Which meant that suddenly, the Argonaut and the Speed Razor were back on level terms again.
Sally worked a killer stop - just as Koch got his hose working again - with the result being that both cars shot out from their pit bays at almost exactly the same time, only now the Argonaut, astonishingly, was slightly ahead of the Speed Razor!
The two cars blasted back out onto the track, and with only two laps to run, the Argonaut was in the lead!
It was now a one-minute scramble for the Finish Line.
Jason flew.
Xavier charged.
Shoom!-shoom!
One lap to go and Jason still held the lead by half a carlength.
The crowd leapt to their feet.
Last lap.
Jason’s eyes never left the track.
Left into the sweeper through the city, blurred buildings swooshing by him on either side…
Up and over the cross-over…
Then into the final right-hander, holding the racing line - and Jason saw the Speed Razor‘s nosecone enter his left-side peripheral vision, heard the roar of its engines loud in his ears.
The Speed Razor was right alongside him! Xavier wasn’t giving up.
The two cars took the final turn side-by-side.
Jason gripped his steering wheel tightly, his knuckles white; clenched his teeth. His bloodshot eyes were wide, on the verge of sensory overload.
Still the Speed Razor kept coming…and slowly, gradually, started edging ahead of him!
Jason couldn’t believe it. There was nothing he could do! This was the best he could race and still Xavier was going past him.
And with that, the realisation hit Jason.
Xavier was too good. Too fast.
This race was slipping out of Jason’s grasp.
Xavier was going to win.
And then the home straight opened up before them and the Argonaut and the Speed Razor rushed down it side-byside at full throttle, before they shot together through the red laser beam that marked the Finish Line and the winner of the race - of the final - of the day - of the whole entire tournament was -
CHAPTER ELEVEN
- Xavier.
By 0.003 of a second. Three thousandths of a second. And as the two cars glided around the track, slowing, Jason sighed with deep relief.
He’d lost. Lost the final - and for that he was bitterly disappointed - but he was also glad that this day, this long day of racing, was finally over.
Almost every member of the 250,000-strong crowd stayed for the winner’s ceremony.
They clapped loudly as Xavier stepped triumphantly onto the podium to accept the winner’s trophy from Race Director Calder and Jean-Pierre LeClerq.
Jason could only stand behind the podium, behind the 2nd-place-getter’s step, and clap too.
He’d come so far, raced so hard, through four of the most difficult races of his life, and he’d missed out by the smallest fraction of a second.
The applause for Xavier and his team died down, and the announcer’s voice came again over the loudspeakers:
‘And in second place, Car No.55, Team Argonaut. Driver: Jason Chaser; Navigator: Bug Chaser; Mech Chief: Sally McDuff.’
Head down with disappointment, Jason stepped up onto the podium.
What happened next made him freeze in shock.
The crowd went nuts.
Absolutely, totally ballistic.
The colossal roar that they gave him and Sally and the Bug almost brought down the entire stadium.
Flashbulbs popped, horns blared, people raised their hands above their heads to clap. Even Xavier was taken aback by the strength of their cheering.
But it was true.
The crowd was giving a bigger cheer to the racer who’d come second than they had for the racer who’d come first!
Jason was stunned, and at first he didn’t understand why this was happening.
Nevertheless, with the Bug and Sally beside him, he took his place on the second tier of the podium and, dressed in his cool new racesuit, waved hesitantly to the crowd.
The crowd went even crazier at the gesture, started chanting: ‘Jason! JASON! JASON!’
It was then that Jason saw his mother down in the crowd. She was crying with joy. Beside her, his father, Henry, was busily taking audio-included digital photographs for their family album.
And in that instant Jason began to understand.
Xavier had won the tournament, and won it well, and the crowd respected that.
While for his part Jason had lost - but he had lost well.
After a staggering 390 laps of racing, at the edge of total exhaustion, he had lost by less than a second to a guy who had creamed every other opponent he had faced - and the crowd respected that even more.
Jason remembered something his father had once told him: It’s not how we win that defines us, Jason, it’s how we lose. Winners come and go, but the racer who goes down fighting will live forever in people’s hearts.
Jason smiled at that as he gazed out over the roaring crowd - the crowd roaring for him.
As he did so, Race Director Calder handed each member of Xavier’s winning team an enormous bottle of champagne, and Xavier shook his bottle hard and popped the cork, sending a geyser of champagne shooting into the air above the winner’s podium.
That evening, the Chaser family - plus Sally and Scott Syracuse - returned to Chooka’s Charcoal Chicken Restaurant for another celebratory dinner.
‘Guess what,’ Sally said as she munched on a burger. ‘I heard that after the winner’s presentation the head of the Lockheed-Martin pro team, Antony Nelson, approached Xavier and asked him if he wanted to apprentice with them at the Italian Run next month.’
‘No way!’ Jason exclaimed. ‘The Lockheed Factory Team. Wow! To the winner, the spoils, I guess…’
‘Don’t you worry,’ Henry Chaser said, seeing his disappointment. ‘Your time’ll come. I don’t think your efforts today went unnoticed.’
‘Yeah?’ Jason laughed. ‘Well, I don’t see the chiefs of any pro teams walking up to us and offering us a run in a Grand Slam race.’
Just as Jason was saying this, a large figure entered the restaurant.
Heads turned, whispers arose - precisely because you don’t often see billionaires in takeaway chicken joints.
It was Umberto Lombardi.
‘Ah-ha!’ the big Italian boomed. ‘Now this is my kind of dinner! Three Super Burgers to go, please, madam, with extra cheese! Oh, would anyone else like anything?’
Lombardi sat down beside Martha Chaser. ‘My sincere apologies, Senora Chaser, for intruding upon your celebrations. But I beg your indulgence, I will not stay for long. I do, however, have a serious question for this wonderful young team.’
Everyone at the table fell silent.
Lombardi leaned forward, lowered his voice. ‘I thought you all raced well today. Very well. No other team out there came close to surviving almost 400 laps of matchracing. But you did. More than that. You did that and you almost won!
‘Now. As you are probably aware, the Italian Run is to be held in three weeks’ time. Up until now, my team has only ever run one car in pro events, but lately I’ve been thinking of expanding the team…and adding a second car.’
Jason felt a tingle race up his spine. ‘Yes…’
Lombardi went on. ‘What I was wondering was this: would the members of Team Argonaut like to race the second Lombardi Racing Team car in this year’s Italian Run?’
Jason dropped his fork. The Bug blanched. Sally’s mouth fell open. Henry Chaser stopped chewing. Martha Chaser’s lip started to quiver. Scott Syracuse just kept eating casually.
‘You…’ Jason stammered. ‘You want us to race for you in the next Grand Slam race?’
‘Yes. I do,’ Lombardi said simply.
Jason swallowed.
This was too much. The enormity of what Lombardi was suggesting rocked through him with the force of an earthquake.
This w
ouldn’t be like any old School race. Or even like the Sponsors’ Tournament for that matter. This would be bigger - much bigger. This would be a professional race against professional racers, in Italy, beamed live to the entire world.
‘Well?’ Lombardi asked. ‘Do you race?’
Jason looked at the Bug, who nodded once.
He turned to Sally who, still silent with shock, nodded vigorously.
Then he turned back to Lombardi and said, ‘You bet we race.’
And so it was settled.
Team Argonaut was going to Italy.
PART V: THE ITALIAN RUN
CHAPTER ONE
In the hover car racing world, there are four ‘Grand Slam’ races. In order, they are:
The Sydney Classic, held in February.
The London Underground Run, May.
The Italian Run, August.
And the New York Masters, in October.
Naturally, they are all very different kinds of races.
The Sydney race is a typically Australian event - tough and hard and long, a test of endurance, like five-day-long cricket matches or the old Bathurst 1000 car race. It is a lap race that lasts 20 hours, during which racers do 156 laps of a course that runs past the eight giant ocean-dams that line Australia’s eastern coastline, ending underneath the grandest Finish Line in the world: the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Australians call it ‘the race that stops a nation’.
The London Underground Run is a gate race - the most fiendish gate race of all. Held in the subterranean dark of the London subway system, it tests every racer’s tactical abilities, seeing how many underground stations they can whip through in 6 hours. No racer has ever ‘clocked up’ every single station.
For its part, the New York Masters is a carnival of racing, four races held over four consecutive days, one race per day - one supersprint, a gate race, one collective pursuit, and finishing it off, an example of the rarest race of all, a long-distance search-and-retrieve ‘quest’ race that takes racers from New York City to Niagara Falls and back again.
The Italian Run, however, has its own unique format.
Held every year in the baking heat of the northern summer, it is a unidirectional race. Racers do not do laps of a circuit. Rather, they start in one city and end in another, on the other side of the country.
The race starts in Rome, inside the Colosseum, after which it shoots north, up the spine of Italy, swinging through Florence, Padua and Milan before it winds up through the Alps and then begins the long trip south down the western coast and between the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Then it’s under the bottom of the boot - where racers can choose to cut the heel if they dare - followed by the final dash up the eastern side of the country to the grand finish in Venice II.
Interestingly, there are two pit areas in the Italian Run - one at Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport in Fiumicino near Rome and a second directly across the country at Pescara. It is thus the only race in the world where pit crews have to travel overland to get to the second stop. It is not unknown for a racer to get to Pescara and find that his Mech Chief has not yet arrived.
Unlike most of the races Jason had run at Race School (which operated under the southern hemisphere rules of racing, such as ‘car-over-the-line’ finishes), the Italian Run operated under the more traditional rules of the northern pro-racing confederations, including a different finishing rule: ‘driver-over-the-line’.
This meant that it was the first racer - driver or navigator, it didn’t matter - over the line who won the race, whether or not they were in their car. On more than one occasion, a racer, his car broken down or crashed, had run (or in Italy, where the Finish Line was over water, swum) over the Line to finish the race.
Ultimately, however, the Italian Run was a truly European event, and as such it was loved by all of Europe. Every year, millions descended upon Italy for it. Immense crowds line the coastline of the entire country, sitting on hills and cliffs and hover grandstands.
For one week in August every year, Italy becomes the centre of Europe, buzzing with tourists and race fans - all of them with money to spend. Economists say that the week of the Italian Run injects $60 billion into the Italian economy.
It was into this surging pulsating world that Jason Chaser was about to plunge.
CHAPTER TWO
THE INTERNATIONAL RACE SCHOOL HOBART, TASMANIA
But before Jason and Xavier were to depart for Italy, there were still almost a dozen school races to be run.
While the Race School was very proud to have two of its racers invited to compete in a Grand Slam event, it was made very clear to both Jason and Xavier that while they were away in Italy, the School season would continue without them.
Which meant they would do well to put as many competition points as possible in the bank before they left. This was less of a problem for Xavier, who was currently leading the School Competition Ladder by a clear 30 points.
For Jason, it was tougher. As runner-up in the midseason tournament, he had garnered a solid 18 points (the tournament being worth double points), lifting him to 7th on the overall Competition Ladder. But Italy would take him away from the School Competition for eight days, forcing him to miss three whole races. And Italy aside, he was still mindful that he had to finish the School season in the Top 4 to get an invitation to the New York Challenger Race in October.
He would have to do some catch-up when he returned from his adventure in Italy. But hell, he thought, it was worth it - it wasn’t every day a rookie like him got a ride in a Grand Slam race.
Goddamn, he was excited.
Early one morning, a few days after the tournament, Jason went for a walk by himself out across a grassy headland overlooking Storm Bay. It was a place he went to be alone, to think and to breathe, away from the frenetic world of racing.
Someone was waiting for him at his spot.
Ariel.
‘Hey,’ Jason sat down beside her.
‘Hi there,’ she said.
Jason hadn’t seen her since the day of the tournament, the day he had beaten her, the day after she had - ‘You raced well in the tournament, Jason,’ she said.
‘I almost had him. Almost.’
‘Jason, I couldn’t believe you stuck with Xavier for as long as you did. No-one did,’ Ariel said. ‘And after all those races before. You just never give up.’
Jason bowed his head, said nothing.
Ariel said, ‘You know, I was cheering for you by the end. Sure, after you beat me, I went back to my room for a while and yes, I cried some. But after a while, I switched on the TV and saw that you were still in it, beating everyone. So for the final, I went back out there and sat up in the back of one of the grandstands and watched.’ She turned to him. ‘I was proud of you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I also felt I let you down by what I did the night before. With that asshole Fabian.’
Jason looked at her. ‘Ariel - ‘
‘No. Don’t say anything. I was stupid. I shoulda known better. He told me everything I wanted to hear, but he was only after one thing. Jason, you’ve been the only person who’s been good to me this whole time at Race School. I hope you can forgive me and be my friend again.’
Jason was silent for a long time.
Then he said, ‘You never let me down, Ariel. So we never stopped being friends. Except, of course, out on the track.’
And with that Ariel gave him a big hug.
The next twelve races went by in a blur.
Knowing he needed to bank some points before he went to Italy, Jason had solid finishes throughout: four 3rds, three 2nds and even two wins - although it had to be said that both of his wins came on days when Xavier Xonora decided to take a rest and sit out the race.
This fact actually bothered Jason.
He realised that he had only ever beaten Xavier on one occasion - in Race 25, and even then, it had been in pretty incredible circumstances, after he’d taken the very nonpercentage move of skipping
his final pit stop.
In any case, his results catapulted Team Argonaut up the Competition Ladder and by the time it came for him to leave for Italy, the Ladder looked like this:
INTERNATIONAL RACE SCHOOL
CHAMPIONSHIP LADDER
AFTER 37 RACES
DRIVER NO. CAR POINTS
1. XONORA, X 1 Speed Razor 266
2. KRISHNA, V 31 Calcutta-IV 235
3. WASHINGTON, I 42 Black Bullet 224
4. CHASER, J 55 Argonaut 217
5. BECKER, B 09 Devil’s Chariot 216
6. WONG, H 888 Little Tokyo 215
7. SCHUMACHER, K 25 Blue Lightning 213
8. PIPER, A 16 Pied Piper 212
Xavier was way out in front. Sitting 31 points ahead of his nearest rival, he could sit out three more races and still not lose the Number 1 spot.
Jason was in fourth position - but with a bunch of quality racers nipping at his heels. After missing three races, he’d almost certainly drop out of the Top 4.
But that was a battle to be fought another day. It was time to go to Italy.
CHAPTER THREE
VENICE II, ITALY (MONDAY OF RACE WEEK)
The whole of Italy was positively buzzing with excitement when Jason, the Bug and Sally stepped off Umberto Lombardi’s private hover-liner at the main wharf of Venice II.
It was as if hover car fever had gripped the entire nation.
Gargantuan images of Alessandro Romba blared out from building-sized hover-billboards along the coast - pictures of the world champion holding cola cans or driving sports hover cars.
Multi-coloured banners fluttered from every lamppost - either in the colours of the Italian flag or of some racing team. People danced in the streets dressed in the colours of their favourite teams, sang, drank and generally had a great time.
The week of the Italian Run was Party Week in Italy.Magazines and newspapers and TV talk shows spoke of only one thing: La Corsa. The Race.
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