You get used to it after a while

You get used to it after a while. All of it. The smell, the sound. The speed. People always ask about the speed but that is in fact the first thing you get used to. Chronologically speaking, I suppose, it’s the first thing I had to get used to with an abusive father with fast hands.

“You are slow in the first sector, we need to keep pushing.”

The smell is not necessarily what you might think. It is like a mishmash of scents of an overly ambitious perfume concocted by a young, rich upstart looking to make a statement. Burning rubber? Yes, of course. A predictable smell that is easy to learn to endure and even to savour.

“That’s slow in sector two as well, we need to pick up the pace.”

But there’s more than that. Much more. There’s the musk of warm tarmac on sunny days. The nasal taste of salt on wet ones. The sweat in the helmet, of course, builds up over time and inevitably dries to a damp, celery-like fishy odour. People surprisingly forget about fuel as well. The garlic in the dinner. It’s not the same petrol smell you get at your local BP. This is something entirely unique. The finest restaurant in Beijing, Siji Minfu, does the best Shrimp balls you’ll ever have. And though extremely hot, the accompanying Chinese mustard is a must have. The smell of that hot mustard and lacquer thinner. That’s the smell. A chemical smell, but kind of organic as well. Distasteful but at the exact same time, utterly delicious.

Actually, I tell a lie... you never get used to the nerves. Yes. That’s the one thing that reminds you that what you are doing isn’t completely normal. The heartbeat of humanity in the otherwise robotic process of driving a Formula One car. Repeat something for 10,000 hours and you will become an expert in that field. Malcolm Gladwell once said that. What he didn’t say was that you would lose your soul to it. You would lose friends, family, loves to it. Your fucking mind. Any particle of fucking normality slipped through your hands and for what? Disdain, mockery, abuse? 12,000 twitter followers and no blue tick? One new follower for every hour worked. Sounds like a shitty deal to me. Especially when most of those followers are just there to spit at you from behind from their comfortable seats.

“Try to take the corner into turn two sharper, we’re losing time there.”

They are there working to remind you of how little you matter. Though they are not needed. You have already come to the realisation that you never truly were anything special. Because you have seen special. You compete with special every single day and it beats you physically and mentally again, and again, and again. And again. AND AGAIN. AND AGAAAAIN. But it also flaunts its peacock feathers whilst doing so. Not to diminish you, they are barely aware of your existence. You mean nothing to them. They are doing it just to appease their fans for a slight second. To soak in even more glory by sponging the last drops of dignity from me. An extra crumb for their full plates and fat bellies.
As long as you make things easy for them, you’ll get a patronising pat on your head like a dog that hasn’t shat the carpet after going into the living room. The instinct of a dog is to shit anywhere he pleases. That’s what an animal does. But its instincts are curtailed by abuse. As are mine. I have to succumb to the monotonous task of moving out of the kings’ way as I am lapped race after race. To cause any resistance is “bad sportsmanship”. Any semblance of my animalistic, fighting spirit is constantly threatened with being hunted and ravaged by fans and media alike. Those vultures and hyenas... And all a spritely piglet like me can do is make peace with the winning lions and not give them a reason to want you killed.

“Your speed needs to pick up, your third sector is slower still and you are now 3 tenths down on your team mate.”

Gavin. Cunt. Absolute cunt. A nice guy by all accounts. He has his pressures just like me. Works harder than anyone I know. I once came into the garage late one night to go over the data analysis on my simulated run for the Belgian GP. It was 04:00am on a Tuesday and I couldn’t sleep. Yet there he was. Just a part of his routine apparently. Sleeps four hours every day, two, two hour naps and for what? His wife left him last summer. Can you believe that? Here’s a man who throws his whole life into a work with no rewards for a family that doesn’t love him. He should be the lion in his own jungle, but instead, he is another piglet like myself. Feeding on scraps to feed his sanity. Namely cocaine and prostitutes. The mind has a strange appetite when it hates itself.

He leads a team of over 400 people. Can you imagine that? 400 children to look after. To feed and appease. To listen to. Of course, it isn’t as straight forward as that. You don’t listen to all of them. You can’t. So you give special favouritism to the best, most intelligent and highly skilled children to lead and report back to you on how the others are doing. The better the highly skilled children are, the better the family does and the better you look. So you invest all your time, knowledge and money into giving these highly skilled children the best possible platform to succeed. And as they expunge all your knowledge and value, as they suckle on your tit to strengthen their bones and instincts, as they become younger, cheaper, more ambitious versions of what you once were; they eventually diminish your value to the family to absolute zero. And an expensive grandad is not required in this cost cutting amoral church. All of these highly skilled children you have been nurturing to full strength have all been carrying pocket knives and will look to slice your throat at your first sign of vulnerability. A job where you are literally training your assassins in the art of murdering you. And when your carcass is discarded, and all your time is suddenly free, your sanity will inevitably over feed itself into a fat mess of death.

“That’s not a good time at all. Come in now, we’ll have to adjust the down force possibly. You are exiting the corners on average six tenths slower than you should be.”

At least it has taken fifteen odd years for his value to diminish to nothing. Mine has been less than a year. A lifetime of work to get this opportunity of a lifetime, only for it to slip from my grasp through no real fault of my own.
So many things increase your chance of success before you are even aware of what success is. Your name. Your money. But nothing is more important than your teacher. Take the little piglet just 1cm off course every mile for 10,000 miles and he will eventually end up 100 meters away from everyone else. A margin not worth mentioning when looked at from a distance, but there is no distance in my world. Under the microscopic lense where every one-thousandth of a second matters, it is a chasm that can never be rectified. I have been slightly misled my whole life and the bitterness overwhelms me every second I give my brain enough time to rest and think about it.

Oh how my teacher has fallen. Before he was a god amongst peasants. Every word out of his mouth was a line for my bible. My superman. My captain. My guru. And now my devil. Just hearing someone say a name similar to his brings me out in a cold sweat of putrid hate. A complete fraud with the audacity to sell me a lie and blame me for its failure. I had no choice in the religion I chose, that decision was made by my father, but it was this decision that led me to the hell I’m in now.

“You’re over-braking on the corners; try not to overheat the brakes as we want to put you out for another run on softer tyres.”

I wasn’t built for this. I thought I was. I was arrogant in my belief I was. But I wasn’t. I was built for success. I was built to be first and to win. That’s all I have ever known whilst doing this. Victory, victory, victory. That is all I was ready for. This isn’t even close to victory. This is defeat. I am a predator being hunted, one who has never learnt the art of survival. I do not have the tools or experience to be a success in failure. I see others who handle this with happiness. A contentment to be a part of a financially beneficial machine that reaps its rewards. These are the people who have always been second best. These are the ones content in their failure. These are not me.

“Remember you are pitting this lap, you don’t need to be going so fast. Just bring the car back and we can get you ready for one final push.”

In a sport so dominated by Maths, I did some of my own Maths last night. Fifteenth I will likely finish this season. Eight cars quicker than mine, in those cars I believe there are seven drivers better than me. Formula One is the pinnacle of racing. The number one motorsport. That makes me quite possibly the eighth best driver in the world. In the top ten at least. Around a billion people drive their cars every day and I am better than 99.99999992% of them. I am so rare in my ability, I would take your breath away if you were with me in the car for three seconds. I can do things you never knew were possible. And yet you belittle me. You judge me. You even pity me. I am everything you wished you could bother to be yet somehow I seek your acceptance? You come and watch us without putting anything into it, yet you are our masters. You are our decision makers. You are our real puppeteers. The uneducated masses.

“There’s been an incident up ahead, so there’s a yellow flag. We’re worried you’re not hearing our messages. Is everything ok? Could you just give us a signal you can hear what we are saying to you. There may be a problem with your microphone, so maybe a thumbs up as you come out of one of the next corners if you can?”

Look at that boy with the flag. How happy he is waving it away. No one ever expected him to be a flag boy. He will cherish this memory forever. He will tell his grandchildren he was there that famous day in history. He saw all his favourite drivers in all his favourite colours. He saw the banners and flags in the giant stands. He heard sound reach a level he didn’t think possible in a wide open space. He smelt the burning rubber mixed with the Chinese mustard and lacquer thinner. He was there when a driver nobody cared much about drove straight into a wall at high speed. The first live suicide in sport. My death will be a story he will value for the rest of his life. It will make him feel like he was a part of something special. I will at least matter in his eyes and he will love me for it. And he will cry for me because of it. And people will care about him because of me.

“Hey, could you hear us ok? I think there’s a problem with the radio; we will have to have one of our engineers take a look. Cool down, get a drink and be ready to get back out there in fifteen minutes.”

Fuck giving that boy the glory of my death. He already has so much more than me.