OK48 - The Long March

Li Xingke lined up so far back along the grid that he could barely see the lights count up one, two three, five, and then extinguish, only intuiting this information from the fuzzy resolution of the lights, some two hundred meters down the road, and by the increasing swell of engines. It was only as the red faded that he was in any way aware of the race beginning.

While Xingke had only stolen one podium back in 2015, and had spent all of his time since leaving the World Endurance Championship for prototypes and sports cars to make the leap into single seaters in middle of the road cars, his normal starting place was between eight and fifteenth, as opposed to the back row.

He wasn't Shinichiro Tamaki, after all.

He had only lined up last twice before, and his third instance stood in unison with the prior two; his engine had let him down, either, as it had on this occasion, in Qualifying, in free practice three, which was just before qualifying, or as a function of penalties. However, the reason did not matter; he was here, he remained here, and he still had the pace to do well, certainly not pace that would land one on the last grid slot. As the tyres screeched, complaining aloud in their pursuit of purchase, Xingke used his free paw to slam down his visor as his eyes began to feel the soft pelt of atomised rubber from the car ahead. Visor down, focus on. This years car and tyre performance had given him his best opportunity in years to win at home not only for his first time, but for the first time of any Chinese driver. This chance would not easily be discarded for Xingke, who saw red as he built up speed up to the first corner, hidden by the concertina crowd of cars, bunching together at the apex as the natural line of the corner funnelled them all into one lane. However, while he couldn't see the line through the traffic, he could definitely see a cloud of smoke and a thud up ahead, just at where the curve doubled back on itself.

The source revealed itself as the polesitter, winner of the last race, and in all honesty the biggest threat to his victory, Kallen Kozuki, facing backwards, giving Xingke a bizarre sense of déjà vu for last year, before the déjà vu was ramped up to eleven as Luciano Bradley was pitched in the gravel behind her. It appeared that Luciano's divebomb had been about as effective as it had proven in Silverstone 2017.

Well, at least that was one threat out of the way, though, while Luciano was beached and out of the race, Kallen had managed to keep it on the tarmac runoff and was able to rejoin, if in last place, as not only would she be behind end of the queue, but when she arrived at the end of the queue, she would be shocked to learn that Xingke was not the person she was staring up the rear wing of.

This was because Xingke had shuffled a good way up the road, using his better grip and acceleration to rocket out of turns three and four, having massive overspeed on the straight through the almost undetectable kink of five, passing in a straight line up to sixteenth, fifteenth with a dive up the inside for the hairpin for turn six to claim fourteenth. Six places in six corners, even if two were claimed more by a deficit of skill on the part of the others than any particular skill of his own.

However, as the first car got away from the second, and the second from the third, and the third from the fourth, Xingke's job would become increasingly difficult as the pack increasingly became far less bunched up.

However, Xingke still had the pace of a frontrunner, and through the long left hand sweeper of seven, where a car was grip limited, he absolutely hounded the thirteenth placed driver, Rivalz Cardemonde, getting within inches of his diffuser and just sitting underneath his rear wing before the road changed direction, the corner tightening into a slower rightwards bend, where Xingke struck, moving to the outside of the Ashford and driving the wider, longer, and most importantly dirtier strip of tarmac, having the grip and confidence to just muller him as they went side by side out of the corner and into turn nine, not a lift to be heard what with Xingke's understanding of how to switch on the full potential of the tyres, where one of them would have to concede the position, and it wasn't going to be Xingke.

Rivalz seemed to acknowledge this, and conceded the position by braking early. Wary that this could be the same trick Kallen had tried in Malaysia, braking early to get a better approach and exit acceleration, Xingke used the newly opened space to his right to shift towards the outside, widening his approach as he swept into the double apex set of corners, slow then fast with a deceptively tight approach to the apex that Xingke hated. However, his plan had worked, and Rivalz was not able to strike back at the local driver. However, his party piece was still to come.

Violating parc ferme meant making changes to the setup after the final session of practice. The car you qualified on had to be the car you raced on. This was enforced with grid penalties, dropping a driver down five places if a change was made to any performance element of the car apart from tyres. However, since Xingke was starting last, he didn't have any further back to go, and had effective license to focus his setup on overtaking in the race as much as his heart desired.

The upshot of all of this was that he was running the narrowest wing on the grid, which, as he wound the car up through twelve and thirteen, meant that he could take full advantage of the single longest straight on the Formula One calendar, with a top speed the other drivers, who had focused on qualifying where corner speed mattered far more, could only dream of. They would be sitting ducks.

The overspeed was something like twenty kilometres per hour, as Xingke breezed past car number thirteen, having cleared its front wing well before the braking zone. Braking from well over two hundred, almost two hundred and ten miles per hour, the momentum of the car bled off like it was missing a limb until he finally arrived at the apex of the hairpin, travelling at some sixty miles per hour. A final kink, and lap one was boxed off. Fifty-five to go.

The rate of advance slowed, as the gap between each car grew. If he overtook one, the next one along would be further ahead than the one he had just taken had been as they stretched out like an accordion. During the process of reeling the next one in, the one after that would extend the gap to the car behind them. However, he plugged on, confident the race would come back to him as it moved through the lull. Perhaps one every two or three laps, he would reel them in and blast past on the straights with far less drag. He had the pace, he just needed to be measured. He had plenty of time, as well, as he just marched forward, careful and considered, but continually just closing the gap, closing the gap, there's no rush, it was a long race and come lap twelve he was already up into the points, with most of the backrunners being quite easy pickings. Each new opponent would be harder and faster than the last, but, Xingke knew as he coolly calculated the race ahead, he had twenty five laps to overtake nine cars, in either the fastest or second fastest car/driver combination on track, with the only potential rival for the title of fastest, that being the Camelot of Kallen Kōzuki, some way behind him.

Here was where Xingke's Le Mans years came in. It wasn't in the stamina- the condition had put pay to that- but it was in the patience. A distinct weakness in Kallen was how she would see red and make a risky lunge, taking the chicken out of the oven before it was all finished and getting salmonella. Xingke had had to sit in someone's wake for six hours before finally completing the pass back in the 2004 Twenty-Four Hours of Daytona; he had developed a thick skin to being patient.

However, unlike the overly conservative Kururugi, he would not hesitate to bite once an opportunity arose, as he did into the first turn, sneaking up as Albert Darlton defended the inside to take the wide arcing line through the two hundred and seventy degree turn, jumping to ninth as he switched back up the inside of the now defenceless B.A.R.

Eight cars to go.

Xingke, much like Kallen had done in Malaysia, opted to start on the harder tyre to mix up the strategy and propel himself up the field, with the top ten cars required to start the race on the tyre they set their fastest Q2 lap on, which was generally either the soft, or, in Kallen's instance back in Malaysia, the medium. Xingke was on the full boar hard, and now the cars ahead were pitting off of their soft tyres and onto mediums. While China was a notorious track for tyre wear, the soft-medium strategy was not unwise, as local meteorologists were noting the possibility of rain coming halfway through the race, forcing drivers into aggressive strategies that had them pitting often, to make sure they would not be caught out.

However, Xingke had a keen awareness of the weather, and ploughed on. While he wasn't particularly fast in the wet, certainly not as fast as Kallen or Tohdoh, his time spent in the marshes of central France had given him a unique skill; he always knew what tyre to be on for the conditions, he knew from the clouds and humidity what the conditions would be in the next lap, and when to pit.

Nonetheless, the drivers ahead had already pitted. Such was the traffic snake formed by the spreading field, they had pitted and come out ahead of Xingke, with Naoto, the leading car, almost in a different postcode. Well within Xingke's postcode however was his teammate, Zhou Xianglin, who seemed to be struggling around her home track, and was well within Xingke's postcode.

Xingke, who was on a charge and had a championship lead to preserve, was tempted to call in for team orders to ask Zhou to not obstruct him, however he didn't need to, though not for the reason he expected.

They moved in line down the pit straight, separated by half a second, however, just as Xingke shifted to the inside of Zhou, he was in the box seat to watch her rear right tyre rip apart down its central spine, leaving the two sidewalls to flap about without a binding. Suddenly without her rear grip, she fell into a half spin, nearly t-boning Xingke as the car slewed inwards out of her control, his sidepod being saved only by his quick responses and willingness to crop to the inside of the kerb, dirtying his tyres.

However, between his tyres and Zhou's, he would definitely choose his, which were a great deal more intact than the delaminated rubber flopping about Zhou's rear end, as he pulled ahead of her limping car, but not so much as to miss her pulling off onto the inside grass patch, unable to continue with the race as her floor was ripped apart from rubbing against the tarmac.

With Zhou now having reached her cars final resting place on the inside line of a hairpin, a safety car was inevitable, which, given that several drivers had already pitted, could gain him time, as he would be entering the pits while the grid was travelling much slower than they were when the other drivers had. However, the other shoe dropped as he made his way around.

Neither Naoto nor Tohdoh hadn't pitted from first and seventh respectively, being on the same strategy as Xingke of going long on the harder tyre, however, given that each team only had one pit box, whoever didn't go in on this lap would have to go round again, and catch the back of the safety car. Once the leading car had caught the back of the safety car, they could not overtake it or exceed its speed.

Whoever Rebellion didn't pit would lose a shedload of time behind the trundling safety car on their way back around to the pits while everyone else pounded around at full tilt, trying to catch the back of the queue. If they pitted, they would come out at the end of the queue.

Xingke laughed as he moved through to the pit lane, not having caught the pace car, knowing that anyone who didn't enter the pit lane would run into a brick wall as soon as they entered the first corner and ran up behind Marianne Vi Britannia. He moved from hards to mediums, just getting away from the box as he caught a glimpse ahead of the Rebellion, with the rear wing sponsor indicating it to be Tohdoh's. Naoto was the one Rebellion had screwed over.

And so, while he had fallen behind Albert Darlton, Zhou's retirement had meant his stop was functionally free, and Naoto would have to pit while the queue was all bunched up, so this safety car gained him a free spot, from ninth to eighth.

The safety car bunched them up just out of thirteen, and kept rotating for another two laps as a tractor extracted Zhou before releasing them on lap forty two of fifty six, just as Qu Yianqiao, his race engineer, came over the radio.

"We're expecting light rain in five minutes, to progress into heavy rain. Alert us if you need to get off the slick tyres, let us know when you need treaded."

Xingke did not respond, instead deep in thought as he shot out of the hairpin of turn six. The Circuit de la Sarthe was a big, long track, but more importantly in some respects it had a large area. It had a wide geographical footprint, being spread out over public roads. The Shanghai International Circuit was not public highway, far from it, but it shared one element with the site of the world's most famous saloon car endurance race; it was massive. Turn thirteen was one point two kilometres away from turn fourteen down a straight, which was in turn a kilometre away from turn one, and the distance from turn one to six was another kilometre. This approximately square shape meant that the track enclosed around seven hundred thousand metres squared. If it was raining on turn one, it could be bone dry at turn six, or thirteen, and so on.

This had lost him a Le Mans victory in 2008, when he pitted for wet tyres as it was raining absolute buckets down the entire length of the Mulsanne straight. He hadn't realised that because it was not raining at around the Porsche curves and the final chicanes, though these were the only dry areas, because these curves were where tyres and traction was more critical, it was faster to be on dry tyres even if most of the track was wet, simply to gain time on the parts that relied on having grip. He did not intend on repeating that mistake now that he had an opportunity to win at home, and so, even as he saw the clouds and heard the thunder, he did not bite. He quickly discovered the rain that accompanied the darkening conditions, lingering at the northeastern stretch of the track, along the second snail section, down the whole length of the back straight, and into the hairpin, however, as he cleared the hairpin, he saw the standing water dissipate, as the cloud had not fully enveloped the breadth of the circuit.

"I think we'll stay out, stay out." he breathlessly spoke into his earpiece. He was again getting fatigued, his lungs screaming at him to stop, but he couldn't stop now, not so close to the end. The twisty section, particularly between turns two and ten, were still mostly dry, and Xingke knew that anyone who switched to intermediates would be shedding far more time through this section than they would be gaining in the traction zones of thirteen and fourteen.

Of course, clouds did not stand still, they moved and would, just as they moved southwest to cover the eastern segment of the track, they would continue west, however they hadn't reached the two-through-ten complex yet, and as more and more cars peeled off into the pits, he felt more and more confident.

The rain was coming. But it hadn't arrived yet.

His pit crew continued to plead, however it was only with six laps to go that it became apparent that the wets were providing a better lap time than the dries, being faster in now a greater number of points on the track than the dry. Given how bunched up the field had been when the rain first arrived on the back straight, the pitting wet runners had fallen behind, and Xingke, the highest person at the time who had not pitted, now led the race, and with track conditions over the course of an entire lap more on his side than not, he had been pulling away from those behind him, though with the proviso that he to stop to eventually put on wets.

However, would this drastic overcut see him take the lead? He had only been five seconds off the lead when he head of the pack, Gino Weinberg, had first put on the intermediate wet tyres, such was the compressed grid, but had he pulled out five seconds? Had he, had he…? He pulled out of the pit lane, with a fresh set of intermediate boots, and just as he turned into the first corner, he saw Gino just leaving it.

He was within two seconds of Gino, he had the fresher tyres, and the faster car. Xingke smiled as he throttled through the curve, before tappeting the throttle to keep the revs up out of the corner, and set off in hot pursuit.

He had five laps to overtake one car.

With the fresher rubber, Xingke made short work of Gino, stalking him through the sharper and sharper bends, closing up, closing up, until Xingke finally struck. Getting a monstrous exit out of turn ten, he pulled deep to the inside and sailed ahead of Gino.

And that was all she wrote. He had gone from last to first, and completed the job with four laps to spare. The rest of the race was just letting the string play out, as he was the fastest man on track as he crossed the line, flying past the weeping man at the chequered flag, to win his home Grand Prix, the Chinese Grand Prix!

Xingke immediately exploded, using the last dregs of his energy to let his arms and shoulders fly out past the pillars on either side of his head, and, seatbelt unbuckled, raise his torso out of the cocoon of a cockpit, flaying his arms upwards in mad celebration. He had actually won his home bloody race! Not only that, but after Monaco, after breaking down in Qualifying, to bloody win! He almost jumped out of his car, with both hands off the wheel, resting his elbow on the pillar as a mount to prop his torso up and out of the chasm, with all his body up to his waist, as his off arm triumphantly waved the five starred red flag, as he roared his last spats of oxygen and blood.

He only brought his hands down to earth to steer wherever corners were imminent, but his in lap was simply spent in mad celebration, both hands fluttering about the sky in jubilant, until he settled his car in the slot under the podium, placed the wheel on his nose, before he jumped out of the car and leapt into the arms of his team. He felt his hair be ruffled by a hundred hands as the sheer energy of the entire team was conducted into him as they embraced.

And the tears, god he was crying. He could only chuckle as the waterworks streamed down his face like the Yangtze.

He had done it.

They parted, allowing Xingke to catch his breath, before Gino, who had had to settle for second for the third time in five races and had maintained his podium streak, slapped him in the back, causing Xingke to turn, and shake hands with the Briton, before the third place finisher joined them, which was, to Xingke's surprise, Naoto, who had somehow come back from pitting after being caught behind the safety car, overtaking some seven cars in fourteen laps, likely with the same 'wait it out' approach to rain strategy as him. Xingke, who was doing his best to hide the fact that he was physically shattered, simply hugged Naoto as they exchanged compliments.

Nodding, they all moved towards the cooldown room in the brief period before the podium, where the television was displaying the finish. Obviously, it had Xingke, followed by Gino and Naoto, before the lineup took a turn.

Fourth was Kallen, who like Xingke had had to deliver an immense comeback drive, who had passed Suzaku on the second-to-last corner of the last lap, ahead of Rolo, who finished behind his teammate for the first time this season out of races where they both saw the chequered flag, and then Tohdoh. Curious, Xingke turned to Naoto and posited a question.

"Did the team know what would happen by pitting Tohdoh first and making you go around and catch the back of the safety car?"

"Yeah, they said that it would." Naoto breathlessly nodded. "Tohdoh's the faster car they said, so they had to give him preference."

"You were at like forty points, he was barely pushing twenty." Xingke frowned.

Naoto looked terse, pursing his lips, before responding "Well, that's what they said."

"How did you overtake him? I presume they didn't roll out the welcome mat."

"They instructed me to hold position." Naoto nodded.

"Well then you must be lost, Tohdoh finished third, if I'm to believe that."

Naoto suppressed a chuckle, silently conceding the point, before they were invited up to the podium. Naoto's cheeky move on Tohdoh, followed by his charge through the field from ninth to third having a strategy similar to Xingke's had taken him from forty points to fifty-five. However, he was still some ways behind the second placed man Gino, who sat pretty at eighty-four points, one of only two men to not finish off the podium. The other man, of course, was Xingke himself, who had built up one hundred and eighteen points with four wins and a second.

Interestingly, Naoto's fifty-five points put him now exactly level with his sister Kallens' fifty five points, the pair now positioned in joint third. Tohdoh, Naoto's teammate, was at thirty six points, nineteen behind Naoto, and the Schwarzenritters of Rolo and Suzaku, who, as an aside, Xingke noted were now being referred to in the press in that order, respectively sat at thirty six and thirty two points, finishing fifth and sixth, Suzaku for only the second time ahead of Rolo at the flag.

However, Xingke didn't care. As he ran up to the podium, he saw thousands of wǔxīng hóngqí being waved madly and held to attention by the furious winds. They were mounted atop Poles almost fifty meters long, as the entire crowd celebrated in unison, ecstatic. As Gino and Naoto joined him for the third time that season, he stood to attention for his national anthem, played for both the winning driver and winning constructor. As the first trumpets soared, Xingke stood on the top step and looked out over the stadium ahead, his breath weak and light as his heart sat lodged in his throat. This was the first time this anthem had been played at this race, the March of the Volunteers, and as he mouthed along to the words, the tears continued to flow through the simply overwhelming emotion.

As he leaned his head back, he let the tears streak down his face as he soaked in the joy. He had bloody well done it! After so many years of trying, after so much time spent in frustrated hope, it had finally happened!

And just in time too.

谢谢您们! 您们都很棒, 谢谢您们的阅读, 如果您喜欢这个, 请评论一下！再见!

~吉勒