Fast & Wet

by Kat Ransom

  “It’s too soon, we’ll lose track position,” Dante answers.

  I run back to my computer and look. Dante’s right, he isn’t scheduled to come in for a pit stop yet, but his tire life is showing as virtually gone.

  “Copy that, but you’re losing time, box this lap,” his engineer tells him again.

  “I can do a few more laps,” Dante argues.

  I see an engineer on the pit wall throw his hands up in frustration. Clearly, Dante is always cocky and doesn’t like to follow orders.

  Sure enough, Dante zooms right by the pit lane entrance and zips past us in the garage. Just after he passes us, there’s an awful screech, and a plume of black smoke waifs past our line of sight.

  I look up to the monitor, and one of the cars on another team has just had a massive blowout. Chunks of rubber fly in all directions as the tire disintegrates like it’s taken a grenade to the sidewall.

  The yellow car skids, then moves to the side of the track to get out of the way, its metal rim sparking against the asphalt before he makes it to a run-off area.

  “Yellow flag, Sector One,” Edmund tells both drivers, so they know to slow down and use caution in that area.

  Good lord, the carnage the tire has made looks terrible on the television monitors. The tire coming apart and flopping around has torn up the floor of the car, and the driver is pissed as he gets out. Pissed, but he’s okay.

  This shit is scary in real life, damn.

  In two laps, the track marshals have removed the battered yellow car, and our engineers tell the boys the track is clear.

  Dante again passes the pit lane entry and continues defying his engineers. I wonder if all the drivers have this much ego. Cole certainly did even when he was just eighteen.

  All the computer data on Dante’s car looks good. It’s just tire life that’s the problem. I wonder if the engineers in the other team are thinking the same thing as their dead car gets wheeled back to their garage. I’m wondering what settings we can tinker with on our end that may help.

  I’m chewing my cuticle when the data on my screen blows up, bright red lights and error messages flashing.

  I see it on my computer before I look up and confirm it on the television monitor. Dante’s car goes off at a corner. He sails into a gravel trap as his rear left tire comes apart in strands and flings huge pieces of rubber everywhere. The car kicks up a plume of dust, and the gravel thankfully does its job. It slows Dante down significantly before the car knocks sideways into a barrier wall and rocks to a halt.

  “Cagata pneumatici! Vaffanculo a chi t'è morto,” a very long string of what I’m assuming are Italian profanities come through my headset as Dante’s car comes to a stop.

  I need to learn more languages.

  “What is he saying?” I ask the engineer sitting next to me.

  He lifts one of his earphones off his head and says, “Umm, more or less, these bullshit tires can go fuck corpses. More or less,” he shrugs.

  “Are you all right, Dante?” Edmund asks him.

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine. These piece of shit tires should not come apart like this,” he yells back.

  Edmund tries to calm him down over the radio, but Dante is right. All tires, especially high-performance tires like these, are designed to fail in safe ways. They should not implode like this. Is this what’s been happening all season?

  Typically when I watch races at home, I’m only paying attention to Cole. And I’m also usually hiding in my bedroom, so the rest of the world doesn’t know exactly how not over Cole I am.

  I want to see that damaged tire.

  I check the monitor and see Cole’s doing fine out there, his data looks good. I watch as the marshals work on getting Dante’s car onto a wrecker and wait with my hands on my hips as the tow truck starts it’s slow progression back to the garage area.

  Dante makes it back before the tow truck and storms through the garage, hurling more Italian inside his helmet. He shoves a door open so hard it bounces off the wall behind, then escapes through the rear of the garage. I need to talk to him about what happened, but not now. Angry Dante looks a little scary.

  Eventually, the car makes it back on the wrecker, and I’m clamoring to get near it as it gets lowered to the ground from the truck. A crew of our mechanics is waiting to assist, and once the car is on the ground, I start inspecting the tires.

  They’re beat to shit, they’re hot, but I need to really look at them.

  Our crew gets the car on a dolly, and mechanics get to work on removing the tires and cooling the brakes, so they don’t catch on fire. As I’m waiting for a tire to be removed, a team of Concordia reps in white shirts appear with a rolling metal rack.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name,” I tell the mechanic removing the damaged tire. “I want that tire.” I point to the shredded tire that blew apart on Dante.

  “I’m Mark, but what do you mean you want this tire?” The mechanic asks.

  “I mean, I want it. Give it to me, please,” I make a motion with my hand to give it the hell over.

  Mark looks at me like I’m nuts.

  I find myself pissed off. Dante could have been hurt.

  I don’t know if it’s the tire’s fault or what happened, but I intend to find out. I do know that I should not be looking at a tire that looks like shredded chicken, for god’s sake.

  “Uhh, I can’t give you the tire,” Mark argues.

  “What? Why not?”

  One of the Concordia reps wheels the rolling rack and takes the tire from Mark. The other reps start taking tires from the other mechanics as they are removed from the car.

  “All used tires return to Concordia immediately for inspection,” some little nitwit Concordia chick who’s crept up next to me says.

  “Inspection? Well, I want to inspect them first,” I snap back.

  Don’t start with me, bitch. You have no idea what I’m dealing with this week.

  “Sorry, that’s not how this works,” she sashays her head.

  “Mark, is this true?” I turn to him.

  Mark looks like he is afraid he’s going to get dragged into a catfight at any moment and is none too pleased about it.

  “Yeah, sorry. Those are the rules,” he confirms.

  Salty tire bitch gloats at me as the fourth tire is loaded onto their rack to be wheeled away. All these stupid rules, who comes up with this garbage?

  “Fine,” I squint at Tire Bitch, and I pull my cell phone out of my pocket.

  The other Concordia people have started wheeling the tires away, but I jog after them and start taking photos as I chase them. I’m just aiming my phone in the general direction of the damaged tire and holding the shutter down.

  “You can’t do that,” Tire Bitch argues.

  “Mark,” I yell back to the mechanics. “Is there a rule about me taking photos?” I run backward.

  “Not that I know of,” he bellows.

  “Ha!” I sneer at Tire Bitch, who rolls her eyes at me and instructs the other three Concordia reps to pick up their pace.

  I chase after them like a crazy person until I have taken what feels like a hundred photos. Hopefully one or two will be useful.

  Then I make my way back to Dante’s wrecked car, which is being wheeled into the garage bay now. First, I check the ground where it was lowered off the truck, and damn, no rubber chunks are lying around.

  I wonder if I can get some off the track later, but no, those efficient German marshals have long since swept up all the debris.

  Damn it.

  I want the materials data from Olivier.

  I check the television monitors and my computer again. Cole has come in for a pit stop while I was chasing manufacturer reps around like a nut, but everything looks good for him.

  I look over at Dante’s car, the carbon fiber pods are smashed and splintered, the front wing is dangling off, the floor of the vehicle is bent up at an unnatural angle. According to the data, he hit the wall at 93 miles per ho
ur, and the impact was nearly 14g. A couple more and the g-force sensor in the car would have tripped, and Dante would be taken to a medical center for a mandatory check.

  If Dante had been in a normal road car, he’d be dead several times over.

  This could have been Cole.

  By the time the race has ended, I’ve chewed my cuticle enough that it’s bleeding. I barely knew what place Cole finished in because I was overwhelmed with him just coming back in one piece.

  No matter what has happened between Cole and me, I don’t think I could handle it if he got killed out here. I know the dangers, obviously. I’ve always known but seeing it creates a pit in my stomach.

  I want to slap him and shake him and ask him a thousand questions about how he could have done what did to me, but I don’t want him dead.

  I wonder if this is how Mom feels being married to a military husband, though Dad has long since even gone up in a plane, much less been deployed.

  I’m probably blowing things out of proportion. Dante is fine. I have no idea where Cole is, but he’s also fine.

  Breathe.

  The only thing I can do is do what I do best. Put my head down and figure out what is going on with these tires. Even if they’re not faulty, there has to be some reason the team can’t get them to work right.

  And if they’re not working right, for any reason, they aren’t safe.

  Eleven

  Emily

  “Enhance. Enhance,” I joke to Zane, one of the factory engineers who’s helping me in the lab today as we analyze my tire photos. We have them pulled up onto an oversized monitor hung on the wall.

  “It’s not CSI, Emily,” he says. Zane is American, too, so we’ve been making jokes us Yanks would know.

  “Maybe we need to turn the lights out and look with flashlights, that’s when you find all the good clues.”

  Most of my pictures are trash, blurred beyond recognition because I was jogging when I took them. But there are two that might be useful if only Zane would enhance like television shows indicate we should be able to do.

  I’ve spent the better part of my time between races digging up as much information as I can because Olivier still has not sent me the promised materials data. I emailed him a reminder and got an out of office notification.

  I even found a French student at Cambridge to help me request the patent information Concordia has on record in France, but that’s going to take twelve weeks or more, and now I have to tutor someone else for the favor. But, without a tire from this season in hand, preferably a destroyed tire, I’m on my own to ferret out clues.

  But I’m not going to be underestimated. I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime. I am smart and damn good at what I do. To hell with anyone who wants to put me in a corner and thinks otherwise.

  “Wait, go back one photo,” I tell Zane and move closer to the giant wall monitor.

  He clicks back one photo and blows up the image. “What?” He asks, fixing his glasses to look closely.

  “Can you zoom in any more right here,” I point to a corner of the image.

  Zane tries, but the resolution blows out if we zoom in any more. “What are we looking at?”

  It’s hard to tell because this is a shitty cell phone photo, and most of it is blurred, but there might be something. “Right here,” I tap the monitor, “what do you see?”

  “Cracks in the rubber?”

  I nod. I really want someone else to see what I see, though, because it could be nothing, and I don’t want to bring bias in. And I am definitely biased now after Dante’s accident scared the bejeezus out of me.

  “I don’t get it,” Zane finally shrugs. In fairness, he did not spend nine months of his life learning everything there is to know about tires. He spent his graduate year learning about computational fluid dynamics, which also sounds fascinating if I'm honest.

  “Do those cracks look random in pattern to you, or do they run perpendicular to the grain?” Both of us have our noses pressed into the monitor and are cocking our heads from side to side, trying to figure it out.

  “Perpendicular. Maybe?”

  “Ugh, you’re no help, Zane,” I put my hands on my hips and step back.

  “What does the crack orientation have to do with anything?”

  “The way the cracks form tells a story. Perpendicular cracks can be from ozone…”

  “What are you guys doing?” Zane and I both jump and spin around to find Cole with one eyebrow cocked, looking at the magnified tire photo on the wall, and my smattering of papers spread out around me like a tornado has been through.

  “Looking at cracks,” Zane shrugs.

  “As one does,” Cole smiles at me with that panty-melting grin he does so well.

  I’ve seen Cole a handful of times at the factory since we’ve been back. He’s being pretty professional, I have to admit. He’s conveniently available when I’ve had questions, but he isn’t underfoot or making me uncomfortable in any way.

  A couple of times I’ve caught myself wishing he were around more, actually, but I’ve been pushing that down and trying to focus on work. Because I’m good at that.

  “What’s up?” I ask him. His hands are in his jeans pockets, which just makes his pants tight in that area, and I try not to glance down. He’s gotten scruffy since we’ve been home for the last several days, and it makes him look even more impossibly rugged.

  “Dante said you wanted me to tell you when I’d be in the simulator?”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. When are you doing that?”

  “Now.”

  Has his Adam’s apple always been so pronounced?

  Good lord.

  “Um, okay, let me just grab my laptop,” I start scrambling around looking for my computer and find it buried under a stack of research papers I printed off at the University about other auto sports projects.

  Cole stands still as a statue just watching me, an ever-present smirk on his face. Every time I’ve bumped into him, he’s smirking or smiling at me. I don’t know how I’m supposed to be hateful when he’s always polite. I was expecting him to be confrontational when I arrived if anything.

  Nope, he’s playing the perfect gentleman, instead.

  I was hoping to be confrontational, myself, if I’m honest. I have years of rage I would like to get out. But we’re both being professional, and it’s oddly unsatisfying. I feel robbed of wanting to punch Cole in the face or kick him in the balls like I’d always envisioned.

  Walking out of the lab together, we need to go up a flight of stairs since the lab is in the basement. Reaching the stairwell, Cole extends a hand so I can go first. Again, the gentleman. Maybe he’s matured, grown up.

  No sooner do I think that when I feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling. We’re halfway up the stairs when I stop and glare at him over my shoulder. He’s right behind me.

  “What?” He asks.

  “I feel like you’re looking at my ass.”

  “You would not be wrong,” the corners of his eyes wrinkle, and he continues his grinning.

  “Stop it,” I scold him. “You go first.” I step aside on the stairs so he can move past me.

  “Now you’re going to look at my ass,” he says as he steps past and leaves a trace of his cologne to swirl past me.

  It’s not the same cologne he used to wear. It’s better.

  “I am not.”

  I absolutely am.

  “Mmm, I think you are,” he teases.

  I ignore him because anything else I say is only going to encourage him. He holds the stairwell door open for me, again, as we exit into the lobby.

  When we walk past the hallway where I first ran into him, he asks, “Why were you hiding the morning of your interview?”

  “I was not hiding, I was here early and just wandering around,” I feel goosebumps climb over my skin.

  Liar, liar, panties on fire.

  “You were twenty minutes late for your interview. You were hiding.”

&n
bsp; “My watch was broken.”

  “Okay,” he chuckles at my ridiculous excuse.

  I sigh and will myself into being an adult. I can be more mature and grown up too, I suppose if I must. “I was trying to bomb the interview.”

  “Because of me,” he states, not so much asking, but confirming.

  I nod. There’s no point in denying it. Cole’s not stupid, and he knows me better than anyone.

  Or, he did, once upon a time.

  “Are you uncomfortable around me?” He asks. His head hangs down as we walk as if he’s embarrassed.

  It’s a question I should have to think about, but I don’t. Cole’s always made me feel comfortable, like a cozy pair of slippers that you slink into. My answer leaves my mouth immediately, “No.”

  As we continue to walk through the lobby and toward the Simulation room, I pay attention to my thoughts, how my body feels. I’m not uncomfortable at all. I’m relaxed, there’s a calmness inside of me. Now that I recognize the feeling, I can’t remember the last time I didn’t feel awkward or have thoughts racing through my mind.

  Probably six years ago.

  I was here with Dante earlier in the week, but the Simulator room still makes me do a double-take. There’s a partial, mock F1 car raised up on a platform in the middle of the darkened room on four hydraulic legs. In front of it is an enormous one-hundred-eighty degree vision screen so the driver can experience what he’ll see on the track.

  It looks like a theme park ride, but six times as expensive.

  Running along the side of the room is a control station, and I plug my laptop into the data portal as Cole climbs the stairs into the cockpit and settles in. He’s running the Hungary track simulation today since that’s our next race.

  I get the program pulled up, and the screen comes to life, the mock car rises up into the air. The program starts running as if the car was on the grid at the front of the race.

  Data starts pouring in as the car rolls and pitches like a real car would. I watch Cole’s fingers snap the paddle shifters behind the steering wheel, watch where his eyes go on the screen, and how the car responds.

  “Why did you do that?” I ask when he fiddles with a setting on his steering wheel, and the data points change.