Thorns

02

February 22nd
Preseason Testing

Lelia Amani

"Generally, the guys work out four to five times during the week. At least I try to get them to. Usually, it ends up being three days with how many sponsorships and events and blah blah blah they have booked that takes up their time," Jeff rambled, straight up uninterested in the opportunities the drivers get.

His desk today was much more organized, the papers that were once sprawled across the wooden piece of furniture were in sloppy stacks with paper clip after paper clip holding the stacks together. The same yellow sticky notes were also organized with those stacks, being stuck to the top sheet of paper of every pile.

If this guy wasn't retiring soon, I would get him some file folders and an organizer to hold them all in for his birthday or something. He was so old school it was starting to hurt.

The small stack of papers–that I'm assuming Horner put into the folder for me–had probably an average of six sentences on each piece of paper. It was the absolute bare minimum of what my job entailed. It barely went into any detail about the kinds of workouts the drivers did or even the workout split for the week.

Jeff and I have been sitting in our shared office for about a half hour already, and he just started going into what his job looked like for the last 39 years he has been doing it. From what he has already shared with me, the consensus was "same shit new day." The only thing not scaring me away from that thought was the fact that I was on a good foot with Max and Daniel.

We talked for a little while longer in Max's garage yesterday before the two of them hit the track in their cars, and spent a long afternoon with the engineers for every minuscule detail that needed to be changed, replaced, or deleted as a whole. After getting comfortable with them, I took it upon myself to get familiar with the garages and paddocks. I had a good idea of where to find a lot of items I could need, some more than others.

When I walked around the paddock yesterday before boring myself with Jeff, while Max and Daniel were with their engineers and mechanics, I noticed a lot of little details that weren't exactly relevant unless you were searching for a reason for it to be.

Smaller teams, like Haas and Kick Sauber, were in the back of the paddock. The bigger teams, like Ferrari, Mercedes, McLaren, and Red Bull were all up front and the busiest in terms of journalists and sponsorships. Throughout the entire day, I had somehow missed seeing most of the drivers, but an unmistakable bleach-blonde mullet belonging to Valtteri Bottas had me on my toes. I didn't confront him, not wanting to be mistaken as another journalist again, but I smiled to myself knowing he had a huge personality and always made the most of the situations he was in.

After he left Mercedes, I'm pretty sure his only goal was to still enjoy being on the grid while he still had a seat, even if he had one of the worst cars that never got him into point finishes.

After realizing I knew that much information about him, I could tell the studying worked.

"The guys are all for early morning workouts. They get them done in the hotel gyms around seven at the latest. But boy, do they love their five-thirty starts," Jeff giggled like a fangirl. It was clear he had a lot of love for the sport, but in his prime, there was a whole different grid of drivers, besides maybe Fernando Alonso. Now, he was the old-timer, and all of the employees only got younger as his colleagues chose retirement over the new generations.

"What do their splits look like? Are they the same workouts, or are they different for each driver based on his preferences? What changes during the week?" I questioned, feeling almost as if I was interrogating him at that moment. However, those were kind of big details that I was still lacking as I attempted to absorb as much training and knowledge about this position as I could.