F1: The Making of a Racing God

Chapter 36 The bratty kid Landora and the stinky old man Marco

A week before the start of season testing, Shu Long and his team traveled to the UK on a chartered Red Bull plane to report to the team.

Marko left earlier, and the F1 teams have recently undergone a lot of personnel changes under his leadership, the most important of which is his current favorite, Max.

Kvyat is now a dislike to the old man, and whenever he sees an opportunity, he will kick him off without hesitation to make room for Max at Red Bull.

As for Shulong, besides getting to know his teammates for the new season, the team also has a lot of work to do before starting testing.

The one named Ryan Drisdale was incredibly enthusiastic, with a pious look on his face as if he'd found a powerful figure and was begging to befriend him, while the other one, Nico Carry, was rather indifferent.

All of them are new faces who transferred in this year. Last year's star player, George Russell, transferred to the HitechGP team normally this year. They didn't even know that someone had been replaced.

Nico had a higher overall ranking than the other two last year. When he saw an unfamiliar Chinese name on the list, he thought he would definitely be the team's star player this year.

It turns out that this newcomer is making such a big fuss just to join the team; there's no doubt he's got connections.

Thanks to Red Bull's technical support, the team is almost certain to be more competitive on paper this season than last year, which is an opportunity for the team's drivers as well.

Everyone who struggles to climb the ladder at each stage of racing can be considered the protagonist of their own story. No one wants to be a supporting character, and when opportunity knocks, many people want to seize it at all costs.

Shu Long, who had communicated with Zhou Guanyu, could understand their mentality to some extent.

Shu Long is participating in the F3 European Championship this year. In addition to two teammates and several substitutes, several drivers who compete in the F3 British Championship are also at the team base today.

Shu Long, forced to stand in the center of everyone's attention, felt somewhat at a loss. At least he could talk about anime and games with his classmates, but with foreigners all around him, he didn't know how to take the initiative to start a conversation.

Do they play League of Legends? No, it's an American game, but it seems to be quite popular in European clubs.
Just as Shu Long was debating whether to make an excuse to pee, a clueless person behind him pinched his butt. When he turned around, he saw a little guy with curly hair, who wasn't even up to his chest.

Where did this naughty kid come from?
Hey, are you Chinese?

"uh-huh."

Shu Long responded with a straight face. This little brat came up with a grin and started patting other people's butts. His accent was standard British. Did he run into British customs?

"Then you must know Zhou, right? I felt your name sounded familiar; I heard him mention it several times recently."

"Some time ago?"

“Yes, we just finished the Toyota Racing Series as teammates in New Zealand. We also knew each other from our previous karting races, and we always chatted about other things when we had nothing to do off the track.”

Wait a minute.
My mind is a bit of a mess; I need to sort it out a bit.

If I remember correctly, the minimum age requirement for participating in the Toyota Series in New Zealand is 15 years old, and this person also said that he knew Zhou Guanyu when they competed together before.

How old are you exactly?

“I was born in November 1999. Didn’t Zhou ever mention me to you?”

“I don’t even know your name. If Zhou Guanyu had told me anything about you, I think I would know.”

"Lando, Lando Norris, the Toyota Series champion from earlier this year."

The little boy's eyes shone with great hope, and Shu Long couldn't bear to dampen the child's enthusiasm, so he pretended to have a sudden realization.

I've never actually heard of it.

However, Shu Long's response seems to have won over Lando a lot. The brat has won a bunch of championships but has not been selected by the youth training system. He is still running Formula One at his own expense, which makes him seem a bit unappreciated.

"Hey, I just saw you looking for someone. Do you know anyone else here?"

"No, I'm looking for the restroom."

"I know the toilet, let's go together! I've been standing here for ages and I'm starting to feel it too."

Almost without saying a word, the brat grabbed Shulong and headed outside.

What a person with no sense of boundaries!
Even though the other person is older, Shu Long feels exhausted. Why does he always feel like he's giving in to a child?
"Oh, by the way, what kind of championship did you win?"

"I"

“Oh, I remember now, KZ2 won the championship with one hand, right? You’re really ruthless. It’s just that you seem to have run a little less race. You and Zhou are both really lucky. You were spotted by the youth training program early on. Unlike me, I run races every year until I’m about to throw up and no one pays any attention to me.”

Throughout the rest of the journey, Lando kept talking about the honors he had won, especially the recent Toyota racing series, where Zhou Guanyu only finished sixth while he was the champion.

His results sound pretty impressive, but I don't know if it's because he was beaten by Zhou Guanyu a few times during his karting days, but no one in the youth training program has any faith in him. If he didn't really love racing and his family wasn't rich, he would have given up long ago.

This is also why Shu Long always felt that his and Zhou Guanyu's skin color, which would not normally be favored, was actually an advantage. There are just too many white children, and people like Lando are often easily overlooked.

The young man is indeed talented, and he is also incredibly wealthy. The number of races Lando participated in last year alone is more than all the races Shulong has participated in to date. It is estimated that he has spent at least ten million.

There are even many obscure competitions that Shulong has never heard of.

Having arrived at the youth training camp, he shouldn't have been as ignorant as before. Unfortunately, because Marco didn't make any corresponding arrangements, Shulong, who was engrossed in playing simulators, didn't pay much attention to this information.

Before the Lunar New Year, Zhou Guanyu was struggling with the issue of choosing a team. While others were racing, Shu Long was busy enjoying the New Year without any distractions. Now, if Lando hadn't mentioned it, Shu Long wouldn't have known that Zhou Guanyu had secretly participated in other races before racing F3.

Ever since seeing Shulong break the base F3 record in just a few laps, lower-level entry-level formula racing like Renault or Toyota has almost completely fallen out of Marco's consideration.

Besides ruining the driving experience, playing against weaker opponents can also easily wear down a person's fighting spirit. Otherwise, Marco wouldn't have gone to such lengths to cram the dragon into the F3.

The two were forced to stand at the toilet door for half a day to be exposed to the fumes. Only then did the incessantly chattering Lando realize what they had come for. He even asked Shulong why they were standing there motionless. After going inside and lining up, he insisted on choosing the stall next to Shulong's.

What a shameless person!

"."

Are you really not even 16 years old yet?

"My birthday isn't until the end of April."

"Tsk tsk, I didn't realize you... No, no, no, I was wrong, I was wrong!"

A British boy, sixteen years old, 1.6 meters tall.

Because he was peeking into someone's urinal, he was grabbed by the collar and thrown out by Shu Long, who was six months younger than him. He felt very embarrassed. For the next few days, besides meetings with the team and engineers, Shu Long spent most of his time being wary of Lando's ganks in the lower lanes.

Where did these elementary school students come from? Shu Long felt that he had been completely cut off from this activity since entering junior high school.

However, after a while, as long as they didn't meet, they would grab each other's crotches, and Shulong and Lando actually got along better than their other two teammates.

Ryan was filled with envy and jealousy. He had spent several days trying to get close to the guy, but his relationship with him wasn't as deep as the friendship the guy had formed by fighting together in the bathroom.

Fortunately, although the F3 cars in the European Championship and the British Championship are both called F3, there are significant differences in both car specifications and engine types. Even though both are races in the F3 class by the Carlin team, Lando and his team's cars can't even have Red Bull printed on them.

This means that no matter how good their relationship is, Lando will never get soup from the Red Bull technical engineer, which is a great comfort to Ryan.

Soon the preseason testing for the European Championship arrived, and Shu Long saw Zhou Guanyu in his red outfit again after a long time.

The two communicated in encrypted Chinese in the repair area, complaining about their strange teammates.

Unlike Shu Long, who was new to the team, Zhou Guanyu had known Stroll, a key player in the team, since the youth training period, and the two had a fairly good relationship.

When the engineers from F1 help him tune the car, this rich kid who looks silly when he smiles doesn't really mind sharing the data. His teammates are actually quite similar to him in terms of the general direction of tuning.

They need to ensure the team's overall performance, so this is normal.

However, when the team has new parts or a more powerful engine, Zhou Guanyu and his team can forget about it; they will definitely prioritize providing it to Stroll's car.

Actually, Shulong's situation was pretty much the same. Most of his teammates' cars were tuned by the mechanics who came with him. The difference was that Shulong's confidence didn't come from a differentiated engine, but rather from his confidence in his own abilities.

Unfortunately, his teammates weren't very appreciative; Shu Long's training was a bit too sensitive for them.

Because of the need to compensate for the engine's power disadvantage, drag reduction was implemented on straightaways. When entering a corner, one must maintain a very narrow speed range; otherwise, it is particularly easy to lose grip in the corner.

For Shu Long's two teammates, this bizarrely bad tuning was truly terrible. When entering a corner, it pushed the steering wheel so hard that it felt like the front wing couldn't hold the front of the car down at all. When exiting a corner, it was strangely unstable, and it felt like the front of the car was going to fly off at the slightest touch of the steering wheel.

If they hadn't been watching when Shu Long was adjusting the train, the two of them might have thought that this guy was deliberately messing with them, and in the end, they would have each adjusted their own train.

Prema's car was indeed fast; Stroll's lap times were far ahead throughout the entire testing phase, and he didn't even bother to hide them.

The second and third places following closely behind were all Prema cars, with Zhou Guanyu in second place, less than 0.2 seconds behind Stroll.

Shu Long is in fourth place, 0.07 points behind third. His two teammates are in seventh and eleventh place respectively, and Ryan is the slowest.

Shu Long wasn't sure how much effort his teammates put in, but he himself actually slowed down on several turns.

The team's ranking last year wasn't great, otherwise the British driver George Russell wouldn't have chosen to transfer. The team's current position isn't exactly impressive either.

If the team had performed better last year, Shu Long's seat this year wouldn't have been so easy to secure. The original script might have turned into two like-minded Britons attacking each other's groin instead of Shu Long suffering the consequences.

Fortunately, considering that the two teammates wasted a lot of time adapting to Shulong's tuning style, the Carlin team still has considerable leeway after the start of the season.

To put it nicely, it means there's a lot of room for improvement and it's highly malleable.

The mechanics who came with Shu Long were certainly excellent, but Marco's favoritism towards Shu Long did not go so far as to directly send F1 engineers down to Shu Long. They also still had a lot to learn and improve.

Russell's test was also quite fast, right behind Shulong.

Many people in the convoy were saying that this guy was very handsome, but Shu Long stared at him for a long time and still couldn't appreciate him. Norris was more pleasing to the eye.

Russell's eyes and lips, taken individually, are delicately feminine, yet her facial features are strikingly strong, giving Shu Long a resemblance to the sexy prisoner from One-Punch Man.
The test had just ended when Marco called Shu Long's cell phone almost immediately.

"PhD?"

"What's wrong with you? Haydn messaged me saying your best lap time in the test was only fourth?!"

Hayden is Shulong's racing engineer, the one in TR who is mainly responsible for communicating with Shulong about strategies and car settings.

Now, whether it was a premonition or not, when Shu Long stared at the person, he could clearly see a hint of almost purple red peeking out from under the other person's earpiece.

There's a mole inside! We agreed to keep quiet and make a fortune together, didn't we?

"But this is just a test. We can't reveal all our cards to others at the very beginning, can we? There's a Chinese saying: 'A wise man keeps his talents hidden until the right time to act.'"

Marco didn't understand, so Shu Long patiently translated it for him: in layman's terms, it's about pretending to be weak to catch a tiger.

Because F3 has a reverse grid start, the sprint race also starts in the order of qualifying, but the top ten start in reverse order of their qualifying times.

Shu Long originally intended to finish in fifth place today. This position is advantageous for both offense and defense, and it won't have a significant impact whether the start is in the forward or reverse order. As long as he is confident that he can overtake, it will be the most efficient position for scoring throughout the entire race weekend.

As a result, he didn't control his speed well and accidentally became a tiny bit faster than Russell.

He originally thought that his amazing strategy, which was full of the mindset of a top student controlling his grades, would be appreciated by Marco. However, the old man just chuckled and scolded Shu Long harshly.

"I'm asking you, did any of the Prema team members hide their lap times?"

"Probably?"

Marco's response on the other end of the phone was nothing but suffocating silence.

"Then there isn't one?"

"That's right! I don't need you to hide it!"
Listen to me! I don't care how many points you get in the end because of a less-than-smart strategy; that's the responsibility of the rest of the crew. I just want to see your abilities as a driver throughout the process.

But I only see the victors.

　Before 2017, F3 started with the first ten cars in reverse order. After 2017, it was changed to the first twelve cars in reverse order. It is because of this rule that many less competitive drivers will try to compete for the reverse pole position.

　　Thank you to Baeksang Arts Awards Best Actor Di Guang, ~Haliluya~, Book Friends who are reforming themselves, Book Friends 20211207202256657 and Book Friends 20230401134738401 for your monthly ticket donations.

　　Thank you to the generous donor, Star-Dyed Clouds.

　　The bosses spent a lot of money.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)