Connections (F1 story)

Chapter Thirty One: Prospects

Daniel sat up rubbing his eyes and, judging by the look on his confused face, was wondering what the hell was happening. "Did I hear Paul?"

"Yeah, I saw Paul too." I said, still embarrassed. My bra laid on the floor, and Daniel's personal trainer had stepped on it.

"Fuck!" He threw his head back into the pillows, squeezing my hand. "Sorry."

"Don't worry about it." I replied, reaching up to kiss him on the cheek, holding the covers close to my body.

"Paul was kinda guessing it anyway, especially after Monaco. I told him nothing had happened." He ran his hand through my somewhat tangled hair.

"So that's why he was being nice to me?" I sniggered, preparing myself to stand up. "We'd better get up, something about bikes."

"Oh you're going to love this." He shot up and darted towards the door, leaving me to stumble into the en-suite still very much half asleep but nevertheless content, surprised and still discomfited. It was worse than uni days.

"Daniel, I leave you for three days and- what the hell is this junk food packaging doing on the side?" Paul's voice echoed around the flat.

There was some attempt from Daniel to reason with him, giving some half viable explanation and then pointing out that we had a lot of vegetables last night. Paul replied with a comment about getting more than enough exercise too. Just not from the usual run.

Yup, definitely time for a shower and then to get ready to go mountain biking- Formula 1 training style.

---

Working as part of the communications and management team at Red Bull means you have to have initiative, your wits about you and arguably, most importantly, extremely good communication and alike interpersonal skills.

And that means speaking two languages. Fluently.

Luckily enough for me Daniel had spoken my first language, hence him being from Australia, so that meant that I didn't need to be fluent in, say Russian, if I was looking after Daniil Kvyat (how I still envy Rebecca for being able to speak that).

So, that pretty much meant I could be perfectly okay with my French- and I was, just not when it came to Austria and Britta was translating a fair few requests from me, as well as the team back at home before I processed them and responded to them.

German was the national language there and other than a few phrases that I could remember from GCSE lessons at school and the occasional utterances from Seb or indeed Britta, I was completely clueless.

I left Daniel's apartment in Milton Keynes on the Thursday night and headed to my flat in London for a measly two nights, before jetting back out to Eastern Europe, beginning preparations for the Austrian Grand Prix on the Sunday.

Although that was more of a day off compared to the greater than ever rush before the Thursday, Friday, Saturday and of course Sunday.

Due to Daniel's incredible win in Canada, things had escalated rather suddenly and, everyone wanted to speak to him- asking primarily the same question. When will he win again?

Now Sunday at the Red Bull Racing Ring in Spielberg, things were manic and that was before we had even left the hotel room.

Phone calls had started before I was even awake, so from then on in I was playing catch up. I had spent a lot of time with Ricciardo as per, although we hadn't spent hardly any time together alone as there was constantly someone who wanted to talk to him. This was the team's home grand prix so the pressure was even higher. We had still messaged one another constantly though.