Formula 1: The GOAT-Chapter 250: Race Weekend | Saturday | Qualifying
"They have already taken the telemetry data and are planning to take the engine for deep scrutineering to see if we have made any modifications. During that period, we will have to use a replacement engine they provide.
We are pulling mechanics from the other two garages to finish the swap as fast as possible, so you don’t have to worry about missing the second free practice," James said as he handed Fatih a document. It contained the technical delegation’s reason for the surprise inspection, the depth of the scrutineering, and all other procedures they would be doing.
"Since we are tearing the car down, I want them to do a setup change on the suspension geometry, including spring stiffness. Is that possible?" Fatih glanced at the document and moved on from it, as it was something he had expected, having already experienced it when he broke lap record after lap record on his first visit to La Conca.
"We can do that since the car will be torn down to remove the engine, but doing so would add at least two hours to the timeline. You might miss the second free practice entirely, which means you won’t be able to test the new setup to see if it changed the characteristics as you expected. The first time you drive it will be in the qualifying session, and any corrections from there will be breaking parc fermé rules, meaning you will serve a penalty," James explained in detail what a deep-level setup change meant timeline-wise if he decided to go along with it.
"Why do you need to make the changes when your race pace is already two-tenths faster than anyone else in the free practice?" he added, wondering why Fatih wanted to take the risk and if it was worth it.
"Since the engine is being changed anyway, we might as well do it. If it fails, I can just take the penalty and start from the back. I have confidence in my pace, so let’s do it," Fatih said, making it clear that there wasn’t really any risk on their side if it failed and they had to return to the previous setup.
"Sure," James said as he exhaled. He realized there was really no benefit in advising against it, since Fatih’s pace solved any potential penalty he might face if things didn’t go as planned. As for his wheel-to-wheel racing, no one who had seen him during the F4 training period would even question if he would have difficulty overtaking.
It had reached a point where, instead of competing with the other two Red Bull drivers as equals, he was used as a training tool to put the other two drivers in different conditions to give them valuable experience, which he had done very well.
Now that James had no other reason to be against it, he finally called the setup engineer. Fatih immediately started detailing all the changes he wanted. To make sure his intentions were understood, he broke down why each change was necessary and what advantage it would provide.
This was so that if the setup engineer found a fault in his expected outcome, he could correct it, though Fatih was confident that wouldn’t happen. He had worked very hard to find this optimum setup, taking him more than three weeks of tinkering and analyzing the car’s data to understand what results the changes yielded and what negative aspects each improvement brought to the car.
"How is it?" James asked the setup engineer as they looked at Fatih, who left once everything was noted down. He was drinking water that Alex had handed him and looked like he was going to rest.
"He could even talk with the mechanics directly, since there is nothing for me to change. It makes me question where he even found the time to come up with all of these changes while driving at the pace he was," the setup engineer said as he looked at the paper with all the notes, tapping the back of the clipboard.
"How would the handling be?"
"In return for a very sensitive front end, the car will be very nervous and twitchy, to the point that even a slight mistake in a corner, from steering input, throttle input, or brake bias, and the rear will try to overtake the front. But if he can keep it within the operating window, he would be faster than he was in the session, and by a big margin," he said before turning to walk to Fatih’s chief mechanic, as he needed to come up with a plan with her for once the technical delegation was done taking the engine out.
"If?" James said, before he left to have a discussion with the other two race engineers and their drivers, as he was their head.
...........
Saturday.
"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to North Yorkshire. If you’ve just joined us, you are right on time as we are minutes away from the start of the qualifying session. On the screen, you are looking at the story of the season. After a twelve-race forced holiday, the Turkish-German teenager is back in the cockpit, and frankly, from what he has shown us in the first free practice, he looks like he never left—or rather, he looks like he has been here for years.
But due to a scrutineering test that resulted in his engine being taken for in-depth testing for any illegalities, and him being handed a new engine to use for the duration, he ended up missing the second free practice. Many would see this as unfair, but the organizers’ response was that they were only doing their duty to keep the competition as equal as possible.
And I wonder if things are not well already because while everyone else is in the pitlane waiting for the green light, he is in the car but hasn’t left the garage at all," Brad said as he opened the qualifying session with exciting commentary, while still focusing on the story of the weekend: Fatih.
"And we have the green light! One after another, the cars are entering the track, giving one another enough of a gap to not hinder each other, but there is no movement on Fatih’s side at all. He is just sitting there. His car is already on, but it is as if he is not in a hurry.
If I were him, I would want to join the track as fast as possible to try and understand the new engine as much as possible before going for a push lap. But maybe he has a plan of his own, and I hope so because if it is a mechanical problem, then I will be very disappointed." Just as Justin mentioned the possibility of there being a problem with the car, the feed changed to a cameraman standing next to Fatih’s car, showing what was happening in the cockpit.
It showed Fatih, already strapped in, holding a tablet which displayed the live feed of the race. A few seconds later, the new camera angle showed up on the tablet, causing Fatih to turn and wave at the camera before returning to watch the qualifying session.
"I don’t think he has any problem; he is just on a different strategy from the other drivers. Hahaha, what an interesting lad," Brad said as he laughed at how calm Fatih looked when he should have been feeling pressure, given the car under him was on a different power unit compared to the one he was used to.
