How Did I Become an F1 Driver?

Chapter 1350: Chapter 508: Beginning Contract Negotiations (Part 2)

Meanwhile, on the other side, Mercedes unsurprisingly found out that Ferrari was getting in touch with Qin Miao’s management team.

After hearing this news, the Mercedes team held an emergency internal meeting for half an hour, then rolled out a new negotiation strategy, bumping Qin Miao’s original 20 million US Dollar salary offer up to 30 million.

Strictly speaking, with Qin Miao’s current market value, that kind of money is what he deserves, but since he doesn’t do commercial events, Mercedes had a reasonable excuse to cut his pay.

But with Ferrari jumping in and stirring things up, if Mercedes didn’t want to let Qin Miao go, they had no choice but to raise his salary.

Of course, for now Qin Miao’s management team is only talking about cooperation with these two teams. As for the others, either they’re offering too little, or they won’t accept Qin Miao’s conditions, or in some cases they agree to both the money and the terms, but they simply can’t give him a car that can reach the very top step of the podium.

...

Still, all that blood-in-the-water business negotiating had little to do with Qin Miao himself. Over this stretch of time his routine went back to normal.

Training, going to work at the team, running back and forth between home and the factory.

And finally, on February 19th, Mercedes unveiled their W14 challenger for the new season.

After not seeing each other for the whole winter, Qin Miao and Hamilton reunited at Mercedes’ Brackley headquarters.

Standing together on stage at the launch event for the new car.

The livery was still predominantly black, with the blue stripes of title sponsor Petronas as accents; standard Mercedes zero-sidepod design philosophy. At this point you don’t even need to look at the paint job—this being the second year of the ground-effect era, basically one glance at the sidepod is enough to tell which team’s car it is.

Over this winter break, freed from the shackles of the budget cap, the Mercedes engineers took all the PPTs they’d piled up toward the end of ’22 and just yanked the ideas straight out, dumping them wholesale onto the W14.

The upside was, in the wind tunnel simulations the W14 showed improvements across the board compared to the W13B. Acceleration, top speed, and cornering G-force in slow, medium, and high-speed turns all saw pleasing gains.

Of course, when you cram so many new things onto the car without fine-tuning, there are naturally plenty of downsides.

First off, the car ended up a bit overweight.

Compared to last season’s W13B, which just hit the FIA minimum weight limit, this year’s W14 is 20 kg heavier than last year’s car.

That puts a lot of pressure on the two drivers’ body weight.

Thankfully that’s an easy fix; the team will gradually start optimizing each component of the car—there are still plenty of areas where they can shave weight.

It’s just that for the first few races of the season, the two drivers will have to keep a tighter rein on their weight.

The other issue is the car’s balance.

Because they bolted on so many new things, a car that used to be reasonably well-balanced is now getting a bit front-heavy and light at the rear.

But that’s also easy to sort out; once they’ve solved the first problem, they can pretty much fix this one along the way.

So you could say the W14 was already primed and only waiting for that final moment when it would roll onto the track.

And during this period, Qin Miao also received a piece of good news—at least for him.

The movie The Wandering Earth 2, which he both invested in and acted in, was about to finish its theatrical run.

The total box office so far was 4.59 billion, making it the box office champion of the 2023 Spring Festival season.

Of course, for Qin Miao there was another layer of meaning to that.

Which was: The Wandering Earth 2 had made a killing, and as one of the investors, Qin Miao naturally cashed in big time.

While chatting idly on the phone with his wife, Qimeng roughly calculated the income from this very first investment of Qin Miao’s career.

About 100 million.

Right then Qin Miao felt that, damn, doing investments seems more profitable than driving!

Even if that 100 million isn’t much to Qin Miao at this point, investment is all about return ratios.

Qin Miao’s ROI this time hit a crazy 2.5x—the kind of number that makes capitalists die for.

It was really a huge success.

After this little interlude, the winter break was basically over, and time rolled around to February 23rd.

The start of winter testing in Bahrain.

Normally, before the Bahrain test, almost every team would head to the Catalonia circuit in Barcelona, Spain for winter testing.

Because the Catalonia circuit is widely recognized by all teams and drivers as the most balanced track; pretty much every performance parameter of your car can be tested there.

The track is just too well-rounded.

As for why this season’s test wasn’t held in Catalonia...

It’s mainly because Bahrain’s organizers offered way too much money.

The Middle East oil tycoons are just too rich, and with the season opener being in Bahrain anyway, they might as well treat it as a warm-up before the actual race.

On the Mercedes side, the W14 obviously wasn’t in its final form for winter testing. At this point, every other team was watching Mercedes like prison guards, so whipping out the fully developed car now would basically be asking for trouble.

So winter testing was mainly about running in the package and pushing the car to its limits to test internal system reliability. As for the exterior... as long as it works, that’s enough.

And for all of this, Qin Miao was already a seasoned pro.

Still, on the first day of winter testing he couldn’t help wandering over to the new Lynk & Co Team’s garage to check out the buzz.

In fact, Lynk & Co’s car this season was just the original AT04 from the junior Red Bull team, with the main change being the livery switching from white to black-and-gold.

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