Chapter 419: A Press Nuke

With the interview over, Fatih and Alex rushed back to the garage to start the post-session briefing, which was quite energetic as everyone was happy and excited for the team to finally get their second pole position since their existence.

After hearing the detailed feedback from the drivers, they finally watched the lap again to see how such a lap time was possible.

Among everyone in the room, Gasly was the most focused, as it was the first time he was watching the lap in its entirety after catching a few glimpses of it on the TV during the red flag, and he wanted to know where all that time was gained.

As he watched the lap unfold, he shook slightly, feeling goosebumps at how close he was pushing in every place, even tapping the barriers in some places to gain time, leaving no margin for error at any single place as he collected all of them.

He knew how difficult, if not nearly impossible, it was to remove all worry and fully focus on extracting everything. After delivering a perfect first sector, you subconsciously ease up in the middle sector so that you don’t make a mistake and kill the lap.

Even if you could handle giving it your all in the middle sector, with only a single sector remaining and knowing that if you kept pushing that far, you might lose the perfect lap, drivers found themselves subconsciously easing up, albeit slightly, but easing up nonetheless.

However, Gasly saw none of those hesitation signs in Fatih’s lap, as he had pushed all the way to the final corner. The left rear scratched some paint on the left-side barrier on the final corner as Fatih passed it, darting into the start-finish line where he gained additional time, helping in his breaking of the previously thought-to-be unbreakable barrier.

"We will have to put it through the simulation and scrutinize the data for the night to fully understand how it was achieved, but for now, we can fully celebrate and enjoy this," Franz Tost said with a smile on his face, as things had gone the best way they could have ever gone for him.

With that, the meeting was brought to an end, and everyone stood to return to whatever task they still had to complete, while the drivers prepared themselves for the post-session interviews.

Gasly dragged his feet as he moved, but inside, he felt relief, as the meeting was focused on him for only a short moment before they fully focused on Fatih. Otherwise, he didn’t know how he would have gone through it if they had tried to focus on him too much, as he was already having a headache about what the post-session interview was going to be like, considering the reporters were going to use his words from the press conference against him.

.........

"I gave it my all and bet everything on that single lap, so I’m quite happy that the lap was phenomenal and the results were very satisfactory.

After all, we were at every disadvantage one could be in. We didn’t have a banker lap, so any flag in the middle of my lap would have killed it. We didn’t have two sets of softs like everyone else, so we had to make do with the single one we were forced to keep..." Fatih, in front of the TRT Spor reporter, answered in Turkish with a wide grin still on his face, which was the same for the reporter asking the question, since they had come here expecting Fatih to at most enter Q2, but the Turkish phenomenon had beaten all expectations and taken pole.

"It is unbelievable, and I’m sure everyone back home in Turkey is cheering at the top of their lungs for the history... Excuse me!" Recep Altyatan, the Turkish reporter who was in the middle of adding more context and asking his final question to the Turkish hero, paused for a moment as he received an update on his earpiece.

Fatih just nodded and waited before turning to receive a slight hug from Sebastian Vettel, who had finally finished his interviews, to congratulate him on his first pole position.

While he was doing that, with each passing second, the eyes of the Turkish reporter kept getting wider and wider, his right hand holding the earpiece harder and harder, as if he was having difficulty believing what he was hearing was actually coming from it and that he was not mishearing or that someone was pulling a prank on him.

When he was done receiving the update, he paused for a moment, rubbing his eyes with his hand before turning to Fatih and saying, "We have just received news that Scuderia Ferrari Mission Winnow have logged a protest against your Q3 lap under Article 9 of the Technical Regulations, which strictly bans automatic driver aids.

They are arguing that your gear shifts, your immaculate hydraulic power steering inputs throughout the lap, and your trail-braking curves are physically beyond human biological limits. They are accusing AlphaTauri of running an illegal, automated driver-assist software loop in an attempt to void your lap and promote their driver, Charles Leclerc, to pole position for tomorrow’s race. What do you have to say about that?"

"What?" Fatih could only say those words in response to what he was hearing; he was filled with sheer disbelief.

"What the fu—" just as he was about to finish saying that in English, Eve, his press officer, interrupted by calling his name, "Fatih," while touching his shoulder.

Although he stopped himself from finishing his sentence, he still continued speaking, not stopping like Eve would have wanted, but this time back in Turkish. "That is pure, unadulterated bullshit. Look, I completely understand wanting to do whatever it takes to get your driver onto pole position at Monaco, but inventing these pathetic, fabricated excuses just to steal a lap time is the definition of unsportsmanlike cowardice.

I mean, what the actual fuck goes on inside someone’s mind to conjure up that much total shit? And for the entire Ferrari team to actively back them up? It means the organization itself is shit..."

Eve had to physically interrupt Fatih by covering his mouth and trying to push him away from the microphone to make him stop, as it seemed like something had snapped inside his mind when he thought someone had questioned his ability to achieve that lap time.

She unfortunately had to use her instincts because she couldn’t understand Turkish, but it didn’t take a Turkish speaker to know that whatever was coming from his mouth was not good at all, considering his previously interrupted English profanity.

Eve pulled Fatih to the side and started talking with him, wanting to understand what exactly had happened for him to be like that, but Fatih didn’t seem to be in the mood to talk at all, his eyes red. Before she could ask further, she received a notification, and after reading it, she couldn’t help but become pale, as she was sure that this matter was definitely a nuke in the current problem.

As she looked around, she could see the reporters who were finally updated on the situation, all looking in Fatih’s direction. The ones who had resumed asking questions to the drivers in front of them were all changing the questions to ones related to this matter, and she could tell the area was gaining energy with each passing second. As a result, despite Fatih not finishing his interview, she held his hand and started pulling him while walking at the front as they headed out of the media pen.

The moment they left, it was like a bomb had exploded as photographers and reporters swarmed them, wanting to hear their response to the matter when they were yet to come up with a PR-perfect response. With Fatih having just entered adulthood, they knew he wasn’t going to be able to control himself and would lash out if they hit a nerve, so they piled on him.

"Don’t say anything and just keep walking," she said to Fatih as she kept pushing forward. Thankfully, AlphaTauri, who had learned about the matter, had immediately sent a group of mechanics who reached and surrounded Fatih, separating him from the mob of reporters as they rushed back to the garage.

As Fatih walked through the garage with Eve walking him to the back, he turned to his side to see his car now being impounded by a group of people with FIA official bibs on them, which made it clear that the FIA believed the protest had merit and they had grounds to investigate the matter further. The car was soon lifted and soon to be wheeled out of the garage to the FIA scrutineering bay.

From that moment on, the car was out of the control of AlphaTauri, as no mechanics or anyone from the team were allowed to touch or do anything to the car without an FIA delegate standing over their shoulders until after the investigation was done, which would start as soon as they had a plan.

Fatih kept facing that side of the garage until he entered the corridor and could no longer look at it. Eve finally arrived at the meeting room, and only after closing the door behind her could she finally breathe a sigh of relief.

But that lasted only for a moment, as she knew they had a short time before Fatih had to go to the post-qualifying FIA press conference, and she knew it was going to be a nightmare.