Chapter 452: The Path to His Decision

Rümeysa, who had been silently listening to her son’s suggestion, finally spoke, starting with a question: “What level of control do you have in mind?”

“One no different from temporary ownership when it came to the team’s operations and decisions related to racing. Is it possible?” Fatih added, asking because he knew that although his idea might be something he saw as perfect, all of it was under the assumption that these things could be accomplished. Even despite thinking about it, he couldn’t come up with concrete leverage that would make Red Bull do that in the first place.

They could lean on the billions in possible penalties if they didn’t promote him, but Red Bull would avoid that by terminating his contract if they saw no other way out. Even if they agreed, there was no way they would allow someone else to control their team for five years. At most, they might concede on it until the end of the current season before they promoted him to the main Red Bull team for the next season.

In his mind, he had devised two routes he could take to guarantee that he had the best possible chance of securing as many drivers’ championships as possible using his memory advantage, which now had nine years left.

The first route was to make as few changes to the Formula One sport as possible and follow the flow of things: remain in AlphaTauri to the end of the season, then move to Red Bull for the 2022 and 2023 seasons, then to McLaren for the 2024 and 2025 seasons before heading to Mercedes for the 2026 season, and so on.

This route guaranteed him to be in a dominant, title-winning car for the next decade, and barring force majeure, there was nothing that would stop him from winning back-to-back titles all the way to 2030, earning him a total of possibly nine world championships.

But he knew all of that was nothing but wishful thinking because quite a few things weren’t lining up to allow him to be able to make some of those moves without requiring the other side to sacrifice something, which would in turn expect him to make some sort of sacrifice as well.

At the end of the 2022 season, McLaren would part ways with Daniel Ricciardo and recruit Oscar Piastri, leading to a contract dispute with Alpine and a hall-of-fame-level Twitter post.

For him to secure that McLaren seat would mean he would have to choose to either move to McLaren at the end of the 2022 season, which meant he would be left watching Verstappen dominate the 2023 season, racking up record after record, and do the same for the first half of the 2024 season until the Miami upgrade arrived, and only from there could he start fighting back in earnest and finally bear fruit in the 2025 season, where he would finally have a dominant car to dominate as Verstappen did.

Or for him to negotiate the move in 2022 but start with them for the 2024 season, which would mean McLaren would either have to keep Daniel until the 2023 season or sign Piastri for a single year, which his manager, Webber, would not accept in the first place.

It also made McLaren’s decision to poach him from the Alpine academy needless for a driver they would keep for only a year, and all of that only for Fatih to sign with them for a two-year contract.

It was not going to be worth it for them when there was an option of having two young, talented drivers grow together with the team in its rebuilding phase.

The same problem would be faced by Mercedes, as Lewis left for Ferrari at the end of the 2024 season, and Toto fast-tracked Antonelli to F1 for the 2025 season.

So for him to move there for the 2026 season, it would mean they would have to drop a driver for that season, a difficult decision considering Antonelli was still getting up to form with F1, and Toto would never give him up, as he saw him as another coming of Verstappen.

Although they could give up Russell, they would want a commitment level from Fatih matching the sacrifice they would have made for giving up Russell.

Similar problems would be there until he reached 2030, when his memory advantage would come to an end, and he would have to tread on his own from there.

All of that was something he was considering while focusing only on where he would find the fastest car capable of winning the championship, which would mean he was going to give up his memory advantage of race incidents. Because by moving from one team to another, he would be drastically changing what happens in those races, as some drivers might not even debut in F1, and some who didn’t in the past might just do that.

The theoretical, perfectly optimized route was possible, but it required a few unrealistic things to happen for him to be able to fully exploit them. As a result, the most realistic route he could think of was for him to remain with Red Bull and extend his contract for the 2024 season before moving to Mercedes in 2025, and so on. This meant he would be sacrificing not going to McLaren and, in turn, doing his best to prevent Red Bull from falling into the quagmire and downward trend it had found itself in following the 2023 season.

Amidst the thought of how he could prevent Red Bull from falling down the same path, a question arose in his mind: “If he is going to improve or prevent Red Bull from dropping in performance come the end of the 2023 season, why not take advantage of the massive overhaul in regulations starting in the 2022 season and use his memory not for following who was going to be fast in what year, but by making the team he was in fast by guiding them towards the design trends and tricks other teams pulled in his past life to make the car he was in the fastest?”

It was with that line of thought that he realized that by chasing the fastest car in other teams, he would not be using his memories to their full potential, and it would be a disrespect to the system and the one who had made him reborn all the way back with all of his memories intact.

With the best possible new route appearing in front of him, he found himself with another problem he couldn’t deal with: he couldn’t buy a team with a competitive enough infrastructure that he could immediately put to use, and if he were to enter as a new team, it would take time to build the infrastructure up to standard, and that would take years.

Having racked his brain for some time, AlphaTauri came out as the perfect middle ground amidst all other teams and considerations. It would act as the perfect placeholder for his new team, as everything would be prepared for the 2026 entry, in line with the next new set of regulations, marking it the perfect entry year as a full constructor on both the chassis and power unit side, which his research company has been building up for it from the start.

Although AlphaTauri’s infrastructure was not to the standard of a top team, it was both better than the ones at the bottom and, because they shared a sister relationship with a team that had that infrastructure, it allowed them to act as a team with one.

The other reason was that, for the 2022 new regulations, Honda was going to deliver a very competitive engine by all standards, and if he managed to implement the homologated designs from each team’s best designs and make them work with one another, he would have a very competitive car.

The other reason why AlphaTauri was perfect as a placeholder was that it allowed him to use it as a breeding and growing ground for both his engineering knowledge of F1 and for the talent that he would be recruiting, who would be signed by the new team entry but moved to AlphaTauri until everything on the new team was ready for that talent to move there without any “gardening leave” problems.

This should allow him to recruit talent like Rob Marshall, Hannah Schmitz, Peter Prodromou, James Allison, Pierre Waché, Pat Fry, Eric Blandin, Craig Skinner, and more, who all either moved to new teams or renewed their contracts long-term during the 2022-2025 period and would be unavailable for the 2026 season start with his new team.

While there, they would all learn how they each operate and form their synergy before they all moved to the new team that they were initially signed on to. This should also act as a disruption to other teams’ ability to reach their full potential and even go as far as to try and recruit outside the normal F1 recruitment areas and bring in NASA engineers and others to test and see if they can bring their out-of-the-box thinking into F1, all done in AlphaTauri and moved to the new team if they proved themselves adaptable, or left in AlphaTauri if not.

This window was also perfect for him to recruit for the powertrain side as well, as talents like Andy Cowell, Owen Jones, and Hywel Thomas, who ended up working for Red Bull Powertrains or Mercedes HPP and had been the foundations of the engines and battery side that made them competitive, were all free at some time between 2021 and 2024, prime for recruitment as they will jointly work on the 2026 ICE, Battery, and ERS to create a truly competitive power unit.

As those ideas settled in his mind, he grew greedier, seeing an opportunity to turn his memory advantage, with an end date, into an extremely stable foundation for himself and his new team, building experience in its formative years while avoiding all the pitfalls new teams fall into.

By the time his memories came to an end, he would already have a very competitive team with which he could continue fighting for race wins on the journey to live up to the system’s name and become the Greatest of All Time Formula 1 driver.

But the only obstacle was getting Red Bull to give up control of AlphaTauri for a five-year period, and he was racking his brain inside and out for a solution.

All of his idealistic fantasies relied on that first step being possible to take, and at the moment, it was the hardest of all, but one he needed to take no matter what for the picture to pan out. All of his hopes were on his mother to make that possible, as he was already at his wit’s end.

Rümeysa, upon hearing the answer to the level of control Fatih expected from the team, took a few seconds to think about it before she said, “Let me think about it before making a decision,” as something came to her mind, but she refrained from bringing it out lest she give her son hope only for it to not pan out as she had imagined.

All she needed to do was wait for that thing, see if it was possible, and only then give her son an answer.

“Okay,” Fatih said with a smile on his face, knowing that what he had brought up at the breakfast table was too much and was going to require too much money for her to decide go or no-go immediately, as things were going to be on the scale of billions and she would need to wait on the secretariat to give her a breakdown of everything if she were to give a “go” and so on.

‘But what an idea’, he said to himself as he once again went through the idea, and he couldn’t help but laugh at how good it was at fully using his memories.