The Princess and the Prix

by Nell Stark

  “Hon, really,” Courtney chimed in. “Do you need to give Thalia the third degree this instant?”

  “It’s not unreasonable,” Peter said. “We got married in my first year in F1.”

  So much for her theory. But when you purposefully dated people who wouldn’t become attached, the likelihood of meeting someone interested in marriage was slim to none. She didn’t want to tell him that the idea of settling down felt to her like settling, period. Instead, she fell back on humor.

  “Well, find me a wife like Courtney and I’ll consider it.” She leaned forward to include her. “Do you have a sister?”

  Courtney laughed. “Two strapping brothers, older, both with broods of their own. Sorry to disappoint.”

  Peter was like his dog with a bone. “You may be new to Formula One, but you’ve been racing for a while. Our life is crazy, but that’s not a reason to give up on stability.” He reached out for Courtney’s hand. “Family grounds you. I love racing and I love winning. But having all this…it reminds me of the bigger picture.”

  The bigger picture. Thalia thought of Alix and her concern for the rural communities in East Africa. Where did that generosity of spirit come from? If she were being honest, she rarely thought of anyone except herself and her own goals. In GP2, she had participated in plenty of charity endeavors, but they were always a means to an end. Other people worried about the bigger picture. She worried about the racetrack. Was that a flaw? Was she missing something?

  “You’re happy,” she said carefully, hoping she was choosing the right words.

  “Damn right I am.” He grinned. “Look, I promise I’ll leave off lecturing you in a moment so we can get back to enjoying these pints. But you deserve happiness too.”

  “I am ha—”

  He held up a hand for her to wait. “You’re still near the beginning of your career. I’m getting closer to the end. Once, that would have terrified me. But because of my family, I’m not afraid of what happens when it’s over. In some ways I’m even looking forward to it. That’s all I wanted to say.”

  Thalia nodded slowly. She looked from Peter, to Courtney, to Bryce, and then beyond him, to the lush lawn of their spacious garden. It was beautiful. Comfortable. Orderly. But as much as she could appreciate its charms, she didn’t want them for herself. The familiar restlessness, her constant companion, seethed beneath her skin, craving the rush of the track.

  “I’m glad that’s how you feel. You deserve all of this.” She shifted her glass in her hand to let the amber liquid catch the sunlight. “But I don’t ever want racing to be over.”

  Chapter Eight

  As the bell tower at Monza struck the half hour, Thalia felt all of the trepidation and none of the anticipation she had experienced at Catalunya. In yesterday’s third qualification session, her gearbox had failed during the Variante Ascari chicane, forcing her to pull into the pit. Her time had been strong enough to qualify for sixth place, but after the five-place grid penalty for having to replace the gearbox, she would begin the race today from eleventh position. As much as she had tried to put on a brave face for the media, she had to face reality: reaching the podium from eleventh position was nearly impossible.

  “Stop psyching yourself out.” Peter’s hand on her shoulder was a merciful distraction.

  “I’m good,” she said, hoping she sounded confident.

  “No, you’re not. You’re wallowing in a pity party. Knock it off.” He leaned forward until their foreheads were pressed together, balaclava to balaclava. “Sure, you’ve had some shitty luck this weekend. But anything can happen out there. Claw your way back where you belong, okay?”

  For one horrific, ludicrous moment, she thought she might cry. Ruthlessly quashing the impulse, she swallowed hard and pulled back enough to look him in the eyes. “I will.”

  He nodded sharply and was gone. As much as she was hoping for a chaotic race that would give her a stronger chance of making headway, Thalia wanted him to have a smooth ride. Peter had taken the pole position today, snatching it out of Lucas’s grip by four hundredths of a second. Hopefully, he would never see anything but pure daylight for the next two hours. While Aiglon’s second driver, Mason Chadworth, had taken P3, Thalia considered Ferrari to be the most dangerous threat in this particular race. Neither Terrence nor Hugo had qualified as well as they wished, but both would do everything in their power to claim a victory for the Tifosi on their home track.

  “Time to saddle up, Thalia,” Carl called.

  As she slid into the car, the engineers swarmed around her like worker bees. She closed her eyes to escape their freneticism. The racetrack unfurled in her mind like a simulation and she saw herself in it—her car, shining silver and red and blue, slicing down the straights and effortlessly commanding the turns, overtaking rival after rival to join Peter at the apex of the pack. As she envisioned each subsequent meter of the track, she felt her pulse finally begin to steady.

  “Fall asleep in there?” Carl asked with an affectionate thump on her helmet.

  Suddenly invigorated, Thalia flashed him the finger. “Not likely!”

  The next several minutes were a whirlwind of checking and double-checking before Carl finally started the engine. Her installation lap from the pit to the grid was thankfully uneventful, though she had to grind her teeth at watching Terrence pull into her sixth place spot. The team was protecting her from the media’s intrusiveness, but Terrence had no compunctions about preening under the lights and before the cameras. Silently, she vowed to catch him.

  With two minutes until the start, Alistair entered her field of view. “If you can get us at least one point, we’ll call today a success.”

  Carl punctuated his words by starting up the engine again. Its roar thrummed through her body like the deep purr of a lion. She could feel it hovering—the elusive zone where her conscious mind was suspended in a state of hyperawareness even as her muscles reacted from memory. If she could only enter that headspace at the beginning of the race and remain there for its duration, she would be unstoppable.

  The warm-up lap passed uneventfully, and by the time she had repositioned her car on the grid, anticipation had trumped her anxiety. She was an underdog. Everyone in front of her—and probably some of those behind—would underestimate her. Peter was right: she belonged on top of the grid, not at its midpoint. This was a golden opportunity to prove herself as the real deal and shut up everyone who was calling her a fluke, or a publicity stunt, or worse.

  The world became five lights turning red. When they winked out, she was ready, surging forward to gain position on both cars in the row ahead. From eleventh to ninth in less than one second. Not bad. As the triumphant hollers from the garage echoed in her earpiece, Thalia remained aggressive, pushing hard in an attempt to overtake the eighth car on the first corner. Gravity knocked the breath from her lungs as she entered the chicane faster than she ever had, and she fought to keep the car on its line even as she hurtled past her opponent.

  Eighth place. But by now, the field was beginning to spread out. Any other gains wouldn’t come so easily.

  Despite driving as efficiently as she ever had on this circuit, it took until the twenty-sixth lap for Thalia to make up another position. Once in seventh, she set her sights on Terrence. He was almost two seconds ahead, but she chipped and chipped away at the gap, gradually whittling it down. Unfortunately, by the time she was within striking distance, she had to pit.

  “He’ll have to come in soon,” Carl said. “You’ll have your shot.”

  He was right. A few minutes later, Terrence pulled into the pit lane, and several seconds after that, Carl jumped back onto the microphone. “Long pit for Terrence. Put him away!”

  Jumping at the chance, Thalia took the final corner—the Curva Parobolica—as quickly as she possibly could. By the time she returned to the pit lane exit, they were on a collision course. Forcing her throttle to the floor, she blew past Terrence with what had to be scant hundredths of a second to spare.r />
  He was going to fight her for the position, and so she focused on making her next circuit the most efficient yet. For the next few laps, he pushed hard, trying to force her into making a mistake. But that strategy went both ways, and if she kept her calm, perhaps he would eventually be the one to misjudge. She had to hold on. The cramp between her shoulder blades was nothing compared to the pain of the frustration she would feel if he managed to retake sixth place.

  “Doing great, Thalia,” Carl spoke into her ear. “Keep fending him off. He’s burning more rubber than you.”

  That was true. Every time he swung wide or moved inside to challenge her, he was wearing down his tires more quickly than she was by maintaining the best possible line. She kept her car directly in the middle of the track on the penultimate straight and took a quick sip of her energy drink in preparation for the battle that was sure to come on the parabolic curve. Praying her new gearbox would continue to hold up, she downshifted and hit the brakes. Defending the corner was a matter of accelerating precisely at its apex in order to thwart his inevitable attempt to overtake. Even if she had wanted to breathe through it, the g-forces had temporarily paralyzed her lungs. Poised to open up the throttle and blast out of the turn, she waited for just the right moment—

  The car shuddered and jerked toward the inside of the curve, its wheels scraping the turf. Thalia’s teeth rattled in her head, and she accidentally bit her tongue as she desperately tried to wrest back some control. Reflexes honed by years of training were all that kept her from colliding with the barrier. She straightened out her course with mere inches to spare and let her car coast to a stop. Her ears were ringing and her mouth tasted like copper and she was dazedly captivated by the afternoon sunlight glinting off the spires of the main grandstand ahead.

  “Thalia!” Alistair’s voice sliced through her shock. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay.” She swallowed blood, gagged, and instinctively pushed the drink button. “What the bloody hell just happened?” she demanded, not even caring that her voice was trembling.

  “Terrence clipped you. Wait for my word. Once the backfield clears, let’s see if you can come in on your own.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Thalia could feel the rage bubbling up inside her chest, threatening to drown her. With a supreme mental effort, she forced it back. For the moment, she was still in this race.

  As precious seconds ticked by, fear warred with her anger. Here, on the inside of one of the fastest corners in the world, she was a sitting duck for anyone who happened to make a mistake or experienced a technical failure. When Alistair finally gave her the all clear, relief and nerves almost made her stall out.

  The instant she pulled back onto the track, she could feel that something was wrong. The car was pulling hard to the right and responding sluggishly to the throttle. As she limped into the pit lane, hope drained away like sand from an hourglass. Even as she tried to convince herself that her damage was localized to a tire, every instinct screamed that it was much worse. This race was over for her—she would have bet on it.

  Back in the pit, it took less than ten seconds for the engineers to corroborate her instincts. There was damage not only to the rear left tire, but also to the axle. In the blink of an eye, she had gone from sixth place to DNF—Did Not Finish.

  After the crew guided her car back into the garage she waved off Carl’s attempt to help her out, vaulted over the side, and barely resisted the urge to dash her helmet to the ground. “God damn it!”

  Alistair was suddenly in front of her, gripping her shoulders. “You need to see the doctor.”

  “No, I’m not hurt. You’re sure he clipped me?”

  His mouth tightened. “Come and see.”

  At the nearest bank of computers, he called up her on-board camera. It showed two points of view, one behind and one ahead, and she gripped the table’s edge as Alistair homed in on the rearview vantage point. As he replayed the footage from her last few minutes on the track, Thalia felt as though her brain had split in two: one half was critically analyzing her own driving, while the other focused on Terrence’s maneuvers. At some points, she had done an admirable job of defending her position, while at others, she had created more space than she should have.

  Thalia could see now that as she had gone into that final turn before the collision, she had left Terrence more of an opening than she had intended. But instead of taking the space he’d been given, he had pulled up close beside her in his overtaking attempt. Just as she’d been about to pull away—even now, she could feel that instant of anticipation before slamming home the accelerator—his front wing had nicked her rear left tire.

  “What the fuck!” She brought her fist down on the tabletop, rattling the entire row of flat screens. “He could have gotten around me!”

  “I agree.” As always, Alistair was calm. Too calm. How could he be so even-keeled about something that had taken one of his drivers out of the race? Now, instead of the eight or even ten points they might have earned from her position, they had none. Peter would have to carry them both, and through no fault of her own.

  Thalia wanted to scream. The rage bubbled up inside her, hot and fierce and animal, begging for an outlet. But she couldn’t scream. She was supposed to be a professional. A true professional would be asking all the right questions right now, like whether they could file a formal complaint with the FIA and ask that they look into the collision. Thalia opened her mouth and the words just wouldn’t come around the festering knot of emotion that clogged her throat.

  At that moment, Alistair was called away to address a question about some of the telemetry data from Peter’s car. Struggling to blink back tears at her own helplessness, Thalia forced herself to watch the end of the race. That’s what Peter would have done, had their roles been reversed, and it was the least she could do now.

  But as she watched Terrence lock in his sixth place finish while Lucas and Peter dueled for first, envy and bitterness rose up to choke her. Clutching the edges of her stool, she prayed for the race to be over quickly so she could begin drowning her sorrows with the very expensive spirits that would doubtless be provided at the after party.

  *

  Alix’s second Grand Prix had been nothing like her first. Last time, she had been a prized spectator, valued for the prestige her royalty automatically bestowed on those with whom she associated. Now, she still felt objectified, but at least she was a member of the club—albeit still on the fringes. As the official guest of Franz Mueller, the FIA president, she had spent the day in his box. Mindful of her own lack of fluency in F1 jargon compounded by her relative ignorance of the rules, she had spent most of her time hovering at the periphery of conversations and paying special attention to the behavior and responsibilities of those in charge of the event. In a few months, she would be in their shoes.

  Since her arrival on Friday morning, Alix had been swept along with the other VIPs from event to event: the free practice and qualifying sessions at the track, a tasting at a nearby vineyard, a charity gala in Milan. The gala had inspired an epiphany; if she were to solidify the creation of Rising Sun before the Monaco Grand Prix, couldn’t she hold a similar event? Energized by the revelation, she had stayed up late into the night struggling through what felt like endless paperwork.

  She had needed more than her usual two cups of coffee to feel alert today, and the extended extroversion of the weekend was starting to take its toll. Fortunately, she wasn’t a recognizable enough face that people constantly sought her out, and she had managed to retreat to a corner of the sofa in order to alternatively watch the race and the other spectators.

  Like the Monegasque committee, the Italian organizing team appeared to be composed of both government officials and businessmen. Benito Brunardi, the Italian Prime Minister, was rather aloof and standoffish, but his wife did a fine job of playing the role of hostess. Their adolescent son was completely obsessed with Ferrari, and his enthusiasm was charming. Thalia’s histo
ric race in Spain had helped her understand how a racecar driver really could be a true hero, and Alix decided then and there to allocate some of the reserved Monaco GP tickets to children and their families who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend.

  Thalia. The thought of her inspired a rush of sympathy. The crowd had erupted in confusion after her collision, and Alix could only imagine how discouraging it was for her to be unable to finish the race. Among those gathered in the box, debates had sprung up about whether the FIA should penalize Terrence Delamar and Ferrari. Despite the fact that the television announcers had been unanimous in their attribution of the fault to Terrence, Alix had overheard more than a few uncharitable comments about Thalia’s racing ability. Each time, she had felt the urge to intervene and point out Thalia’s detractors’ obvious misogyny, and each time, she hadn’t dared. Did that make her a coward?

  Her self-recrimination was interrupted by Mueller’s invitation to join him and the Brunardis on the track for the awards. When the elevator doors opened, a wall of sound assaulted her. Claude stepped out in front, fully on alert, but Brunardi’s security detail had already taken care to create a clear passage. They were going behind the scenes to prepare for the award presentation, but Alix declined to join them. She wanted to try to touch base with Thalia, and Thalia was most definitely not getting an award.

  Claude guided her to the VIP paddock, which commanded a perfect view of the stage. Thalia’s teammate Peter had taken first place, but if Alix understood the rules correctly, Thalia’s “DNF” meant that she had not been able to contribute even a single point, despite the strength of her position before the collision.

  Alix forced herself to pay close attention to the intricacies of the podium ceremony. After brief interviews with all three drivers for the benefit of the grandstand and television viewers, each man raised his magnum of champagne. While everyone else in the paddock was pressing forward, she did her best to move out of the range of the bottles. Fortunately, her father would be presenting the trophies to the competitors in Monaco, so she wouldn’t have to risk a close encounter.