Formula 1: The GOAT

“The good news or the bad news first?” the doctor in the medical center asked while holding the medical files from the thirty-minute tests that had been done on Fatih.

“The bad news first,” Fatih said, clenching his left hand into a fist before wincing and being forced to open it again from the pain.

“How pessimistic of you,” the doctor said, looking up from the documents at Fatih.

“It’s like drinking bitter medicine and then having juice afterward. The good news is the palate cleanser for me,” Fatih explained, noticing the doctor’s expression.

“Well, it is up to me, and I will go with the good news first, which is that your left hand has a sprain.”

“How is that good news?” Fatih asked, wondering if he had misheard or misunderstood something.

“Well, with a crash like yours, only ending up with a sprain is as good as news could get.”

“What is the bad news?” Alex, who was next to Fatih, couldn’t wait for the two to continue their back-and-forth and asked.

“The bad news is that it takes three weeks on average to be completely healed and avoid further complications.”

And he was right; it only got worse from there. British F4 operates on a two-week buffer between race weekends, and although that was good news for Fatih, it was still a week short of when he would be considered ready to hop back in the car.

“Can’t we accelerate the healing process with intense physical therapy?” Alex asked, trying to find a way for the injury clearance to fit that two-week window.

“I’ve just started my A-level studies, so I can’t be away from school for that long,” Fatih said immediately, wanting to give Alex context before he made any plans Fatih couldn’t realistically follow.

“Ah, there is that,” he said, slapping his forehead in realization.

The doctor looked at the two of them before he answered Alex’s question. “If he does intensive physiotherapy, it can be accelerated. The three weeks I mentioned are just an average; it could be faster or longer depending on the individual. It should be enough for him to pass the recertification test and be approved to race on the final weekend. However, I don’t suggest you do that, because another accident like that could make the situation much worse.”

Due to the injury’s scale, they were required to declare it to the Championship Stewards and the Chief Medical Officer. This meant Fatih would be ineligible to race until he re-passed the Extrication Test, getting out of the cockpit within seven to ten seconds, to prove he had healed.

Their conversation continued for a short moment before Fatih was cleared to leave the medical center, as nothing abnormal was discovered other than the sprain. By then, the race had already ended, so vehicles had a bit more freedom to move, and they waited for the team to come and pick them up.

“I have been curious, what are the subjects you are taking in your A-levels?” Alex asked as he adjusted the arm sling that was supporting Fatih’s left hand, which had a compression sleeve.

“Mathematics, Further Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry,” Fatih said casually, but those subjects caused Alex to flinch and look back at him in disbelief.

“Four?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“To take Further Mathematics, you need at least a Grade 8 in GCSE Maths, and you are telling me you got that?” Alex asked in disbelief, having a hard time believing what Fatih had achieved despite spending most of his days either on the track or exercising to prepare for it.

“Yes, and I got a Grade 9,” Fatih said with a teasing smile on his face.

“Get out of here,” Alex said as he dismissed what Fatih was saying as teasing and not the truth.

“Want to bet on it?” Fatih asked with a mischievous smile.

“What’s in it for me?”

“You accept my mom’s offer, and if I’m lying, you get 10k pounds. Is that fair?”

“Deal,” Alex said, knowing clearly that even if Fatih was just bluffing, he was not going to take the money anyway.

Fatih took out the phone that Alex had brought with him and went to the gallery to show him his GCSE results that had come out on the 23rd of August.

“…..” Alex became speechless when he saw the results in the picture.

[Mathematics: Grade 9, Physics: Grade 9, Chemistry: Grade 9, Biology: Grade 9, English Language: Grade 9, English Literature: Grade 9, Design & Technology: Grade 9, German: Grade 9, Spanish: Grade 9, Italian: Grade 9, Turkish: Grade 9, Arabic: Grade 9, French: Grade 9]

In front of him was an unbelievable sight: a clean sweep of results where Fatih got the highest grade in all of the subjects he entered, despite having entered more subjects than a normal person would by a large margin, as the average was eight GCSE subjects. Getting Grade 9 results didn’t mean he got a perfect score, as some of the subjects could have been low or high Grade 9s, but the results didn’t differentiate that and only gave a single grade from 1 to 9.

Alex started looking up at Fatih, then back at the picture, back and forth, before he asked, “You’re saying you are one of the less than eight hundred students who got a clean sweep?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t I hear any news or articles about it? Or did they come out, and I just haven’t heard about them? But that should be impossible because someone from Red Bull should have heard, and it would have reached me,” Alex asked and answered his own question as he brought forward possible reasons why he hadn’t heard before shooting them down with his own counter-reasoning.

“To get into the news, I would need to be the one to call them, or the school would have to do it for me, but since I entered as a private student, that offered a buffer.”

“But isn’t it good publicity for you?” Alex asked. He knew that Fatih definitely knew the importance of exposure for any driver, as the more exposure he had, the better offers he would get.

“I already have enough, and there is really no need to actively go out of my way to make this known,” he answered calmly.

“Then what about them?” Alex said as he pointed at the docuseries videographer who was recording all of this.

“I’m not going out of the way to hide it either,” Fatih said, shrugging, as he had already gotten used to their constant presence.

“I think you are better served as an engineer, not a driver,” Alex said as he looked back at the results again.

“I love driving,” Fatih said before pausing for a moment and adding, “Plus, who says I can’t be both?”

There was a short moment of silence between the two before Alex, holding his forehead, said, “Now you are making it difficult.”

“For what?”

“To suggest you specialize and focus on a single thing.”

Alex had initially planned to advise Fatih to take some time off school to focus on intense physiotherapy and heal to go back and win the championship, as the chance was still there. But the realization that Fatih was not just a good driver but also a very good student, a genius, even, made that advice moot. He was performing extraordinarily on both sides, and although winning the F4 season would be good for his career, not winning it was not going to harm him at all.