The roar crescendoed.
Five lights burned. They were all on. They stayed burning. Then, suddenly, they were out.
GO!
The noise was deafening. All twenty-one cars screamed off the line. All that energy and testosterone headed down to the entry of Turn One, the famous La Source.
Simi Luciano got away well on the clean side of the track from the second row. Ahead of him were both Ferraris. They had pulled level with each other and were racing side by side as they hurtled into the braking zone. No team orders could have been at work between these two drivers. Both Ferraris dived for the racing line into the first corner. The second place man aimed for a tight line on the inside, while the pole sitter tried to come in, claiming the line for himself. A massive test of nerve. The two Ferraris banged wheels, momentarily throwing themselves off pace and rhythm. Both decelerated as a consequence. The whole field was suddenly bunching up behind them.
Remy Sabatino, in P14, was a long way back from all this. But the field concertinaed quickly. She was able to see the convergence of the front runners — one of the few consolations of being further back. It afforded her more time to try and read what was going on.
Up at the front the mêlée continued. Compression of speed and space into such a bottleneck gave the drivers little room fore and aft, let alone amidships, to move. A hair’s breadth soon separated the cars, meaning the only protection against bumping the car in front was to lift off.
The pack as a whole more or less ground to a halt.
Remy Sabatino, resigned to be patient — because of her unrepresentative grid position — had been ready to play a waiting game in this race. But all that was abandoned in the blink of an eye.
She spotted Simi Luciano flinch to the outside — an act of evasion, desperate to miss running into the Ferrari squabble directly in front of him. Sabatino saw immediately where he’d been forced to go. With the rest of the pack still to his inside — all fighting for the racing line — she extrapolated the possibilities of Luciano’s move. She thought she saw a chance. And went for it.
The Ptarmigan Team looked on, their hearts in their mouths. Was this the move of a champion or an outlandish punt from someone so frustrated that they might have reached the end of their tether?
Immediately swinging wide herself, Sabatino made to go completely right round the outside of La Source, out to the left. She was going to take herself deliberately off line.
The moment she started this move, her car struggled for grip. Sabatino’s gamble became all too apparent. The rear end got away from her — twice. Badly. The Ptarmigan then yawed dramatically as she tried to slow and turn in round the outside of the corner on the dirty surface.
Out on the marbles, she was wrestling frenetically with the wheel.
Over to her front and right, at the apex of the reflex bend, the leaders were still trying to unravel themselves. There was a collision between Paddy Aston in the Lambourn and a Lotus — the Lotus losing its front wing in the process. Shards of carbon fibre — as it shattered into pieces — were bounced like pins across the surface of the track. La Source was now littered with razor-sharp splinters.
Sabatino was still going wide. She soon found herself bouncing along the red and white stones on the outside of the corner.
A car to her inside nearly hit her as it, too, swerved outwards, taking evasive action. Sabatino was forced to go even wider — to start straddling the kerb. There was a soul-wrenching grunt as her undertray hit and scraped along the ground. Was this now a mistake? Had she really gone too far — taken too much of a risk? Sabatino kept pushing, knowing she was well past the point of no return.
Somehow, though, she managed to hold it together, even while rallying, her left wheels well and truly on the ungrippy artificial grass.
Still Sabatino fed in the power, fighting all the way to maintain the balance of the car. She started veering back — back towards the black stuff. Moments later she was fully on the circuit again, with all four wheels, and quickly accelerating aggressively through the exit of the turn.
She breathed deeply as the car found stability. Sabatino took in her surroundings — and position. The leaders, breaking away down the hill in front of her, were picking up speed heading towards Eau Rouge, while the chaos through Turn One was slowly starting to unwind behind her.
‘Amazing, Remy,’ said Backhouse over the radio. ‘You’ve jumped ten places to fourth — quite superb.’
But to Sabatino’s frustration, that was nearly all the excitement for the Belgian Grand Prix. The race order remained unchanged for a number of laps: Ferrari, Ferrari, Luciano, Sabatino, Red Bull, Aston. There seemed little available to the two Ferraris in front to pull away from Luciano’s Massarella, while Sabatino got more and more frustrated every time she closed in on Luciano. Her Ptarmigan was performing brilliantly and was able to make up ground. But, under braking, any dirty air killed the effectiveness of her front wing. She couldn’t pass, because she never managed to get close enough to mount a serious challenge.
Sabatino had to settle for a waiting game for twenty laps.
Then the race-leading Ferrari dived in to the pits. Changing tyres, the crew worked extraordinarily fast, but the fuel rig jammed at a critical moment, taking a full twenty seconds to be disengaged. By the time the Ferrari had regained the track, he’d dropped back down to seventh.
By default, Sabatino had gained a place.
Luciano in the Massarella passed the other, front-running, Ferrari two laps from the end and, as a consequence, took the chequered flag.
Sabatino was confirmed in P3, so even making it onto the podium.
Paddy Aston, after fending off the rebounding Ferrari, prevailed and retained fourth.
Straker heard and saw Backhouse’s radio message to Sabatino on her in-lap: ‘Not the cleanest weekend. But third, from fourteenth on the grid, Remy? Much better than we might have feared.’
‘Yeah, but without Massarella’s sabotaging of my qualifying, we should’ve been on pole. This race should’ve been mine.’
Sabatino made it back to the headquarters truck after the TV interview. She took a shower to rid herself of the sticky champagne — a hazard of the spray on the podium — and emerged wearing a large baggy jersey and jeans. She was rubbing down her hair with a towel.
‘A great drive, Remy,’ said Treadwell. ‘A disappointing weekend but a great save, considering. After yesterday, six points are far better than we hoped. It keeps us just ahead, by one, in the Constructors’ Championship. While your six points to Luciano’s ten still keeps you at the top of the Drivers’ by six.’
Sabatino clearly wasn’t warming to any attempt to be philosophical. Trying further, Treadwell said: ‘Also, confronting Van Der Vaal and the guy from Benbecular must have frightened Massarella off today.’
She slumped down onto the bench in the motor home. ‘Who cares — I should have been on pole. This should have been mine.’
Suddenly she looked distracted.
Sabatino had just caught sight of an image on one of the plasma screens. Jumping up, she crossed the floor of the motor home to take a closer look. A live CCTV shot showed the front of the Ptarmigan garage in the pit lane and — and beyond it — Massarella’s. ‘What the hell?’ exhaled Sabatino to the others in the motor home. ‘What the fuck’s he doing?’
They all moved over to see the same screen. On it they saw Sabatino’s race engineer chatting on the pit wall.
Andy Backhouse was engaged in conversation with Eugene Van Der Vaal.