Chapter Five: Blood, Sweat & Tears

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You track down Lucy in the garage – She's taken care of most of your affairs already. After an hour in the garage of going through some car adjustments with Lucy and your mechanics, Frank Bartollini, Jordan Grey and you sit down for your meeting. Lucy mentioned she'd pop in later. 


Bartollini: Alright you two, I don't want to chip away at your prep time, so I'll keep this short. 

Jordan: Good. 

Bartollini: Two words; Reliability. Performance. I know you'll each focus on your own car, and that's good to enhance your own performance in the long run, but we need to enhance reliability in the car, otherwise your performances will suffer as soon as we hit the circuits. 

He glances at you when he says 'suffer'; He knows about how close you got to winning against Simons last year... If it wasn't for the reliability issues and Ferrari's strategy, you might have won. 


Bartollini: Y/n, you saw what it cost you last year. 

You nod in frustration – You've gotten over it, but it still fuels your motivation. 


Jordan hisses: You had the better car of the two and still lost against Simons!

That was absolutely unnecessary, so you stare at him in disbelief.


y/n calmly: We had the same car, Jordan, cool off. 

Jordan feisty: Excuse me? 

Bartollini: She's right – The two of you had identical improvements on the car, yet she made it into second place of the championship in her rookie season, whereas you barely scored any points after years of driving in F1. So quit it. 

Jordan under his breath: Fine whatever– She's just getting special treatment anyways.

y/n: Dude?


Jordans's eyes are brewing; How is this guy still so furious about last season? You know that he doesn't quite like being second to you, but you don't care. If he wanted to be better, he would beat you, but he simply can't. Frank pushes some notes across the table. 


Bartollini: Grey, loose the attitude or loose your seat. We don't need sexism in this team, nor do we have time for it, let alone do we deal with egotistical god complexes. She won by her own merit, not because of 'special treatment'. I won't be dealing with this childishness, alright?

He rolls his eyes and focusses on the sheets of paper in front of him. Bartollini isn't so bad after all.


Bartollini: I want Jordan to take off first in the first session – With some delay we will bring you out then, y/n, alright?

y/n: Sounds good...

Jordan agitated: Yeah.


Frank points out some of the main issues on the car. It sounds like a handful of open ended problems to have, but you're in it to win it. He highlights that there would potentially be some resistance from the gears and that the engine needed some time to adjust to certain speeds. You glance up from the data, when Lucy joins you in the meeting room. She sits down next to Frank and listens. 


y/n: So just to check, you're saying that you suppose the engine in itself is one of the strongest on the grid, but the electronics and mechanics around it won't always be able to support it?

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