OK Number 74 - Eye Of The Needle

"Whoah hoah, she didn't wait around, did she?"

Diethard almost let out something between a gasp of surprise and of disdain as Kallen dropped the clutch like a hot coal, spinning up the wheels as she left the pit box. She had just shouted something, inaudible over the noise of the pit lane, before turning her head in clear and visible anger.

But, as soon as leaving the box, as soon as the car matched the pit limiter, there was a visible transition. While in the pit box, there had been a vivid fury, but as she travelled at pedestrian speed down the pitlane, there was a visible change, in Kallen's body language, in the cars body language, in Kallen's eyes, or at least that much of them that could be seen through the visor; a transition from a vicious, wrathful glare, to one not quite of calm, but of focus. The anger faded not because it was no longer there, because she was any less fiery or motivated, but because she became completely absorbed by the road and the race, melting away to become another cog within the car, focused solely on getting the car round the track as fast as it could physically go.

Of course, it didn't minimise the news that had been communicated in the wheel spinning start that had amounted to a clutch dropped into second gear near the top of the rev range. That message being that she was livid.

Jeremiah tutted, before adding to Diethards immediate reaction.

"Not at all. Not a very elegant exit at all, and.. ugh, you're asking a lot of the transmission, driveshaft and everything if you drop the clutch like that. Not a lot of patience behind the wheel of that Camelot."

Diethard sucked air through his teeth, before adding "I can't say I'm surprised, Kallen's not a driver with a lot of mechanical sympathy at the best of times, but while she isn't a lap down at the moment, Rolo up the road has just come out of Juncao and onto the main straight as she is beginning her trek down the Reta Oposta, just twenty seconds up the road. She wants to get a hurry on so she isn't put a lap down by Rolo, and I can imagine that with these hard tyres, she can push near enough flat out to the end, with the upgrades that car has received on the tyre wear front following the disaster at Monza."

Diethard petered off as Kallen, for the first time out of traffic, launched the car into turn four at full tilt. If she was conserving the tyres to the end of the race, she didn't show it, as the car cornered totally flat against the road surface, going from entry kerb to apex kerb to exit kerb, at the limit of grip each time. It was visibly fast, although Jeremiah was ready and eager to point out the big problem for Kallen.

"She'll have to catch up to her brother and pass him, about six seconds up the road, then Suzaku up another ten, then the pack tightens up five seconds up from Suzaku, but Kallen has the hammer down, setting the fastest second sector of anyone, don't count her out for some small points yet, but let's head back to the front, Gino is catching up with Rolo."

Indeed, he was, and by lap seven, Gino was right with Rolo, peering up his rear diffuser into Descida do Lago, the corner where Naoto had been pinched out on the first lap, however the cars were growing lighter and more wieldly as the fuel burnt away, and they were both able to wheel their way around the corner, side by side though it may have been.

The battle for the lead was now on.

Side by side out of Descida, Ferradura was rushing up, and that was a one groove turn. One of the drivers would have to give, but neither did. Each knew that winning this race would put them in prime position to seize the title out from under the leaders. Gino held his line to the inside, pushing Rolo out onto the rumble strip just off the kerbs, killing Rolo's momentum. Rolo decided to make the best of it, brake early and rotate into the Esse, cutting down across Gino's profile from behind.

While the run into Pinheirinho wasn't long enough for Rolo's better exit to count for a lot, it counted for something, as he arrived at the large, off camber hairpin half a second before Gino did. He was ahead, but, as Rolo glanced in the mirrors, as the commentators watched from the helicopter camera above, he wasn't ahead by enough to cut across, wasn't ahead by enough to crest in towards the apex, not without clipping Gino's nose, which he was not completely clear of.

Without the grip rubbered in around the apex, without access to the easier and gentler line, Rolo could only scrabble around the outside and watch Gino take the shorter path around the corner, and essentially take a shortcut to pull his way back alongside.

However, while Gino's shorter route allowed him to swing around the inside to pull alongside, the fact that Rolo was substantially alongside, physically blocking off the space of road he would normally drift out towards on the exit. Forced to keep on the steering lock for longer, Gino was not able to get on the throttle nearly as early as Rolo, for whom the corner was less angular and opened up much sooner allowing him to gas it much sooner and pull out ahead of the Briton.

Now Rolo had the inside for Bico de Pato, and had much better drive out of the corner compared to Gino, and so was able to, as the road curved in towards Rolo and away from Gino, hold his line, pinching Gino out of the road.

Gino, not wanting to concede the position, kept his nose in until the tarmac turned to kerb and the kerb turned to grass, forcing him to try and drag the car back around to the road, losing all of his momentum. It would take two laps for Gino to, having fallen across the grass and a few seconds back, catch back up to Rolo and attempt another pass.

After drafting up the front stretch and taking a wide swoop through the Senna Ess, Gino had the run up to Descida do Lago again. That corner had been Rolo's achilles heel all through this race, it had caused trouble with Naoto, it had caused trouble with Gino the first time, and Rolo was not about to let it be the source of another passing opportunity.

He moved down low to block any dives, however Gino, with the extra momentum, was alongside going into the slight braking zone of the fast corner. Even moreso than Ferradura, going two cars wide here, at what was a two wide corner at the best of times, was a bad idea, requiring a huge momentum advantage and grip advantage for the car on the outside.

At first, it seemed that Gino would pull it off, cutting across Rolo in much the same way Rolo had to Naoto, boxing Rolo into a shrinking corner of track, and forcing the Frenchman to back out and concede the position.

But in a jaw dropping move, Rolo kept the throttle pinned, and, after several laps of near misses, they finally collided.

As the commentators looked on, absolutely gobsmacked, Rolo's nose ran wide into Gino's mainframe, and the pair immediately bounced apart from the sudden impact. Rolo, for the second time, was able to keep a reasonable course, however Gino took a few moments to get his car back to racing speed.

In the booth, Jeremiah was going mad, yelling at the top of his voice.

"I can't believe it! I cannot believe it! For the second year in a row, a Lamperouge in the fight for the title has gotten into a controversial collision with another title rival at the Brazilian Grand Prix! This is insane!"

Indeed it was insane, as Gino piped up over team radio.

"Honestly ridiculous, the carry on." the Briton gruffly sighed. "Someone needs to show this kid to a lecture on giving way, he just ran right into me."

"Understood Gino." his radio engineer replied, trying to calm the pilot down. "Is there damage?"

There was a pause, as Gino tried to shake the car through the curves in the base of the bowl of Pinheirinho, Bico de Pato, and Mergulho to test it out, before he finally answered "I'm not sure, car feels loose, the chassis has lost a lot of stiffness."

A pause, and then the engineer replied "Okay, when you come around the next time drive close to the pit wall so we can get a look at the damage."

There was no answer verbally, however after Juncao Gino kept the car pinned to the wall on the inside, giving the engineers looking on a clear view of the body, and they got back to Gino as he slewed through the Senna Ess.

"Okay Gino, you have some damage to the floor and to the sidepods, it is not front wing, we cannot fix damage. You aren't as fast, but you're keeping a good enough pace, stay out and keep this up. If Rolo retires or falls back, you will inherit his lead. Just try not to fall too far back, you won't be as fast."

Gino angrily huffed, as Diethard noted "But he'll be lucky if he even keeps this, Albert Darlton is the next car back, and he's not that far back, Gino is now under threat from the rear, he might not even finish on the podium. It's never championship over, but-"

Jeremiah nodded, replying "Yeah, it isn't looking good. We'll see if he can find some pace or hold off Darlton, but right now he's going to have to cross his fingers, toes, and whatever else he can that Rolo falls off the road, because right now, with Xingke down in tenth, a win for either Rolo or Gino would clinch it for them."

Meanwhile, several kilometres back, Kallen was coming to grips with her post-pit stop car.

It was her first chance to feel out the car in race trim, and particularly now that she would have only seventy laps to claw her way back into this championship, she would have to come to grips with it quickly.

On first impressions, the car felt tight, and hard, like a twisting bottle lid that had been screwed on too tightly. There was no lateral give, and with the suspension and the chassis keeping all the energy suspended in the bounces and changes in direction inboard, tight down the cars spine, there was almost no rotation in the mid corner. Ironically, this blunder in the setup of the car from Friday would serve to aid with something Kallen did not find intuitive; saving tyres.

She had done it in Brazil of 2017, she would simply have to do it a second time today.

However, she grew to understand the needs of the car. All of the grip was at the back, with the front serving more as a rudder than as something that actively grabbed the car by the scuff of the neck and hurled it about the place. This passive setup, which concentrated more on turning the car with the front wheels dragging than on the rear ones pushing, did make it easier to turn under braking without destabilising the car, which Kallen appreciated, and the power could be planted with much less trepidation than normal, where the rear tyres would normally be prone to breaking traction and spinning up, but she was grasping at straws.

She just had to get her head down and do the job, now more than ever if she wanted to slip through the net and win this championship.

Because now, sliding the car through the Senna Ess and out the back wasn't about sliding the rear end of the car; it was like an arrow, with a limited range of direction change with which you had to effectively thread the needle. The rear, no matter how much you tried, would never break, and so every corner was front-limited.

You could only go through corners as fast as the front tyres would allow you to go, and unlike a rear limited car there was no way to negotiate this through fancy drifting or clever sliding, which was Kallen's usual modus operandi of slithering the car up the road, never at lateral ease, never at rest.

Which, Kallen supposed, was appropriate in two ways; firstly, given that this was the way Gino liked to set up his car, the chassis and underlying architecture would have been built to facilitate this style of driving. Kallen had been fighting against the intuitive grain of the car all season; in this setup, as much as Kallen would have to adapt to it to make it work, it would fly.

And, though it did not come naturally, Kallen managed to find a way to make it work. Hard on the brakes deep into the corner, with the bias split as far rearwards as the dial would allow, and the differential as internally locked as it could be, early on the throttle once past or even before the apex. Use the downshifts to help decelerate and rotate the car, knowing that you could plant the power early under lateral load and not spin.

There was a way to drive this package quickly. Tohdoh had done it, Weinberg had done it, it was hardly as if there was some immutable law preventing Kallen from doing it. Like Xingke and his oscillating throttle, drawing speed out of this rear-focused setup was simply a matter of mirroring inputs to mirror outputs. Once again, Kallen would simply need to reshape herself to be whatever she needed to be to win.

And, sure enough, she came to understand this car more as she drove it, throwing it into corners with the fronts at the capacity of their grip, feeling certain that the rear would snap away and yet it didn't. She could just keep it pinned, charting a course with the wheel and knowing that the rear would stick as firm as a rock. It was like directing a boat, without the pejorative such a comparison would normally imply. With the amount of momentum Kallen was conserving through the lack of repeated, minute steering corrections, her apex speed in high and medium speed corners was actually improved as compared to her dream setup, even if she lost a lot of rear slip in the slow corners.

With that much squared away, Kallen knew how to drive this car quickly. She would now just have to go and do it. Over the next two hours, she would have to deliver the performance of her life.

And, sure enough, as she shot the car fearlessly into Descida do Lago, without hesitation into Laranjinha, to the limit into Esse, it was working. Kallen, in removing herself, in creating an artificial separation between herself in her headspace and her work in the car, simply chucked the car in, braking later than she would have ever dreamed possible, later than she would have been physically able to imagine being possible if she was paying any mind to that voice, very far away, that pleaded to her about safety, and risk, her crash with Xingke at Japan of 2018, with Lelouch at Brazil, with a burst tyre at Austria, all of them, they were gone. To the millimetre, braking out to the mathematically last possible moment. Through every corner, she risked spearing off, unable to turn in enough, and plough into a barrier, ending her race. Every corner was a calculated risk, depending on her focus being absolute and her concentration being unceasing.

But it was, and as the lap times rolled in, it was clear that she was catching up to the nineteenth placed Naoto, who, while he wasn't catching Suzaku, was catching the leading gaggle of cars from positions one through seventeen.

Kallen asked over the radio what the situation was. Right now, she was apparently the fastest car on the track, but to get back some points, she would have to make up almost a minute, and overtake over a dozen cars.

And it seemed the first one up would indeed be her brother Naoto, who from pole looked to be having a miserable day, last but one, and soon to be last. Having come to grips with the ins and outs of her car, Kallen felt wired into the tarmac with thousand volt cables, and Naoto was not going to stop her; she would find a way around, she would have to find her way around.

Of course, Kallen knew what the way around was. As she rocketed up Juncao, watching her brother plant the power and ride the groove up around the outside, riding the rim of the bowl, Kallen knew what she would need to do.

Where Naoto, who no doubt saw his sister looming in his mirror, took the inside, defensive line into the first turn, the Senna Ess, compromising his run out of the corner, but ensuring he couldn't be overtaken.

Kallen, contrastingly, rode the kerb as wide as she could, using her brakes to rotate early and cut down into the corner, down into the bowl. She was wielding a blade, striking down over the head, down across her torso and ending apart down along her waist. And, like butter, the car sliced through the corner, smoothly opening up the second part of the corner for a faster, easier slice up through the exit. Slow in, fast out.

And now, Kallen had a fantastic run out of the exit and into Descida do Lago, much better than Naoto, who had had a much shallower gap through which to forge a line, had much less room through which to rotate the car, and had to slow to a much lower speed to fit the ninety degrees of rotation into the much narrower gap.

On the exit, Naoto tucked to the inside, protecting himself again. Rolo had tried to make the high line around Descida do Lago work against him on the first lap, and though neither knew it, against Gino a second time, and getting past there cleanly was almost impossible. While Naoto knew he was putting himself at risk, he bet that Kallen, herself in the title race, would not try around the outside, where she would be put at a severe risk of crashing with Naoto and retiring out of the finale. He likely felt that she would be too afraid to try to overtake him around the outside of Descida do Lago, too afraid to risk a collision, too afraid to go for the gap, too afraid to fight with as little restraint or as little caution with a championship in the balance.

But Kallen was not afraid of Naoto. Kallen was not afraid of anything.

End of Lap Seven

First - Rolo Lamperouge – 229 (2 wins)

Tenth - Li Xingke – 224 (5 wins)

Third - Gino Weinberg – 223 (1 win)

Twentieth - Naoto Kōzuki – 214 (1 win)

Eighteenth - Suzaku Kururugi – 211 (4 wins) (2 seconds) (2 thirds)

Nineteenth - Kallen Kōzuki – 211 (4 wins) (2 seconds) (1 third)

A Lamperouge colliding with a driver they're in a title fight with at the Brazilian Grand Prix, the last race of the season? Can you say cinematic parallels? Anyway, please be sure to leave a review, things are getting pretty lairy as the battles spread out. Cheers.

~G1ll3s