by Jim Cangany
By the time she got back up to speed, Gabrielle had dropped from fourth to thirteenth. The car felt good; she’d hit her pit mark perfectly. She pounded the steering wheel.
“What happened?” Her insides were boiling. The team had spent the better part of the last two weeks working on pit stops back at team headquarters. To have a problem after all the work was aggravating beyond belief.
“Troy had a little trouble with the left rear tire, that’s all. The car’s fine. You can make up those positions. Take it one car at a time. Onward and upward.”
It was Brad’s reassuring tone more than his words that calmed Gabrielle. If he wasn’t concerned, there was no reason for her to worry, either. His little catchphrase actually helped, too. She couldn’t win races fixating on the past.
When the race reached its halfway mark at lap thirty-five, Gabrielle had moved up to sixth position and had Chas in her sights. Passing him was going to make her day.
To the general public, he was just another competitor. Within the team, it was no secret Gabrielle considered Chas her chief rival. Sure, there was her motivation to prove the switch to her was a good one. It was more than that, though.
It seemed like every chance Chas got, he trashed her. To the media, to other teams, to league officials, it didn’t matter. She understood Chas resented her for taking his ride. She also understood he was only twenty and had a lot of maturing to do. She could live with those things. It wasn’t fun, but she’d dealt with worse.
What she couldn’t deal with were the sexist comments he’d made about her. She’d worked too hard to climb the racing ladder, twice, to let some spoiled child of privilege run her down because of her gender. She was a good driver. No, she was a great driver, and she was going to use every fiber of her mind and body to prove that when you were behind the wheel, your gender didn’t matter.
Talent was the only thing that mattered.
“When I pit, loosen me up a quarter turn. I can get close to Chas, but I can’t pass him.” It was time to show Chas who the better driver really was.
Two laps later, Gabrielle eased off the gas and guided her car down pit lane. Chas stayed out, which meant he was getting slightly better fuel mileage than she was. Hopefully, that wouldn’t cost her in the end.
Brad called out instructions in a calm manner that made him sound like he was ordering a pizza, not directing a high-stress pit stop. In no time, he was shouting “go, go, go” into her microphone while Scott was waving her out.
With a smile and a surge of adrenaline, Gabrielle rejoined the race. The stop had been flawless.
“You’re P eight, but two cars need to come in. When the pit cycle is finished, you’ll be back to six.”
“Where’s Chas?”
“P five, but don’t think about him. Drive your own race.” Brad was right. That didn’t change her burning desire to finish ahead of the jerk, though.
At lap sixty of the seventy-lap race, Chas was back in Gabrielle’s crosshairs. She was the bull. He was the matador with the red flag. This time the bull was going to come out on top.
Three laps later, her radio crackled to life. “You don’t have enough fuel to make it to the end, so pit next time by. Your bogie’s crew is putting tires out. Follow him in. We’re doing fuel only.”
“Yes.” By foregoing new tires, her stop would be lightning fast and should get her out in front of Chas. Her older, worn tires wouldn’t perform as well as his new ones, though. She’d have to use every last ounce of her skills to stay in front.
This was going to be fun.
She followed Chas into the pits and reached her stall first. In what seemed like a blink of an eye, Scott was waving her forward. Despite her better judgment, she gave Chas a little wave as she motored by him on pit lane.
Before she re-entered the course, he was out of his stall. Now she was in fifth, and Chas was in sixth. The race was on.
With five laps to go, Gabrielle’s lead on Chas was a mere two seconds. Her lead was cut in half with four to go. Another lap and it was down to a half second. She and Chas were nose to tail.
As they exited turn seven and entered the best passing zone on the circuit, Chas pulled alongside her. It was a quarter mile drag race to turn eight. Whoever had the guts to wait the longest before braking would hold the lead.
That driver was going to be Gabrielle.
The moment Chas backed off, she moved right to give her a better angle for entering the turn and waited, waited . . .
Way past what should have been the last possible second, he hit the brakes hard and went with it as the car slid through the turn. Thanks to the crazy move, she flashed by the finish line with two laps to go with her lead back up to a second.
The top four cars were too far ahead to catch, so Gabrielle kept her undivided attention on the blue and white machine filling her mirrors. On the final lap, he tried to nudge to the inside going into turn one, but she cut him off. He tried the same move going into turn eight, so she did the same.
She came out of the circuit’s final turn with Chas mere inches behind her rear wing. He made a final attempt to overtake her but fell short by half of a car length as they sped under the checkered flag.
“Great job, short stuff. Best driving I’ve seen, from anyone, in a long time.” Brad laughed.
Gabrielle climbed out of the car to shouts of congratulations and too many high fives to count, but instead of acknowledging the cheers, she sprinted for the transport trailer. Once inside, she locked the door and dashed into the bathroom, where she threw up until there was nothing left but bile.
So much for proving Bonnie wrong. She’d made so much progress over the years and had completed the previous season symptom free. Yet, here she was, her head hanging over the toilet for the second race in a row. Well, she’d conquered the other symptoms. She’d figure out a way to conquer this one, too.
Brad was waiting for her when she emerged from the trailer. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” She leaned against the trailer to keep from falling to her knees. “Had a queasy stomach the last half of the race, and well . . . ”
“Say no more.” He rounded up a chair and had Gabrielle sit.
“Well done. How you held Chas off is simply beyond words.” Barbara offered her a high five.
“I’ll tell you how she did it.” Brad gave Gabrielle’s shoulder a comforting squeeze. “She and Scott and the rest of the crew were on the same page the moment we rolled the car off the transporter. You take that and throw in some mad skills behind the wheel, and that’s a tough combination to beat.”
“Mad skills?” Barbara raised an eyebrow.
“Well, yeah. It’s a term my nephews use. It means—”
“I believe we’re all familiar with what it means, Brad. Do us a favor and please refrain from using it. It doesn’t suit you.” Barbara stole a glance at Gabrielle while Brad’s cheeks turned beet red.
“Gotta agree with the boss on this one, Brad. Don’t ever say that again. Even if the comment was one hundred percent spot on.”
“Fine. You both win. What I should have said was that between Gabrielle’s driving skills and her ability to communicate with the engineers on a technical level, we’ve made great strides in a short period of time.”
Gabrielle handed her helmet to Brad. “What did you expect? I went to Rose Hulman University, the finest engineering school in the nation, after all. You see, Team Director Thomas, there’s more to your driver than just this pretty face.”
A reporter wandered up to ask Gabrielle a few questions. Even without a win, the weekend was a success with a capital S. She and Scott were speaking the same language. She’d qualified well and raced even better. Her boss was happy and, most of all, Brad was pleased with her performance, even if his way of expressing it backfired on him.
Things were headed in the right direction. If only she could figure out a way to make the post-race nausea go away.
Chapter Eight
“Chas
said what?” Gabrielle’s eyes were wide in apparent disbelief.
“That the only reason you finished ahead of him in L.A. was because you were driving dangerously, and he wasn’t going to let you crash him out of the race.”
“Puhlease.” Gabrielle snorted and crossed her arms. “I finished ahead of him because I out-drove him. On old tires. What a little weasel. What did you see in him, anyway?”
Brad sighed and turned off the radio. He and Gabrielle were driving south on Interstate 65 to the Gulf Coast Motorsports Park, where race number three would take place. They were halfway through a fourteen-hour drive, the result of Barbara overhearing a disagreement between them.
And totally overreacting in response.
Sure, his and Gabrielle’s disagreement over strategy for the upcoming race had gotten a little heated, but they weren’t angry with each other. Barbara’s decision to have them drive to the next race was an effort to facilitate communication, in her words. It was a completely unnecessary directive, but sometimes when Barbara Sawyer made up her mind, that was the end of the conversation.
And now he was faced with a question he’d hoped nobody would ever ask. Well, at least Gabrielle might understand the answer.
“I saw some flashes of J.P. in him. I knew he was obnoxious, but I thought I could teach him, help him mature. I thought the potential reward outweighed the risk.”
“The J.P. I remember was nothing like that twit.” The heat in Gabrielle’s voice was scorching enough to melt steel.
“Don’t get me wrong. I agree with you one hundred percent. To this day, I don’t know that I’ve ever met anybody who got as much joy out of life as J.P.”
Brad took a peek at Gabrielle. She was nodding and didn’t look like she wanted to strangle him, so that was good.
“It’s just that, well, remember when a race would be over and somebody would inevitably ask how J.P. managed to pull off some crazy move?”
Gabrielle chuckled. “How could I forget? I was the victim of more than one of those moves.” She gave him a light punch to the arm. “I recall you complaining on occasion about being victimized by him, too.”
“Guilty as charged.” He passed a semi that had the audacity to drive a mere five miles over the speed limit. You could take the boy out of the race car, but you couldn’t take the race car out of the boy. “After Barbara hired me, I watched a lot of video of the kids in the feeder circuits. Every now and then, I saw Chas try a crazy move and pull it off, and it made me think of J.P.”
“Was that the only reason you hired him?”
“No.” He let out a long sigh. “His grandfather’s money sealed the deal.”
“So you chose dollars—”
“We’re a brand-new team. The old man’s money gave us the ability to put together a first-class program. They said all the right things at the beginning.”
“So what changed?”
He spent the rest of the drive recounting the team’s slide into dysfunction. Chas refused to take responsibility when he crashed and wouldn’t listen to Brad when he tried to tell the young driver how to keep the same thing from happening again. Then the old man started making suggestions, first to Brad, then to Barbara, about running the team.
“The final straw for me was his crash at Tampa. Evidently the final straw for Barbara came earlier. When did she contact you, anyway?”
Gabrielle was silent for a moment. Brad got the sense she was debating how much she could reveal.
“When AES decided to enter the North American market last fall, my manager contacted a number of teams. Barbara responded that she had a driver but still wanted to talk to me. We talked on the phone in December and met in person in January. She said she’d be in touch, but when she didn’t offer me a contract, I figured we’d reached the end of the line.”
Brad did some mental calculations. They tested in the desert the third weekend of January, where Chas pounded the wall hard. “Evidently that wasn’t the case, though.”
“No. She called the first of March, asking if I was still available. When I told her yes, she said she wanted to meet with me but asked me to keep our conversations under wraps.”
The disastrous test at Gulf Coast was at the end of February. It was as obvious as the bug splattered on his windshield his boss had realized their mistake before he did.
“When did she hire you?” The question came out sounding way more abrupt and angry than he wanted.
“She signed me to a personal services agreement in the middle of March. I didn’t sign on the dotted line to drive until after we met in Tampa. I’m sorry, Brad. This has to look terrible.”
“It doesn’t look—” He scratched his hip. Sitting in one position for too long always made it itch, but that was another matter. “You said you didn’t sign to actually drive until after I left our meeting?”
When she nodded, relief rolled over him like a warm ocean wave. “Then it wasn’t a done deal until we talked. But then again, you were waiting in her suite, so maybe it was.” He shook his head. “Sorry, I’m rambling.”
When he parked at their hotel, he let out a long breath. “Thanks for leveling with me about your and Barbara’s negotiations. I’m still trying to get comfortable as team director. I appreciate your honesty.”
“Well, she did instruct us to work on our communication skills.” Gabrielle gave him a smile before she got out of the car.
“She can’t be mad at us if our communication led to uncovering her little secret, can she?” Brad held the hotel door open.
“No, she can’t.” Her answer carried a lilt that sent shivers down his spine.
After they were finished checking in, Brad handed her a key card. “You want to grab dinner before calling it a night?”
“That would be great.” When they were in the elevator, she bumped his shoulder, just like in their younger days. “So, are we okay?”
He returned the bump. “Yeah, we’re okay.”
In the past, a development like this would have made him angry. This time it didn’t. That seemed like progress. Progress was good. Maybe this was also progress toward having things between him and Gabrielle work out in the end.
• • •
Gabrielle closed her hotel room door and tossed her helmet bag on the bed. Her dinner with Brad had been the highlight of the weekend by a mile. They’d laughed and enjoyed real conversation that had nothing to do with racing, which left her on top of the world heading into their first practice session.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say her weekend went straight downhill from there. The team’s performance wasn’t bad. They just never got the handling on the car quite right, which led to a disappointing P fourteen qualifying spot. Things were only marginally better in the race, as she finished in an aggravating twelfth place and was never in contention.
It was little consolation she wasn’t the only one who had a lousy three days. Everybody, from Brad to the tire changers, fought an unending sense of frustration. To top it all off, despite a race in which Gabrielle essentially drove around the course for fifty-five uncompetitive laps, she still ended up sitting in the car’s cockpit for ten minutes using her breathing techniques to get an anxiety attack under control.
Leg one of the drive home took a millennium, as neither she nor Brad was in the mood for conversation. And they still had the second half of the trip to go.
When Gabrielle asked Brad if he wanted to get dinner, he said he appreciated the offer but was going to order room service. He claimed he wanted to study data from the weekend to try to figure out why they’d struggled so much. The excuse was plausible enough that she didn’t call him out on it.
So she had the evening to herself.
Which would have been great if she’d had an appetite, but she didn’t. Or if she was sleepy enough to turn in early, which she wasn’t. Or if she wanted to unwind with a book, which she couldn’t, given her agitated state.
To keep from climbing the walls, she went to her silver bullet and cal
led her brother. Three years older than Gabrielle, Rafael had taken a path in life as different from hers as night and day. He’d always been fascinated with their grandparents’ stories of growing up in Cuba and emigrating to the U.S. in the early sixties. Because of that, he went into social work and served as a youth-services caseworker in the South Florida area.
Rafael got Gabrielle help when her inability to even get out of bed revealed how badly she was struggling after the crash. While their parents gave Gabrielle all the support they could, Rafael had met Brad and knew Gabrielle’s feelings for him, so he had insight into Gabrielle’s PTSD their parents didn’t have.
Years ago, they’d made a pact. If she was ever in a crisis, she would send a text and follow it up with a phone call. That way, Rafael knew the situation was serious.
Right now, it was serious.
He picked up on the first ring. “Hey, G, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore.” She told him about how every race so far, she was fine from practice until the checkered flag flew, but as soon as possible afterward, she had to make a beeline for a restroom.
“On top of that, I still haven’t been able to get through to Brad. I haven’t been able to sleep for days, and I don’t know what to do.” Her heart ached at the thought of her return to racing in America ending like a car crashing into a wall on only the third lap. Worse, it was on the verge of breaking at the thought of losing Brad forever if she couldn’t figure out a way to stay on track and navigate around any potholes.
They talked for an hour. Rafael asked question after question, demanding, in his gentle way, that Gabrielle answer every one honestly. The longer he kept her talking, the better she felt. The knot that had been in her stomach for three days loosened. The muscles at the base of her neck relaxed.
“I understand your anxiety, G, but Bonnie warned you racing in America and reuniting with Brad was going to be a tall order.” He sighed. “You’ve got to talk to him. Tell him how you feel.”
The blood in Gabrielle’s veins went cold. “I can’t do that. There’s no way—”