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Story: Overdrive

Chapter Nineteen

Shantal

‘S hantal!’ Miguel calls from through his helmet as the

furore of car preparation buzzes around us. I can barely hear his voice, but I turn away from my laptop on the counter, heading towards his car, where he’s just gotten out, and the mechanics are moving towards Darien’s garage with a bucket of brightly coloured, slime-like flow-vis paint. I’ve been told they can apply it to the front of his chassis when he pulls back in, and so get tabs on wind flow, along with the new Conquest sensors we’ve been using.

Miguel must be grinning; his eyes are crinkled at the corners. ‘This is your first time seeing the cars, right? Are you enjoying the show? Darien’s gonna put one on for you. I mean, the way that guy has gone for a toss, looking at you with those puppy eyes.’

I feel an uncontrollable flush rise in my cheeks. As if. I’m not here for puppy eyes. Not for his puppy eyes.

Miguel chuckles, patting my hand. ‘I’m playing with you. But actually, how’s it going?’

‘Stressful,’ I reply with a nervous laugh. ‘You are all so strange .’

He just waves the thought away with a goofy little cackle as he joins me on the wall with the engineers. Numbers have been coming in. Afonso explains to me what’s strong, what’s not so strong. It’s different from the older stats we’d checked out way at the beginning.

‘Shantal, are we good for Darien?’ the lead mechanic yells from Darien’s garage.

‘Yes, go ahead!’ I reply, still focused on the graphs forming on my screen.

Initially, I’m unfazed by the reports Afonso gives me as Darien does his out lap. It’s pretty standard, till he goes for a hot lap, as they say, and suddenly, everything changes for us.

Darien’s data are absolutely astounding. It should not be possible on a car he’s never been in before, a car he’s learning as we speak. I can’t just watch points on a graph pop up any more. I have to tear my gaze from the monitors and on to the track. This is real, and I can’t for the life of me believe it.

My eyes go wide as the number sixty-seven car whizzes past us. It should be a crime to be this fast. The speed traps are reading outrageous statistics that I can scarcely comprehend.

So naturally, it’s not long until we get a request from Darien and Afonso: it’s time to put him on soft tyres – the fastest compound we have. The man’s only been running medium tyres so far.

‘I can do softs,’ his voice crackles over the radio. ‘Go ahead and open the box.’

Afonso looks my way. ‘We’re going to pit him,’ he says over radio to the crew and me. Then, to Darien, ‘Good. Box, box next lap. We will change them out.’

Darien comes into his box. ‘You said to make it count, Shantal, now it’s time,’ Darien says into my headset. I can’t help but smile, shaking my head as I watch him on the screens. It’s easy when he can’t see me.

The way the car zooms out of the pit lane sends my pulse bounding. Darien is running at, if not above, the expected speed.

‘Traps are reading upwards of three-twenty kilometres an hour on those straights. Three-thirty,’ the engineer reports excitedly. ‘He’s on his way.’

Camera feeds show Darien easily lapping the others, making complex corners look simple. I’ve never seen anything like this up close.

‘We’re watching history being made,’ says Celina with a broad smile. ‘Unbelievable, right?’

Unbelievable. Unbelievable doesn’t even begin to cover it.

It’s the way Darien drives: a manner as laid-back as everything about him. Each turn looks so simple, each corner a clean shot. On straights, his car looks like it glides into the curve at the end with a sort of ease that no one else has, except maybe Miguel.

This is the miracle. All the training we’ve done in the past month, all of it spent trying to get Henri and Miguel essentially mimicking Darien’s pin-drop turn style, it’s paying off. We are running the best times on corners. I let go of the biggest breath as I scroll through side-by-side data for Miguel and Darien. I took a gamble, we all did, and it worked.

‘We look good,’ remarks Miguel, grinning as he taps his screen. ‘We look damn great .’

I laugh in relief. He gives me a congratulatory knuckle-bump, and both of us turn towards Darien’s car as it soars across the main straight, illuminated by direct sunlight.

And naturally, moments after Miguel’s made this proclamation, Darien’s car pirouettes right past the pit wall, spinning front over rear wing, sparks spraying every which way.

‘OH! OH MY GOD!’ I yell as Celina and Miguel wince. Darien almost immediately rights himself and keeps chugging along as if exactly nothing happened. My hands are on my head. I’m hiding behind Celina, for crying out loud. ‘ Wow. What? What was that?’

‘Little spin,’ Miguel replies casually. ‘Too much push in an unfamiliar car or track can do it sometimes.’

I shake my head. Little spin?

Darien gets out of his car after his lap to roars of applause and cheers, his arms held high as he whoops happily. I don’t understand how he does it. That spin? That’s the only thing that replays in my head. That, to me, is nothing short of a near-death experience.

‘How was that?’ he hoots, snapping his visor up to reveal smiling eyes that meet mine. He raises a fist, presumably expecting me to return the gesture and bump it, but I must still appear in shock, because he says, ‘What? What’d I do?’

‘A spin like that …’ I press a hand to my forehead. ‘Miguel called that little . Do I want to know what not so little looks like? Huh?’

‘You gotta shake it off,’ Darien tells me. ‘You don’t want to know. And you can’t let your imagination take you there. So,’ he smiles sunnily, ‘how was that?’

I bite back less kind retorts. I don’t, and I never will, understand the kind of devil-may-care attitude this man has adopted. Nor, apparently, will I understand why my heart plummeted so quickly and took so long to recover the second he was in any sort of danger.

I choose the safest route of response. ‘That was good.’