Formula 1: The GOAT

The meeting with Helmut lasted only five minutes as he gently encouraged Fatih to keep giving his all while also constantly and subtly reminding him that the people on top, who could decide his motorsport career, were watching. People from other teams were also doing the same, wanting to see if their mistake of missing him while he was still in karting was a strategic miss or if they were confident he couldn’t succeed in higher categories of motorsports.

Fatih just remained himself, speaking what his mind told him without trying to humor Helmut or follow his direction, which at times tripped up Helmut, who just shrugged it off as Fatih being a child and not yet knowing how to go with the flow.

But just as Fatih was about to leave, Helmut called for him as if he had just remembered something important at the last minute. “There will be new guests joining and moving along with you.”

“Are they also training to move to F4?” Fatih asked, surprised by the last-minute update since there had been no indications of it at all.

“No, they are people you already have a very close relationship with,” Helmut said with a slight smile. When Fatih didn’t bother to guess who those people were, he lost interest and decided to just reveal it directly, as all the fun was gone. “The team that shot your karting docuseries is coming to shoot your F4 docuseries. They have just finalized the contract with the Red Bull Driver Academy.”

“When are they coming?” Fatih asked, not bothering to try and learn why they were coming, since it was very obvious.

“Today or tomorrow at the latest. After all, they seemed eager to get the behind-the-scenes footage of the transition training. But why aren’t you surprised?”

“The producer told me that they are working on something, but I didn’t expect it to be this,” Fatih said before nodding and resuming his walk to the door.

Helmut didn’t add anything and just watched as Fatih walked to the door silently. He was trying to come up with an answer to the questions that had started brewing in his mind since the start of the meeting.

From the beginning, he was slowly unsettled by how calmly Fatih took things happening around him. Starting with the blatant displeasure shown by some of the people in the meeting room, he seemed to have not cared about them. Even if he had missed that, he wouldn’t have missed their reaction to the plan being pulled forward, which had pushed some of their displeasure more outward since their workload had just been increased. He had even used his last card to elicit a reaction from him by revealing that he would be under cameras for the entire training period.

For anyone in the sport, they would know the training period is when they will be at their worst since they will be learning everything about the car from scratch, making them look bad from the start, which many drivers wouldn’t want to have immortalized. If forced to go through with it, they would be under immense pressure to not make mistakes, which in itself was one of the reasons he had accepted their offer. But it seemed like all of it was for naught, and it wasn’t funny.

Slowly and without realizing it, the direction of things he had in mind for Fatih started skewing in a different direction from his initial genuine plans of just seeing how he performed under pressure, to now subtly wanting to see him in that situation. But that part was yet to grow to a level where he would actually do something about it directly, as even to him, that feeling felt like nothing but the same feeling when something you planned didn’t work out well.

……..

“Isn’t he making it too obvious?” Apollo said, materializing still in his child angel form, flying around him.

“When something you planned is not going well, you would want to recover by having an even bigger thing go well to cover for both events. Just like in investments, the same way one of the oldest banks in England ended up crashing due to the mistake of a single employee in their Singapore branch, which acted as the domino for the Asian financial crisis in the nineties,” Fatih said with a smile as he walked back to his apartment, finding it amusing.

“Then doesn’t that mean there is a risk that he might diverge from his original intentions and actually become a thorn in your side?” Apollo, who had read those books with him out of curiosity, asked, knowing that if what Fatih was saying was true, then they might have an adversary on their hands instead of someone who just wanted to see how their drivers perform while under pressure.

“He most likely won’t reach that level, but even if he does, it is not a problem for me,” Fatih said without much worry.

“Where is this confidence coming from? Are you confident that Red Bull will side with you if he pushes things too far?”

“Even if they side with him, it is not a problem. I’m pretty sure there are many teams that will welcome me if things go wrong.”

“What about the penalty clause? Are you planning to pay it with your own money? I don’t see anyone taking it for you.”

“Do you think Toto would miss the chance of snatching a talented driver from Christian Horner and Helmut after having already missed Max, who could have helped them create a legacy even after Hamilton leaves? He would be even fiercer to snatch me if an opportunity came because he missed Max, the same way he did for Kimi Antonelli. Many considered his move to be him looking for a Verstappen-like talented driver, and the moment he found one, he jumped on it, making many see it as an overreaction on his part from the fear of losing him to other teams as well,” Fatih said with an amused smile on his face throughout his long-winded reasoning.

“I would have said you are getting ahead of yourself, but it is impossible to argue with someone who comes from the future,” Apollo said, sounding as if he was going to give up.

“Even if that doesn’t happen, I can handle it anyway. Or else, why would I be working hard to make as much as possible despite the talent I was given and the hard work that I’m putting in?”

Even while he was far from home, he was still earning large amounts of money every day from both his YouTube channel, which was dwarfed by his earnings from his subscription website, which had been slowly increasing its number of subscribers while also increasing the fee, raising the amount he earned monthly. The shares he had bought with that money with the help of his mother had also appreciated in value, increasing the amount of money he had. He wasn’t even considering the shares he had in Formula One Management, which he was not planning to sell anytime soon.

“You will buy an F4 seat if none of the others work out?”

“Yes, why not? It’s not like I can’t afford it or something. The only reason I tolerate his antics is because they are not yet affecting me, and the logistical and training convenience they provide is still top-notch. But the moment that isn’t the case, what would be the reason for me to remain with them?”

“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA!” Apollo clutched his stomach as he laughed loudly in amusement, imagining how the two sides were thinking about two very different things to the point that he couldn’t help but laugh as he imagined how trivial and childish the thoughts of the other side appeared to him due to Fatih’s knowledge of these characters’ actions in the future.

Fatih just walked silently back to his apartment, appearing alone to others while he was trying very hard not to react to Apollo’s loud laughter and appear like someone crazy who was laughing alone.

Alex seemed to have been called somewhere because even after looking for him, he had failed to find him where he would have usually expected to see him waiting.

Now back in his room, he picked up the book about investing and resumed where he had previously left off as he sharpened his other blade in preparation for the future.

………

Next Day

“This here is where most of your exercises will be taking place. We call it the Oven, but it is just a temperature-controlled room that allows us to replicate the heat you will be experiencing during a typical race, which starts at around 35 degrees Celsius and goes all the way up to 50 on a particularly hot day. If you just jump into the car without training in such conditions, you will not be able to perform at your max,” Dr. Ernst explained to Fatih, who was standing beside him in a full Red Bull-branded racing kit with his helmet in his hand, fully prepared to start the training.

“We will start at twenty-five degrees, and as you keep riding the bicycle in the room, we will slowly raise the heat until you reach your limit today. Then we will work hard in these two weeks to make sure you are able to endure the cockpit heat on the hottest days. Ah, we will also be asking you random questions to see how your cognitive performance deteriorates with the heat,” Ernst added before he opened the door to the Oven.

“Let’s go and make some bread,” Fatih said, finding it amusing as he entered the room with a trainer who would supervise his training but also react in case things got bad and he fainted. Unlike him, the trainer was wearing just a sports shirt and trousers, looking quite used to this.

“Can I join them? I want to test it for myself,” Alex asked Dr. Ernst.

“Be my guest. Who says no to more bread, right?” Dr. Ernst said, piggybacking on Fatih’s cheesy joke as he found himself laughing. He closed the door and walked to the monitoring side of the room to supervise everything as Fatih was having wires placed on various parts of his body for them to check his live body condition and intervene if they saw something wrong.