Formula 1: The GOAT

“I call this the Fatih Session One, because I don’t think this is a free practice anymore. For the past thirty minutes, I’m pretty sure we have been seeing Fatih for at least twenty of them,” Brad said, his tone sounding as if his brain was already saturated with the emotions of surprise he had been feeling from the start.

“He is the most interesting part of the session, considering that even with continuously pushing the car and having to overtake cars that are moving slowly or are badly positioned, he still retained the same delta time, plus or minus thirty points. This proves that he can push it more, but he is sustaining it within this window because that is where he is confident he can consistently maintain it for an entire session.

He has already exceeded a race distance and ten minutes more, and there is no sign of the pace reducing, so it looks like it is going to be a nightmare for everyone else because even the closest driver to his lap time is still two-tenths behind him,” Justin broke down for the casual viewers.

“I think this is him venting his anger out,” Brad said, revealing one of his new conclusions he had come up with when he tried to see if there might be a reason as to why he was revealing such pace so early.

“Why so?”

“Why was the penalty given?”

“Because he was still underage when he raced.”

“And what was the argument for why the minimum age was placed?”

“Because they consider people below the threshold age are not yet ready, and they will be dangerous on the track.”

“So you are saying this is him venting and showing that he had the pace, and the rules need to be flexible to accommodate talent?”

“I know it is a stretch, but it aligns well with how he is driving.”

“I mean, until he answers, any assumption from our side is one of the possible reasons. But isn’t his pace, consistently about two-tenths above the rest, raising eyebrows from the Technical Delegate?” Justin asked a question that would have been in the minds of anyone who still remembered that this was a spec race where every component was homologated, and even the engines were equalized to only be within a few percentages of each other.

………..

{Are we sure everything is fine?} James asked again on the team radio with the data team.

{Yes, we made no changes to the engine mapping, and the chassis itself hasn’t been touched at all,} a response came from one of the performance engineers behind the paddock who were responsible for monitoring everything performance-related across all three of their cars.

{Prepare all of the data ahead of time. The other teams are definitely already complaining about it, so we’d better have the data ready so that we can save as much time as possible. Tell the mechanics that we might need to be ready for a fast engine change if they decide that they want to take the engine for deep scrutineering,} James said, as he knew it was going to come.

It sounded unfair that a driver who was performing above average was going to be investigated under suspicion of cheating. Depending on how long their scrutineering took, it might take the mechanics hours before the car could be ready to return to the track for the next session. But this being a spec series made any outlier performance shine bright like a beacon, and to remove any suspicion, it was something that needed to be done.

It wasn’t going to sound good to Fatih, who had been having problem after problem every time he started a session. He was now thinking how he was even going to make Fatih understand that he wasn’t being targeted, but that his performance being too good was the reason he was experiencing this.

“At least there are a few hours between the free practice sessions,” he said to himself before he returned to focusing on Fatih’s telemetry. A machine of consistency, that is what he could describe what Fatih was doing, as his telemetry traces between one lap and another were almost identical, other than the few times where he was impeded and needed to push more in the coming sections in order to keep up the same lap times. The rest was like someone had copied and pasted the telemetry traces again and again.

“No one is going to bring up Patrik again,” James said as he chuckled. Some people had been talking about why they were removing a driver who was performing well when Fatih could just spend the rest of the year practicing and return next year, but the performance in a single free practice was already enough to shut all of them down and never bring it up.

While in the middle of his thoughts, a red flag notification appeared in front of him before the live feed cut to show a car with its rear tire already disconnected and the track littered with carbon fiber pieces.

It immediately went to replay to show a driver going through the chicane that many people drove through like a straight, but which had obstacles that required precision in order to take it flat out. The driver on the screen just clipped the barrier with his rear tire, dislodging it and sending everything flying everywhere, while he was sent off the track into the grass.

………..

“I think that is the end of the free practice because it is going to take more than twenty minutes to clean that up, and time isn’t stopped during a red flag in free practice sessions,” Brad said after the replay that showed different angles of the accident happening one after another before the feed returned to Fatih, who was now driving slowly as he came out of the final hairpin before entering the pit lane.

“Ah, I’m pretty sure Hankook, the tire producers, are breathing a sigh of relief that those tires are going to finally get a breather because I think they were being pushed more than they ever took into consideration during production,” Justin said as Fatih’s car was raised by the mechanics into the garage before he immediately got off, showing that he too thought the same, that the session was not going to continue.

But just as the camera was about to continue focusing on Fatih, it zoomed out and panned to the right, showing people with FIA lanyards holding clipboards with the FIA logo on them.

“Ahhh, that car is going to suffer today, and I feel for the mechanics who will have to put it back together before the second free practice session,” Brad said in an amused tone as he imagined the mountain of work that was waiting for them.

“I hope the repair doesn’t take until the start of the second free practice, or I’m sure he will never have a positive outlook on the British F4 championship again, because for every weekend he participated until now, every time he has been met with a problem not of his making,” Justin said as the feed showed covers being moved to cover the front of Fatih’s garage, meaning the scrutineering was going to be extensive.