Chapter 433: Azerbaijan Grand Prix | Friday

"Urghhhh!!!!" Enes groaned as he stretched while the chair he sat in rotated because his legs were in the air.

"Time for lunch," he said as he stopped the chair from rotating before standing up from it, picking up his phone and earphones as he walked out of the office, heading to the cafeteria.

Upon his arrival, he just chose his food from the self-serve area before finding a secluded spot to take a seat. Before eating, he took out his phone, connected it to his earphones, and headed to the Formula 1 TV channel, clicking open the video titled FP1 Highlights | 2021 Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

As his uncle, he would have loved to watch the session live and see Fatih living his dream while also bringing pride to his home country. However, unfortunately, both the first and second free practice sessions were ones he couldn’t watch, so he had missed the first session and would definitely miss the second. Thankfully, there were highlights of each session, and he kept himself informed through them.

As he listened to the female narrator summarizing the session, he started enjoying his food:

"It’s back-to-back street circuits as Formula One returns to Azerbaijan. After 2020’s cancellation, drivers were understandably cautious early on. Rookies got the opportunity to learn, and veterans accessed their muscle memories, pushing hard.

Lewis Hamilton, the reigning champion and current championship leader, locked up at Turn 15, taking to the runoff area to avoid the barriers, while Carlos Sainz also flirted with the margins.

Sebastian Vettel was another going off at Turn 16 for the four-time world champion, and his Aston Martin teammate, Lance Stroll, also bounced over the curbs in the same place.

Lando Norris has played down McLaren’s expectations ahead of the weekend, but both he and Daniel Ricciardo impressed in first practice.

The Australian topped the timing tables just after the halfway point, and the Briton was not far behind, although he spun his MCL35M at Turn 16 as he pushed a little too hard and found himself in a small car park at Turn 3 in an attempt to avoid the Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas, who was trying to return to the track.

The rookie Fatih Yıldırım, winner of the last race and what many are calling rookie of the year after just one race, impressed in the opening period, setting a blistering lap from the get-go but later failed to put any competitive time on the clock as he reused the softs used earlier in the session, failing to improve on his final laps.

A gust of tailwind sent Nikita Mazepin off, and the Russian did well to avoid damage to his Haas. His teammate, Mick Schumacher, also had to bail out at Turn 15, the windy conditions proving taxing.

Current P2 in the championship, trailing by two points, Max Verstappen found the Baku traffic a little frustrating.

Despite the holdups, the Dutchman was quickest of all, ahead of the Ferrari pairing of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.

Red Bull’s Sergio Perez finished P4, ahead of Ricciardo, Pierre Gasly, Hamilton, Norris, Fernando Alonso, and Bottas for the top ten.

Fatih Yıldırım managed to stay in P11 with his opening laps, followed by Kimi Räikkönen, who just got the better of his Alfa Romeo teammate, Antonio Giovinazzi.

Then came Stroll in P14, ahead of Vettel, with Esteban Ocon in 16th.

Then the Williams pairing of George Russell and Nicholas Latifi and the two Haas drivers completed the lineup." His eyes never left the screen as he watched the highlight video that focused on the most interesting parts of the session, showing cars going off the track and doing the pendulum swing to turn around, others sliding, and some brushing the wall, showing everyone that the drivers were still just beginning to relearn the track after more than a year away.

When the video was done, an auto-recommended video followed, and it was the Monaco Grand Prix race highlight. He couldn’t help but smile when he saw Fatih on pole at the race start.

.....

"I can understand that having more fresh tires will diversify the strategy, but what you are doing at the moment will hinder the amount of learning you can do on the track," Marco Perrone, the head of strategy at AlphaTauri, said, trying to advise Fatih against going ahead with the plan he had asked of the team.

Before the weekend even started, Fatih had made his request clear: he wanted a brand-new soft, medium, and hard compound tire to be available for race day, so all the planning, strategies, and data gathering needed to be rerouted around making that a reality.

They had tried to dissuade him, reminding him that there was a reason why teams didn’t just keep tires to use on the final race unless absolutely necessary or a situation occurred leading to them accidentally having more than needed. Any unused compound was a compound that could have been used during practice to gain more relevant data and make the car faster, better, or more stable. But Fatih had remained adamant in his request.

Although, as the head of strategy, he just could not listen to his request, that would destroy their relationship. However, with the permission of Franz, the team principal, they had decided to grant him his request to use this as an opportunity to teach Fatih why teams left only the bare minimum of tires at the end of the race weekend by showing him actively instead of just talking.

Thanks to that, Fatih had only used two compounds for the FP1 session, a medium and a soft tire, starting with the mediums for the opening stint to clean the track before he moved to the brand-new softs, then back to the used mediums before finally returning to the used softs for the qualifying practice part of the free practice, which resulted in him doing horrendously compared to other drivers and even his teammate.

Even that in itself was promising, but Perrone saw this bad pace due to dead tires in the first session as enough of a lesson and tried to persuade Fatih to give up on his plan and return to the original one.

"It is still too early to call my decision a bad or a good one, so please indulge me for this week. If it doesn’t work in my favor and I underperform, I will not question your decision again," Fatih said with an assured smile on his face.

For the past two weeks, he had already driven on this track for thousands of laps in the simulation, pushing all the tires to their structural limit and causing all three compounds to undergo structural failure and send him into the wall multiple times.

Although painful, these crashes, being done multiple times, had allowed him to know just how far he could push them before they got destroyed and what the precursor signs were before they underwent structural failure.

With other teams not having this data, he knew what had happened here in his previous life would definitely repeat itself, since it was not something that could be changed by his presence, as it was a tire problem, not a driver problem.

Because the same compound as in his previous life was being used, it was nothing but guaranteed, so he was setting himself up to have the opportunity to fully exploit and benefit from it.

"....." Perrone looked at Fatih for a moment before he gave up and walked away after bidding him farewell. Fatih was being both hard-headed and selfish at the moment because, as a result of his decision, the majority of the valid data now needed to be collected from Gasly, increasing his workload, which had been the same for the previous Monaco GP. And although that one had a good explanation, this one didn’t, other than the driver just requesting it.

In his mind, he was already coming up with several ideas to reprimand Fatih once all of this failed, so that he would learn not to think that he was smarter than everyone else and why certain things were done a certain way.

In FP2, he finally made a comprehensive run of both the hard compound and two soft compounds, following the long-run race simulation before moving to qualifying practice, since the time matched when the qualifying session would take place tomorrow.

This left him with five soft, two medium, and one hard brand-new compounds, having returned both the tires used in FP1 and one soft and the hard used in FP2.

Fatih continued to do things according to his plan, and with the use of brand-new compounds in the latter half of the FP2 session, he finally returned to the top ten group by taking P4 and wedging himself in the middle of the two Ferraris in P3 and P5, with his teammate, Gasly, putting himself in P6.

.........

"Did he build this car or something?" one of the mechanics responsible for Fatih’s car complained as he moved his waist side to side, trying to relax it after bending for a long time.

"He knows every damn component, and for the second week in a row, he wants to make all of these changes at the end of Day 1. I have never seen a driver know the car that much and make this many bold changes," continued the mechanic as he looked at the list of things Fatih had requested they make improvements on, which were many, and for many of those improvements, he had even specified by how much the changes should be made in that area, making it clear that he knew the car very well.

"Well, he works as an intern with those who designed it, so he will know more than most of those who only drive it," Lisa, already used to Fatih’s shenanigans, said as she rubbed the sweat on her forehead, seeing it as no different than a daily occurrence for her, having been with him since his F4 debut.

It was tiring for them most of the time, but on most occasions, their hard work was repaid by a performance worthy of it, not making them do meaningless work. Since their bonus was structured based on how the cars performed, this was just another way of securing it. At least, that was how she had come to see things after spending two years with him in the junior series and a year driving TPC before he joined them in Formula 1.

"He better win and buy us dinner, or I will leave a bolt out next time he asks us to do this," the mechanic said, causing everyone working on the car to laugh at his words.

It was because, although he was complaining, he was the most hardworking and diligent mechanic on Fatih’s side of the garage, making him look like a tsundere.