A/N: This will have a few characterizations/references drawing from research on the real people rather than anything that was shown in the film. Maybe I say this to clarify that not all details are necessarily conjectured as what the female version of Hunt or Lauda would have been like, but may just be biographical bits I was drawn to including for whatever reason. Lauda's relationship with Regazzoni is somewhat more inspired by their real-life relationship, if it will be pretty complicated here. Nonetheless I can only warn you to expect amateur inaccuracies and deviations from history, though some of them—most significantly the standings in the '75 season—are intentional for the purpose of the story, though obviously, so is the two of them being turned into women.
::
::
The thunderstruck silence was no surprise, as she sat with the smell of mahogany and the dust of the parlor churning like a distilled meadow in the wide space between her and her mother, but it did last much longer than Niki felt like sitting through.
"Mama, you never once asked me about why I was going on a different diet and going out cycling every day and all that. Why did you never ask what I was doing?"
"I thought..." She had her hand pressed to her sternum, swallowing.
"Nevermind," Niki said, confirming, "you thought maybe I'd gotten a boyfriend."
"Niki," her mother interrupted with a rising boil of conviction now that she was beginning to recover from the disbelief. "Your father isn't going to hear about you trying to do this for a living. And even if he would, my God, you're going to end up in hospital, or—"
"It's not impossible," she said, giving a shrug. "And I'm sorry about that. But it's what I want to do."
"You can't. The answer is no."
"I don't need permission, that's what you don't understand. I'm telling you that I already have plans to get my own apartment. I've been saving money for years; I have about 70 percent of a good car put together at Fabian's garage, I just have to start winning races and I'll be—"
"Niki, I can't let you do this. This is just...some idea you're pursuing to get attention, or make yourself feel—"
"No," Niki said, so sternly that her mother slowly closed her mouth, staring back at her daughter in angry speechlessness. She shook her head and let out a long sigh, finally accusing, "This is always what you've done, you've always pitied me, you've always worried about me. You're afraid that if I make Father turn his back on me, then his father won't let me help him with the company, and you're afraid because I'm not pretty and I'm not going to end up living some socialite life of a rich businessman's wife, that makes you worry about me. I know that."
"Oh, please don't think that—"
She interrupted, continuing with a finger pointed decidedly down on her armrest. "But you don't have to worry anymore, because I can do this instead. I'm going to be the best. You'll see. When I start winning, you'll be proud of me...Maybe even Father too, but he won't deserve it." She added that last with a slight baring of bitterness before mentally waving that off for another day, and was standing to make her exit.
The desperation was kicking in like a grating screech in the air, and Niki looked away to hear Mama say, "Niki, you're going to get hurt. Please, you're going to get killed..."
She said, "I will try very hard to keep that from happening."
That wry if genuine response fell into more weight as she did look at her mother then, and saw the thing she couldn't stay for, the outright pleading that would happen when it was realized all at once that this was the reason she would have to worry about her daughter now, not about her leaving home or what any man could do to her but what she was planning to regularly do to herself. For that second when she met the eyes that almost mirrored the alert grey-blue of her own, she saw the fearful certainty so thickly felt that it was like an omen, a feeling that Mama was right, that Niki was signing up for her death and that of course, this was ludicrous.
And Niki couldn't see it or hear it because she did love her mother, after all; she'd given way to the half-hearted attempts at ballet and piano and getting versed in the vapid cocktail party topics over the years, but this time there could be no yielding. She could not let any emotion for her mother make her waste herself anymore. So she said, "I'm sorry, but I've made up my mind," and was out of the parlor room at a brisk walk, having so scathingly snatched herself away now that there was no response.
::
Tony Dron, during some years down the line, would have a good laugh over the fact that he was almost too late to the circuit to even be able to compete that day. He'd been left under his granddad's vigilant watch for the duration of Ma and Dad's anniversary trip to France, and the old man had simply decided that none of this karting garbage was going to happen this weekend; it was the same old story with at least one person in the family of every sod who'd decided one overturning time or another that he was to become a race car driver, or so he'd been told by every other young sportsman.
Over the course of breakfast Tony had struggled to explain, in turn, that kart racing was for total amateurs, that formula racing on the other hand wasn't something he could just back out of with less than a week's notice, and that he was eighteen years old now, thank you. When it became clear he had no ride, sneaking off to get a cab proved to be an accomplishment on par with espionage. He'd arrived at Oulton Park fully expecting to be far too late, but barely managed to slide into his car a minute before the starting time, earning a bemused expression from one of the gents on the inspection team.
Because of this whole rut, he was unable to really put faces with cars on that particular race. After what started out as a strong run, when he gauged too far back and forth around the Cascade corner, the Ford that was nipping behind his third position and then was rushed to overtake him had no name attached in his mind, when the driver tried to fling his car out of risk and immediately wrung it with an ugly crack through an advertisement board, and was down the green.
A quick knot of dread pulling up in his throat, Tony pulled over and got out. He ran in gasps after the telltale imprints of a cartwheeling wreck running down into the edge of the lake. His nerve seized him up when he saw the rollover bar ripped off into the grass, but he ran down the path of chewed-off metal right into the water, bracing with a cringe against whatever ugly carnage might surface.
"Ah, shit," he groaned, ready to run into the water, though at this point he knew it was probably the worst. The car had been shoved deep, almost completely submerged in the middle of the lake. His astonishment stalled him.
The very moment he came back to his senses and flinched forward to step into the water, a splash was spat up and someone ripped above the surface: the driver was shoulder-deep and had yellow hair long enough that the tips floated in the rippling ebbs, and coughed once, turning a head with wide eyes back towards the track.
Tony didn't know if he was more surprised by the fact that the driver was alive, or that the face was a woman's.
They stared at each other. Finally after some time he hollered, "Are you alright?" just when she began, slowly, to step forward and make some way out of the water. Those eyes were shocked, unfocused, but she nodded in response. He waded in till he was soaked past his knees, offering her his arm, which she grabbed with vague attention. "What's your name? I didn't see earlier."
"Hunt," she said, pinching some hair out of her eyes with a look of stiff distaste that somehow softened her tension. "Jaime Hunt."
He looked behind their shoulders back into the lake. "I'm sure the medics will be out...God. Did you get flung right out? What happened to your belts?"
"No seatbelt. The engine put me in the bloody red, and I had to cut corners to save the other few pounds. Funny thing, I guess. If I'd been wearing one, I think I would have drowned just now. I think that's a certainty." And then she opened her mouth and laughed, a startling laugh that struck the air a little wrong next to her alert, darting eyes. She said, "Hey, listen. Did you ever hear the one about Saint Nicholas walking into a sex shop?"
It seemed clear she'd gotten some sense knocked out of her, if she'd had any to begin with. Tony chuckled uneasily, continuing to walk her up to the track. "Uh, Miss Hunt. What's a nice girl like you doing driving a race car? You sure are lucky you didn't get yourself killed already."
"Look, man, don't interrupt. I'm trying to tell you a joke."
.
Jaime didn't have anything to say about the appearance of the bob-haired and bucktoothed girl she'd seen walking around in driver's overalls until Nathan, a med student she'd picked up for good luck the night she'd landed in London, asked, "Did you see there's another woman racing?" This was in a mumble as he kissed her out of her clothes for a quick shag in a friend's trailer just less than half an hour before Jaime was supposed to be on the starting position.
"Yeah. So?"
"So who is she?"
"How should I know?"
She did end up asking Bubbles about it, though.
"That's Niki Lauda. Some princess from a family that owns a paper company in Austria...You worried about her?"
Jaime scoffed, then winked. "I'll pray she doesn't give me a paper cut."
Once she was strapping in, there was a motion that caught her eye from the edge of her vision just as she tossed her hair back to make it behave underneath her helmet. Lauda was bowing to check something on or under one of her tires, and when her glance came up to meet Jaime's, it flickered back down with indifference. The lack of acknowledgment having settled comfortably, Jaime put her helmet on, smirking lightly as the charge forward was already buzzing through her, narrowing her vision.
.
"Hey!...Hey, asshole!"
Jaime's gaggle of fellow celebrators rang up in laughter after a stunned pause at the sound and sight of Niki making a beeline for Jaime, who stepped forward to make an ironic curtsy, bowing low and coming up saying, "Your English could use a primer. Most people would just say 'bitch' to the ladies, though I can't imagine you've never heard the word."
"'Bitch' might be a compliment for you," Lauda replied in a light snap, her accent frizzing out the severity of it somehow. "I'm calling you an asshole. What the fuck were you doing out there?"
"Now, girls," one of the bystanders started tutting, inducing another wave of sniggering around them which they both ignored.
"I'd call that winning," Jaime Hunt said, popping open her lighter and unzipping her overalls a few inches to let some air in. "Don't come crying to me like a little girl cause you're not used to competing against professionals."
"Oh, professional. That's what you call that." Lauda nodded, her prominent teeth showing in a snarl. "Fuck you, alright?"
As she was walking off in a steady storm, Jaime's friend Dina hissed through her laughter, "Is she serious?"
"You know, it's almost sad," Jaime said. "I think she is completely serious."
And that was that; while no one said anything out loud about it, there was the amused consensus that in all likelihood none of them would ever see Niki Lauda again, not in the big time anyway. After all, how many women did you ever come across who could really drive?
::
The colors of the sunrise scorched behind the profile of Niki's stooped shoulders when she paused next to the track to make a few notes in a leather-bound notebook, her just shy of masculine figure catching curious stares from some other early risers shaking hands in the bleachers.
There were several Formula Two drivers getting in practice runs that day, and a few others floating around in social mumbles. Clay Regazonni caught up to her outside the motel where a lot of them would be staying. Half-amicably, they complained about every little problem she'd found with the track, until Clay clearly took an interest in a blonde who'd just come into the bar alone and in a moment she said, "You might as well go on if you're just going to be thinking about her for the rest of this conversation."
His eyes darted, then settled down. "Alright. I can see no man could ever get anything past you." Her reaction to this barely committed to being a shrug, and he asked in a curious lilt, "Ah, why don't you smile every once in a while? Is it because of your teeth?"
"Are you more comfortable when women around you are pretending to be ecstatic?" she demanded. By her standards this was a playful riposte; she usually ignored the question when she got it.
"What would make you happy?" he asked in a thoughtful taunt.
She turned a page in the magazine he'd leant her. "Maybe a prospect with Enzo Ferrari, but I'm not promising anything."
He sighed, laughing at her forwardness. "I told you I would try, but I can't make any promises either."
"Thank you. Now go," she said, before this could get further into the topic that would make him detect too much at play here that would feel like cold politics to his freewheeling sort of favorability towards her, which to her added up to nothing more than the simple fact that she badly needed one of the only people she could tell was actually taking her seriously as a driver to convince the next person it was with good reason.
It was a shame, she thought with some inner flicker of sarcasm, that she wasn't more like that Jaime Hunt: able to get a sponsorship out of someone's mere amusement with the idea of a fit party girl who got behind the wheel of a formula car almost as often as she had a person spread between her legs and far more often than she did anything remotely ladylike; the general picture wasn't unlike Niki but Niki didn't have the looks, and if the compact-bodied Austrian girl wore more skirts and knew which fork to use first at a restaurant, people would rather pay attention to the loud novelty of Jaime with her unusual pets and her excess of skin always provoking store owners into tapping the "No Shirt No Shoes No Service" sign.
Niki supposed she couldn't begrudge Hunt for taking the leg-up where she could get it, but Hesketh was only becoming more of a joke now that the woman was becoming almost as infamous for her inability to keep cars in one piece as she was for incidentally being a girl, so the inevitability that someone backing the races was going to get tired of her antics and pull the plug made Niki perfectly comfortable with how things were. Not that she felt threatened in any way by Jaime's barely noticeable improvements within the past year.
It was just that she didn't particularly like the inevitable comparisons between them, though she could remind herself with a different kind of satisfaction that Hunt liked that even less. At the last race they'd both competed in, a curious photographer took their icy conversation as friendly from a distance and yelled politely if they could pose together for a quick photo, please. Both women had extended a gesture of flicking him off in unison, and continued launching their insults at closer range than usual.
Often, when Jaime saw Niki around, she winked at her or made some other mockingly exaggerated show of friendliness. It was becoming increasingly ritualistic, to the point that when their paths actually didn't cross at the circuits Niki caught herself looking along the pits to check whether Hunt was somewhere after all. And something about the track didn't kiss her wheels as fiercely, something about the speed didn't slide by with the same precise hiss to her adrenaline, when Jaime wasn't there to beat. So clearly Niki didn't feel she was a threat. Wouldn't be for much longer, either way.
At the next race Lauda came in first but Jaime made quite a show of celebrating her second place anyway; it seemed in fact that when she didn't celebrate winning she always considered her living through the race to be a perfectly good reason for a party. Jaime wasn't staying at the hotel that was popular with the drivers but she sparked into the bar, still in her overalls for some reason though she'd of course bothered at some point to remove her boots. Shortly after that the party revved up with a few rounds of liquor and somebody's copy of Aladdin Sane.
When Niki was taking her leave of the noise she happened to glance back into the window at the sight of Hunt standing up on one of the tables, beginning to put on a show of teasingly stripping out of her suit to unveil her bra underneath to a small throng of pleased drunks. Niki did a kind of lazy scoffing, wanting to go in there and tell her she should save the sultry production for when it wasn't the only commodity she could claim to have. But even if she would have bothered, she could smell what the comeback would be, something to do with the fact that the men didn't need her to win to want to watch, and Niki hardly needed that sort of shallow smugness from somebody so second-rate.
.
It was no surprise that the media had started taking an exceptional interest in both of them fairly early on, even if it was only sometimes in a complimentary way. Jaime had gotten asked by one of the Formula journalists what her husband (some musician named Gary Green, Niki had heard) had thought of her doing nude photos for Playboy recently. Without missing a beat Jaime's response had been, "I don't know, I'll have to ask him some time."
Niki couldn't guess whether she was actually faithful to Gary, but it was hard to miss much of the rumor mill's rapt attention upon Jaime's infamous sex life, especially after they'd stayed in one too many of the same hotels. There was something so elemental about the woman's sexuality, an alluring ease in the way her every move could suggest it, that somewhat went beyond any possible objectification if you were smart enough to really recognize that she was very much in charge of her effect on people. Life was underneath other people's skin and she had to dig it out to make the most of her own. Men would go up to her room, sometimes two at a time, maybe even three, expecting they'd get a good story to tell, but later a lot of them would come back blushing and vaguely mesmerized and finding themselves unable or unwilling to divulge much of the details whenever the topic arose. It was nothing to romanticize, Niki figured; they'd probably just been screwed up on too many drugs to have fully absorbed the experience.
There were women too, unless you could buy that they sometimes went up there just to watch. But nobody would call Jaime a "dyke"; with her long-limbed body of a goddess and earnestly seductive mouth, she would not suit the package they associated with that word. Better to stomp that label onto someone more ugly, more bucktoothed and bitchy.
It wasn't true that Niki never had boyfriends, but it could be said that she repeatedly seemed to find them to be not worth much of any compromise. Her first was Ulrich when she was seventeen, who had taught her a lot she needed to know about cars but had found some reason to break up with her soon after realizing she was learning too fast for him to keep up. "I feel like we have nothing to talk about anymore," he'd said.
There was Oliver, with whom she'd had an at least abstractly serious relationship during the F3 days, but later during the humiliation that was her '72 season she fell into such a depression that he more or less balked, trying to pin the failures of their intimacy on how much she depended on him because she needed a place to live; outraged at the suggestion, particularly because he just might have been right, she'd arrogantly made her exit without really making any time to process whatever heartbreak may have happened, and promptly dove into the crisis that made her have to take out a second loan with absolutely no room to even contemplate the possibility of more failure.
And then she'd made a bit of a name as a driver and, while they say there's no such thing as bad publicity, the complications with the gents had only been replaced by different ones. Some of them she felt sure were genuine fans, but it was hard to discern them from the ones who just wanted a particularly odd notch on their bedpost; it was better to avoid men who followed racing at all.
But there was one night during the off-season when she went home with a drama student named Tobias who was more than halfway handsome and didn't give any hint he even knew what she was relatively famous for. It wasn't impossible that he actually didn't, but when she was in his bathroom later she absently perused the pile of magazines, going wry at the naughty ones she found sandwiched under the issues of Time and Creem. When she spotted the cover she'd seen all too many times in the lean of fans bleeding into the pits for autographs, her mood dropped into something like an accusing sigh.
Tobias knocked on the bathroom door. "Are you okay in there?"
"I'm sorry," she said abruptly, and started to tightly roll up the magazine to shove it into the side of her bag. "I'm actually not feeling well."
The lie was indifferently concerted, and his disappointment leaked noticeably into his offer to give her a lift home.
"No, I'll get a cab." She opened the door, moving by him quickly. "Thank you."
She went through the photos and the interview while eating a sandwich at an all-night cafe, her interest creasing into the predicted amount of disgruntlement minute by minute. On one page they'd posed her in profile on the hood of a Mercedes, wearing an open letterman jacket, her pubic hair barely brushing up from the coy pose of her legs and one shapely breast sighing pointedly out between the buttons. Her face was poised up, lips open as if wanton for the sunlight that graced so many bends of gold in her feathered hair. She could have gone far in modeling. Even farther in penning cheap erotica, considering all the entendres she was capable of making about the rumble of the engine and what types of pets she liked best.
When Niki asked the waitress to bring her the bill, she added, "Also, could you throw this away for me?"
"Sure," the server said, then hesitated, blushing, when she looked at the magazine she was holding.
Gulping a last drink of coffee, Niki looked her up and down, demanding, "What's the problem?"
Where Jaime was an open book, Niki kept as tightly sealed a profile as possible. Even having come up with their own conclusions, the journalists always had the most predictable lack of tact.
"I think you mean to ask, am I frigid?" she said to one of these entitled inquiries on one occasion. "I've been asked these questions in every possible way, as if I'm going to actually think it's your business if you word it a bit differently. You all seem very uncomfortable with the idea that a woman could possibly be more interested in cars than the things you all buy them to compensate for."
Later somebody from a small magazine, in a somewhat more candid setting, asked, "The thing is, the stereotype is that race car drivers sleep around like rock stars. Can you at least understand our curiosity about whether the environment is any different for you, being a woman?"
She decided to throw this guy a bone. "It gives me an advantage that I don't get easily distracted, and that has not so much to do with being a woman. I like sex just as much as the next person." After a second, she added with emphasis, "Unless the next person is Jaime Hunt."
It just seemed like she was constantly putting up with all this bullshit from any man who was showing her the slightest hint of interest, for all that she insisted, when asked, that she had nothing to prove. In Italy she picked up a hitchhiker who was charming enough, laughing and immediately nicknaming her "Detective" for the way she'd deduced he was too far out of town to not have given somebody else a reason for kicking him out of their car. He explained about a friend of his he had pissed off pretty badly for saying something admittedly in bad taste about the guy's unfaithful girlfriend. Once they'd gotten into what they did for a living, though, she lost her patience.
"You really race for Ferrari?" he demanded.
"That's what I said, isn't it?"
"How come I've never heard of you? I know McClaren's got that one beauty...but I don't recognize you."
"You will now."
"How do I know you're not joking with me? Look at the way you're driving this thing, for starters. All this open road and you're crawling along..."
"What is the incentive to go fast? Just to prove it to you, because you don't believe me? Why do I care about that?"
Scoffing at the dropped pleasantries, he made an attempt at a peaceable gesture. "I don't mean to disrespect you, I just think, why not show it off? Especially since you're a woman, that's really something special if you can do something like that...Come on, I just want to have some fun."
"You're right, it is special. But you? A man who's used to getting what he wants?" She demanded, "What's so special about that?"
Without turning to look she could feel his chagrined decision that she wasn't nearly worth the trouble, and they said very little to each other for the rest of the drive.
::