‘It’s going to be a struggle to get you in and out in time.’
‘Fuck.’
An army of turquoise pit crew was ready waiting as Sabatino entered the pit lane. There was no time for congratulations or praise at her extraordinary handling of the incident. Swerving into her bay, more Ptarmigan mechanics than usual dived in around her to check the car. It was lifted straight up on its front and rear jacks. Off came all the wheels; the replacements were held back while the suspensions and brake assemblies were all checked. Off came the nosecone and front-wing. A replacement was quickly fixed into place, secured, and rapidly adjusted. At the rear, two mechanics dropped to the ground to look up underneath the car to check the undertray. Two more, one on either side, were checking the radiators for any damage sustained over the kerbstones, as well as the aerodynamic flourishes — bargeboards, wings and fins — to see if any of them were missing or broken and would affect performance. A “clear” signal was given: all the wheels were replaced, sporting a new set of tyres.
Backhouse, speaking with her over the radio, asked whether she was okay.
‘Just get me out in time to complete a flying lap.’
A signal was soon given to the lollipop man. He raised his sign. Sabatino shot forwards, swerving back out into the pit lane, charging down to the end on the limiter. She looked at the official clock. She only had ninety seconds to get right round the circuit to cross the start line before they closed the session.
It was going to be nip and tuck.
Particularly on cold tyres.
Feeding out of the pit lane exit, she passed Turn Four and headed up the Kemmel Straight to where the incident had just occurred. With such little time, she had no chance to coax the car gently up to speed and temperature. She had to cover the ground. And fast.
Q2’s time was running out.
Hurtling round the circuit, her only chance was to hammer round every corner if she was to get to the start line in time.
One minute to go.
She rounded Rivage, getting a little ragged through the exit and rising up on the kerb. Down through Turn Nine and on to Pouhon, which she took with now typical verve.
Turn Twelve and on to Fagnes.
Thirty seconds to go.
She took Turn Fifteen, her back end slewing out through the apex and kicking up a cloud of dust as she scrambled over the patch of earth between the kerbstones and the grass.
Up to two hundred miles an hour down the bottom of the valley.
Fifteen seconds to go.
She had the Chicane and half the pit straight left. Was she going to make it?
A coasting car was in the middle of the Chicane, idling home. Sabatino had to swerve dramatically around it, thwarting her exit into the start/finish straight.
Five seconds to go.
She floored the accelerator.
The clock was counting down.
‘No!’ she screamed into the radio as she saw the ominous red lights and chequered flag before she could cross the line.
‘No!’ she screamed again.
Sabatino had missed the cut-off.
By one and a half seconds.
Straker heard a string of profanity over the radio at the failure to lodge a fast enough qualifying lap.
‘She’s outside the top ten. Hasn’t made the cut for Q3,’ said Oliver Treadwell in the headquarters truck beside him. ‘She’ll miss the shootout and will start only fourteenth on the grid. She’s out of it.’
‘What a waste, after all that speed,’ said Straker. ‘What the hell happened to her, though, down at Les Combes?’
Treadwell looked bemused. ‘God knows. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ll rerun the telemetry and go through everything. We’ve got to try and find out what the hell went wrong out there.’
TWENTY-FIVE
Qualifying Three went ahead, to determine the ten places at the front of the grid, without her.
A dejected-looking Sabatino sat with Straker, Backhouse, Treadwell and several other team members at the meeting table in the Ptarmigan motor home. Laid out in front of them was a mass of printouts, charts, data sheets and other readouts.
‘I just don’t get it,’ said Backhouse. ‘Everything was optimal, right up to the moment it went. None of the components that could have caused the rears to lock-up like that show any sign of being anything other than perfect.’ He ran a finger along some data. ‘Absolutely fine. Then the trauma of the incident — and then absolutely fine again. Just like that.’
‘What about mechanical failure?’ asked one of the turquoise-uniformed team.
‘If it were a major component, how come Remy could drive back in and sense nothing wrong?’
‘What about an impact with something? A stone, an animal, a bird?’
‘No sign of impact. The gyros show the car running unencumbered right up to and after the incident.’
‘And again, any impact should have had a lasting effect,’ added Sabatino. ‘Except I found nothing wrong immediately afterwards.’
‘What about fuel?’ asked Treadwell.
‘We’re just running the data off the system now.’ Leaning back, Backhouse called to one of the team for an update. A few seconds later a stack of paper was plonked down on the table between them.
‘What’s this?’ asked Straker.
‘The Fuel Injection trace.’
Straker looked at the landscape-formatted A4 sheets, with row upon row of graphs, extending left to right across each page. They put him in mind of a music score. ‘What are these showing?’
‘The injector pulse width — basically the workings of each fuel injection valve in the engine. These show how much fuel was going into each cylinder.’
‘Why so many lines?’
‘Eight cylinders, an injector each — eight traces.’
Straker studied just one row. As he did so, Backhouse offered more of an explanation: ‘Each valve is opened and closed, electronically, by a solenoid at precise times in the combustion cycle, producing a square wave.’
Straker could see exactly what Backhouse meant: in each of the traces, he saw a line looking like a gappy row of squarish teeth.
‘Each one of those columns — the up strokes — shows the injector opening,’ Backhouse explained. ‘The width of a column shows for how long — how much fuel — was injected. The down stroke is the injector closing.’
‘Why so many pages of them?’
Sabatino smiled. ‘Eighteen thousand RPM is three hundred-odd revs a second. In printout form, that takes up a lot of pages.’
‘Okay,’ said Straker, with a hint of apology, ‘so which period does this lot cover?’
‘Before and after the incident. As you can see, bizarrely, everything’s okay after it.’
‘What about at the very moment of the trauma?’
Backhouse leant forwards. He asked for the exact time code of the incident recorded in the telemetry. A few papers were shuffled before a readout was produced: ‘1.36.52.09.’
Backhouse found the corresponding page of the fuel injection report. ‘Good God,’ he breathed.
‘What is it?’ asked Sabatino.
Backhouse laid the sheet of paper in the middle of the table. ‘Look there,’ he said running his fingers vertically down through the rows of heart beats. ‘At 1.36.52.09 the EFI effectively shut down — across all injectors.’
Running his finger along one of the rows left to right, Backhouse summarized: ‘Full throttle — wide columns — fuel injection fully open. Then, for what looks like no more than a quarter of a second, the pulse width narrows significantly — is practically closed — to almost nothing. Then back up to fully open again.’