Formula 1: The GOAT

While his fans were crushing the website for a chance to see him do his 300km test, Fatih was now back in Italy at the main team’s factory. As a fully-fledged intern, he started attending the meetings and discussions of the engineering team, with a young engineer assigned to show him the ropes.

Normally, an intern would have been given basic, menial tasks to slowly learn, with their tasks increasing with every good result. The situation was slightly different for Fatih due to him being a driver first and an intern second. He was needed in the simulation to help gather data for both the first race simulation and for the improvement of the car.

The basic steps were skipped, and he was immediately given access to the schematics of the front suspension, with a month to fully understand it and propose a modification.

Franz was planning on fully pushing Fatih to understand the car that he would be driving, but he also wanted to be sure that Fatih’s discovery wasn’t something someone else pointed out for him in order to show off or gain something from the team.

He was hoping that Fatih had actual talent on the engineering side, since that would mean they would have someone in the cockpit who could do more than just describe a feeling and require the race engineer to interpret it into engineering lingo, a process which sometimes led to a loss in translation.

With Fatih, he would be able to directly discuss what he was feeling, what he thought might be the causes based on how the problem was triggered, and even help come up with a temporary or permanent solution. But for now, he was still skeptical.

.....

"Don’t you feel nervous?" Yuki asked as they waited for the media setup to be done. They had chosen to pre-shoot as many of their media obligations ahead of time so they would have as few of them as possible during the season. The team also allowed it because it looked like there was a very big chance that he was going to be demoted to reserve driver, so having everything recorded ahead of time gave them material to use that the then-reserve driver might not be open to shooting.

The news regarding the expected public testing had already reached all the way here, and some had even wondered if the AlphaTauri engineers were going to be the ones heading for this test during a weekend when they would have been at the factory preparing for the Monaco GP. Things calmed down a little bit after management reassured them that Red Bull’s heritage division was the one that would be responsible for fielding and preparing the cars for the test weekend.

Fatih, the center of it all, kept getting looks when he arrived at the factory the following day, but for him, who was used to attention, this was nothing problematic at all as he continued working as usual.

"Not really, I’m used to racing in front of many people since F4," Fatih said as he swiped on the tablet to move to the next picture that contained complicated schematics and a breakdown of the designs.

"But this time you will be the only one on the track, and everyone will be there just for you," Yuki said, reminding him that on a race weekend, the crowd was mostly there for the main championship, and the series they were racing in was just a feeder series, so not many people knew them or had their attention on them other than for passing time.

"Not worried much since I will be inside the car focusing on the track and not who is in the grandstand. I just hope the weather cooperates," Fatih said calmly.

Yuki, speechless at the answer, looked at him as if he was wondering if Fatih was just playing mind games with him or if he was really serious, but he couldn’t do that for too long as he was finally called into the studio to start his recording.

Fatih, now left alone, fully focused on the images in front of him, as he had to deliver a report to Thomas before the end of the day.

Thanks to his additional role, he didn’t end up staying idle, not knowing what to do until he became an active driver. But the same story couldn’t be said for him at night.

....

"Let’s increase the sensitivity by five points," he said the moment he entered the simulation after returning to the hotel after a full day of hard work.

"Well, your wish is my command," Apollo said before Fatih was teleported into his AlphaTauri F1 car.

"What run are we doing?" he asked Apollo after he was done adjusting himself to the seating.

He chose the conditions while Apollo chose what he was to do for the sessions. This was the arrangement they had ended up with when Fatih pleaded to not have to physically do the setup changes, since they would lose him too much precious simulation time. In return, Apollo gained the freedom of choosing any scenario he wanted on the track of his choosing for the first two hours of the session, with the remaining two hours being the time where he could choose the track and conditions on his own.

"Starting today and until you manage to perfectly do it, all of my first two hours will be about you trying to get through Monaco GP Q2 and enter Q3 using nothing but medium tires," Apollo said with a proud smile on his face. The benchmark time they were going to be using would be the same one that actually happened in his previous life in the 2021 Monaco Grand Prix qualifying.

Despite the rule that forced drivers who qualified in the top ten to start the race with the same tire they used to get through Q2, and for Monaco, no one had used mediums to get through Q2 due to how close it was, but also due to the tire delta between the compounds being nearly 0.8 seconds slower than the softs.

Although he knew their car was competitive, he needed to do something to find enough time from it to get through Q2 and enter Q3, and the only avenue he could do that was through setup.

"Sometimes I wonder if I’m just dreaming everything and you were brought here to torture me," Fatih said as he shook his head, knowing how difficult of a task it was going to be. He was confident it was not going to take two hours to come up with a setup improvement and fine-tuning to do it now, at least not with the current problems the registered car still had.

But although he complained, he still closed his visor and left the pit with his brand new medium tires, heading onto the track because he knew that if he managed to do it, even after an entire month of hard work, it was going to be a game-changer for him in Monaco and might even allow him to go for a race win in his debut due to the tire delta.

And who was he to deny the chance of making history?

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