Chapter 465 - 2021 French Grand Prix | Race X

"My tires were dead before making that dive, but I knew if I didn’t do it, I would be a sitting duck," Verstappen said as he watched the race highlight on the screen, showing him locking up slightly as Fatih let him through before taking the corner.

"You left it too late before braking. I knew you couldn’t make it, and if I turned, you would have collected me," Fatih said before chuckling, talking about being T-boned as if it would not have been race-ending for him.

"HAHAHA, you have to try something," Hamilton chimed in when he saw the replay of himself taking advantage of that.

They were chatting as if they were done playing and hadn’t just been pushing one another to the brink. It looked like all three of them had enjoyed that wheel-to-wheel fight at the closing part of the race, since it was very rare to have a three-way fight for the race lead that lasted that long.

...

Gasly was at the moment standing in the pit lane with his media representative waiting by his side as he looked in the direction of the podium, watching the AlphaTauri mechanics filling the area around it, waiting eagerly for Fatih to join them.

Inside, he was feeling very conflicted. In this sport, he was a team player, but he also had to be an individual if he wanted to remain in it for a long time.

At the moment, he was on a three-for-three losing streak against a rookie who had driven fewer races in his entire F1 career than he had done this season alone, and he knew people were already talking about him in a negative light.

He had hoped Fatih’s two-stop strategy was going to be an opportunity to get him, going so far as to back him up, but instead, it was that same strategy that allowed him to snatch the win from the tight watch of both Mercedes and Red Bull.

At the moment, he had a total of 58 points scored over the seven races he had participated in throughout the season, while Fatih, who was in his third race of the season, had already amassed 78 points.

If the gap remained that big or worsened, his seat for next year was guaranteed to be lost, so he was racking his brain about what to do to reduce the deficit.

Although not yet desperate, he knew he had to deal with it before he became so. At the pace things were going, he was not confident that if it went on, they wouldn’t replace him with Tsunoda mid-season.

’Do I have to do it?’ he asked himself as an idea came to his mind, one that he would have hoped to avoid with all his heart, but it looked to be the only solution to his plight.

With a resigned expression on his face, he started walking towards the interview area, as he had already made a decision and needed to finish everything in order to start acting on it.

....

KORKMA, S?NMEZ BU ?AFAKLARDA YüZEN AL SANCAK

Fatih, ever the vocal man, sang the national anthem with a smile on his face as he enjoyed his victory. He knew just how precious it was, and he had sworn to never take any of them for granted.

Marco Perrone, who had joined him on the podium as the constructor’s winning representative, just looked at Fatih, who had his eyes closed while singing the national anthem as if he were fully enjoying it. He only smiled as he tried to set aside the questions that were brewing inside his mind.

Once the excitement of the win subsided slightly, he had started wondering if Fatih had some monstrous intuition for strategy decisions because, for the second time in a row, the strategy call that he had pushed the team to adopt had panned out almost exactly as he had argued when he was trying to push the team in a certain direction.

In Baku, he had pushed the team to go for aggressive under-fueling while also asking for more fresh tire compounds to be saved, as he ended up using all of them to great effect, granting him the race win in the end.

And now, here at Circuit Paul Ricard, he did the same by requesting an aggressive two-stop and the tires for it to be saved beforehand, only for his call to be right again and once again rewarding the team with a win.

With two proofs, he was now more convinced and had already made the decision not to argue with him when it came to strategy until the day one of his calls panned out wrong. The bigger question in his mind was whether to preemptively ask for his input beforehand or if he had to wait until he requested something himself.

And if he did, should they transition Gasly to that strategy as well or not? Because if the reward for following those strategy recommendations was something like a race win, then doing it with two cars would reward the team more than doing it with only one.

Marco Perrone and AlphaTauri as a whole, instead of being content with what they managed to get out of the car, were now slowly becoming greedier for more.

As a team that was guaranteed to always be under the shadow of the main team, having won three races back-to-back seemed to be the push they needed to break that mentality and start to think of the possibility of competing on equal footing with the main team, and even having the chance of beating them through pace and strategy, and not through one-off luck in a one-in-a-hundred situation.

And that enthusiasm could be seen and heard as they sang the Italian national anthem at the top of their lungs, as it symbolized their constructor’s celebration anthem.

......

Horner, on the other hand, was trying his hardest to hide the frown that wanted to form on his face, as he knew there were multiple cameras locked on him as he stood under the podium watching the podium finishers and Marco Perrone dousing one another in champagne, and rose water, in Fatih’s case.

By delaying reporting to Dietrich Mateschitz, the situation had gone from bad to worse because Fatih’s latest win had finally broken the "explainable rare exception paired with gambling" narrative that his first two wins could be explained under. The boss was definitely going to think favorably of Fatih since he was outperforming what Verstappen had managed to do in the junior team.

With the performance Fatih had now shown, the boss was most likely not going to be open to antagonizing Fatih to the point of risking losing him, since he was definitely someone who could be the team’s future post-Verstappen. Horner now needed a new way of trying to persuade him and show him the situation clearly.

He almost sighed, as time and time again, he found himself wondering why he was fighting this hard to prevent this driver’s promotion.

As he reminded himself that in Red Bull, a drivers’ championship was more important than the constructors’ championship, and promoting Fatih was definitely going to put a wrench in the chances of that, he always gained more conviction to keep him in AlphaTauri for improvement until next season.

Even he knew this argument was not the whole of it, though he couldn’t come out and accept the full truth of it.

The Verstappens, worried about Fatih, had shifted from being neutral and playing both sides for maximum benefit to fully being on his side and supporting him, in return giving him immense power in the team.

Amidst this support, if they went on to win the drivers’ championship, that power would finally consolidate and permanently lock the Verstappens’ interests along with his, permanently undermining and reducing the influence Helmut Marko would have on the team.

The owners who were backing him would side with Horner more, as he would have brought results, and the driver who was responsible for that would be on his side, backing him up. With his young age, Max was going to be on the team for years to come as they created a dynasty.

With Fatih’s arrival and his monstrous performance, it was now risking his opportunity to cement his position and win this back-and-forth fight for influence in the team, and his standing with the Red Bull higher-ups was put under threat.

The driver backed by Helmut was now providing the higher-ups with another option, and one who would deliver the same performance and caliber Verstappen did, but even younger, meaning he had more years to perform for the team and deliver results.

If Helmut had realized Horner’s intention to undermine his power by separating him from Fatih, he would have backed his promotion even further in order to bring back balance to the fight. The only saving grace was that Helmut seemed yet to know that the Verstappens had sided with Horner.

This was the main reason he was against promoting Fatih this season, as it would be like giving Helmut a chip that would once again balance things, and he was not foolish enough to willingly do that. He had to find a new avenue in which he could convince the owners to keep Fatih there, just long enough for him to consolidate his power, and only then let it happen next year.