Chapter 1

Del

SAKHIR, BAHRAIN — PRE-SEASON TESTING, DAY SIX

Nine hours before they announced my name, the man I’d been hired to sack sat down two stools away and explained to me, very kindly, exactly why sacking him was the right call.

The hospitality suite had been decorated by someone who’d been given the word desert and a budget. Sand-coloured everything. Rush matting that wasn’t rush. A palm in a pot, dying quietly in the air conditioning, six feet from a man being paid to stand near a fridge.

I’d been in the country nineteen hours and hadn’t told anyone I was in it.

That isn’t a strategy. It’s just what I do. Before I sign anything I go and stand in the room, because rooms tell you things that decks don’t, and the deck I’d been sent in January had four slides about brand heritage and one about a factory I’d never been inside. So I flew in on my own passport, took a hire car nobody had authorised, and spent a day and a half walking the length of a pit lane at a circuit where I had no accreditation and nobody looked at me twice, because there is a particular way of walking that makes people assume you have already been checked.

Nineteen hours. Seven of them at the track. Four in a hotel room doing the thing where you read the same page of a term sheet nine times.

He came in at ten past midnight with wet hair and a plate of the shrimp nobody had touched, sat two stools down, and looked at me the way men look at women in rooms like this. Briefly. Pleasantly. Filed.

“You’re not sleeping either,” he said.

“I don’t sleep before things.”

“Before what things?”

“Most things.”

He ate a shrimp. He had a scar through his left eyebrow that the photographs never catch, and he was shorter than I’d expected, which is true of all of them, and his forearms were doing something I chose not to have an opinion about.

I want to be accurate about this, because I’ve had eight months to be inaccurate about it and I’d like to get one thing down straight.

I knew exactly who he was. I had four hundred pages on him. I had every lap he’d driven for nineteen months broken out by corner phase, and a spreadsheet with a column in it called entry delta that I’d been staring at since November, and a photograph of him from a wet Thursday at Interlagos in a folder on a laptop in a hotel safe eleven kilometres away.

And he had no idea who I was, and I let him not know for four and a half minutes, and I have never once been able to make that sound like an accident.

“You’re here for tomorrow,” he said. “The announcement. The new principal.”

“That’s right.”

“You know what she is.” Not a question. He said it the way you’d read out a weather forecast for somewhere you don’t live. “She’s a spreadsheet in a nice coat. She’s never turned a wheel in anger in her life. She’ll look at nineteen months of data and she’ll cut me, and the thing you have to understand—“

He stopped to move a shrimp tail to the side of the plate. Took his time about it.

“—is that she’ll be right to.”

The air conditioning cycled. The palm did nothing.

There were four other people in that room. A barman polishing a glass he’d already polished. Two men from a tyre supplier at a table by the window who had been talking about a house purchase for forty minutes. And the man near the fridge, who had not moved, and whose job I could not work out and never did.

“You want to say something,” he said.

“No.”

“You do. You have a face like a woman who’s timing something.”

“I’m listening.”

“That’s what I said.” He pushed the plate an inch towards me. I didn’t take anything off it. “Fine. Listen, then. I’m thirty-five. I have two championships and forty-one wins and I haven’t won anything since Zandvoort the year before last, which was nineteen months ago on the fourteenth. Nineteen months and six days, if you want to be precise, and I find that people usually do not.”

“I do.”

“Then you’re the first.” He said it without any weight at all. “I’m a tenth off. Not two. Not five. One tenth, sometimes twelve hundredths, and everybody outside this building thinks that means nothing, and everybody inside it knows it means everything. Over a lap that’s the difference between P4 and P11. Over a season it’s the difference between a man they extend and a man they thank.”

“And you’ve done the arithmetic.”

“I did it a year ago.” He ate another shrimp. “Before anyone. I want that on the record, since we’re doing records. I was the first person in the world to know, and I’ve had twelve months to sit with it, and I promise you there is nothing anybody can say to me about it that I have not already said to myself at four in the morning in a great many hotels.”

The barman put the glass down and picked up another one.

“So she comes in,” he said. “Very good CV. Strategy at Argonne, everyone says she’s the cleverest person in the sport, which is what people say about you when they can’t think of anything they like. She gets handed a team with one asset and a mediocre budget and she looks at me for eight months and then in November she does the only thing the numbers permit. And she’ll be right to. That’s the part nobody believes when I say it. I’m not building a case. I’d fire me.”

“Then why are you still here.”

He turned his head and looked at me properly for the first time.

I have been in a lot of rooms with a lot of men who were about to say something they thought was profound. You can see it arriving. There’s a particular resettling of the shoulders.

He didn’t do it.

“Because I said I would be,” he said, and drank about a third of a glass of water, and that was the whole answer.

Three seconds of nothing. Three is a lot. One is a pause, two is thinking, three is a decision.

“What’s your brake bias at Turn Four here,” I said.

The stool didn’t move. Nothing about him moved. But something went out of the room the way sound goes out of a garage when the door comes down, and I watched a very intelligent man do nine separate pieces of work in under two seconds without his face changing.

“Fifty-six point five,” he said. “Fifty-seven in the race if the rears go.”

“You’re carrying it two clicks forward from Turn Ten.”

“Yes.”

“Why.”

“Because the car doesn’t tell me anything on entry anymore and I’d rather lock a front and know about it than find out in the middle.” He set the plate down on the bar. “Who are you?”

I could have done a number of things. I’ve thought about all of them.

“Delphine Ashcroft,” I said.

He nodded once, slowly, like a man confirming a delivery.

Here is what he did not do. He did not stand up. He did not apologise. He did not laugh, or put his hand over his eyes, or say of course you are, or perform any of the eleven small humiliations I had already braced for and would honestly have preferred.

He picked up his water and finished it and put the glass down on the bar with the care of somebody who has broken a lot of things in his life and has decided not to break this one.

“I’d have said all of it to your face,” he said.

“You did.”

“Yes.” He almost smiled. It didn’t get anywhere. “That’s a fair point.”

The tyre men got up and left. The one with the house was still explaining the survey.

“Can I ask you something,” he said, “now that we’re being efficient.”

“Go on.”

“When did they decide?”

“They haven’t decided anything. That’s what I’m for.”

I said it and it came out clean. Subject, verb, object. All of it exactly where it should be, and no gaps in it anywhere, and I meant every syllable, and that is worth writing down because of everything that comes after.

He looked at me for a while.

“In January,” he said, “a man came to my house.”

The fridge man shifted his weight for the first time in twenty minutes.

“Outside Sabadell. On a Tuesday, in the afternoon, in a hire car with a Barcelona plate. English. Grey suit, no tie, about forty. He’d flown in that morning and he flew out that night, and he’d had somebody find the address, which is not in any document I have ever signed.” He was speaking quite slowly now, and entirely evenly, and I understood that he had rehearsed none of it and had been carrying all of it for seven weeks. “He drank one coffee. He was extremely polite. He told me that the club was very grateful, and that these things are always difficult, and that in his experience it is kinder for everybody when the timing is understood in advance.”

“That isn’t—“

“He didn’t give me a name.” He put on his jacket, which was the wrong jacket for that room and the right one for outside. “He didn’t have to. He said the decision was taken and the announcement would come when it suited the calendar.”

He picked up the plate, because he is the kind of man who picks up the plate, and put it at the end of the bar where the barman could reach it.

“I assumed it was yours,” he said.

Chapter 2

Rafa

SAKHIR, BAHRAIN — 05:40

The gym in this hotel has four machines and a mirror and a window that does not open, and at twenty to six in the morning it has me in it and nobody else, which is the only reason I use it.

Fifty-two. That is my heart rate sitting on the end of the bench with my hands on my knees before I have done anything, and it has been between fifty and fifty-four every morning since I was twenty-four, and I have it written down for eleven years in an application that Sergi set up for me and that I have never once shown to the team. Fifty-two is fine. Fifty-two is a good number. It is the number of a man who is completely all right.

The ankle is not all right and has not been since Austria in 2019, when I got out of a car with the front-left folded under it and walked forty metres on adrenaline and a broken talus and waved at a grandstand, which is the single stupidest thing I have ever done and the photograph is still on a wall in Milton Keynes. It complains for the first six minutes of any morning and then it stops. I have learned to do the first six minutes without thinking about them.

Ten minutes on the bike. Then the band work for the neck, which is the part nobody films, because the part nobody films is most of it.

There is a man who cleans the pool below the window. He arrives at ten to six and he uses a net on a long pole and he goes up one side and down the other, and I have watched him do it in four countries now and I am aware that it is not the same man.

What I am actually doing, the whole time, is arithmetic.

Not on the car. On last night.

Item: I sat down next to the woman who decides whether I have a job, and I told her that she is a spreadsheet in a nice coat.

Item: I told her I am a tenth off. Which is true, and which is mine, and which I have never said out loud to anybody in this sport including Marcus, and I gave it to her in a bar for nothing, along with the date, along with the hundredths, along with the four in the morning.

Item: I told her about the man with the coffee.

That is the one. The other two are vanity and I can survive vanity. The third one is the only card I had and I put it face up on a bar because a woman asked me a question about brake bias and for about ninety seconds it was the best conversation I have had in a year.

Qué idiota.

I do the neck band forty times each side and then I do it thirteen more times on the left because the left is worse and nobody knows that either.

They set the stage up in the paddock behind Meridian’s unit, which means they were building it while I was in that bar, which means it was going up ten metres from my room at one in the morning and I did not hear it, and now, at nine, there is a backdrop the colour of the car and a lectern with nothing on it and a hundred and forty people standing in a rectangle of shade that is not big enough for a hundred and forty people.

Heat already. Not the real heat, that comes at six, but the heat that tells you.

The light here at nine in the morning does a particular thing off the white of the buildings, a flat hard bounce with nothing soft in it, so everybody looks tired and nobody looks like they slept, and for once this is accurate.

I stand at the back because I have been at the back of this exact rectangle eleven or twelve times in my career and it is a very good place to watch people’s shoulders.

Marcus is four metres away with his arms folded and his accreditation turned round the wrong way, which he does when he is annoyed and has decided not to say so.

Kai is near the front. Twenty years old. He is standing the way a boy stands at his first funeral.

There are two men from the investment company by the cable run, one of them older, one of them about my age with a folder under his arm, and neither of them is watching the stage. They are watching the press. That is a thing I did not know how to notice until I was thirty.

Then the announcement, and it is the same as every announcement: a man from communications says a number of true sentences in an order that means nothing, and then he says the name.

Delphine Ashcroft.

She comes out from behind the unit and she is wearing a team shirt that was made for her, which means somebody had her measurements in December, which means the whole of this was decided a long time before anybody told me anything, and I would like to say that I only work this out later but I work it out immediately and it costs me most of the next two minutes.

She does not smile at the room. She does not thank anybody for their warm welcome.

She stands at the lectern with her hands on the edges of it and she says, “I’m going to talk for four minutes and then I’ll take questions until you run out.”

And the rectangle goes quiet, all of it, a hundred and forty people, the way a room goes quiet when somebody does the thing nobody does.

She talks for four minutes. I do not remember what she says. I remember that she does not once look at a piece of paper and that she gives a number in nearly every sentence, and that when a man from a German broadcaster asks her about me she does not do the thing.

The thing is: Rafa is a two-time world champion and a legend of this sport and we’re delighted to have him.

What she says is, “The option runs to the first of November. I’ll decide before that. It’ll be decided on data, and I’ll tell him before I tell you.”

And then she takes the next question.

Somebody near me exhales through their nose.

I understand, standing at the back of a rectangle of shade at nine in the morning in Bahrain, that I have misjudged something. I do not yet know what. I know that a person who wanted me gone would have been much warmer about it, and that a person who wanted to be liked would have said legend, and that she did neither, and that both of those facts are the same fact.

Also she has the palest hands I have ever seen on a person standing in that light.

Marcus gets to me before I get to the gate.

“What did you do,” he says.

“Nothing.”

“Rafael.”

“I said the car is difficult on entry and I would like the sixteenth of the wing we talked about.”

“That is not what I asked you and you know it is not what I asked you.” He has his headset in one hand and he swings it slightly, which is nine years of information. “You were in the Al Areen bar last night until half past twelve.”

“How do you know that.”

“Because Tomasz was in the Al Areen bar last night until half past twelve.” He looks at me. “Who were you talking to.”

I could tell him. It would take forty seconds and he would fix twenty things by lunchtime, because that is what he does, and he has been doing it for me since I was twenty-six and had hair.

“Have they given us the tunnel hours for the floor,” I say.

He looks at me for a while.

“No,” he says. “They have not given us the tunnel hours for the floor.”

“Then it does not matter who I was talking to.”

There is a fence between the paddock and the road where the buses come in, and there are always people at it, and there are always more of them here than you would expect for a Thursday.

A boy holds a cap over the top of the fence with both hands. He is maybe nine. His father is behind him holding a phone up and saying something to him in Arabic that I think is hold it still.