Chase You -1- Formula 1

99. Love is an emotional minefield

I arrived in Japan, hoping I was able to put in a better result. At least better than last race. This would be the first time I raced at Suzuka and I was pretty nervous. I only had a few shots left to perform well, and making Ferrari regret signing me was the last thing I wanted right now.

The Friday created a big fuss in the paddock. They announced a delay of all Saturday track action. Thanks to the unconditional weather, as in, a literal typhoon. Most of us assumed the first free practice was the only dry running we were about to get, on the other hand, I didn't mind another rainy race. The last one brought me to the podium. For safety, qualifying was postponed until Sunday morning, only a few hours before the race started.

The weather forecast made me a bit nervous, but I had to stay in the hospitality to record a grill the grid video with Kimi. The most human interaction we had the months we were teammates, probably. Other than downing shots when we had a bad race, of course. I got a bell, and Kimi had this horn that was honestly deafening, so they stuffed a wad of paper in it.

A woman with a lovely accent sat in front of us, she gave us a stack of cards and held a few in her own hands as well. Firstly we fooled around with our 'buzzers' but quickly got to the more serious part. "Who is Sauber's most recent podium sitter?"

I tapped the bell as fast as I could, though I was unsure if I or Kimi was faster on this one. The woman looked at me and I answered the question. An easy one, since we were talking about me in this case. "That must be me, Germany 2019."

Then she showed us three cards, we had to put them in chronological order. I shuffled the pictures around, but this time I wasn't as quick. The order was correct but the speed counted as well, so now Kimi had a point and we were even. For so far, so good. We didn't only compete against each other, we also had the other teams to consider. I doubted if we'd score high, Seb was literally a walking encyclopaedia of F1 history. On the other hand, we had Charles there too, to balance it out.

Our grill the grid session was filled with lots of embarrassing moments. Especially when we needed to listen to an audio recording from an onboard. Apparently, we raced at this circuit and we needed to guess which one it was, but Kimi kept honking in my ear. Once the recording ended, we simply named all circuits we raced at. We didn't score any points since our approach wasn't correct.

We then had to name a driver on a photo, but again Kimi was faster than I was. Well, I named him first but my teammate honked sooner. So he got a free point. For so far I had only scored one point, he had two.

"Now this is definitely a piece of art," I commented when we got shown a drawing of a circuit. With lots of things surrounding the circuit, which I didn't recognise at first. The other factors, like the drawing of a panda bear on the side, dragons and bamboo, helped me determine what the circuit was supposed to be.

Kimi hadn't flipped his card, instead looked over my shoulder. "You have the same picture," he said as an explanation. It made some sense, why waste efforts when you get the same picture. I pressed on the bell and got the correct answer, pointing out the drawn circuit was in fact in China.

"Which of the current F1 drivers made his F1 debut at the same team as his father?" The interviewer asked.

"Apart from Max, who else has a father racing?" Kimi asked me. I shrugged.

"Do you know?" I asked.

"I don't know, that's why I'm asking you." Makes sense.

We started naming everyone on the grid again, just skipping the ones we knew. So that brought us with a bit of a narrowed down choice, but we still got it wrong. No points for either of us. Again.