Taming the Bull ~ [Sebastian Vettel]

Chapter 2 - To Be, Or Not To Be

The snow only stayed for a couple of days, and before anyone knew it the weather in London was back to its usual gloomy array of greyscale. It was once again time for that all-time classic January weather that just made you long for spring days and the feeling of sun warming your bare skin.

It was in this very weather, with headphones in her ears and warm training clothes on, that Ingrid made her way through Hyde Park in London, in a higher tempo than usual.

Ingrid had always loved to run. The feeling of your own feet pounding across the ground was addictive, it almost felt like flying sometimes. She loved how once you thought you had reached the barrier, if you just kept on digging, you'd come out on the other side stronger than ever before and you could just keep on running for miles.

And it was just that very feeling of invincibility Ingrid was feeling as she made her way through London with her blonde ponytail swinging from side to side.

As per usual, she had a lot on her mind.

It had been five days since she'd met up with her brother for lunch where he had sowed seeds of desire and hope in her brain. The prospect of a much more enjoyable future than the one she was living at the moment. A future where she could do what she'd always dreamt off. Work in Formula 1.

Ingrid hadn't been able to shake those thoughts out of her head once, since Sunday last week. She could find herself helping a patient at work and all of a sudden she would start thinking about dragging a driver out of a car wreckage at a Formula 1 circuit. She could be driving in a roundabout on the way home to her parents, when her thoughts would turn to how she should best approach the "apex" in order to drive through the "corners" as fast as possible. Those intrusive Formula 1 thoughts even appeared in her dreams. It seemed as though there wasn't a single moment of her day when she wasn't thinking about the sport that had always eluded her.

She was yet to receive an answer from the FIA after she had managed to convince herself to take a step into the unknown and send in her application five days ago. The more time that passed, the more she was convinced that no one would reach out to her. They had probably received applications a million times more appealing than hers, at the end of the day she was just a normal trauma nurse wasn't she.

It was at that very moment a sharp ringing sound could be heard through Ingrid's headphones, much louder than she had anticipated, making her almost trip and fall on her nose.

Ingrid instantly stopped to bring her phone out and check who was interrupting her peaceful workout, out in the last hours of January "sun".

When she didn't recognize the number, Ingrid decided upon just letting the signal ring out. She could just listen to the voicemail later and find out if it was anyone important that was trying to reach her, if it was just another seller calling she simply couldn't be bothered.

Ingrid started taking a few careful running steps again, slowly but steadily getting up to more speed again. As she looked to her right she was met by something very familiar to her.

"I can't seem to escape you can I?", to her right, on a red double-decker was an advertisement. But not just any normal advertising. A Formula 1 advertisement.

As she kept up the same pace as the bus, the faces of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton were staring her down, dressed up in their matching McLaren driver suits and with a zooming McLaren MP4-26 in the background. Both of the drivers were pointing out towards the person watching the advertising and it was almost as if they were talking directly to your soul when one read the words; "We're ready for the new season, are you?...", it was after reading those words that Ingrid froze.

What if it was the FIA that had called her?

She had been too busy thinking about all the reasons why they wouldn't call her, that she might have actually missed them calling her.