Formula 1: The GOAT

{How does the car feel?} James asked Fatih on the radio as he drove a cooldown lap following a rapid push lap that had pushed him into P3 before he was soon dropped to P4 following Perez’s rapid lap.

{"It feels great. A few adjustments and it will be like I asked,"} Fatih said as he entered the tunnel, making sure to be as far from the racing line as possible to not block anyone on a push lap.

{One more push lap before we box for changes,} James said in response before immediately informing him that Verstappen was coming his way on a push lap a few seconds behind him.

A few seconds later, Verstappen went past him, but instead of continuing his slow drive, he rapidly accelerated, chasing Verstappen and trying to remain in his dirty air. Verstappen, who was already up to speed, had opened quite a gap, but Fatih wasn’t worried about that at all, as he was fully focused on feeling how the car was reacting to these unstable conditions in its current setup and if it was similar to what he was experiencing when behind Apollo.

"Good," he said with a smile on his face when the feeling was exactly the same as he had experienced, and the slight difference he could differentiate was all correlated to the different aero design of the car compared to the AlphaTauri that Apollo was driving ahead of him.

At the end of this lap, he started his second push lap on the set of softs he had started with, investing a large portion of his focus on feeling the car instead of focusing on the track, which in Monaco would have been a guaranteed accident. But for someone who had driven this track thousands of times, he could drive it blind, but he still retained a portion of his focus on that.

.......

"He fails to improve on the blistering lap that still keeps him in P4, as he is now being called into the pit lane to make some changes. I keep wondering what the heck they did to his car for him to improve this aggressively and remain this competitive over just a few days.

Surprisingly, the rookie, in his third free practice session, is beating his senior teammate, and although it might be a difference in plans for FP3, this isn’t normal at all. What do you think, Martin?" David Croft, who looked to have gone all-in on the "focus on Fatih" train, asked Brundle, who, unlike in FP2 where he was on the track with a camera, had finally returned to the commentary box.

"It is very difficult to imagine someone being that good on his debut, but what we are seeing is not imagination either, so I’m inclined to believe that they are on different setups and plans, and we should see the real pace between the two of them and their overall pace in the upcoming qualifying session," Brundle said. As someone who had been an F1 driver, he was very cautious about simply believing that Fatih was faster than Gasly when the circumstances didn’t support that.

"I would agree with you if not for the pace we are seeing from Fatih being already faster than any lap that Gasly had driven in both FP1 and FP2, so the argument that a difference in plan doesn’t make sense to be run for the entire three sessions?" Croft asked, having gone through the notes he had written on Thursday.

"If we rely on that, then there isn’t really any explanation for that, but to err on the side of caution, I would wait until the final ten minutes of this session to know the pace of the drivers, unless he and some other drivers are sandbagging."

"And he is getting out again with brand new softs! How many of them has he used already?" Croft said this the moment the camera showed Fatih once again leaving the garage to rejoin the track with brand-new soft tires, bringing the topic up.

"This is his fifth soft of the weekend from his eight allocated soft compounds. He used one in FP1, two in FP2, and this is the second soft compound he is using in FP3. With more than forty minutes on the clock, he is definitely not going to go with them to the end of the session, considering the final qualifying simulation will require another set of softs if he is going to participate in it, bringing the total set that he is going to use up to six by the end of this session," Jenson Button said, coming in with an answer regarding that, pausing for a moment before he continued.

"And considering you have to return two compounds after every session, and even if he returned one hard and one soft in FP2 out of the two softs and one hard that they used, and if he returns two softs in this session, it brings a total of six used softs, leaving only two new sets of soft tires remaining.

One of them is required by the FIA to be sealed to only be used for Q3, so they will have a single new soft tire set and two used soft sets to be used for Q1 and Q2 before they can have a brand new one.

So it seems like they are sacrificing track position to give him as much experience as possible, or maybe he is not going to use the final soft set like we thought and use another compound and not participate in the qualifying practice at the end of FP3 to retain three new sets of soft and use two for Q1 and Q2."

"Is this the right direction, Martin? Or are they giving up this weekend?" Croft directed the question to Martin Brundle.

"Well, they might have confidence that he can get through Q1 with a used set, or else such a gamble wouldn’t make sense. At least, I’m thinking that is what they had in mind, but unless they say it outright, we won’t really know what their plan is until qualifying is over."

As the commentators speculated, Fatih started his blistering qualifying lap, and with the track having undergone a large amount of track evolution and tires in perfect condition, he was aiming to top the timing tower.

.....

"Is it okay for us to do it this way?" one of the engineers on the pit wall asked Marco Perrone, the head of strategy at AlphaTauri, as Fatih started his push lap upon finding himself in a nice gap.

"What do you mean?" Marco asked as if he didn’t understand what the engineer was talking about.

"Sending him on a new compound now and sending him out with a scrubbed compound on the final qualifying simulations? Wouldn’t it make sense if he used a scrubbed compound now and used the new ones later?" Contrary to what the commentators imagined, AlphaTauri was not planning on using three new soft tires in FP3, but only two new softs and one used soft one from FP2, outside the ones they already returned to the FIA.

As for why they were going to be using the used soft on the final part of qualifying and a new one in the middle of the FP3 session, the answer was quite direct. "The possibilities of him being interrupted and forced to abort his push laps during that period are too many, and we need him to have as many push laps without interruption as possible, so we are doing it now when not everyone is pushing.

As for traffic management, he can experience it without needing new softs to do that on the final stint," Marco said with a smile on his face, quite proud of the idea they had come up with to extract as much experience from the tires as possible without risking losing any of them to interruption when everyone was attempting to go for a qualifying simulation.

"Won’t the poor performance in that period kill the confidence he builds now?"

"Do you think so?" Marco said, but this time without turning his head, as Fatih had just finished his lap. For the second time in the weekend, he had moved to the top of the timing tower, having set a blistering lap time that was two-tenths faster than what Leclerc had driven, which caused quite some reaction from anyone watching as it looked like it came out of nowhere.

The first time he moved to the top of the timing tower was in FP2 when he started with softs while everyone else started on either mediums or hards, making it explainable as the softs were faster by more than half a second compared to the harder compound. But now he had gone to the top of the table despite other drivers being on soft compounds as well, meaning it was done through pure pace and, at most, a low-fuel run.

"That should be enough to give him confidence for the rest of the weekend," he added as he remained looking at the screen, noting that to be the exact reason they sent him on a low-fuel and full qualifying trim now and not at the later part of the session: maximum confidence building. From the reactions they were seeing, it was definitely going to work; at least that was their plan.

But did fate have the same plan for them?

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