COLLISION COURSE - Lando Norris [ff]

Eight

Meetings were usually horrible. He would much rather spend his time on track or in the simulator as the wearisome businessman-talk just simply was not for him. Lando understood one or two things about money himself- at least as much as he needed to, because he had handed everything about accounting over to the professionals he had hired years ago. Also, because of the silent pleas his father had given him with his judgmental looks whenever he had talked about his latest shopping spree. A whole bunch of people were now working for him, while he focused on producing content and racing.

“I hope you all understand how much money stands behind this team and this sport in general,” Zak Brown started his speech.
Only the most important members of McLaren attended. The two drivers and their managers, as well as the team principal himself accompanied by the leading engineers, strategists and the first mechanics.

“Silverstone put this team at least a few points on the tab, but we’re still limping after AlphaTauri. We had caught up to them after Baku, but our horrible results ever since threw us back to where we started from. Every point we score in races is valid for the championship and for the future of this team,” the CEO added before tapping onto his tablet and going through slides someone had prepared for him to present. “Our main question should be ‘Why and where did we fuck this up?’”

He sighed and handed out a couple of papers filled with statistics and diagrams. Lando had learned how to read and interpret them throughout the years. Still, he could imagine doing more entertaining things than spending his week off with sitting in a brightly illuminated conference room. It had been a two-hour car drive to the MTC where he had been greeted by his manager with a stack of documents to work through- on top of it all a timetable for what was planned for the day.

Lando rested his head in his palm and drew a couple of tortuous lines onto the stapled copies of the presentation slides their CEO was working through. He heard him talk about the quality of their pit stops and the tire degradation that- in the end- had almost costed them P8 as well. While the Brit had been fighting for the last few places in the points for the team, the younger Australian had fallen back to the very back of the grid aiming for Zhou Guanyu in sixteenth position. Lando knew about how difficult it was to secure a place in the team after joining the sport for the first time, so he tried to assist his teammate as often as he possibly could. However, he was on his own fighting in the driver's championship so he had to focus on himself only. By the end, all of them had to be selfish and cruel if they wanted to make it in the rough world of Formula One.

“What happened to P7?” Zak now asked and the room went silent.

Lando immediately raised his head to find everyone eyeing him. His thoughts snapped back into place when he cleared his throat to speak, “What?”

“Why did we lose P7?” His boss repeated.

He thought the meeting would be about how the team could become better, learn from their mistakes in Silverstone and improve the car to come back stronger when travelling to Hungary the following week. However, he had been wrong about that– the meeting was not about Oscar, or the messed-up pit stops– the meeting was about him.

“Collins overtook me,” Lando explained.

“Why did she overtake you?” Zak questioned him and leaned his body over the table, pressing his hands onto the smooth, wooden surface.

Lando stuttered, “The AlphaTauri is faster than us, I guess. I couldn’t quite keep her behind.”

“The data showed that there was nothing wrong with your car. The stats were amazing, and you would have had the chance to shake her off after just three turns. I am not asking you why Christina overtook you, I am asking why you let her.” The voice of McLaren’s CEO was fierce. “I understand that the past few weeks have been rough on all of us, especially you and Oscar. You are the ones carrying the weight of this team on track, and I appreciate your constant efforts to secure points in the name of all of us because this is incredibly important for everyone’s future. We- as a team and company- had promised the fans and our sponsors years ago, that we would start fighting for championships again very soon. Here we are- five years later- with a shitbox of a car and literally no progress to show off at all.”