Driving Me Crazy

Chapter Thirty-Four

Charles

We finally made it to the qualifying day after a long, hard week. Katana and I spent a lot of time exploring the city while multitasking the free practices and media calls. She avoided all of the press conferences, but she was all they wanted to talk about when they had my attention. Eventually, I just shut down and refused to answer any questions about my personal life.

After free practice this morning, I had an itinerary full of press conferences until I had to get back in the car for qualifying. I'm now sitting here, waiting for the green light to get on the track and get my fastest lap in before the day is over. The team decided to let some of the other cars warm up the track before we head out, causing us to lose some time in the first session.

We were given the green light with ten minutes left of qualifying, but as soon as we make it on track we can feel the heat radiating off of it. Currently, Lando is in P1 with Max in p2 and Daniel in P3. On the out lap, Carlos and I spend a lot of time warming up our tires, but I make the first move to start a hot lap the second we cross the finish for a second time.

I push the car to its limits through every turn, heat from the engine running down my back. In turn seven I lock the wheels up slightly, but bring the car around just in time to maintain my speed, hopefully not losing too much time. I fly around the rest of the turns and luckily everyone stays to the outside line, avoiding me while I get my time in. I reach turn 17 and swing the car around, nearly drifting which puts me at a great angle for turn 18. The final stretch and the slight turn of 19 bring me back to the line and put me ahead of everyone and into pole position.

In the second session of qualifying, I make my lap cleaner with fewer lockups and slides, but Max isn't as lucky. His teammate, Sergio Perez, pushed the hot lap at the same time, causing them to collide with one another in turn seven. The drivers are fine, but the cars will have to retire from the qualifying session, not allowing them to get higher than 15th for the start of the race. Carlos and Lando fight for P2, but Daniel pulls through and surpasses them, putting my teammate in fourth and Lando in third.

Today's qualifying session is rough despite it being dry, but we still have one session left. I have been fighting hard this year to become a world champion, and as of right now, I'm ahead in points. Lewis Hamilton, the reigning champion, has an unreliable car this year putting us ahead of him. Right now, Lando and Carlos are my biggest rivals. Carlos is in second, 12 points behind me and Lando is one point behind Carlos. The year could go any way, so my goal is to keep myself ahead and keep my laps as clean as possible.

In session three of qualifying, I keep my laps tight and try to improve from the last one. Every time I set a lap time, I get into P1 and then someone slowly surpasses it. Lando is really pushing his car to the limit along with Carlos, so we are all fighting for pole position right now. We all start one after another, with Lando leading. One after the other we fly through the turns and make improvements one by one. There is enough of a gap between us to keep things healthy so that we aren't ruining each other's time. All three of us round corners within seconds of each other, but as we come around turn 18, there is a bunch of traffic that nobody warned us of. Lando isn't able to break away and ends up crashing into the back of Pierre's Alpine. Carlos and I manage to swerve around the madness and set a time, putting Carlos ahead of me for tomorrow's race.

"Is Lando alright? That was a bad one..." I say over the team radio. There is silence until they finally reach out and say, "Lando is fine. He's out of the car. Box, Box, quali is over."

Pulling the car into the pits, I jump out of the car and grab Katana before rushing to the McLaren pits to check on Lando.

"Is he okay?" Katana asks, worry in her voice as she follows me, hand in hand.

"They said he got out of the car, but I want to double-check. It was pretty bad," I say, my mind running all over the place. When I look back at Katana, she has her eyes glued to the ground so that nobody can get pictures of her face. I slow my steps and bring her closer to me so that my body shields her from the majority of camera angles. Tipping her chin up, I look down at her and say, "Own it, baby," and continue on my way to McLaren.

When we get there, Lando is surrounded by media but his crew manages to push them away so that he could have a second to breathe. I push my way to the crew as Katana finds Camryn.

"Hey, you good? That was hard to watch," I said to Lando as I pulled him into a small embrace before continuing the conversation.

"I'm good, just a little banged up. Sucks that I'll be starting so low though," He says. Since he wasn't able to set his lap time, he will have to start from where his previous lap had placed him. Normally they will just drop you to the end of the standings, but since Pierre received a penalty for causing the collision, they granted Lando placement based on his last lap. He might have pulled ahead of Carlos and I had he gotten to finish that flying lap.

Lando looks away with concern and his face slowly turns to anger as we look over to see our girls surrounded by cameras and microphones. Angrily, we push through the crowd and get to the center of the group where they have the girls surrounded. They're bombarding them with questions and not even giving them time to respond.

"Enough! If you wouldn't question a driver like this then don't question them like this. Treat them with the same respect you treat us and back the fuck off," I hear Lando shout. Luckily he said something because I was about to swing on the next person that got in their face. The crowd diminished and left the pits thanks to the security that escorted them out.

"Are you okay? Let's fucking get out of here," I say to Katana. She shoots me a weak smile and we leave the pits together. I set a reminder in my phone to have extra security on them during tomorrow's race because I'll be damned if they try to get to her without me there.