accelerating to scrub the tires of any debris, weaving left and right before the final push to his grid position, where he angled the car inward aggressively.

“That is very aggressive positioning from Fatih,” Brad said just as the camera started panning out, showing the drivers at the rear of the grid still exiting the hairpin, which would take them a few seconds to reach their grid positions. “That is not something those in the front row are going to appreciate. They are losing temperature in their tires with each passing second.”

……..

Fatih tore off one of the visor tear-offs, removing the small particles that had landed on it during the formation lap and storing it inside the cockpit before fully focusing on the starting lights.

The moment the first red light lit up, he immediately engaged the clutch and started revving the engine. One by one, the lights illuminated. He reached the optimum RPM a few moments before the fifth light came on, and when they all went out instantly, he immediately released the clutch to the halfway point. As the car started moving, he fully released it once he gained full traction.

Due to how he angled his car and his very fast start that caught a few drivers at the front off guard, Fatih threaded through the middle, between the two cars in front of him. He was forced to lift slightly as the gap closed, immediately moving to the right side of the track as the entire field barreled down the straight in the midst of the chaotic start.