F1: The Making of a Racing God

Chapter 72 For Passion, For Winning
The first round of winter testing concluded peacefully.

After Albon began experimenting with his own tuning methods, his ranking improved further. Tire issues persisted, but at least his lap times stabilized at around 11th or 12th place.

Toro Rosso's car this year actually has a pretty good foundation. Over the four days of racing, their overall lap times often reached around third or fourth place, sometimes making them quite competitive compared to the three top teams: Mercedes, Ferrari, and Toro Rosso.

Of course, this is just the surface; almost all the teams will definitely hide during the winter testing period.

Things like limiting engine power, adding counterweights to the vehicle, and setting the discharge power to a very low level.

Especially in the first round of testing, most teams focused on calibrating the discrepancies between the actual performance of the car and that of the simulator, and checking for any hidden, deep-seated car balance defects.

Red Bull doesn't have much anxiety about rankings, since the Red Bull Group will pay them on time every year regardless of their final position. So, rather than worrying about their competitors, Shulong is more interested in whether their car has the potential to compete with the podium this year.

It was hidden, but not much.

Speaking of competitors, we must first mention Ferrari's overall performance during the few days of testing—it was absolutely unbeatable!
So much so that even within the hunting grounds, there were whispers of doubt that they had been secretly seeing things these past few days.

Whether it's Leclerc or Vettel, these two take turns setting the fastest lap times on the track, completely different from everyone else.

Their performance on straightaways, in particular, was simply unstoppable.

The signs were already visible at the end of last season when several customer teams using Ferrari engines almost simultaneously squeezed into the Q3 battle zone, and consistently made it into Q3.

Judging from the current situation, at least at the beginning of the season, Shu Long believes that his main competitors for the STR14 are likely to be Haas and Arro.

This year, Aro promoted an older newcomer whose performance throughout the round of testing was mediocre, consistently ranking near the bottom.

However, Arro brought in the strongest old man Kimi this year. He and the two Haas cars have basically completely divided up the remaining spots in the top ten except for the three major teams and Shulong. This base model Ferrari seems to be particularly fierce in his hands.

As for Haas, although the brakes seemed to have problems for two days, the two drivers were still significantly faster than the other cars in the Earth group.

This is probably one of the highlights of Haas. The team gives the impression of being a makeshift team that hasn't been in the paddock for long, and their low-level mistakes every year are both laughable and absurd, yet their cars are incredibly fast.

It's hard to say whether it was simply good luck that the race car's design happened to coincide with the latest version; or whether the two drivers were truly exceptionally talented; or whether Haas's CNC machine tools have some special advantage in manufacturing race cars.
There is another person who deserves special attention.

Lando Norris, also a first-time F1 player, immediately displayed remarkable lap time potential, almost always outpacing his teammate Sainz and frequently appearing in the top ten.

After tormenting Alonso to retirement last year, the orange turkey car seems to have undergone a phoenix-like rebirth this year. At least in terms of overall competitiveness, it is no worse than the factory Renault team, which finished fourth in the constructors' championship last year.

Red Bull may have been hiding a lot of talent, but Gasly has been struggling to control the car these past few days. He not only has difficulty keeping up with Verstappen's pace, but sometimes he can't even outrun Albon, who is driving a bull.

During the breaks for meals, Gasly had a gloomy face for several days in a row, and he wouldn't say anything when others asked him.

It wasn't until Shu Long and Alben, both from the Red Bull group, sat down that he whispered some of the truth when no one was around.

Red Bull's cars now tend to be extreme, which is largely due to Shu Long. Gasly had only seen many of these performance metrics on Shu Long's cars before.

Actually, none of this is a big deal. Although it was a bit difficult, Gasly was generally able to adapt. The problem was that he provided the team with a lot of feedback, but received almost no response.

No matter what problems he mentioned about the RB15 in which corner, or what his ideas were for tuning that particular section, the engineer would always just give him a cold "Copy!"

Then, after the car was pushed back to the pit garage, the mechanics began to modify the car's settings, and Gasly discovered that these people had not adopted even one of his suggestions at all.

Gasly asked, "Why?!"

The engineers' answer is always, "We will take it into consideration, but it seems that Max's tuning solution has a higher ceiling, so we need to keep up with it."

Utterly speechless!

To be honest, it's unheard of for a team to completely ignore the needs of its second driver in recent years. Even Red Bull, which officially announced the departure of Da Ya last year, didn't do it this badly.

You can't blame Max for this; he's not one to hide his data.

When Verstappen first saw how difficult Gasly was to adapt to the car, he even shared his tuning plan with Gasly.

It's actually quite embarrassing to let someone down, but Verstappen's training seems to be really not for people.

This is quite different from when Albon copied the tuning of Shulong. This time, Shulong took better care of the tire temperature and handling of the rear wheels, so the main solution adopted was not difficult to drive, because most of it was a conventional tuning, and the overall characteristics were actually slightly biased towards understeer.

The difficulty lies in the fact that the tuning method used by Shulong is applicable to too wide a range. His correct answer lies in his own operation. Simply copying the tuning data may result in very poor lap times.

As for Max's approach, it was the kind of thing that could easily get out of control if you weren't careful. It wasn't until the very last day that Gasly finally managed to build up a little bit of confidence to let go and push it forward.

Gasly felt there were some things he couldn't say, but he always felt that there was something going on within the Red Bull team that was trying to sabotage him. Sometimes he even wondered if he was just a filler.

The purpose of their existence is simply to temporarily fill the vacancy before the next Red Bull driver they truly value develops, and then when they need him to make room, they can easily find a plausible excuse to kick him out.

This person is none other than the one who is currently helping him criticize Red Bull's internal practices, and there is almost a 90% chance that this person is the one who is the most likely candidate.

Gasly knew Shu Long's abilities and character very well, and he could barely accept being replaced. If it weren't for Shu Long's lack of racing experience and Red Bull's belief that he still needed to be tested, he probably wouldn't have gotten this spot this year.

Neither of them noticed that Alben, who was cutting a sandwich, looked somewhat uneasy.

The hints from Tai Niu were cryptic and difficult to understand. Now, whenever there was any unusual movement in the convoy, his first suspicion was that Tai Niu might be up to something again.

If he could, Alben would actually prefer to be recognized for his own performance rather than for some underhanded tactics that he would be ashamed of. But frankly speaking, he is now nothing more than a pawn manipulated by capital. He is favored by conglomerates but has no real say. Apart from doing his best in what he can do, he can only be manipulated by the higher-ups.

Moreover, F1 seats are inherently murky due to commercial interests. As a commodity in a sense, drivers cannot simply reject many things; they must force themselves to get used to them.

Putting aside these unpleasant topics, the group returned to talking about this year's racing.

Honda's engine seems to be quite reliable at first glance; over the past few days, it hasn't broken down as badly as it did in Abu Dhabi last year.

In terms of power, it is slightly stronger than Renault, but it is still a bit inferior to the engines of Mercedes-Benz and Ferrari. Turbo lag in low-temperature environments needs to be addressed, especially the power response is slightly sluggish when exiting corners.

Regarding the problem of tires, especially those with harder compounds, having difficulty heating up, the team seems to have come up with a solution, which seems to be to install an additional heat insulation cover or something similar.

The impact on Shulong is not actually that significant. He can simply find the appropriate driving rhythm and adjust his habits slightly. The new term "Tai Chi," although currently only at 27%, allows him to have very precise control over the load on each tire.

Of course, there are other upgrade options, some of which have already been conceived and may be implemented in subsequent matches.

Because the overall additional demand in Shulong is relatively low, the main focus is still on Alben. At least on the surface, these decisions do not seem particularly unusual.

If we ignore the suggestions that could further push the limits of racing cars by removing the dragon-binding device, and those suggestions are "pending," then...
For mid-tier teams in the Earth Group, racking up a large number of points is an extremely low probability event, especially for a junior team like Toro Rosso. Rather than hoping that one of their drivers will achieve the annual KPI in one race, it would be better to be more realistic and adopt the most efficient points-earning method where both drivers can consistently score points.

Of course, the drivers don't know the specific technical details very well, after all, everyone has their own expertise, but this attitude alone is enough to make Gasly drool with envy.

Look at those racing teams! They're not only willing to listen to the second driver's opinions, they even consider the second driver's needs as a primary reference point!
There is a five-day break between the first and second rounds of testing. During this period, in addition to cooperating with the team to fine-tune the race car, the drivers' main job is to deal with the media.

The first is an official F1 quiz show called "Grill the Grid".

This is a program aimed at the general public, planned by Liberty Media Group since it took over the operation of F1 racing, based on the trend and purpose of entertainment, mainly to allow the audience to have a closer understanding of the drivers.

The current main format is that teams work together, with drivers paired up and conducting a series of rapid-fire questions and answers in their respective team's driver's house.

Another issue was Netflix's requirements for DTS's recording. They specially set up a small dark room and invited the team leaders and drivers of each team to go in and reshoot some footage from last year, as well as to create an opening for this year's second season.

Shu Long appeared to be the first one summoned after the first round of testing.

Compared to the Abu Dhabi final, where the overall landscape remained unchanged, Brazil, the penultimate stop last year, was clearly more interesting.

Aside from Mercedes' triple crown at one race, Shu Long's stunning podium finish is clearly a more fitting conclusion to the season's theme of generational change centered around Ricciardo.

The director explicitly told Shu Long that his scenes would make up the bulk of the final episode of the first season, giving him a very prominent role. Therefore, some content needed to be urgently cut and added before the official release on March 8th.

"Okay, are you ready?"

"Of course, uh, wait a minute!"

Shu Long scratched his hair a few times in front of the camera's reflection, then glanced awkwardly at his shorts and flip-flops.

He had just stepped out of his hotel room this morning, and before he even had time to have breakfast, he was arrested by the film crew. The Red Bull T-shirt he was wearing was something he had to get from the film crew.

"Sorry, how about we do it again? Or will this part be cut? Hopefully they won't film my lower body, right? I really didn't have time to prepare this morning."

"Yes, don't worry, we know exactly what the audience likes to watch."

The director, who was watching the camera, made a gesture to reassure Shu Long, while simultaneously directing the cameraman to zoom in on Shu Long's upper body from a close-up to a full-body shot, and then maliciously gave a close-up of his flip-flops.

"Okay, first question: do you remember what happened at the start? After all, it was a truly legendary starting reaction, and it could even be said that it directly affected the result on the podium."

“Sir, Aimin, now when I try to recall the details, there aren’t many. All I can say is that I was 1000% focused, and of course, nervous.”

"Many people actually question whether you were just lucky to guess the light, so was the actual situation really as they say?"

"Uh... actually, there's no point in answering this question now. Even if I said it wasn't luck, you'd probably think I was just bragging. So, there are still many more matches to come, and you'll find out the answer eventually."

Then the female host asked him what he thought when he learned he was actually in first place on the track, and whether winning third place after many laps of intense competition was more of a surprise or a regret.

Some of these questions were actually answered last year, and his answers this time were not much different. However, compared to the emotional delivery of following the script last time, this time it was more of a genuine expression of his feelings.

"Okay, thank you for your cooperation. Finally, shall we record an opening monologue for season two?"

"Huh? You guys don't even know how the first season was received, and you're already planning the second season?"

The director replied that this was a long-term project, and the content would be adjusted based on audience feedback at most.

"Okay, 3, 2, 1. Could you please introduce yourselves?"

"My name is Shu Long, an F1 driver from China, currently driving for the Scuderia Toro Rosso team. Is that enough? I feel like the content is a bit monotonous."

"No, no, that's great. So why did you come here? And could you share your expectations for this season?"

"For the love of it, and of course, for the chance to win."

　Thank you to SiLentQ, 闲咸咸咸鱼, 百想影帝地光, 南国手术刀, Lo, 静是一个美, 龙蜒若雪, Recialy, 星海starry, 面庭柯以怡颜, sway晨, 阁楼死尸, 飞过海看你, 卡布奇诺先生cc, and the big shots who have been donating monthly tickets for the past month!
　　
　
(End of this chapter)