Chapter 448: Hail Mary II

"....."

A heavy silence filled the room. Rümeysa stared at the representative on the opposite side of the table without saying anything, as if something inside her had malfunctioned.

"Are you playing some kind of prank?" Elena asked after a minute of awkward silence.

"Can we have a short break? This discussion is heading in a direction we didn’t anticipate, so we need a moment to recollect ourselves," Eden, the head legal officer for the motorsport department, said, sensing Elena’s anger. He was trying to buy time to calm her down so they could adjust their plans.

"Sure. Let’s take a twenty-minute break," the Red Bull representative said before he and his team stood and left the meeting room, leaving Rümeysa and her team alone.

"What is going on?" Rümeysa asked, turning to Elena with confusion still on her face. Although these things could have been handled by Elena and the legal team, she had decided to join them to actively help her son take the next step, only to be hit with a haymaker from Red Bull.

"I don’t know how they went in this direction. The worst I had considered was a delay of a few races to set things up correctly, but this is beyond anything I imagined," Elena said, tapping the table rapidly, a nervous habit she had when she was confused.

"Ten million. Do they think we are poor and will just accept it?" Rümeysa said once she finished her water and set the bottle down. Although she wasn’t looking down on that amount, the way the other side spoke about it was as if Fatih’s family would be desperate enough to accept it from the get-go.

"I believe this is their starting price, and they would most likely accept if we go all the way to twenty, if not even higher. Or they might be starting with their worst possible offer and will slowly move in the direction they want. They might be targeting a second-half promotion or something of that sort. We will only know when we start negotiating," Eden, ever the man for these situations, said, reminding them that this was most likely a negotiation tactic.

"We have never been anything but direct in every contractual interaction we have had with them, but it seems like they want to play a power game, believing they are the ones in charge," Rümeysa said, coming to a conclusion before she picked her phone from her handbag and held down the number five for a few seconds to make a call.

Elena and Eden just looked at one another, wondering what Rümeysa was planning. They had a vague feeling that whatever she was planning was not going to be good for Red Bull, but they couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it might be because they didn’t know the full extent of the wealth of the woman who had hired them.

The only thing they knew about her in matters related to money was that she was very accommodating to her son’s requests, which were most often related to motorsport, like giving them the green light to recruit other drivers into their driver academy, a venture that was sure to be a money shredder, or chartering a private jet for her son for every race weekend to ensure he was disturbed as little as possible. At the moment, both of them were curious.

"Yes, I need your team to do something for me and have it on my desk by this evening," she said the moment the greetings were done, getting straight to the point. "I want to know everything about Red Bull."

’Red Bull?’ Elena and Eden wondered if she was going to look for internal team dynamics to influence one side or another, or find out Red Bull’s exact plan. That thought was thrown out of the window by her next words.

"Not the F1 team, but the main parent company, Red Bull GmbH, and everything under them. You can give me the surface-level details today and the detailed report later," she said, speaking a few more words before ending the call.

"You can go ahead without me, right? I don’t plan on sitting here and listening to them disrespect us and go against our agreement. I need to inform my son about this, so you can update me on their full offer later today," she said as she stood up and placed the phone back in her handbag before walking out of the door, leaving the two of them looking at one another, wondering what was going on.

What they thought might be an information-prying attempt turned out to be her wanting her secretariat to gather as much information as possible about Red Bull and all its operations, along with every subsidiary they owned.

"But why would Red Bull want to renegotiate a notarized contract when it is to our advantage to not do anything?" Elena asked Eden, because as a lawyer, he knew these matters more closely.

"Because although Red Bull is negotiating with us at a table, they can flip the table and throw the whole negotiation out, and that is not what we want," Eden said, explaining something he knew from having read the contract multiple times.

"What do you mean?" Elena asked, very surprised that there was something she might not have considered that Red Bull could use.

"All of these negotiations are still being done with a very specific outcome anchoring everything in both sides’ minds: Fatih remains within the Red Bull family. But if they see us remaining hard-headed and inflexible, they can terminate Fatih’s contract.

With the termination being without merit, they can just pay the termination penalty, which at the moment is 200 million dollars, and his salary for the period of the contract. It is a lot, but compared to the billions of dollars they would be on the hook for if we don’t come to a mutual agreement, that is what they could use to flip the table," Eden explained as simply as he could.

Elena, who had been solely focused on the billions of dollars in fines to be received from Red Bull, finally understood why Rümeysa didn’t look like she was planning to use that at all and was now redirecting her focus to something else entirely, making her curious about what she was planning to do when the other side had the option of terminating the contract and leaving her son as a free agent. A free agent every team would want, but a free agent nonetheless.

"But isn’t it in his favor if they do that? Fatih has already proved himself to be a monstrous driver by winning both races he’s participated in. Teams should be lining up to sign him the moment he is a free agent. Why does she seem intent on forcing that promotion, even finding other means to force Red Bull to retain and promote him?" Eden was the one to ask this time. From his perspective, receiving 200 million dollars and becoming a free agent was very advantageous, as it would give them all the power to choose which team to go to and under what conditions.

"Fatih loves racing more than anything and is scarily competitive. Having won two races and with more than fifteen to go, he definitely sees a possibility of winning the driver’s championship.

It is a situation he has already experienced once when he was in F4. After accidentally participating in an official timed session without meeting the minimum age, he received a twelve-race ban out of a thirty-race season and still went on to win it.

As his mother, she definitely knows that is what Fatih believes he can do at the moment. Considering how accommodating she is to his motorsport pursuits, she definitely believes that she needs to do everything in her power to provide her son with what he needs in order to have a chance of making what is only in Fatih’s mind a reality, even if it means she gives up millions of dollars," Elena, one of the closest people to Fatih’s family, explained to Eden, whose contact with the family was limited to legal matters.

As they continued their small talk, now knowing that they were not going to come to any decision when the meeting resumed, the two of them just talked about what they should ask to get a baseline understanding of Red Bull’s position to report back to Fatih’s mother.

During the conversation, Elena kept wondering what the endgame of this matter was going to be. Both sides seemed to have certain expectations for these negotiations, and at the moment, those two expectations were at different ends of the spectrum. It was impossible to meet both of them at the same time, and one of the two had to lose.

She wondered who that would be, or if there would even be a winner in the first place. All she knew was that she needed to prepare as much as possible to make sure her side won, no matter what.